stevenberlinjohnson.com: Expose Yourself

It'll be interesting to hear what the original Mac OS purists have to say about Exposé, the new window management technology announced today as part of Apple's forthcoming OS 10.3. Just from the demo alone, it looks to me to be one of the most useful and innovative interface enhancements to come out in quite a long time. And one that seems true to the original principles of the Mac interface: it looks genuinely useful, intuitive, and cool all at the same time.

As I type this post, I have about twenty separate windows stacked open on my monitor: five or six in the finder, a dozen email messages, three web pages, a MS Word document, the iTunes browser. But I can see only a small fraction of them. I'd like to be more organized about closing or hiding windows that I'm no longer using, but after fifteen years with my Mac, I've learned that this is just not who I am. The idea behind Exposé is basically that you can let the screen get as cluttered as you want, and with one keystroke the OS will give you a big picture view that puts everything into perspective. Once you've found the window you're looking for, the screen switches back to the old cluttered view, with the desired window now front and center.

Exposé is one of those interface elements that's better to see in action than hear described, but basically what it does is zap all active windows down to smaller, but still legible versions of themselves, distributed across the screen so that none of them overlap -- not unlike a contact sheet of photos. (Another keystroke highlights only the active windows for a specific application, graying out all the windows belonging to other applications.) It's a great visual effect, and unlike some of the other OS X design elements, it harnesses our visual memory in ways reminiscent of the original Mac interface. Most of the time, I have a general memory of the shape and coloring of the window I'm looking for; I just can't see the window because there are fifteen other ones stacked on top of it. Because Exposé preserves the relative shapes of each window, and includes shrunken versions of their contents, picking out the window I'm looking for should be a breeze.

I say "should be" because you never really know with these things until you actually start using them. Some interface tools sound incredible, but you never end up adopting them in any regular way. But I'd wager that I'll use Exposé dozens of times a day, and be thrilled with it every time. Maybe that will be some consolation for having to put up with that irritating brushed metal look that 10.3 is apparently adopting across the board...

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of seven books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

My Books

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
An exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books. Sold more copies in hardcover than anything else I've written.
The Invention of Air
The story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!

Comments

It's not adopting the metal across the board--there is actually a subtle new white scheme for normal windows. It is, however, using metal for Finder windows, which, I agree, is annoying. Oh well, I guess I'll get used to it...

Posted by: Buzz Andersen | June 24, 2003 at 01:02 AM

I've never liked seeing all my app windows on my screen at once. I use AutoHide, a free little OS X app to only show me my active application.

Yes, I agree, actually using the application will determine how useful it is.

Posted by: Jeff | June 24, 2003 at 08:41 AM

I don't foresee myself using Expos that often because I rarely have more than two or three apps open with perhaps several windows from each.

I guess I've just gotten into the habit of closing applications I'm not using or hiding them and their windows. I've also enshrined open-apple-` and open-apple-TAB in my motor memory, often doing a combination of these in rapid succession to find the window I'm looking for.

If I'm trying to focus on a particular application, I'll hide all of the other applications by doing an open-apple-option-click on the desired application.

Now I know that my style isn't the norm and I'm sure there are plenty of people who will go ape over this feature (I'm pretty sure my wife is a cluttered desktop person). And this app may even encourage me to release my seeming compulsion about clutter-free computing.

Posted by: Bill Brown | June 24, 2003 at 10:37 AM

Apple had several great anouncements today. I can't wait to get my hands on some of this stuff. Looks like it may be time to upgrade my PowerBook to a tower again.

Posted by: Adam | June 24, 2003 at 12:14 PM

I find the fading of the background, while highlighting windows from one app, very intruiging. Apple should use contrasting and transparency a lot more in the user interface. Having the windows of the app you're currently using highlighted (and the rest toned down) could for example be a permanent setting and the background could be lighter instead of darker, like this. Pardon the quality of the mockup, I'm no Jonathan Ive ait.

Posted by: Rikard Linde | June 25, 2003 at 01:35 AM

I'm curious about comparisons between Exposé and CodeTek VirtualDesktop (which I've been using for nearly a year). Seems one thing Exposé provides is a method for dealing with window clutter, while CTVD can be used for organizing windows to avoid that clutter.

Some of my applications run on dedicated CTVD desktops, using window cycling or the Window menu for window selection. I use hotkeys to switch between CTVD desktops.

When necessary, I can temporarily hide an application to expose the real desktop, grab an item (with click-hold), unhide the application (with command-tab), and drag-drop it on the desired window (possibly using command-` to cycle to it). I'm wondering if Exposé will be more convenient/efficient for that sort of operation. Likely more visually interesting, at least for awhile.

I'm sure CodeTek will find a way to integrate Exposé and VirtualDesktop on Panther. And maybe Exposé is Apple's first step towards more flexible desktop/window management in OS X which will eventually include their own flavor of "virtual" desktops, even extending the single desktop metaphor to encompass true multiple desktops containing shared and unique objects.

Posted by: Scott J. Kramer | June 28, 2003 at 09:22 AM

For those of you who aren't familiar with Panther and Exposé, take a look at http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/expose.html.

I happen to be one of the lucky ones who can legitimately run the Developer Preview of Panther. I can give a bit of detail without violating my NDA in any substantive way.

Exposé functions can be triggered by moving into one of the corners or via keyboard shortcuts. Once the miniturized windows are displayed on screen, you can pick the window you want using the mouse or the arrow keys.

Saving the best for last, when you're looking at the mini-windows, pressing the Tab key cycles you though the mini-windows for each open app. For example, you go from seeing all windows, to just the windows for Safari, just the windows for Photoshop, etc.

All in all, it means you can get to any open window without lifting your hands from the keyboard, and in almost all cases, without having to stop and mentally map the name of a window to the actual window you want.

I've always considered Mac OS X to wonderfully navigable, especially in contrast to the nightmarish Windows XP navigation scheme, but Exposé is truly amazing.

Posted by: Anon | June 29, 2003 at 03:35 AM

It sounds like a great app, but also like a solution of a problem that sprouts directly from the MacOs uses windows. The way Mac applications are setup, results in lots of windows from different apps on one big heap. The 'nightmarish' Windows XP navigation scheme doesn't have that, since with Windows XP, each application has one main window and Alt-Tab cycles you through them. Cycling through the windows of an app usually works with Ctrl-Tab.

Now expose does these things in a visually much more appealing way, but Alt-Tab/Ctrl-Tab has been in Windows since Win3.1

Posted by: Douwe Osinga | July 17, 2003 at 01:29 AM

I'd give up some very important parts of my anatomy (both the left and right ones, in fact) to have Expose for Win XP. I played with it a bit tonight on a friend's Panther beta and it is soooooo sweet.

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