I know my reaction to Expose and Virtual Workspace is entirely because of how I’ve trained myself to use computers in the last {cough cough} years. At work I always have at least 6 and frequently quite a few more Windows open, but I always have my taskbar visible so they’re all easily accessible with no additional commands. And I got really good with alt-tab back in the 3.11 days, actually that’s when I taught myself to leave visible space for the desktop, if you’ll cast your mind to the ancient history 3.x minimized apps down to icons at the bottom of the screen, guess who could always see those icons. So for other people these could be cool features, there’s no chance I’d ever use them.
I wouldn’t use Time Machine, turn it off. I realized I wasn’t a backup guy when finally something bad did happen and when contemplating going for my backups I decided there’d been a lot of crap on the machine I didn’t actually care about so I decided to rebuild from scratch sans crap. I’m a pack rat at heart so system crashes are an opportunity to clean. I also learned how little of my “important” data was actually important. Again this very well might kick butt, but I’d never use it.
So Application Dock is a lot like Dashboard. Dashboard was a great application, way ahead of it’s time. Not only have Mac and Windows stolen ideas from it OS/2 Warp stole ideas from it, I think IBM even called their quick launch/applet thing Dashboard. Of course it’s no surprise, Quarterdeck are the guys that made Desqview, always ahead of their time and never able to capitalize on it. Then they got bought by Symantec and we all know what they do to good apps.
I don’t know I don’t see that much advantage to the Mac screen shot, OK it’s one keyboard combo to turn it into a file, which probably has some funky non-descriptive name so now you’ll have to get to your desktop and rename the file to something useful and you probably want it somewhere other than your desktop anyway, sure you have to open Paint and paste the image and save it manually, but then you can give a useful name and put it where you want. Seems to me like they’ve got about even levels of handy and nuisance it’s just different parts of the process are handy.
Curse Black & White for making “mouse gestures” a dirty word, it is actually a nifty idea.
Cover flow still doesn’t sound even slightly exciting. I never have that much trouble finding things.
Of course the punchline for any feature “wish list” for Windows is that the most common, and most true, complaint about the OS is that it’s bloated. It’s got TONS of features most folks never use and don’t know about. There’s probably only about 10% of the users that even use 50% of the tools Windows already comes with. So anybody that comes up with a list of features Windows needs really should come up with a list of features they can dump, I mean really dump, truly free up the disk space and end all downward compatibility. And they better not complain if MS does put those features in and the guys who’ve been making 3rd party apps to do those things in Windows go out of business.
I tend to have so many open it gets crowded, full names not showing. I just don't bother, squeeze the mouse and everything's right there, move to the one I want and let go. It is especially useful in Photoshop where I may have a dozen graphics open.
Again this very well might kick butt, but I’d never use it.
It's not necessarily about your apps, but your documents. So far I've used it to grab earlier versions of documents. And if nothing else, flying back through time in your file system is COOL! The only thing I don't like about Time Machine is that I don't need it often enough, but that's probably a good thing.
So Application Dock is a lot like Dashboard.
I used Dashboard too, and Norton Desktop (back when their apps didn't suck). But this is a lot better.
Seems to me like they’ve got about even levels of handy and nuisance it’s just different parts of the process are handy.
I use both. The Mac way is a LOT better, especially being able to pick a section of screen or windows that aren't even in front. It's a lot better to select your screenshot and have it saved than to select, paste, crop, save. I always had to buy utilities if I needed to do that in Windows. You can also hold down Control and get it on the clipboard like a PC if that's what you want.
Cover flow still doesn’t sound even slightly exciting. I never have that much trouble finding things.
You really have to try it to see how great it is. I turn it on about half the time. I can't remember the last time I actually opened a PDF from my hard drive. I just press the space bar in Cover Flow. However, I wouldn't suggest doing that if you're dealing with very large image files, as Cover Flow takes too long to show them, at least on my iMac.
OS X has a lot of features, and it's pretty big too. But I've noticed most of the features are geared towards making life easier, not just checking-off the "We got that" list (paging Vista). Another part of this philosophy is performance improvements. Apple doesn't just concentrate on making the system actually faster, they concentrate on making it feel faster to the user. Perception is everything.
Expose is by far the most useful desktop command I have ever seen. Alt-tab, task-bar, workspaces, and everything else pales in comparison. Flicking the mouse to a corner and watching the windows shift gives much more utility than any other desktop organizational concept. And being able to shift everything out of the way to get to the desktop and open an item is icing on the cake. Unless you have used Expose for a week in a working environment, you have no idea how useful it is.