I keep hearing people talk about OSX, and every time they mention it, they talk about some thing called "Expose" (Panther - first impressions, The first big Panther Gotcha, etc.). I don't have a Mac! I don't have OSX! (I know, I know, weep for me...) I don't know what it is. What is it???
Sure, sure, I could google it and get 9700 articles describing it in detail complete with screenshots and feature lists and ways to customize and extend it. But, I am damned lazy.
I just hate hearing, "this is soooo cool!" but no one saying why. People just say, "Expose is cool." And, they leave it an exercise for the reader to understand why. Or, they just assume the reader is in the know, and their statement is understood as fact.
I hate being outside the "know."
Comments
You can't know expose.. expose needs to know you...
Once you understand that, all will become clear!
But seriously, it's just a window management utility.. it arranges windows on the desktop in a couple cool ways. Quite useful if you're like me and work with 10 shells, 3 browser windows, 1 email client, 5 misc applications and a sprinkling of other windows just for fun.
What it does is:
1) Shrink all the windows on-screen
2) Move all the shrunken windows around until they're all visible
3) Grey out the background
Mousing over a window puts up the title of the window (since they're generally too small to see)
You can then click on any of the mini windows and that window, and its corresponding app, becomes the frontmost window and active app. Really handy with a dozen or two windows open.
There's an alternate mode that only shrinks and moves the windows of the active app and greys all the other windows out (handy when you've got a dozen terminal windows).
There's also an exposé mode that'll whip all the windows off the screen with just a little edge showing so you can get to the desktop for stuff. That's less cool, but still occasionally handy.
Very enlightening post here. I too do not get too many chances to play on a Mac and have been hearing allot of buzz around this application. Never bothered me enough to go out and actually search for information about it though…
You aren't out of luck, if you don't have access
to a Mac. You might like to try the larswm
windowmanager. It sure must not be compared to
the aqua interface, its somwhat spartan. It just
draws heavily on its main goal: to free the user
from resizing and dragging windows.
http://groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/larswm-devel
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~larsb/larswm/