There must be some clearer way to write this checkbox. When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application. But if you find it disorienting to have your desktops constantly changing their sequence, you can turn this option off. The point, of course, is to make it quick and easy to return to whatever you were doing most recently. (The most recent one becomes Desktop #2, since Desktop #1 is always your main desktop.) If this option is turned on, then OS X will constantly rearrange your virtual desktops so that the most recently used ones are first. But until the Mac came along, it had never been a standard feature of a consumer operating system, and rarely has it been executed with such finesse.Īutomatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use. Now, virtual screens aren’t a new idea-this sort of software has been available for years. These desktops are also essential to OS X’s Full Screen apps feature, because each full-screen app gets its own Spaces desktop. You can also have the same program running on multiple screens-but with different documents or projects open on each one. On Screen 3: your Web browser in Full Screen mode. Screen 2 can hold Photoshop, with an open document and the palettes carefully arrayed. Screen 1 might contain your email and chat windows, arranged just the way you like them. You can dedicate each one to a different program or kind of program. You see only one at a time you switch using Mission Control or a gesture.īut just because the Spaces screens are simulated doesn’t mean they’re not useful. They exist only in the Mac’s little head. Ordinarily, of course, attaching so many screens to a single computer would be a massively expensive proposition, not to mention detrimental to your living space and personal relationships.įortunately, Spaces monitors are virtual. Mission Control’s other star feature, Spaces, gives you up to 16 full-size monitors. That is, instead of pressing F9 to open Mission Control, you could simply tap the Shift key. These pop-up menus also contain choices like Left Shift, which refers to the Shift key on the left side of your keyboard. That’s how you can make Shift-F1 trigger Mission Control, for example. If, while the pop-up menu is open, you press one or more of your modifier keys (Shift, Option, Control, or ⌘), all these F-key choices change to reflect the key you’re pressing now the pop-up menu says Shift-F1, Shift-F2, Shift-F3, and so on. Within each pop-up menu, for example, you’ll discover that all your F-keys-F1, F2, F3, and so on-are available as triggers. The other three-“Application windows,” “Show Desktop,” and “Show Dashboard”-correspond to functions of other Mac features, Exposé and Dashboard, described later in this chapter. The first, Mission Control, lets you specify how you want to open Mission Control. To view your options, choose →System Preferences and then click the Mission Control icon. You can reassign the Mission Control functions to a huge range of other keys, with or without modifiers like Shift, Control, and Option. It’s fast, efficient, animated, and a lot of fun. You click the window or program you want, and you’re there. Now you feel like an air-traffic controller, with all your screens arrayed before you. The concept is delicious: With one mouse click, keystroke, or finger gesture, you shrink all windows in all programs to a size that fits on the screen ( Figure 4-10), like index cards on a bulletin board, clumped by open program. Mission Control tackles this problem in a fresh way. You’ll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the “deck.” And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop-to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or to eject a disk. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your Dock, trying to find the window you want. These days, however, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be like herding cats. (Apple borrowed this idea-well, bought it in a stock swap-from a research lab called Xerox PARC.) In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing windows was easy this way after all, you had only about three of them. In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative, and extremely effective.
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