Idea/dream/wish: Exposé for classic Mac OS

[CC_333]

Have there been any updates to this recently?

c

 

[Crutch]

Sadly no - I moved house recently and am still living in a chaos that precludes getting back to this. There will be updates in the next several months and you will see them right here.

 

[CC_333]

Ah, I understand. I'm going through that process myself, and it's no fun.

c

 

[PB170]

I'm still using beta 4 daily, and it's working great.

Would be nice to get the speediness of beta 5, sans the bugs, but take your time.

Good luck with the new house!

 

[uliwitness]

Hi @PB170 as mentioned earlier, in the new I scale down the number of rectangles in the “trail” based on the number of windows on screen, starting with a maximum of 4 rectangles and dropping to 3 or fewer if more than 4 windows are being zoomed. I also now skip zooming windows that are mostly obscured or too small. The overall effect is cleaner. You will see this version soon. 4 rects looks better than 3 to me if the number of windows is sparse.

Just wondering: Could one maybe cross-fade (maybe in the style of HyperCard's "dissolve" effect, replacing seemingly random pixels from source with those from dest, i.e. not with alpha) from the image with windows to the one without windows? Maybe leaving rectangles for the outline of the frontmost window onscreen (but so clicks pass through)? That way it would look like windows just fade into smoke, then come back.

 

[Crutch]

Fun idea for a future version. I’ve implemented things like this before (see the classic “DissBits” asm routine documented in MacTutor circa 1986) including in 8-bit color for a version of BeamWars that will come out …. well maybe next year. The trick is doing it fast enough. I also wouldn’t be able to dissolve directly to the icons or whatever is behind the windows that vanish, so there would be a visual artifact: dissolve from window —> blank desktop then suddenly icons appear. But maybe this is OK.