One of the new features in Mac OS X 10.3 is that when using command-tab to cycle through applications, a window pops up (ala Windows) to cycle through applications in the order most recently accessed. Prior to this, cycling through applications took place in the Dock. I didn't mind this feature, but it had a number of shortcomings. Prior to 10.2, cycling through applications went through the order in which they were placed in the dock. This made it very difficult to switch between two applications currently in use if they happened to be spread anywhere but next to each other. In 10.2, the dock was still used, but the first command-tab would go to the last used application, but from there on it was back to the Dock's order.
There were, however, some cool things you could do with command-tab in those versions. When cycling through applications, you could hit the 'h' key to hide an application (different than minimize), and 'q' to quit it. It was a quick way to clean clutter if you really wanted to focus on two applications at a time, and a quick way to clean up applications you didn't intend to leave open.
But Panther's capabilities are just the coolest, and far outdo the alt-tab feature of Windows (at least, as of Windows 2000. I don't know what XP offers):
- Quartz Effects - Of course, Apple goes out of their way to make application switching beautiful. Icons scale gracefully, and the background of the switcher is a very transparent 'smoked glass' look, allowing you to clearly see what's behind the switcher outside of the icons.
- Delayed Appearance - you'd never notice it, really, but a quick tap of command-tab cycles to the next application, but the switcher 'window' never displays. So for quick switching back and forth, your mind doesn't even have to deal with the appearance of the switcher. This is an understated yet very nice effect. The delay before appearance is so small, however, that you never have time to think "I just hit command-tab, where is it?"
- Two Finger Chords for back and forth - Once you hit command-tab and bring up the app switcher, you can take your finger off of the tab key and use the back-tick key above it to cycle backwards. This is much more comfortable than having to add 'shift' to the combination, although 'command-shift-tab' will also take you backwards. And, like Windows, hitting 'esc' at any time backs you out. (Also: the Tab/Backtick feature also works under Exposé to switch between applications).
- Reasonable Repeat - If you hold tab down, Mac OS X cycles through the applications at a reasonable rate. A lot of Windows boxes I've come across cycle way too quickly to be usable, especially when only a few windows are open.
- App Switcher owns Keyboard Events - No events leak through to the current application. On Windows, I've noticed that some leak through, like F4. alt-tabbing through open processes on Windows and hitting 'f4' somewhere down the line closes the frontmost window.
- Other Keys to Cycle - Other key combinations work too, once command-tab is clicked, you can use other key combinations to cycle, namely the arrow keys. This just a nice little feature which might gel better in some users minds. "Here's a list of open applications. Hit the right arrow to go to the next one, left arrow to go back."
- Scroll Wheel Support! - This is my favorite. If you have a scroll-wheel mouse, the scroll wheel cycles very quickly through the applications. It's very easy and nice to use when you have a lot of applications open, due to its speed and control.
- hide/quit - and you can still hit 'h' or 'q' on an application to hide it or quit it. This is a surprisingly useful feature.
The application switcher in Panther is simple yet quite powerful. There are other utilities that have offered this feature under Mac OS X prior to Apple's implementation, and
some offer more features, but my personal experience with such utilities has often been mixed, and usually the ones with the most tweakable features are the ones I throw away the quickest, and in the realm of Mac OS application switching, I've tried a lot. The only one that I've kept has been
LaunchBar, which I used both as a launcher and switcher until OS X 10.2. Now I just use it as a launcher (but still love it very much).