Well, after googling for this I can’t seem to find it, mainly because I don’t know what its called. I am hoping someone here knows if this exists.
My boss has a new Mac running OS X, which has a great feature. Basically you can hit a certain button which will gracefully zoom out the screen to show you a minture version of every application window you have open. Simply moving the mouse over the minature version and clicking, zooms that window to the front on the screen.
In my job it is not uncommon to have many windows open and if I could find a PC app that does this, I would drool all over my shirt.
I think something like this is supposed to come in the box in Windows Vista, but I don’t know if there’s an equivalent thing for downlevel Windows OSes.
I’m going to run the 30 day trial and see how I like it. So far, my response is mixed. It refuses to work correctly on my home PC, but maybe I can get that figured out.
My work machine isn’t quite beefy enough for it, so it works but it’s not very smooth.
Actually it surprises me it’s so difficult to do this. I read reviews on 4 or 5 different products, all of which are payware, and not one can do it half as well as Apple does. They are slow and buggy.
Cue general gloating from the SDMB Mac-user community in 5… 4… 3…
XP doesn’t cache window bitmaps the way OS X does, so it’s harder to implement that kind of UI nicety on XP. I imagine Vista will make it a lot easier.
Another reason that the Mac has so much more eye candy is that Apple can make a lot of assumptions about the hardware its OS is running on - for example, the capabilities of the video card. Since Apple “controls the horizontal and the vertical” for all the machines on which OS X runs, apart from a few hacked installs on PCs, they know exactly what kind of video card and processing power are available, and can push both to their limits. Microsoft is in the position of having to support a myriad of different hardware combinations – from that old junker you have in the basement all the way up to the shiny new Alienware gaming rig. Even though they have the hardware compatibility list, they still have an enormous range of machines to support.
As someone pointed out, Vista will make a lot better use of current generation video cards. Be prepared to see lots of “glass” effects and flashy animations.
