A bit of catch-up first. Corinna was here this weekend, which rocked socks. She arrived Friday night and left this afternoon (she has MLK day off). Friday night we just crashed, pretty much, but Saturday we got together with Chuck, Johnny, and Calmie and played some Pop-Culture Trivial Pursuit (DVD Edition) at Chuck’s place. I DOMINATED without remorse, winning the game with the closest person behind me having only 2 pie pieces. We played Uno afterwards, a game which I never really played before (or at least haven’t played in many moons) and my dominance did not carry over there… :)
Sunday
Regarding my experiment: I think I am getting used to Expose vs. Virtual Desktops, so my real analysis and comparisons will begin over the next week. I seem to have mostly deprogrammed myself of the pager hotkeys, and am working pretty efficiently with Expose.
Your post made me notice just how cluttered my machine’s been lately- running lots of little web development related programs with long uptime- and how little use I’ve got from the dock for window management. Most of it was due to me having windowing functions on my trackball- close, minimize, and hide- with hide not getting much love.
I kept finding myself with three or four finder windows and extra terminals all over the place just because it was easier to make a new one than locate the old spare I had lying around. I switched the mouse buttons to expose functions and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. I’ve found myself using the reveal desktop button indefinitely to unclutter the display when I leave my desk, and being more anal about leaving multiple spare windows open if I’m not using them (finder and terminal, mostly). So far, so good.
I wish Apple would release the Dock api’s so someone could write a real replacement. Replacements like DragThing are nice, but until you can replace the Dock they are pretty much annoying.
I stopped hating the dock when I stopped using it as a launcher. It’s a competent task switcher, but only that. I don’t know if enough people have asked you, but have you tried launchbar yet?
I used drag thing in os 9, so it’s funny to hear you call it a dock replacement, since all my experience with it was before the dock was released to the public.
Launchbar is retarded. I love using the keyboard, but I hate things that force me to unnecessarily switch contexts.
The problem is that the dock tries to do to many things while still keeping it dumb for the intro users. It’s the minimization target, it’s a launcher, it’s runtime status indicator, it’s a finder shortcut bin, it’s a….