Mission Control, Lion’s most advertised feature isn’t really all that new. It’s the combination of what used to be two separate applications: Exposé and Spaces. Although Mission Control incorporates aspects of both these applications, it doesn’t work the same way they did. It does a lot of things differently, some better, some worse.

What’s left of the original Exposé, is the ability to view all windows of a specific application. Albeit, more complicated (read more key strokes) to use than its counterpart in Snow Leopard, Application Exposé, now called ‘Application windows’, can still improve the way you deal with a lot of open windows.

Of course, you can use it to show all windows of the application currently in focus, that’s handy, but if that’s the only thing you’re doing with it, you are not using it to its full potential.

Where it really shines, is its use in conjunction with ⌘TAB. Once opened the application switcher, it stays open as long as you keep the ⌘-key pressed. You can cycle through the applications with TAB/⇧TAB or using the left and right arrow keys. Using the up/down arrow keys, however, will invoke Application Exposé for the application selected, displaying all it’s windows and recently opened documents for applications supporting this new feature of OS X 10.7.

It also works the other way around. Kind of. You can cycle through your opened applications inside Exposé using TAB/⇧TAB. It’s basically a “verbose” version of ⌘TAB.

The default keyboard shortcut for Application Exposé is F10, that is, unless you’re inside Mission Control. F10 in Mission Control quits Mission Control. Another F10 opens Application Exposé. You might think that’s because Apple doesn’t want you to use it from within Mission Control and that’s why it’s not available from within Mission Control. But see, that’s where you are wrong. It is, in fact, available. The only thing that’s changed, is its keyboard shortcut.

It’s not its own, we already established that. In Mission Control, it is invoked using the keyboard shortcut that’s usually reserved to move focus to the next windows of the same application, ⌘`.

It’s the same freaking application, it does the same freaking thing, why in Jobs name does it have to use different keyboard shortcuts in different situations? I don’t get it, I don’t like it.

Different keyboard shortcuts and missing real Mission Control, Apple’s getting sloppy. Why is no one complaining? Am I really the only one using Exposé? It’s ok, but there’s definitely room for improvement.

So, let’s summarise:

• Application Exposé is now called ‘Application windows’
• You can use ‘Application windows’ in conjunction with ⌘TAB using the UP and DOWN arrow keys which will display all windows of the selected application.
• You can cycle between your opened applications in ‘Application windows’ with TAB/⇧TAB
• In Mission Control ‘Application windows’ uses a different keyboard shortcut: ⌘`
• Missing real Mission Control integration

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[...]We’ve been working with Apple from the early days of Lion, and collectively have been able to address many issues leading up to the Lion release. Many of our Office for Mac engineers have been running Lion for months, and are generally having no problems running Office 2011 on it[...]

No problems, eh? Communicator crashes crashed once an instant message is sent and that’s basically the only thing it does. If the Office for Mac team is missing bugs this obvious, then we’re in for some treat.

At least, they already fixed it. You can grab the patch here.

via Office for Mac Blog

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Apple is now “more willing” to ship various integrated circuit modules from Taiwan-based IC design houses as a way of reducing iPad’s bill of material (BOM)

That’s pretty intersting. What’s more interesting is the question whether this would result in cheaper iPads for consumers or higher margins for Apple. Let’s be clear, the iPad’s already a pretty good deal when compared to its competition. But the competition is catching up, albeit slowly, they definitely are.

If Apple can sell a gazillion of the current generation of iPads for 499€, they can sell a gazillion of iPads of the next generation for 499€. Why would they cut prices if they already can’t keep up with the demand?

via 9to5mac

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via @smalera

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Of course this, in turn, means that you’re no longer able to send your Mac to sleep by closing the lid in multi-monitor setups.

The article in the Apple’s knowledge base still don’t reflect these changes.

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via Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA)

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You can use the new “Duplicate” feature to mimic the old functionality to some extend, although, you will have to adapt your workflow a little. When access duplicate from File ⇢ Duplicate, your current window is cloned, duplicated. You can then save it using ⌘S or from the menu bar like you used to and save it under a different file name.

By default, there’s no keyboard shortcut in place for “Duplicate”. You can access it from the menu bar or the small down-pointing arrow next to the window title of an already saved document. You can, however, choose to set a keyboard shortcut.

• Go to System Preferences ⇢ Keyboard ⇢ Keyboard Shortcuts
• Select Application Shortcuts
• Click +

Set it to All Applications and enter “Duplicate” as Menu Title, it’s case sensitive, so make sure it’s written with a capital D.

Now enter your desired keyboard shortcut, but make sure you’re not using any existing global or application specific keyboard shortcut. This setting will have a higher priority, so don’t go for ⌘P or you will no longer be able to print with that shortcut.

You could go for the old “Save as…” shortcut ⇧⌘S. I think it it’s likely to be reused in the future or already in use in different Applications, so I recommend something like ⌃⌥⌘D.

Update: Problems with iWork

This doesn’t work with the current version of iWork as there are two menu items called “Duplicate”. If there are multiple entries by the same name, OS X uses the bottom most, right most entry and in this case, it’s not the one we want.

There’s a workaround, though. You can make an Automator service that makes use of some basic AppleScript actions and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

I made a service, you can download it here. You need to put in in ~/Library/Services.

Then you can assign a keyboard shortcut in
System Preferences ⇢ Keyboard ⇢ Keyboard Shortcuts ⇢ Services (Scroll all the way down)

For those of you who want to see the code rather than downloading it:

tell application "System Events"
    set activeapp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true
    end tell

tell application "System Events" to tell process activeapp
    tell menu bar 1
        tell menu bar item "File"
            tell menu "File"
                click menu item "Duplicate"
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

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I tried clearing the history through  ⇢ Recent Items ⇢ Clear Menu. That didn’t work. Turns out I was just looking at the wrong place. It’s a per application setting. You have to clear it for every single application. Takes a while, but once it’s done, it’s done.

And that’s how you do it:

• Open the application.
• Go to the menu bar
• File ⇢ Open Recent ⇢ Clear Menu
• Restart the application

If you don’t restart the application,it will keep the history until you do.

Update:As pointed out by James this might not work in every application. Some applications need you to log out and back in again. Apple really needs to fix this as soon as possible. This should work without relogging or quitting applications.

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One of these paper cuts is the new fullscreen mode for applications. It makes great use of the limited screen real estate on single smaller screens, but the easy and quick access in mission control is where it excels. Single smaller screen? That’s right. It doesn’t mix well with multi-monitor setups. If you’re familiar with the concept of spaces you will know that in multi-monitor setups a space consists of the two (or more) screens. And that’s part of the problem. A fullscreen application, making use of the new Lion API, doesn’t take up a single screen, it takes up the whole space. It’s goes fullscreen on your primary screen, locking any additional screen on that same space. You get the blueish-grey linen background that’s also used in Mission Control and that’s it, you can’t place any windows on it, you can’t place anything on it. It’s useless.

It defeats the whole purpose of the fullscreen mode, decreasing effective screen real estate. One can only hope that Apple will fix it. However, I have to admit, I have my doubts. I can’t imagine this remained unnoticed throughout the developer previews. The only reasonable, and most disappointing, explanation seems to be that we’re dealing with a serious case of ‘working as intended’. Let’s hope I’m wrong about this one.

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It’s part of the Unicode Emoji support that was brought ‘back to the Mac’ from iOS.

Here‘s the fileformat.info page for the character.

You can use the HTML-code 💩 but it won’t display anything but a box unless your OS knows the character. So far it seems only to be working on Lion and iOS.

If you’re looking for a list of Unicode Emoji to use on iOS, take a look at www.mackeys.info on your iOS device. You can change the user agent to view it on Lion, but since it’s now part of the “Special Characters”-dialog, there’s little reason to. You can access the dialog by pressing ⌥⌘T in most apps.

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