[kertong]

Hey all,

I do all my work on a 12" powerbook, and the display can only do 1024x768.

Now, I was wondering.. is it only me who would love this feature? I was thinking of using the quartz/exposee technology to have windows, by default, scaled down about 30%. That way, relative to the size of the display, your windows would look like they would be placed on a much larger, say, 1440x1000 or so display.

Now, with windows scaled down so much on a 1024x768 display, it would be hard to read the contents of the window. Icons and such may be easily discernible, but text won't be so lucky. So I was thinking that by hitting an exposee hotkey (like the fn key, right enter key, etc), the window your mouse cursor was hovering over would "zoom", exposee style, to 100% of its size. Or a simpler way would be to have just the active window at 100% of its size, while automatically scaling back the rest.

I would personally love to see this done, but I do not have the coding knowledge to implement a seemingly simple hack like this... hm. What does everyone think, would this feature be useful, or more of a pain than it is useful?

[rjenkinson]

except they'd be unreadable. buy a real display or use a TV as a second monitor.

-r.

[kertong]

Originally posted by rjenkinson:
except they'd be unreadable. buy a real display or use a TV as a second monitor.

-r.

well, if you read my post, that's why i suggested that the active window would be automatically scaled to 100%. The rest of the apps would be slightly unreadable, but they would take up much less room on a crowded desktop, and allow you to keep an eye on them.

Buy a real display? Sorry, I don't have oodles of cash leaking out of my ears. And I certainly don't want to lug a "real display" back and forth to the library, work, home, etc.

[rjenkinson]

on a 1024x768 display, if your main window is shown at 100%, just how much extra space do you think you have for other windows? they'd be too small to read text, much more than "slightly unreadable."

you might not have a lot of extra cash for a second display, but you could use your TV as a second screen with the appropriate adaptor.

-r.

[kertong]

Originally posted by rjenkinson:
on a 1024x768 display, if your main window is shown at 100%, just how much extra space do you think you have for other windows? they'd be too small to read text, much more than "slightly unreadable."

you might not have a lot of extra cash for a second display, but you could use your TV as a second screen with the appropriate adaptor.

-r.

Ah, thanks for the detailed feedback.

The way I envision it, the other windows can just be lying beneath the main 100% window. Its not an exact exposee feature where every window has to be tiled.. if you click on the desktop and change focus out of the main window, then all windows would be at 30%. You can drag them around like real windows, thanks to exposee's scaling and live updating. Maybe double clicking on the window would bring it to 100% scale, without disturbing the scale/position of others.

Yeah, I can hook it up to my 27" tv, but the resolution on that is so poor I can't read the smaller text. And I do a lot of my work at the library, so taking the TV with me isn't an option.

[Visnaut]

What happens when you stretch a window to be bigger than your screen boundaries? Will it refuse to scale to full size?

I love the form factor and size of the 12" PB, but I would never ever sacrifice resolution over portability. I assume form factor was more important for you when you purchased your PB, and I respect that. But if lack of screen real estate ultimately hinders your work, perhaps it wasn't a such a wise decision.

That's just me though, I do a lot of design work, and the more space I have, the better. I wouldn't settle for anything less than the 17" PB if I needed a laptop.

Shrinking and growing windows, creating the illusion of depth, will be commonplace in mainstream GUIs in the future, once extremely high resolution displays come out. But right now, I think you simply have to learn how to manage windows more efficiently, and you'll be fine. Exposé has already come a long way in helping us all do that.

[jasong]

I don't get it. As you said, scaled windows would be too hard to read so the feature seems useless. To overcome the fact that the windows are too small, you say to scale the frontmost window to 100%. But if the frontmost window is 100% then what difference does the size of the other windows matter? The whole point of Exposé is to manage more windows than can be visually handled.

-- Jason

[RevEvs]

Id just use Multiple desktops. do a search for "Desktop manager" on macupdate.com - its free, and very good.

revs

[gthyb]

i remember one guy was suggesting the exact same thing last year before expose was ever demonstrated.

[sodamnregistered2]

Originally posted by RevEvs:
Id just use Multiple desktops. do a search for "Desktop manager" on macupdate.com - its free, and very good.

Yeah, not sure why this is not already built into OSX. In Linux it's the shizzna.

[kertong]

I guess this feature would just be more of a hindrance than an aid.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.