Nixta Sinks

F8 and F9 = Hours of Tartleyesque Amusement

Spaces and Expose work well together. Using F9 (or whatever mapping you have) to show all the current windows has already been useful for years under Tiger (OS X 10.4 for the unitiated). Now that Leopard introduces Spaces, which seems to be hotly debated as to its usefulness, we get a nice visual which is actually remarkably useful. Press F8 to invoke Spaces (if you have it enabled, if not, read up on it and have a play) then F9. See all windows across all spaces and be able to choose the one you want. Works very nicely, thanks.

That said, Spaces has a little way to go yet - it doesn't automatically switch window focus for example, so even though you think you're in the current window of the current space, your keyboard focus may be elsewhere. But it does do some things very right. Windows update in realtime (including video, though Lightroom goes a bit gaga). Preview's Screen Grab works. It covers dual screens, even though it looks ugly as hell...

Damn it. Here's a video that covers it perfectly, and I thought I was being so clever and inventive...

Spaces and Expose working together

Stacks in slow motion are fun for a second or two. Hold Shift while you open or close a stack. In fact, all windows animations of this kind work the same way. Minimize or restore a window with the Shift key held (that also worked under Tiger).

Lastly, and quite usefully for me, a stack for recent applications. Just open up the Terminal app and follow the instructions on that page. Oh, all right, here they are too (all on one line please):

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'

and then type:

killall Dock

Note that it's case sensitive (and there's a typo on the original page - "dock" should be "Dock"). It's best to copy & paste the first line. This will add a new item to the Stacks area of the dock. You can remove it by just dragging it off the dock...

My advice? Wait until 10.5.1 is released. Leopard drops my 802.11 connection from time to time (DMC's too), and that bug with interrupted moves leading to data loss hit me twice (although I was moving Jamie Oliver videos at the time, so it was no great loss). I also encountered two out of three installation problems (one on each of our MacBook Pros). Mine kept ejecting the Leopard install disc until I'd put in a video DVD and then the Tiger DVD. DMC's wouldn't find the internal drive when the machine rebooted into the installer (solution? Just wait). Even Vista does better than that...

Update: The original Google video I used (here) doesn't seem to be available in Europe? Or at least Slovenia (thanks for pointing that out, Tomsk). Very interesting. Reminds me of the difference between videos available for the iPhone YouTube service over those available through YouTube.com. Very very interesting.

Labels: apple, Hints, Leopard, Spaces, Stacks