Oh, so tempting. Engadget and Slashgear link to this video from our friend Steven Troughton-Smith: Exposé-style app management running on a jailbroken iPhone. No, you can't download it anywhere yet; no, we don't know when it will be ready for prime time and available on the Cydia repo; no, we don't expect Apple to have anything similar in the pipeline for vanilla iPhone use.

But wouldn't it be nice?

One of the refinements in Snow Leopard is a slightly under-the-radar trick for using Exposé from the Application Switcher. The Application Switcher is a quick way to jump between open applications, similar to the Windows Alt-Tab (at least that's what it was last time I used Windows). On a Mac, it's triggered by holding down the Command key (next to the spacebar) and then tapping the Tab key.

Subsequent taps of the Tab key will start selecting the next app in the row of applications, ordered by their most recent usage (so the last application you switched from is one Tab away). Shift-Tab moves backwards through the list. You can also navigate using the left and right arrow keys ... and, with Snow Leopard you can press the up or down key to show all of the windows of the selected application using Exposé.

Once Exposé is up, you can navigate the open windows using the arrow keys, and press Space to temporarily zoom a window for closer inspection. Pressing Return will switch to that application, with the selected window in the foreground. Escape will cancel the whole deal, dropping you back to your current working window. Also, once you've entered Exposé from the Application Switcher, it behaves just like Dock Exposé, and pressing Tab will advance to the next application in the list and Exposé its windows. See the video below for a quick demo, noting that the window zoom is triggered with Space, which isn't shown in the keyboard HUD on the video.

Thanks, Alexandre and Jonathan!

Have you ever needed more room on your screen? Or have you ever needed a way to organize all the stuff you are working on with your Mac? Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, debuted a feature called Spaces: a way of creating extra screens on your Mac. Think of them as virtual workspaces, where you can easily drop application windows to reduce clutter or simply focus on one thing at a time.

To activate Spaces, go to System Preferences > Exposé and Spaces > Spaces. From there you can enable from 2-16 "spaces" (virtual screens) and you can fine-tune application behaviors. For example, I have Skitch set to appear in Every Space, which simply means it'll appear in whatever space I happen to be working in when I open Skitch. Normally switching to an application will take you back to the space you left it in (you can turn this off in the preferences).

The really awesome thing about Spaces: it's like Exposé on steroids. If you're used to hitting a key and seeing all open windows, now you'll be able to hit a key and see all windows in all the Spaces you have open -- thus expanding your screen real estate considerably. Plus, you can use the two together. Hit a key to see all Spaces, then hit your Exposé key to see all the windows in every Space. You can also easily drag windows to another space either in the zoomed out view or just by pulling a window to the edge of the screen (depending on which space you wish to travel to). It's hard to explain, so watch the video to see what I mean.

Note that there are some apps (Microsoft Word 2008 in particular) that don't play well with Spaces, so your mileage may vary.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

Spaces is a very nice way to manage all of your Mac's applications. You can have certain applications set to open in certain Spaces, and you can drag windows between spaces by clicking the Spaces application icon in the Dock (or menu bar). But did you know there is a simple way to drag all of application's windows between spaces?

To do this, simply launch Spaces (using either a key combo, Dock icon, or menu bar item), then find the application whose windows you wish to move from one Space to another. Command + drag one of the windows, and all of the windows from that application will follow. It's that simple.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

By now, everyone knows about the awesome power/productivity achieved by using Exposé. Well, here is one time saver that Apple built into OS X which you might not have known about.

After you invoke Exposé by using either the Exposé key, F9, or F10, pressing the tab key will cycle through your open windows, one application at a time (all the Safari windows, then all the Mail windows, then... etc.). Keep pressing the tab key until you reach the application that you are looking for.

If you want to return to the previous application while Exposé is still activated, just press shift + tab. You can select a specific open window in the app by clicking with the mouse or using the left/right arrow keys.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections.

Parallels has dropped a new version of their beta release, and it looks good. In addition to a Coherence improvement that now lets any Windows window appear in full preview style on the Dock (as well as show up in Exposé), Windows and OS X can now share the contents of their home folders. That is really awesome-- now, your My Documents and Home folders can share exactly the same contents, so you don't have to worry about where things are being saved, or whether one OS can access the other's information. Finally, it really is like running two operating systems on the same computer, because you can access the same files in the same places in both OSes.

Very nice-- this is exactly the kind of stuff people were dreaming about when Apple switched to Intel. The new beta2 for Parallels 3.0 is available for free download with a 3.0 license, and you can get it right here.

[via Ars Technica]

Move over Shiira, cuz there's another browser in town that can bring the power of Exposé to its tabs. Cocoamug Software's TabExposé enables Safari (even the new v3 beta) with a configurable shortcut key to display the current window's tabs in an Exposé-style layout. To be sure, however, it only works on the current window and the tabs that window contains; if you have more than one window open with tabs in Safari, the others will sit in the background.

TabExposé works well in Safari 3 beta on my MacBook Pro, and with extra options like applying a color bar to the top of the tabs when TabExposé is invoked, $4.90 is a very, very tiny price to pay for such a handy Safari tab management tool.

Google's Summer of Code is a really cool, really massive project focused on open source that first started back in 2005. It functions on a pretty simple concept: the company gives out grants to student developers (this summer they brought on 900 from a list of 6,200 applicants) to work on open source projects for the summer, and we all subsequently benefit in one way or another. Take a gander through the long list of projects on the menu for this summer, and click on any to see what the goals are.

Whether or not these goals are met by the end of the summer is another thing entirely, but there are some great projects and features on the list for such apps as Adium, Camino, Thunderbird, Inkscape and much more. Adium, for example, might gain features like basic voice chat, AppleScript and Bonjour support, while a juicy feature on Camino's todo list is Tabsposé, bringing the window management wonders of Exposé (much like the WebKit-based Shiira features) to the more Mac-like alternative to Firefox. In fact, one of the developers involved with working Tabsposé for Camino is blogging the effort, with a few posts already online covering developer-oriented topics like getting caught up with minor details and coding resources, but also including teaser mockups of what Tabsposé might eventually look like.

Long story short: Google's third round of Summer of Code looks like it will again do some great things for Mac OS X software and open source on a broader scale. Heck, those open source developers are even getting paid, which must be a nice change of pace for some of them. We'll keep an eye on what new features arise from this Google-funded coding powwow at the end of the summer.

Some of the unsung wonders of working in Mac OS X are the features influenced by Fitts' Law. I first saw this concept mentioned and articulated by John Gruber in his Fitts's Law and the Apple and Spotlight Menus portion of a Tiger Details page he was maintaining after the launch of 10.4. In fact, I might as well just quote John for a summary on the basics of Fitts' Law:

The gist of Fitts's Law is that the time it takes to point to a target - in our case here, with your mouse or trackpad - is a function of the distance and size of the target. Bigger and closer targets are easier to hit.

The beauty here is in how Apple has leveraged this concept with Mac OS X's UI, right down to the reason behind the menubar being pinned and always accessible at the top of your display. Basically speaking, there are five primary targets that are dead simple to hit, without even having to look at them: the four corners of your display and the menubar (and sure, the Dock could count as a sixth, but I'm leaving it out for now). You can easily just fling your mouse 'up' and hit the menu that governs the application you're working in (or any you can quickly switch to); it might seem like a minor detail, but it's one that makes it a lot easier to land on the menu you need and keep working.

The four corners of your display are even easier, according to Fitts' Law, since they are what John called 'infinitely large targets.' You can close your eyes and fling your mouse 'down and to the left' and know that you've hit the lower left corner of any display. Attach an action like invoking Dashboard or an Exposé view to those corners (accessible via the Dashboard and Exposé System Preferences pane) and you have just enabled a powerful way to access information and organize your windows. Tack on a 3rd party tool like MaxMenus, CornerClick (a download is available but their site is under renovation) or Spanner and you open up even more possibilities for using these incredibly easy targets to enhance the way you work.

We've seen the betas for quite some time now, but Shiira v2.0 - the feature-packed open source browser based on the same WebKit that powers Apple's Safari - has gone official. As far as I can tell, the feature list hasn't changed wildly from beta into this full version, but check out some of the slick tricks Shiira has up its sleeve:

• Tab Exposé (yep: Exposé comes to browser tabs)
  
• Sharing bookmarks with Safari
• Side drawer showing bookmarks and history
• Search field with choice of search engine
• Cache control panel
• Window appearance switching (Aqua and Metal)
• Enable/disable favicon with bookmark
• Wheel button operation (open in new tab, and tab switching)
• Auto-tab for bookmark folder
• Displaying back-forward list on toolbar buttons
• Search text field for bookmark and history

The feature list is far from over, however, so check out Shiira's official screenshot and features list for more details and even some movies of its features in action. Since Shiira is open source, it's available free from Shiira.jp.

Meandering through the TUAW Flickr group my eyes alighted upon this image. 'Hmm,' thought I, 'that's a lot of email in Exposé.' It got me to thinking about how I use my Mac. Tabbed browsing really has limited the number of windows I have open on my Mac, but perhaps I'm just an odd ball.

I thought it would be fun if everyone posted a picture of their currently opened windows being displayed by Exposé to the Flickr group. This totally unscientific survey would satisfy my curiosity, and I think it would be fun to boot. Here's my contribution. Yep, just three windows.

Remember that Shiira v2 beta preview that delusions of grandeur had at the end of July? Well instead of simply reading about it, now you can take your own copy for a spin, as a public, localized beta has been released. Shiira, if you haven't been following the coverage as of late, is an open source and uniquely feature-packed browser based on WebKit, the same web (and also open source) rendering engine that powers Apple's own Safari.

Most of the new features that were previewed seem to be implemented, including the Shelf, Tab Exposé, a tab thumbnails option (instead of standard tabs found in Safari and Firefox), FullScreen Mode with a really slick and self-hiding navigation overlay, a palette replacement for the sidebar and more.

When this first landed on digg, the download was only a PowerPC build, but it has since been replaced with a true Universal version. So what are you waiting for? Get downloading!

Paul Stamatiou is more productive on a Mac. Why? The combination of Exposé, Quicksilver, and Spotlight. These three things taken together really make the Mac a powerhouse of productivity (and I should know since I use the very same tools, though I tend not to need Spotlight that much. I'm just that good).

Now, I spend a fair amount of time using Windows and it isn't an awful experience (Windows is good for some things), however, whenever I am on my Mac I feel like I'm getting more done.

So, TUAW readers, share your productivity hints in the comments so that we can all become dynamos of productive power!

Drag and drop is one of the many wonders of graphical user interfaces, exponentially increasing productivity with an intuitive, common-sense approach that leaves you with a reaffirmed belief in the unquestionable brilliance of mankind. Exposé takes that to a whole new level: You can actually navigate Exposé while dragging a file/item, allowing you to easily locate and drop it into The Right Window.

Example: You're surfin' in Safari when you run across an image of Bob the Builder that would work perfectly as a title slide in your "Timmy's First Halloween!" home movie project in iMovie. But iMovie is buried behind iCal, Mail, and that Word doc of your thesis you've had open for five years designed to remind you that "one day...[you'll] get it to one day." What are your options? Well, you could save the image to the desktop, pop into iMovie, then import it that way. Or save it to iPhoto, and use the Media Browser to locate and load it in. Both options require extraneous and tedious steps, as well as an extra file you'll almost certainly never need again.

Instead, you could do this: Grab the image and, without releasing the mouse button, load Exposé (F9 is the default). Drag the item over the iMovie window and wait a few seconds (or hit spacebar) -- then pop the image into one of iMovie's media boxes, where it will be automatically imported into your project. The same kind of thing works for all sorts of items: Dragging files between Finder windows, text from one app to another, URLs across browsers, etc.

Cool, huh?

Update: Some readers made a great point, something I should've originally mentioned: Instead of having to use a second hand to hit the F9 key, just set an Exposé hotcorner and perform the drag-and-drop with nothing more than a swift motion of the mouse. I have my bottom-left corner set up for Exposé's All Windows option, and it's great for drag-and-drop scenarios. (Thanks Chadster and Rolphus.)

In case you wondered if we bloggers ever click on the homepage links our readers submit with their tips and comments... we often do. And every now and then we are rewarded with something entertaining for our efforts.

Clicking on fra's homepage link tonight, which I stumbled upon from one of his comments, brought me to a funny picture of a cat (and yes, I clicked it!).

Move along, you say? Not so fast. Further down on the page, I came across a link to Joey Tran's Progeny Motion Picture Festival 2005 winner for Best Sound: "Ode to Mac, or: Yes Way, Expose!" Try it... you'll like it!