Mission Control
It came out today and I upgraded to it today–after reading some reviews of course. Here are some very initial observations you might not find in most reviews out there.
- Missions control, which has been criticized by many who had their hands on the developer release, is actually quite an improvement over Expose in my opinion. One advantage is that it groups windows of the same application together, so the clutter is not nearly as brutal when you have lots of stuff open. Another is that it works more like the “present windows” in KDE, whereby all windows on each desktop are shown as if they were expose’d while spaces are open, and when you drag one window to another “space” it sticks in the same location it was on the desktop you moved it from. To get this affect in Snow Leopard you had to view spaces and then hit an additional expose hotkey. Interestingly the arrangement of “spaces” are much like Gnome 3′s, where they are set out in a single row sequence, rather than e.g. a 2 x 2 grid. Not sure I dig it. Other linux window management elements stand out too.
- Full screen Safari and other apps now, though Safari was much needed. But when they’re full screen, they behave like their own independent “space”, in mission control anyway. Not sure what to think of this. It works, but it doesn’t seem ideal, because there is no way to tell which space a full screen app is associated with. (When you restore to non-full-screen, it goes back to its associated space. But you can’t tell which one from mission control!) Also, when an app is full screen, you can’t access the dock except through mission control. A bit weird.
- Desktop effects are a bit nausea-inducing. No more graphical indication of which “space” you’ve moved to. Just a smooth but nausea-inducing space transition. There are new open and other effects too. Nothing too crazy, and I think they’re mostly nice.
- The darkest button elements are a semi-dark grey (e.g. the arrows of the back/forth uni-button of finder/safari/etc.) Over a grey background it does’t work great, if you ask me. The black may have been too dark, but the contrast made it easy to distinguish buttons that can be “activated/depressed/etc.” from ones that can’t. It’s noticeably harder to tell now. E.g. in Safari, can I go back or not? Is lastpass enabled? It’s not super easy to tell.
- Scrollbars are annoying as hell. In some apps they’re always visible. In some they’re not. It’s the latter that are problematic. When they’re not always visible, they appear only when you do some scrolling gesture/button/etc. But why would you do that if you can’t tell if there’s more to scroll! Stupid–yes. I see they’re trying to free up more screen real estate, but with the growing number of cheap high res displays, even on notebooks, I don’t get it. Leave my scrollbars always visible, jack asses!
Is it worth the $29 CDN upgrade? I don’t know. I don’t notice much of a workflow difference, but I do like mission control. I could certainly live without the upgrade, and I imagine the same is true of most. Then again, at $29, it’s hard not to upgrade.
