Way back, when we were recovering from our hangovers from the millennium parties, Apple introduced, for the first time, Mac OS X and the Aqua user interface. This was still a preview, so it wasn't quite as polished and finished, of course. It also contained a feature that never made it into the final releases: single-window mode. Or did it...?
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Member since:2006-02-12
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
Member since:
2005-07-11
Interesting, but you don't really need this feature to tidy your workspace, Thom. Hitting cmd-opt-H hides all applications except the active one. Also, I found that holding down cmd + opt while selecting an app from the Dock enables this single-app behavior for this one click.