I think this has been discussed at (great) length elsewhere, but…
I am coming at these problems as a user of a desktop Mac equipped only with a
mouse and keyboard, thus gestures are not available to me. I'm not convinced
that's the source of the problems, but I would be happy to be proven wrong!
While there are a couple of things I like about Mission Control in Lion, I
think in many ways the concept is an absolutely egregious step backwards. I
have serious problems with the way Exposé now works.
What I really like about Mission Control is how it groups an application's
windows together along with the app's readily identifiable icon. But I don't
find this particularly useful on its own, because App exposé cannot be invoked
from here (unless I'm missing something). By mousing over an app's grouped
windows and using my mouse's scroll wheel to move up, the windows spread out
slightly. This works acceptably (though not ideally) for 2 or 3 windows, but I
utterly fail to see how this is useful when there are 5 or more windows open at
one time in a given app. They do not spread out nearly enough to provide a
clear indication of the contents of each of the windows, nor to easily select
the desired window. Would it not have made more sense to invoke app exposé at
this point to display every window in the application, free and clear of any
other windows?
The fact Mission Control does not display minimized windows seems to be a
horrible oversight. Now when I minimize windows into an application's dock
icon, they are essentially out of sight and out of mind unless I switch to the
app and invoke app exposé; they do not show up in any other context. I've
already found myself losing windows by forgetting that they were already open
and minimized. I sincerely hope this gets fixed.
The removal of the ability to invoke app exposé by clicking and holding on the
dock icon seems to be a mistake. With Mission Control an ineffective way to
find one window among many, I need to invoke Mission Control first, switch to
the app, and then invoke app exposé to find the window I want. Too many steps
to accomplish what could formerly be done (in most cases) in only one step just
by invoking Exposé, and the negative impacts on productivity and ease of use
are pretty noticeable.
I also just noticed that some applications that keep records of previously
opened documents such as Pages and iChat now display the list of recent
documents when left-clicking and holding (or right-clicking) on the dock icon.
That's actually fairly useful, but when invoking app exposé, these "recent"
documents are displayed almost identically as if they were open, minimized
windows. This seems to introduce a lot of clutter to an interface that was
originally intended to help you find relevant windows quickly; I don't see the
point of displaying documents in this interface if they were last opened days,
weeks, or even months earlier.
At this point, Mission Control seems to be little more than a visual task
switcher; it tries to replace Exposé, but in my opinion, it fails in almost all
respects and is simply not very useful if you have even a moderate number of
windows open. App Exposé itself has also been made less useful, IMO.
I have some other gripes about Lion (I don't think I care for how Spaces works
now, for example, and I find the lack of contrast on window title and status
bars to be rather difficult to read) but to me, Mission Control and Exposé
represent major design problems.
Should I feel differently? Am I doing something wrong?
Matt_______________________________________________
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