One of the really nice features of Mac OS X, and one that many people don’t seem to know about, is Exposé. Exposé is a tool built into the Mac OS X operating system that lets you easily control what you see on your computer. There are three distinct features of Exposé; one let’s you manage all your open windows, one let’s you manage all the windows of one application and the last lets you hide all your windows to see the desktop.
Let’s say you have four windows open on your computer, a word processing document, your email, the Internet and iTunes. Normally you would have to shuffle all those windows around in order to get to the one you’re looking for. However, Exposé makes this task effortless. Perhaps you are reading an article on the Internet and want to switch to your email to tell someone about it. With Exposé, you can cause all your windows to become tiled, allowing you to easily pick out your email application, instantly bringing it to the front of the screen.
What if you have six windows open on your computer, three of them being word processing documents, and you want to choose one specific document? With Exposé you can have just the windows of one specific application, such as Microsoft Word, be tiled, therefore allowing you to easily pick out the window you want.
Lastly, perhaps you just downloaded a file, or plugged in a USB flash drive and want to quickly access your desktop to open the file. Instead of minimizing each of your windows to get to the desktop, you can instead have Exposé temporarily “slide” all the windows to the edges of the screen, giving you a perfect view of the desktop. If you open a file while the windows are hidden and them have them reappear, the recently opened file will be on top of all the other windows.
Now that you have an understanding of what Exposé is and what it can do for you, let’s go over how to set up Exposé on your computer:
1. First, go to the Apple menu, located in the top-left hand corner of the screen and click “System Preferences…”
2. Under the “Personal” section click “Dashboard & Exposé”
3. Here you will be presented with two sections “Active Screen Corners” and “Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts”. “Active Screen Corners” allows you to activate Exposé by simply moving your mouse to a specific corner of the screen. For example, moving the mouse to the top-right hand corner could hide all of your windows while moving the mouse to the top-left hand corner could tile all your open windows. Whether or not you use “Active Screen Corners” depends on personal preference. I personally find that “Active Screen Corners” gets in the way too often. If you are going to close a window that is taking up the whole screen, it is very easy to set Exposé off since your pointer is so close to the active corner. Under the “Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts” section you can assign Exposé functions to different keys on your keyboard such as the function keys (the keys at the top of the keyboard with the small letter “F” on them). The default is F9 for All windows, F10 for Application windows, F11 for the Desktop and F12 for the Dashboard, although these can all be customized. If you assign Exposé to the function keys on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, you will need to hold down the fn key while pressing the function key in order for it to work. If you don’t want to hold down fn, you can change this by going to “Keyboard & Mouse” in the System Preferences and checking the box that says “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features”. Now you won’t have to hold down fn to use Exposé, but will will for things like brightness and volume control. (Note: This is for older models of the MacBook and MacBook Pro, Apple has now changed the keys around and there are actually icons on the function keys for things like Exposé and the Dashboard)
And that’s it! Now that you’ve set up Exposé, you can start enjoying a more organized and productive computer.
Filed under: Apple, Computers, Mac OS X, Technology Tagged: | Apple, Exposé, iTunes, Mac OS X, MacBook Pro, Microsoft, Microsoft Word, USB Flash Drive
