Sleep Spent

I use Macs pretty much exclusively these days, and sometimes I forget just how well thought out and usable the Mac OS is. OS X has gone through its awkward phase, and while there’s still more to do, it is unquestionably at the top of the User Interface heap right now.

An example: Background window manipulation.

In OS X, you can use the mouse to do just about anything you want to a background window without bringing it to the front, so long as the background window belongs to a Cocoa application. Simply hold down the Command key and you are empowered to:

• Manipulate scroll bars: drag the thumb, click the arrows, page up/down
• Manipulate splitters
• Select text, redefine selections
• Click buttons
• Close, minimize and zoom windows
• And most importantly, move windows around by dragging the title bar

(If the background application is not Cocoa, you can still move the window around and use the stoplight buttons. You just can’t do any of the other über cool things.)

Backgound window dragging isn’t new; it’s been around since at least Mac OS 8. What is new to OS X is the ability to manipulate widgets. This is a NeXTism that came with Cocoa, to the benefit of Mac users everywhere.

With Panther’s incredibly spiffy new Exposè feature, I find myself having to move windows around far less often. Still, though, sometimes it’s nice to just check on one thing in a background window that would overlap the one you’re using if you ordered it front.

This was all made painfully clear to me today while using Windows XP to attempt to get some work done. Horrible, horrible interface. Since windows are not grouped by application, you can’t switch between them without having to avoid other applications. (In OS X, you use Cmd-Tab to switch applications and Cmd-~ to switch windows within an application.) And since I couldn’t move around windows in the background and the screen was too small for the three things I needed to look at simultaneously, it was quite a mess.

I guess it comes down to the fact that Windows doesn’t have all the little shortcuts and tricks that make OS X such a joy to navigate around in. (It does have a “minimize all to show desktop” keystroke, though, which is news to 90% of the Windows users I show it to.)

Thanks be to Jobs.