OSNews

I would like it as a setting. I am guessing that a large number of OS X users are on laptops. So there are times when Spaces feels right and other times like XCode/Interface Builder when it feels like a kluge. Generally Speaking the App Pager from GNOME feels right b/c it is expected and Exposé/Spaces feels like it just yanked Textmate or whatever out of my view just to switch view on me. but it really depends on what you grew up on.
At the heart of it I suppose is the difference between Document Centered and App Centered views and who prefers them. Yeah I have the Cmd-H Cmd-Opt-H commands wired. But this 'feels' like what I want the OS to do. Unfortunately if this was a natural setting then I suspect it would turn into AppCentered/DocCentered drama. Usually I am running >= 6 and often up to 15-17 apps so much so that i would have spaces on the F-12 key instead of the Dashboard.

For the Mom and Pop users (and this is all the Unix they need) this might be a confusing setting - no matter what the options are. They would see apps jumping up and backing/blanking out. But for designers and developers this either feels right OR turn it back off.

Apps I am running now. Finder, XCode, Mail, OmniWeb, Textmate, Omnifocus, NewsFire, Interfacebuilder, MIGHT ALSO RUN Delicious Monster, iTunes, iCal, any 2 other iLife Apps and any 2 or three other browsers

Posting a lmgtfy link would be a bit lame.

Sorry, but I don't find that funny.

You referenced it so you could at least linked to a site yourself for the benefit of us who don't have a copy of DP3 (which is going to be most of your readers).

You did it for the psychology term, so why change tact on a reference that actually had some relevance to the article?

This was, unfortunately, nonproductive. The best article I could find from that search was:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-dp3/macos-x-dp3-4.html

which referred to two "easter eggs"; one, "mashing" all the "modifier keys" and selecting "About Mac OS" and the other pressing ctrl-alt-del from the login screen.

The article refers to pressing ctrl-alt-del from the "about Mac OS" window, however. That behavior wasn't described.

The funny thing for me about that, is that this story is like the fourth link returned. Osnews needs to work on its google ranking so it can create the ultimate LMGTFY experience. The link could then bring up google with a link back to the article you posted the lmgtfy on it.

Turtles, all the way down!

Or at least use that fourth button to MAXIMIZE windows (and i really mean maximize as in cover all space) at least. Apple, can we have a fourth "maximize" button please?

In the linked series of videos in which Jobs introduces Aqua at MacWorld, he actually CALLS it a maximise button. Fun, huh?

There is a freeware app called RightZoom that enables the green button to be a true zoom. It only works in native Cocoa apps but it's a welcome feature! Download here: http://www.blazingtools.com/downloads.html#RightZoom

The zoom feature is actually rather nifty, and i wouldn't want it gone from OSX, but rather to have a maximize button too. An alternative would of course be if apple implemented maximizing on cmd clicking the zoom button, like you can with right zoom.

I particularly like the fact that when i click the "green button of mystery", itunes switches to the mini player - wow, apple, that just what i expected it to do (not)
That's funny!

A fourth button would be kinda overkill I think, but Apple needs to fix the green button asap. I don't care if it maximizes or if it resizes to fit content or whatever else a button could do, just pick one function and use it consistently.

That's true. Consistency is what most users expect.

However, it is not easy to achieve that in Mac these days.

The main problem is "behavior". Cocoa framework provides "behavior" associated to the programming model, while "Carbon Applications" do not.

If all Mac apps were Carbon, the things would be easy to fix, but Office, CS, iTunes and many others, are still old school programming.

When you click on the application in the dock, only one application window is shown at any one time. For example, if I have Safari and Terminal open, when I click on the terminal button the dock the terminal window comes to the front and the safari window disappears.

I'm personally confused as to the usefulness of it.

NeXTstep and Mac OS X have a concept of hiding running applications, which is different from minimizing. When you choose to hide an app, all of its windows disappear from screen, but are not minimized to the Dock. When you switch back to the app using cmd-tab or by re-launching it, all non-minimized windows become visible again, on top of other running applications. This works the same whether or not the app was previously hidden. What the single application mode does, is simply to automatically hide all other applications when you select one from the Dock. Hide Others is a standard feature available from the menu bar of any NeXTstep/OS X application.

That's exactly the point: with single application mode, you don't have to move anything anywhere. Single application mode is useful if you want to concentrate on a certain work or app (e. g. writing or designing) or if you want an uncluttered view on apps (e. g. when doing drag and drop operations between two or more apps - in single app mode you start dragging, then switch the app, then drop without having to deal with unrelated windows).

With virtual desktops (or what MacOSX calls Spaces) you can 'emulate' single application mode, however this is way too cumbersome compared to single application mode in a "one app at any time" scenario.

Virtual desktops have an advantage for other usage scenarios e. g. where you work with groups of apps which are completely unrelated (e. g. a desktop for the mail client and one for a group of media production apps needed in a workflow).

I cannot imagine many scenarios where virtual desktops are more useful than other features of MacOSX (single app mode, Exposé) and I guess that's why the virtual desktops feature appears so late in the development cycle of MacOSX.