How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther

Switch Applications with Expos

If you’re like most users, you’ll probably have a few applications open at a time and have windows all over your screen. Switching applications using the Dock or the keyboard, as previously shown, is a good way to work among these programs, but you still end up with a disorganized screen. There has to be a better way to make sense of all these windows.

Well, Apple came up with a great way to do this. One of the most original and useful new features in Mac OS X 10.3 is Expos . This feature lets you get a view of all your application’s windows, or all the windows of a given application, when you press a keyboard shortcut or mouse button, or move your cursor to a hot corner of your screen. You can then switch to the window you want with a single click.

Expos is easier to demonstrate than to explain, though. Look at the following:

This screen is typical of what many users see as they work. Three applications are open—iTunes, Safari, and iCal—as well as the Finder. It’s pretty hard to make sense of which window is which, and it’s even harder to see at a glance what these windows contain. But if you press the Expos All Windows shortcut (the F9 key), you see all your open windows in smaller versions across your screen, and if you move your cursor over the windows, you see the names of their applications (or the name of a document, web page, or other unique information about the window), as shown next.

To switch to one of these windows—and its application—just click it. This window comes to the front, and all your other windows return to their previous positions.

Expos works not only for switching applications, as in the previous illustration, but also for switching windows within an application. Say you have four Finder windows open and you want to switch quickly to one of them. Instead of clicking on parts of the different windows, moving some of them out of the way to see where the others are, press the Expos Application Windows shortcut (F10).

You’ll see all the windows of that application spread across the screen, and when you move your cursor over them, you’ll see their names. Click one of these windows to activate it. No matter how many windows you have open, Expos shrinks them all to fit your screen, so you can see miniatures of them.

Finally, you may have files scattered across your Desktop, or you may want to access removable media or network volumes mounted on the Desktop. Press the Expos Desktop keyboard shortcut (F11). All your windows move off to the side of your screen, showing the Desktop, and allowing you to work there, moving or copying files, and opening folders or volumes.

To return to the previous view, with all your windows visible, press the F11 key again.

Set Expos Preferences

While I explained how to use Expos ’s preset keyboard shortcuts previously, you can change these to shortcuts that you find easier to remember and use. You can also set hot corners to invoke Expos , or you can set mouse buttons, or a combination of modifier keys and mouse buttons to invoke Expos .

To do this, open the System Preferences, either by clicking its Dock icon or by choosing the Apple Menu | System Preferences and then click the Expos button to display the Expos preference pane.

As you can see here, this preference pane has three sections: Active Screen Corners, Keyboard, and Mouse.

• Active Screen Corners If you want to invoke Expos from a hot corner—meaning that its actions are activated when you move your cursor into a corner of the screen—choose which corner you want to use, and then click that corner’s pop-up menu. You have three choices: All Windows, Application Windows, and Desktop, which correspond to the three Expos actions I explained above. You can choose to use two corners, or more, for any of these Expos actions, but you’ll notice that the pop-up menus also contain Start Screen Saver and Disable Screen Saver; this is because you must share these corners with the screen saver controls. You can use hot corners for both screen savers and Expos , but you cannot use the same corner for both.

• Keyboard By default, Expos uses the F9, F10, and F11 keyboard shortcuts, as I explained previously. But you can change these shortcuts to any other F keys, to any modifier keys, or to any combination of these. For example, click one of the pop-up menus in this section and you’ll see the keyboard shortcuts available. If you hold down a modifier key (such as z, SHIFT, OPTION, or CONTROL), you’ll see the shortcuts in the pop-up menu change accordingly.

  Tip

  You’ll notice in the Expos keyboard shortcut pop-up menus that a distinction exists between the right and left modifier keys, such as the right and left CONTROL keys. You can choose to invoke Expos with only the right CONTROL key, and still be able to use the left CONTROL key for other keyboard shortcuts. If you choose such a key, Expos activates when you press that key alone, but you won’t be able to use that key in other shortcuts. So, if you have a CONTROL-A shortcut in an application, and you set the right CONTROL key to one of Expos ’s functions, you’ll have to use the left CONTROL-A combination to activate the other shortcut.

• Mouse You can also set mouse buttons to invoke Expos ’s functions. Click the pop-up menu and choose which button you want to use. Depending on how many buttons your mouse has, you’ll see a corresponding number of choices, minus one; you can’t use the left mouse button for Expos because it must be used for standard clicks.

  Note

  If you have a mouse or other input device (such as a trackball) with a lot of buttons, you’ll find a long list in these pop-up menus. It may take some experimentation to figure out exactly which button in the menu corresponds to each button on your input device.