Apple Expos? Clones, Copycats and Wannabe’s

By far, my favorite feature of Apple’s OS X 10.3 Panther operating system is Expos?. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a feature that allows you to see all the windows of a your current application, all the windows you have open or your desktop by using a simple keyboard combination or a hot-corner on your desktop. It achieves this by quickly and smoothly making shrinking and rearranging your windows or sliding them off the screen to expose the desktop.

The main problem with Expos? isn’t so much a problem with Expos? as much as it is a problem with every other operating system–they don’t include this or any similar feature. When I leave OS X and move to Windows XP or Linux, using the taskbar or alt+tab to find a window seems slow and awkward now. In my profession as a multimedia specialist, I usually have at least 5 apps running and often more than double that number of windows open on my desktop.

So. in order to fill this gap, I’ve started searching for software (preferably free) that will achieve the same thing for Windows and/or Linux. So far, my search has not been all that fruitful.

For Windows, there’s an Expose wannabe called WinPLOSION, previously known a WinExpose (no wonder they had to change their name) which is commercial, costs $10 and from everything I’ve read, is less than impressive–and since there’s no demo, I’ll probably never try it.

There’s also a freeware product that is a pain to find and download on Aqua-soft (registration required, no download area etc. etc.). It requires some external dll’s and the first time I tried it, it caused my Dell Inspiron 8100 to immediately give me a blue screen of death–one of the very few crashes I’ve had under Windows XP. After I tried a later version, it showed some improvements (at least it doesn’t crash) but it is 100% unusable in it’s current condition. It’s on version 0.3 now and I think I’ll hold out until the 1.0 release. Currently, I don’t recommend trying it unless you are willing to risk a crash (I’m writing this for the second time because of it).

For Linux there is a working Expos? clone called Exposity, made for the Metacity window manager. From everything I can tell (there’s not much available online) it works fairly well. I, however, have not had a chance to install it because I don’t have Metacity installed (I have a hard time being motivated to install a desktop manager that is “halfway usable” [gnome.org]).

Another strange phenomenon is that in certain places, I’ve seen any attempt to copy Expose on other operating systems harshly criticized by Macintosh users. Isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Doesn’t pretty much every OS and piece of software copy (at least to some extent) some other piece of software? I believe that the more others copy Apple, the more they (both Apple and the copycats) are inspired to innovate and that by this, software in general improves.