About Mission Control
Last week we joined together to begin exploring Mountain Lion’s System Preferences. This is a journey that will absorb our interest for several weeks to come. But it’s also one that requires us to venture out of System Preferences in order to illustrate what a particular feature does and why you might find it useful. Today’s discussion of Mission Control is exactly that kind of lesson.
One upon a time…
…there were features called Exposé (introduced with Mac OS X 10.3) and Spaces (included with Mac OS X 10.5). They were created to help you unclutter your desktop. While useful for anyone who used a Mac, these features particularly benefited those sitting in front of a small-screen laptop, where desktop real estate is limited.
Exposé was designed so that you could temporarily clear away the junk on your Mac’s desktop and focus on a particular interface element. Specifically, you could reduce all open windows to tiny representations of those windows, move your pointer to the one you wanted to activate, and click on it to bring it to the fore in its full size. Or you could view just a particular application's open windows in their diminished size and select the one you wanted to work with. Or you could choose to temporarily banish all open windows from the screen in order to interact with a file on the desktop.
Spaces was a feature that allowed you to create multiple virtual desktops that acted as individual workspaces. The idea was that you’d organize each workspace by the kind of work you were doing. So, you'd put the applications you needed for organizing your life in one place (Mail, Address Book and iCal, for example). In another space, you'd open iPhoto and Photoshop Elements to work with your images. And in yet another, you'd open a word processor or spreadsheet application to get “serious” work done. To switch tasks, you’d simply move to a different workspace.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2021488/about-mission-control.html
