Stop automatic minimizing windows?

Hello all,

I am new to Macs, and though I love mine and will never go back to the PC world, I am having some frustration with the automatic window minimization.

ie, I want to have a screen, say a Mozilla page, open and then have calculator open on top in the foreground. say, so I can add up some figures on an online pay stub. but every time I try to get calculator to show up on top of other windows, it won't. it just toggles between calculator and Mozilla.

I've searched all over under 'foreground applications', 'on top', 'calculator', etc and I just can't figure it out.

does anyone know how to make windows show up on top of each other like that? is there some global setting in my mac that can do that or do I set the parameter within each program?

sarah

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.7), none

Posted on Jun 21, 2009 3:28 PM

Reply
6 replies

Jun 21, 2009 6:03 PM in response to AxL

sorry I was so vague...the problem was in Spaces...it wouldn't let me have two windows open on screen at the same time. so I couldn't just have them next to each other because it would minimize one to show the other. very annoying! so I never uses Spaces anyway, so I just turned it off and everything works great! thanks for the helpful replies regarding expose, I'll play around with it.

s

Jun 21, 2009 3:45 PM in response to requiredalias

My calculator opens and runs on top of my Safari web page. Does yours not do this?

Your post is confusing because your topic says 'stop automatic minimizing windows' but your problem description doesn't sound like the calculator app is minimizing at all. It's just not on top.

Do you want the calculator to be a floating window that never goes to the background, even when you have another app active?

Jun 21, 2009 3:56 PM in response to requiredalias

Hi Sarah,
welcome to Discussions!

The best Mac OS X way I'd recommend, is to first set Exposé hot corners, especially the "All Windows" one, then another hot corner for "Desktop" is very handy too.
With Exposé alone, mouse-toggling between open applications is just natural, easy and takes no time, back and forth and switching and back-to-front and to-background etc, amongst all open applications you're using
(and you know you can keep many of them permanently open, no need to ever quit them).

If you prefer keyboard toggling,
of course you can set Exposé to F keystrokes for example,
but you can also use a very useful feature called Application Switcher
(command helddown + tab)
which makes it very easy to toggle between, say, Calculator and Firefox, because it always keeps the latest app that was in use, as the next option available without having to press Tab-tab-tab again
(or without having to arrow-right nor mouse-hover on the Application Switcher icons).

Enjoy your new Mac!

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Stop automatic minimizing windows?

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