Will 10.8 fix the serious MissionControl/MultipleDisplay problems?
The following is a copy/paste of an article I posted on reddit/r/osx/. I am driven to post this here because the recent hullabloo over 10.8 does not seem to indicate that any of these issues will be addressed! Anyway, here's a list of the most egregious problems with Mission Control:
An open letter to Apple:
A lot of power users complain that Mission Control is not like Spaces. Let me make a few specific points and suggestions. Multiple displays are effectively broken with Mission Control. The following three points are the most serious, followed by a fourth at the bottom, which is less serious:
- Mission Control shows each display's desktop icon on its own screen, but does not show the overall multi-display layout as a unit. The user must mentally associate the icons on one Mission Control display with those on the other. This is practically impossible and requires "counting" in from the left or right while continuously flashing one's eyes back and forth to try to make sense of the situation. This is a disaster. A better design would have Mission Control show something that resembles the Display System Preferences Arrangement panel, where the multiple displays are shown with their respective spatial arrangement as a unit (I believe Spaces did this!!!). That is what should be shown in Mission Control, perhaps only on the main display or perhaps duplicated on both displays so that both displays are effectively clones in Mission Control. This is the single biggest failing of Mission Control and you should take this recommendation seriously. 10.7 is too old and has undergone too many revisions at this point for this design to have continued for so long.
- Mission Control is incompatible with reassigning windows across the multi-display divide. The user-interaction almost works. One can drag a window to the other display and even "shrink" it into one of the desktop icons at the top, but when the mouse button is released, the interaction fails and the window pops back to its original location. This is horrible. The interaction shouldn't even pretend like it's going to work if it's going to fail at the last second. Obviously, the correct fix is to leave the interaction alone (it works fine) and actually support the underlying window-to-desktop reassignment.
- Spaces permitted one to drag window icons from one space to another. Mission Control only allows this from the current desktop to other desktops. There is no way to move window icons from the desktops out to the current desktop display, nor is there a way to drag window icons between the various desktop icons while neither is necessarily the current desktop. Both interactions need to be supported in order for Mission Control to be fully useful.
- Lastly, the two-dimensional display of Spaces was tremendously helpful because the desktop views could be quadratically larger than in Mission Control, thus easing the visual-mental challenge of recognizing each space or desktop.
I sincerely hope you will take this matter seriously. Considering how old 10.7 is, I'm pretty disappointed these issues have not yet been resolved.
Thank you.
Followup, I am amazed that not only have these issues survived in 10.7 for so long, but there is no indication whatsoever that any of these problems will be addressed in 10.8 either! What the heck is going on in Cupertino?
All Mac products-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.3)