Even though I had read about WindowShade, I guess I missed the part about being able to type in the window. That could be very useful indeed. There was a little while there when I first started using Tiger that I thought the little Show/Hide Toolbar button did this, but alas, it doesn’t.

As for the rest of the stuff, the option to be able to do it is always nice, since you don’t have to use it.

Overall a very nice article and thanks for getting back with me.

1. Exposé is great, but it doesn’t accomplish most of what WindowShade allowed. Specifically, can you write text in one window while looking at something in a window directly behind it? For example, let’s say you’re writing an e-mail to someone and you want to describe the contents of your Network preferences. You can easily shade the e-mail composition window to see the contents of the System Preferences window, and then type in whatever you need to. When you’re finished, un-shade. Look at Adobe’s apps for another example. You can shade the palettes by double-clicking on their titlebar. This helps you look at the area of the document under the palette without having to go up to the View menu and select Hide Layers or Hide Tools, etc.

2. The list was not ordered by importance, as was noted in the first paragraph.

3. Certainly it’s nice to just press a single-button to perform a task, right? That’s why we have the eject button, volume-up, brightness up, and why Dashboard is mapped to F12 by default. Do you use any of those single-button keyboard shortcuts? I do, and it’d be nice if I could map other, often-used functions to single-button F-keys. Things that I do multiple times a day that require mousing down to the Dock. It would also help keep the Dock cleaner, because if you have something mapped to a single key, you don’t really need to keep it in the Dock for easy access. Do you keep the Dashboard in the Dock?

8. Yes, people used this. If you burn a CD with a bunch of files to give to a service bureau or other business, you (and they) want to know what’s on it. You could print the window, fold up the paper and put it in the CD case. And a lot of service bureaus and other print, web, photo design firms use Macs.

10. I understand that some people don’t want the screen or the menubar to flash. I’m not saying it should do that by default (which it doesn’t). There should be an option available for those who would find it useful.

I’m not saying these features are sexy or selling points, just useful. And those people who don’t want to use them don’t have to (just like I never use Speech Recognition, Font Book and FileVault).