Bring back old working Spaces and Expose
Mission Control is a complete misfire and several steps backwards in design and usability. They took something that was beautifully simple and nearly flawless and turned it into a chaotic mess for no reason.
I was a heavy user of Spaces and Expose and it was easily my favorite OS X feature hands down. Now it's been three days of Lion and I just avoid Mission Control at all costs and find myself switching apps instead, something I would expect from Microsoft, not Apple.
Trying to understand how to use MC without going insane I started simply swithing apps instead of thinking about spaces, and at least that made some sense, but there was still a lot of unnecessary changing of spaces back and forth for no reason. It dawned on me to try something: I killed all Spaces and have a single desktop with every window. You know, like Windows would do. As a testament of what a terrible idea MC is, it works a lot better this way. When you do Expose you can at least understand what you're looking at, and you don't care that the tiny Space thumbnail is being covered up by your windows. There's also no unnecessary shuffling between spaces. It's an obviously cluttered, primitive, step back in sophistication and usability that almost makes me wish I had Vista's Flip 3D, but at least I am not spending half of my time jumping between spaces and hunting down lost windows.
Here's some of the issues with Mission Control:
- It's visually confusing and messy. The application windows usually cover the Spaces thumbnails along the top. What is the point of showing me the Spaces if they're covered up with windows? Isn't that defeating the very point of Mission Control? Why do I need to see my desktop background inset within *another* background in MC? Why are the Windows stacked so tightly and messily? It's impossible to pick the window you want unless you do "App Expose". What is the point of having Spaces previews if they're so tiny you can barely see what it's in them anyway? They used to be nice, clean, large previews. Now it's a stupid mess of tiny thumbnails with drop shadows, text labels, multiple backgrounds, being covered by app windows... ugh.
- The fact that they are now a linear row of spaces along the top is clearly much less user friendly than the old grid method, which was spatially and visualy easy to use and memorize. Now I have to think about numbers for desktops instead of "up" or "down". You know how much easier it is to type numbers on a keypad versus pecking the linear numbers along the top of your keyboard? Same thing. Also, you could go into the old Spaces and accurately hit the Space you want to go to because they were huge, easy to read and remember targets. Now they're tiny, hard to remember and usually hidden under something else.
- It took the advantages of both Spaces and Expose and eliminated them in order to merge them, who knows why. You used to be able to go into Spaces, and then Expose while there to reveal every window, and find *any* open window in seconds. Now it's impossible. You have to shuffle haplessly through spaces and hit expose and hope the window you're looking for shows up, and if that fails, which happens often, then you have to switch to every application and hit app expose. What a mess.
Easy solution: Just bring back the old Spaces and Expose, maybe as an option to MC. Or at least give us the option fo a grid layout and old style Expose. Please. Please. Please.
Mac OS X (10.6.7)
