Until I got to Page 7: Window Management

In this page John Siracusa talks about how window have been traditionally managed in the past. MS Windows had its little taskbar, and well, the Mac didn't do it so well - except when the user did it themselves. If you take your time to arrange your windows so you can get to them easily - guess what - you become more efficient.

This makes sense. You're working on a website. You've got a page full of code in BBEdit, and a big document in Photshop. You arrange these side by side (ignoring screen real estate issues here), and how do you know what window to select when you need to switch windows? You know which to select by size, position, and well, content of those windows.

Now Page 8, where John talks about Expose's settings and what it does. He mentions a trick - just tapping your Expose key combination will switch to the mode and hold it there, while pressing and holding your Expose key combination will switch to the mode, but will switch back when you let up the keys.

Page 8 is, however, mostly ho hum. In my mind the rationale is back at Page 7.

A person identifies the window they want to switch to by position, size, and content. With Expose position is gone, but chances are that the window you wanted was hidden behind something else anyway.

That leaves size and content. With Expose the relative sizes are respected - you have a big browser window open, and a small iChat window open, and in Expose the browser window will be bigger than the iChat window.

Unless you have 2 million windows on the screen, you can usually tell what an Expose-d window contains. Look at these product demo screen shot, especially the shots of Expose in action. Notice how you, even with lots of windows, can see the differences of content of each of the windows.

As pointed out in the article, this works great for images, or for varied types of content. Really great. Not so well for just text, though, as you might be able to see - which of those little windows with text on them do you want to select?

Expose is a relatively young technology. I know I'm still wondering when to use it compared to more traditional techniques (like clicking on a visible part of the window you want to go to). Probably the answer is a result of laziness or where your hands are at the time.