Tài liệu Exposé: Death to Window Clutter doc

Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your taskbar buttons Windows or the Dock Mac OS X 10.5, trying to find the window you want.. When you tap F10 the factory se

5.3 Exposé: Death to Window Clutter

In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative, and extremely effective (Apple borrowed this idea from a research lab called Xerox PARC.) In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing your

windows was easy this way; after all, you had only about three of them

These days, however, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be like herding cats Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your taskbar buttons (Windows) or the Dock (Mac OS X 10.5), trying to find the window you want And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop—to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or eject a disk You'll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the "deck."

Exposé represents the first fresh look at this problem in decades The concept is

delicious: With the press of the F9 key, Mac OS X shrinks all windows in all programs to

a size that fits on the screen (Figure 5-4), like index cards on a bulletin board You click the one you want, and you're there It's fast, efficient, animated, and a lot of fun

Note: On the superth in aluminum Apple keyboards, use the F3 key instead of F9 The

painful details are in the box below

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT

A Tedious Sidebar about the Aluminum Apple Keyboards

Do you have the superthin aluminum Apple keyboard (the wireless one, or the

aluminum iMac one)? If so, the keystrokes described in this chapter don't not

work

On that keyboard, the F9, F10, and F11 keys—the keys you need for Exposé—

are mapped to the Mac's speaker volume!

Fortunately, the most often used Exposé function, the one that exposes all open windows at once, has its own special key on this keyboard: the F3 key

So you're covered there: press F3 instead of F9 But what about the other two

Exposé functions, normally triggered by F10 and F11?

Method 1: Add the Control key (to Exposé one application's windows only) or

the key (to see the desktop) That is, instead of F11 to expose the desktop,

you should press -F3

Method 2: Hold down the Fn key If you do that, then you can use the F9, F10, and F11 keys like everybody else (Lots of Fn details are on Section P3.3.1.)

Kind of a drag, right?

Method 3: Actually, there's a final twist to all this In System Preferences

Keyboard & Mouse, you'll find a checkbox that reverses this logic It's called

"Use all F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys."

If that checkbox is on, then you can use F9, F10, and F11 to trigger Exposé

exactly as described in this chapter Now you need the Fn key only when you

want those keys to adjust the volume

5.3.1 More Ways to Exposé

That business about finding a buried window on your screen is probably the way you'll use Exposé most often But it's actually only one of three Exposé functions The other options:

Figure 5-4 Top: Quick! Where's the Apple Web page in all this mess?

Bottom: With a tap of the F9 key, you can spot that window, shrunken but not overlapped As your cursor passes over each thumbnail, the window darkens and identifies itself, courtesy of the floating label in its center What's especially cool is that these aren't static snapshots of the windows at the moment you Exposé'd them They're live, still-updating windows, as you'll discover if one of them contains a QuickTime movie during playback or a Web page that's still loading If you're not pointing to a window, tapping F9 again turns off Exposé without changing anything;

if you're pointing to a window, tapping F9 again brings it forward

5.3.1.1 Find one window in the current program

A second Exposé keystroke is designed to help you find a certain window only in the program you're using—great when you're Web browsing or word processing When you tap F10 (the factory setting), all of the windows in the front most program spread out and shrink, if necessary, so you can see all of them simultaneously, in full—and so you can click the one you want (see Figure 5-5, top)

Note: As noted in the box on Section 5.3.1, you may have to add the Fn key (that is, press

Fn+F9) if you have Apple's superthin, iMa -style keyboard

And now, tips:

• While your application windows are arrayed before you, tap the Tab key to switch

to the next running program All of its windows spring to the fore, and all of the other programs' windows grow dim (Shift-Tab, as usual, cycles through the

programs in the opposite direction.)

• Suppose you pressed F9 to shrink all programs' windows, but you decide that what

you really meant to do was press F10 to see only one program's windows The solution is to press the Tab key, which switches you into F10 mode, dimming (and restoring to full size) all programs' windows but one At this point, you can press Tab or Shift-Tab to cycle through the open programs as described in the preceding paragraph

Here's another way to change programs once you've "F10'ed" your windows: Press -Tab to bring up the "heads-up display" application switcher (yes, even while your

windows are shrunken) Tab your way through the program icons (Figure 5-5) until the one you want is selected, and then release the keys That program's windows spring to the front, still miniaturized and arrayed for your selection pleasure

5.3.1.2 Return to the desktop

The third keystroke (F11 is the factory setting) may be the most useful of all It sends all windows in all programs cowering to the edges of your screen, revealing the desktop beneath in all its uncluttered splendor (Figure 5-5, bottom) There they remain—forever,

or until you tap F11 again, click a visible window edge, double-click an icon, or take some other window-selection step

Note: Once again: On Apple's superthin, iMa -style keyboard, press Fn+F11 instead See the box on Section 5.3.1

This is a spectacular opportunity to save headache and hassle in situations like these:

• You're writing an email message, and you want to attach a file Tap F11, root

around in the Finder until you locate the file you want Begin to drag it, and then tap F11 again to bring back your email window Move your cursor, with the file in middrag, directly over the outgoing message window; release the cursor to create the attachment

Tip: You can apply the same life-changing shortcut to dragging a graphic into

some page-layout program, a folder of photos into iPhoto, a sound or graphic into iMovie, and so on

Figure 5-5 Top: When you press the F10 key, you get a clear shot at any window in the current program (Safari, in this example) In the meantime, the rest of your screen attractively dims, as though someone has just shined a floodlight onto the windows of the program in question It's a stunning effect Bottom: Tap the F11 key when you need to duck back to the desktop for a quick administrative chore Here's your chance to find a file, throw something away, eject a disk, or whatever, without having to disturb your application windows (When you first tap F11, even open Finder windows are

hidden; at left, you've subsequently opened a window manually.)

In either case, tap the same function key again to turn off Exposé Or click one of the window edges, which you can see peeking out from all four edges of

the screen

• You want to open a different document For many people, having access to the entire Finder beats the pants off having to use the Open dialog box

Double-clicking the icon you want automatically opens it and turns off Exposé

• You're on the Web, and you want to see if some file has finished downloading

Tap F11 to survey the situation on your desktop

In essence, Apple has finally realized that the desktop really isn't "just another program."

If the layer of open programs is the atmosphere, the Finder is the earth below—and the ability to teleport you back and forth is a huge time saver

Tip: You can switch among the three Exposé modes (F9, F10, or F11), even after you've

triggered one For example, if you press F10 to shrink only one program's windows, you can then press F11 to see the desktop, and then press F9 to shrink all programs' windows

5.3.1.3 Another way to Exposé

Most of the time, you'll probably use Exposé in two steps You'll tap the function key once to get the windows out of the way, and tap it again to bring them back (if, indeed, you haven't clicked a window to bring them back)

In some cases, though, you may find it easier to hold down the relevant key For example, hold down F11 to see if a file is finished copying to the desktop, then release the key to bring back all of the windows For quick window-clearing situations, that method saves you the step of having to press the key a second time to turn off Exposé

5.3.2 Three Triggers for Exposé

Exposé is wonderful and all, but the standard keys for triggering its three functions—F9

to expose all windows, F10 for current-application windows, F11 for show-me-the

desktop—may leave something to be desired For one thing, they may already be "taken"

by other functions in your programs (like Microsoft Word) or even by your computer (like certain PowerBook G4 models, whose F9 and F10 keys adjust the keyboard

illumination) For another thing, those keys are at the top of the keyboard where your typing fingers aren't used to going, and you may have to hunt to make sure you're

pressing the right one

Fortunately, you can reassign the Exposé functions to a huge range of other keys, with or without modifiers like Shift, Control, and Option To view your options, choose

System Preferences and then click the Exposé & Spaces icon (Figure 5-6)

Here, you'll discover that you can trigger Exposé's functions in any of three ways:

5.3.2.1 Screen corners

The four pop-up menus (Figure 5-6) represent the four corners of your screen Using these menus, you can assign an Exposé trigger to each corner; for example, if you choose Desktop from the first pop-up menu, when your pointer hits the upper-left corner of the

screen, you'll hide all windows and expose the desktop (To make the windows come back, click any visible edge of a window, or twitch the cursor back into the same corner.)

Depending on the size of your screen, this option can feel awkward at first But if you've run out of keystrokes that aren't assigned to other functions, be glad that Apple offers you this alternative

Note: In previous versions of Mac OS X, of course, whipping the pointer into a corner

was one good way to turn on your screen saver Apple hasn't forgotten about that, which

is why you'll also find commands called Start Screen Saver and Disable Screen Saver in the pop-up menus Apple wanted to make sure that you don't get confused and assign two different functions to the same corner

Figure 5-6 You can trigger Exposé in any of three ways: by twitching your cursor into a certain corner of the screen (top), pressing a key (lower left), or clicking the extra buttons on a multibutton mouse (lower right), including Apple's Mighty Mouse Of course, there's nothing to stop you from setting up all three ways, so you

can press in some situations and twitch or click in others

5.3.2.2 Keystrokes

Also in the Dashboard & Exposé preferences, you'll find three pop-up menus—"All windows," "Application windows," and "Show Desktop" —that correspond to the three functions of Exposé as described above (The fourth pop-up menu, Dashboard, is

described at the end of this chapter.) You can't assign any old keystroke to Exposé, but you have far more options than the puny F9, F10, and F11 keys

Within each pop-up menu, for example, you'll discover that all of your F-keys are

available as triggers: F1, F2, F3, and so on If, while the pop-up menu is open, you press one or more of your modifier keys (Shift, Option, Control, or ), all of these F-key choices change to reflect the key you're pressing; now the pop-up menu says Shift-F1, Shift-F2, Shift-F3, and so on That's how you can make Shift-F1 trigger the hide-all-windows function, for example

These pop-up menus also contain choices like Left Shift, which refers to the Shift key on the left side of your keyboard That is, instead of pressing F9 to make all your windows shrink, you could simply tap the Shift key (This is only an example Repeat: This is only

an example Actually using the Shift key to shrink all your windows is a terrible, terrible idea, as you'll quickly discover the next time you try to type a capital letter This feature

is intended exclusively for hunt-and-peck typists who never use the Shift key on one side.)

If you have a laptop, you'll also find out that the Fn key is also available for Exposé—and this time, it's a great choice, because Fn otherwise has very little direction in life (Fn is the neglected key in the lower-left corner of a Mac laptop keyboard, or in the top middle cluster of Apple's aluminum keyboard.)

5.3.2.3 Multiple-button mouse clicks

If your mouse has more than one button, you see a second column of pop-up menus in System Preferences Each pop-up menu offers choices like Right Mouse Button, Middle Mouse Button, and so on Use these pop-up menus to assign the three Exposé modes (or Dashboard) to the various clickers on your mouse: right-click to hide all windows, left-side click to reveal the desktop, and so on

Tip: No matter how you trigger Exposé, try holding down the Shift key as you do it

You'll enjoy watching all your windows shift around with Mac OS X's patented slow-motion animation, which can be quite a sight