Did you know that Exposé has a built-in window switcher?

I didn’t. The details are buried down at the bottom of Apple’s Exposé web page where I missed it.

Activate Exposé and then hit the Tab key. It will bring all the active windows to the front app by app.

Here it is helping me to choose which Safari window to jump to:

How useful this is to you will depend, I guess, on your workflow, whether the normal ⌘-Tab is enough for you and whether or not you already use Peter Maurer’s excellent Witch window switching app:

Still, clever!

Related posts

• Quickies: A Sunday brunch of Mail.app links
• KeyCue: Keyboard Shortcut Reminder
• How to quit an app quickly
• Getting Things Done overview and Mac-friendly web apps
• Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips

Keyboard shortcuts are great time-savers, as everyone knows. The only problem: you need to remember them to save the time.

KeyCue is a nifty little app that will — at a single keystroke (by default the ⌘ key) — list all the available shortcuts for the currently active app, in this case Mail.app and iCal:

Press another modifier key and the screen will highlight the matching keys in yellow. Select the shortcut you couldn’t remember, and the screen disappears.

The app’s Preferences pane offers option to customise the keystroke which calls the app, the contents of the window and when the window should disappear.

KeyCue is shareware (USD 14.99) and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adam]

Related posts

• xCut: Keyboard Shortcut Reference widget
• TextExpander: 20% Discount for Hawk Wings readers
• Quick insertion of Apple-centric glyphs
• Jesus Saves t-shirts
• Exposé’s built-in window switcher

A month ago Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim torched off a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere by announcing that they were switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu.

Hawk Wings covered it because of Mail.app’s central role in Mark Pilgrim’s decision to switch away.

Now Tim Bray is almost having second thoughts. He has posted a list of things that Mac OS X does better and things that Ubuntu does better. Mac OS X wins out in some important areas.

Mail.app and iCal don’t fare so well though:

I have so had it with Apple applications. A couple weeks with Thunderbird made it obvious I should have long since dumped Mail.app. Every week iCal gets slower and every week I hate it more. When I was on Ubuntu, I maintained my schedule by typing it into a plain-text document in Emacs, and that was so much less painful.

No love lost there!

Given that the Mac vs. Ubuntu debate got caught up in the unrelated “proprietary vs. open format” issue, perhaps the most interesting sentence in the post is this:

now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.

Related posts

• Mail.app on Mac trumps Ubuntu hands down
• SyncTogether: Syncing without .Mac
• MobileMe is live – more or less.
• What’s wrong with Apple’s Enterprise Strategy
• What if: Opening up Mail.app

Martin Gordon raises an interesting question .

Now that his iMac boots into Windows as well as Mac OS X, and he needs to spend some time in both OSes, how can he get easy access to his email, calendar and other data in either OS?

His solution is to push everything to the Web, in particular to Gmail and Google Calendar. He no longer uses Gmail’s POP access to read his emails in Mail.app.

Finding a decent online platform-independent RSS reader is more of a challenge.

He seems aware of the problems that a Web 2.0-focussed life raises, access to your information without an Internet connection and data security/backups. Still he is going forward in faith, confident that they can be overcome.

Related posts

• Ten Mac tools for Getting Things Done
• More on WebKit Webmail.app
• More .Mac grumbles: value, missing features
• Fastmail vs. Gmail
• Zimbra iSync beta released

A tasty assortment of links on the recent security excitment, which also affects Mail.app.

Well-done

Secunia rates the Safari vulnerability as “extremely critical”, a rating the company gives when “successful exploitation does not normally require any interaction and exploits are in the wild.” Secunia is a provider of IT-security services.

Anti-virus company Intego has analysed the Leap-A (”Oompa-Loompa”) Trojan horse. After exhaustive testing, the company reported that “the best protection against this Trojan horse and its variants is Intego VirusBarrier X4″. CEO Laurent Marteau says, “it is clear that antivirus software on a Macintosh computer is as essential as wearing a seat belt in a car”.

Medium

ZDNet Australia carries an interview with Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ Asia-Pacific head of technology. ” “There is not a clear and present danger like there is with Windows but the same risks apply”, he says.

Eric Bangeman on Ars Technica thinks that “the malware may be less destructive, more difficult to find, and less prevalent than on other platforms. But it’s there, and it’s not going to go away.”

Medium-rare

At Wired, Leander Kahney is keeping his cool: “These Mac security holes are a storm in a teacup,” he says.

The Daring Fireball puts it all in perspective. John Gruber writes: “It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Stephan Schwab is also fairly relaxed: “Of course this unwanted interference is annoying and it’s far better to let the user decide when to execute something, but it’s not a security threat of any magnitude.”

Related posts

• Ubuntu switcher takes a step back to Mac
• Security Bug back for Leopard Mail
• More security flaws in Mac OSX
• Mail.app too dangerous to use?
• Mail and Safari patched

John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written a long and interesting post on Leopard and the future of Finder.

It’s worth reading.

He suggests:

Dissatisfaction with the Mac OS X Finder is endemic in the Mac user community, ranging from mild frustration to deep-seated rage.

Apple recently advertised for a software engineer to join the development team for Finder.

John, who is always interested in Finder, takes this as a sign of things to come and ponders what Finder’s keepers have in store for the future.

Along the way he touches on the history of Finder, muses on Leopard (10.5) and even Ocelot (10.6).

Recent switchers like me, who know of nothing before Panther, will find lots to learn. Old hands will no doubt find much to prompt their memories and provoke them.

[Thanks, Dan !]

Related posts

• Will Windows Vista be Apple’s Trojan Horse?
• Zimbra gets friendly with Safari 3.0, CalDAV, iPhone
• Whimsy: Vista and Leopard, Protestants and Catholics
• Ubuntu switcher takes a step back to Mac
• Three-pane hack for Panther Mail