Mac's Expose

Having used it on Piera's eMac, I can say that I really don't find it useful. In the world of Virtual Desktops, Expose doesn't do much for me. I mean, seriously, if you have a disoragnised desk, than it probably makes sense, with little notes all over the place. This reminds me so much of "Where's Waldo". You know the book, the one where you have a thousand illustrations of people in an area, and you have one guy, Waldo, who you need to find.

Expose feels like that. Sure, when you only have a few windows open, it is probably nice. But ALT+TAB is so much faster. I can go back and forth without a problem. Expose might allow me to take a look at everything I have open, but I am only looking for one thing. And Expose doesn't know what I am looking for. With Virtual Desktops, I find it much easier to say "Hey, Email goes here on this desktop, generic web browsing here, development stuff here, graphic stuff here,..." and so on. I keep my life organized.

No doubt that Expose is a neat feature, it looks cool, and people probably use it. But as I see it, it's a Band-Aid on a larger problem. Window organization. Taskbars are the same thing. The computer can multitask, but the user is only ever actively using one application at a time.

No, really, that's it. Even if you are using a PHP IDE and checking the results in the browser, their is only ever one active application. You are writing in your IDE, and then switch to the browser. This makes a Virtual Desktop environment much more suited to getting stuff done. A virtual desktop allows you to setup "workshops", and in this workshop, you can get all your tools out ready to use. You are only ever going to use one tool at a time.

But with something like Expose (and as far as I know, Mac OSX doesn't have virtual desktops), it's like having one workshop, with all your tools laid out at once. You are only ever going to use one at a time, but now you have all your projects in one workshop. This means your life is much less organized, and you have just increased the number of choices you have to make whenever you want to switch tools.

And this coincides with something I saw on Daily Planet the other day: we have too many choices.

On a side note, Piera will probably beat me up for all of this. After all, she loves her Mac like any good Mac Addict does. And she freely admits her addiction.

Discovered my companies server IP addresses are blocked by Spamhaus for something I don't know anything about. These are my servers, and I am on these IP addresses. And everyone here knows I wouldn't spam. Anyways, sent them an email. Let's see how this goes.

hadess: The point of my post didn't meant to imply he was telling people to use Microsoft over Linux. Though I admit, maybe my choice of words wasn't all good.

However, that had little to do with the meaning of the rest of my post. Simply put: Whatever the Red Hat CEO says, whatever SuSE and Novell are up to, whatever Microsoft says doesn't make a difference to the whole scheme of things. Every where I was reading about these events, people were treating it like it was the end of the world, or bad omens.

They aren't. It's evolution. Things happen, businesses change focus.

If you think that everybody should be using Linux, you're an idiot who can't see the missing bits. Probably as stupid as that Windows user who downloads warez, and uses mIRC thinking he's l33t. Just about.

Now, where do I even make this suggestion? Would I like everyone to use Linux, or alternative OS's? Of course. That would be great. Do I think we are at a state where this is possible? No. Do I think it's going in that direction? Yes.

Please don't suggest I am saying something I don't, nor believe.

It seems that Novell buying SuSE, and Red Hat only doing enterprise stuff is causing a big storm. Of course, the fact that the Red Hat CEO is saying use Windows for the desktop doesn't go over well with your normal open source crowd.

But even still, people are acting like this is the end of the world. As if suddenly Linux has no more support on the desktop. I've been using Linux as my sole desktop OS for more than a year now, and I have found that I don't need support. Well, I don't need support as much as I didn't need support on Windows.

So Red Hat isn't supporting the home user anymore. Big deal. Unless I am mistaken, Microsoft doesn't provide support to home users. If you want to pay for it, you can, of course.

And then there is the big Novell buys SuSE stories that go around, people proclaiming it's the end of KDE, or that SuSE is dead because Novell will kill it off. You know, because SuSE was the only supporter of KDE. And because Novell is going to ax KDE. I mean, you know Novell bought SuSE just to destroy it, right? And that there are no other desktop linux choices out there.

People, get over it. This is all for the better. Now Red Hat released Fedora. This means I can burn copies and sell it, and call it Fedora. And it's an open source distro of the Red Hat OS. The development is opened up.

What's going on now with SuSE and Red Hat isn't bad. It's good. It's evolution.

In response to Burtonini's post on URIs

Side Bar!

The sidebar is such wasted space, and yet, it has the potential to be so simple and easy to use.

Imagine the simplicity of making sidebars work like they do in Evolution. Except in the nautilus sidebar, you would have shortcuts. Common things that a user might need, such as Applications, Fonts, CD Writer, Network, etc.

To take that a step further, allow the user to drag into the sidebar commonly used directories.

Also consider what XFCE does with XFFM and the books feature. I think Gnome could really benefit from using the Book feature from XFFM, and putting it in Nautilus some how.

Sorry, just dreaming.