Mac OS X has an ability to hide applications. This functionality is completely pointless to my workflow, which consists of use of "Spaces" virtual desktops and suchlike. That's fine, I don't have to use it. It's nicely tucked into a consistent location under the application menu of the application you are currently using.
Unless of course you accidentally hit option-click (or on my pc-keyboard alt-click) on a window. Then the window you were just working with is hidden, which means it is not minimized to the dock, or in fact listed anywhere in the ui. The best part is that it's quite possible to not even know what you hid, and there is no way to find out. Of course, this isn't configurable in the system control panels. And it's really easy to search help on a feature that you didn't even try to use and have no idea of the name of. In fact, when a window vanished of one of the several cases I was working on today (it could have been a gvim window, or an application window, i switch often and the mac wouldn't tell me which it was) , I didn't even know the Mac had hiding as a feature. This platform has shot Usability in the head, and is now parading its corpse about in promotions. -josh
