5 comments to “Blending it in versus bolting it on, and Alt-Tabbing”

1. On Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 9:27 pm Dave Cortright wrote:

   It’s a good idea, Phil, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t preserve the order of icons in the dock and also allow the user to toggle between two recently used apps. In your example, what if Firefox was the app I had last used, and I was copy/pasting some text from a web site into TextEdit. How would I do that easily in your design?

2. On Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 9:39 pm Philip Haine wrote:

   Dave, when you alt-tab, the first one to pop up is the last one that was front-most. So if you are in FF then you alt-tab a couple of times to get to get to TextEdit and do your paste. Then the next time you alt-tab Firefox is the first. Yah?

3. On Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 1:34 pm Dave Cortright wrote:

   Got it. Makes sense. I was trapped in the old way of thinking where the current app is always highlighted by default. I did the worst thing a designer can do: not challenge established conventions.

4. On Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 2:39 pm Johnny Winters wrote:

   Interesting. However, careful when using the term Alt-Tab. The original concept introduced by Windows refers to switching between windows. OS X’s version, Command-Tab, switches between running programs.

   Arguably, it could be interesting to figure out how to combine Expose with Command-Tab to provide the best switcher.

5. On Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 4:27 pm Philip Haine wrote:

   Thanks, Johnny Winters, you’re right that on the Mac it’s Cmd-Tab, not Alt-Tab. (I use the Goldtouch keyboard so I happen to actually press Alt-Tab.)

   Also a good point about Exposé being yet another way to switch apps and docs, and that it, too, should be examined for possible ways to simplify by blending together.

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