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.
Every ripoff of Dashboard is better, of course it was a win3.x app with a completely different concept of how to run the Windows interface. It’s a sign of where they were in the curve though that 14 odd years later Windows still doesn’t have all those features and Mac barely has it covered. Glad somebody else remembers it, high up on my list of best apps ever, also high up on my list of apps that people I mention it to have never heard of.
I can see potential usefulness for those thing, I just doubt I’d use them. Which kind of puts the lie to PC World’s idea that Windows is incomplete without them. If you’ve got a decent chunk of the install base that wouldn’t use them, and readily available 3rd party apps for the folks that want them, do these feature really need to roll into the OS? When MS first started adding features willie-nillie to the OS there was a lot of complaining about what it would do to the 3rd party guys. I suppose most of the writers now are too young to remember those days though.