Alt-Tab style gesture now missing

You mean the little bar with all your open app icons, right? I'm pretty sure it's gone. Mission control serves that purpose. I guess they figured it wasn't needed anymore... You're right, though. They should have a way to revert to old gestures. Time to wait for 10.7.1.

i see it as a major mistake for apple to remove the snow leopard gestures, they worked brilliantly, and especially as lion is meant to be an upgrade from that, now we are expected to learn something completely new, and not have the option of using gestures and methods that some have been using for years.

apple MUST bring back the old gestures as an option, especially the application switching bar in question here as well as the old expose which includes viewing minimised windows; it improves workflow hugely. the launchpad is completely unnecessary, moreso when there is an app stack and spotlight to find apps, and to devote an odd gesture to it without any felxibility whatsoever is just completely wrong.

apple, please listen and act.

s.

yes, the bar is still there with cmd-tab, but that's the whole point, it was much easier and more productive to access that feature with a simple swipe across of four fingers, it made perfect sense when you used four fingers to access expose and show the desktop, swiping down and up respectively.

with very few full screen non apple apps, and even then, with it being a feature that will only be used if practical and more useful when dealing with multiple apps simultaneously, the four finger swipe across becomes non-existent if no full screen apps are active.

it makes a whole world of sense to use that gesture for something always relevant, there is no pre-condition for the gesture in the old case; you have two apps open, you want to see which and switch, done.

also when an app doesn't have a window open, it doesn't appear in mission control, nor did appear in expose for that matter, but the application switching bar displayed the app icon, regardless of whether there was an open window.

...the full screen feature only fully works if it is lion compatible, for example, going full screen in firefox won't give it's own space as with itunes.

s.

I think where they are trying to go with Lion is to create a situation where it makes no difference to user experience if an application is actually running or not. Actively used applications retain their hold on resources, unused applications silently go dormant, retaining the state of your work, until you call them up again. As a skilled user I would like to be the one who chooses what is running and what is not, but I can see the advantages this strategy may have for resource management.

But what this approach ignores, is that a set of running applications, as exemplified by the alt-tab/old four-finger swipe bar, represents the collection of applications that the user has chosen to work with in the present session. Think of it as a 'toolkit' the user puts together for the day's tasks. They may be minimized or have no visible window (mrsuki that's a very good point) but their presence in the alt-tab bar allows the user to quickly switch to them alone, out of the, say, 20-30 Applications that may be available in launchpad, or even the 10-15 Dock regulars.

In this sense, I don't think they gave much thought into reserving a gesture for this feature. It is unfortunate. I too found the Snow Leopard gestures were natural to the hand -- so much so that it felt genuinely satisfying performing them. This new approach breaks things that work in favour of a complexity that seems unnecessary: why treat fullscreen applications any different to non fullscreen applications in terms of switching? SL's horizontal-four finger was able to escape any running process even things like virtual machine fullscreen windows (Virtualbox or Parallel Desktop) or even a VNC session to another mac. It would easily allow a user to switch to another running application irrespective to what screen-state it was on. A shame. 😐

There is a program called "Better Touch Tool" that does gestures. It's free through donations and works very well. You can reconfigure any gesture you like & forget about it until you decide to reconfigure it again, which might be tomorrow or never - up to you.

cmd-tab works, but will not switch between apps if they are on different desktops. This worked well with spaces in snow leopard. The assumption that all of us will use the touch pad to run our computers is a bit bogus. I prefer a mouse. Pure and simple. I finally got the mouse scroll reversed ... you have to plug in a magic mouse (worst contraption ever made) and set it there. Then, when you switch to a useable mouse, it works fine. Sometimes I think Apple is just to smart for itself.

cmd-tab works when switching between apps on different desktops, at least on my system.

the bettertouchtool is an option, but there are several known bugs with that and lion at the moment, and, in all honesty, i'd rather apple address the issue without users having to resort to third-party solutions.

Hmm... Doesn't work for me. If I am in Desktop 2 in Firefocx and use cmd-tab to try to switch to Mail (desktop 1) nothing happens. Even in the dock I have to click twice before it switches. Did I miss a configuration parameter somewhere?

Never mind. Found it. 😟

Where? The same is happening to me and I can't figure out how to make alt-tab work or switch to the app on the first click.

It is in the Mission Control pane. I found that I had unchecked the second and third options -

'Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use'

and

'When switching to an application, swith to a space with open windows for the application.'

Make sure both of these are checked.

Thanks! It works! It was driving me crazy 🙂

Thanks for the post, I have only had my macbook pro sense march and it's my first mac. I was starting to think I was going crazy or something. I have not updated to Lion because of the issue it would cause with some of my software. I started out using firefox but now I'm trying to use safari. I can still use the 3 finger up scroll with firefox but not with safari. Am I doing something wrong or missing something? Thanks for your help.