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Expose bugs in Snow Leopard (Blue box, window jitter, and rough animations)

S

skwirl341

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 10, 2009
44
15
Boston
I apologize if this has already been posted - but I couldn't find anything with search.

Expose in Snow Leopard feels to me like it needs a little more polish from Apple. I am encountering three issues:

1. The "Blue Box" bug: If you call Expose (say by pressing F3) and you move your mouse around in the path that one of the windows is following to its Expose destination, you will see a blue box that appears at its destination. This box is used to form the blue border around the hilighted window in Expose. I use a button on my mouse to call Expose so I see this one a lot and it bugs me.

You can see a video of this one at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_vdPhvk2Es
A screenshot at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/94277347@N00/3868870163/

2. Window jitter bug: Occasionally (I've only had this happen twice) a window will get into a weird state where when it returns to its original position from Expose it overshoots its destination and then suddenly jumps back to where it belongs.

A video of this one is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnemBOZBTZY

3. The animation of windows moving when entering/leaving Expose just feels a lot rougher than it was before. The windows are jumpy as they move around and not smooth like they were in Leopard. I couldn't document this one with a video since the animation always looks jumpy when grabbing video of the screen.
 
Thank you

I guess a lot of people have been noticing and complaining about this.

Just writing to thank you for your work with creating those videos and taking the screen shots ! .. hope Apple rolls out a solution for this annoyance soon !
 
i have the same problem.
another bug i noticed is the "3 hour empty trash bug" that happens on my mac pro regardless how many things are in there. no idea why.

i get the jittery expose too.
 
Don't forget the bug where four-finger swiping up and leaving your fingers on the trackpad for more than a split second, then swiping back down causes the open windows to fly down and back up. The only way to get the windows to come back down is to swipe up again.
 
A Macbook Pro said:
Clean install FTW!
Click to expand...

This IS with a clean install. This is also on a 2.53ghz Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM purchased in January of this year. I see no reason why any of these bugs would be specific to my hardware or software configuration, seeing as its a clean install on a recent model.
 
paulisme said:
Don't forget the bug where four-finger swiping up and leaving your fingers on the trackpad for more than a split second, then swiping back down causes the open windows to fly down and back up. The only way to get the windows to come back down is to swipe up again.
Click to expand...

I hadn't noticed that one (I mostly use an external mouse) but I just tried it and the bug happened for me, too.
 
I've noticed your first bug, but it doesn't bother me.

I haven't noticed the rest. Exposé is super smooth for me (smoother than Leopard actually). I have a Mac Pro with the Radeon HD 4780.
 
And background problem....

I use a solid color as desktop background and when I use exposé the gradient (lighter in the center, darker on the edges...) is not uniform or smooth at all, concentrical stripes can clearly be seen. The effect is like a badly compressed image. Very cheap. I hope I am not the only one that find it annoying.

Not to say that I am not happy at all with the blue box, and not excited at all with the new arrangement of windows (perhaps its that I just got used to it, but I found more pleasant when there was a less geometrical organization) and the introduction of informative text that I never needed.

Very sad with this 'refinement'.
 
I've definitely got the jittery, rough Expose issue. Honestly I had attributed it to the crappy GMA950 in my Mini, but I've seen so many people complain about this issue since Friday, I'm beginning to think it might not actually be the integrated graphics after all. I'm hoping so.
 
For the record, I find that my performance is at least halved when I have both monitors turned on. That might help a few people.
 
The bug I’ve found is that if you go from using Dock Exposé to show windows of a hidden application to something like “All Windows”, you still get “ghost” windows from the hidden application.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe-eUbIViEI (Wow, QTX really does make that easy!)

Screen shot 2009-08-31 at 9.10.57 PM.png

Screen shot 2009-08-31 at 9.10.54 PM.png

Screen shot 2009-08-31 at 9.12.00 PM.png
 
integrat.ethis said:
For the record, I find that my performance is at least halved when I have both monitors turned on. That might help a few people.
Click to expand...

Wow - I just closed my notebook and went monitor only and thats a HUGE difference. Expose is silky smooth now.

I have a late 08 MBP with the 9400M and 9600M GT, I've got the 9600M GT enabled ("High Performance" mode), and it can't handle both monitors well. That's too bad, because I didn't have this issue in Leopard and Snow Leopard was just supposed to be mostly performance improvements.
 
Let me add to that after playing around some more - quality is up across the board just using my monitor, everything looks better and runs smoother. I'm guessing only people with dual monitors (laptop/external) are seeing the rough issues (bug #3 that I pointed out). I guess I'll just stick with my 24" desktop monitor by itself for now.
 
The animations are also rough with an early 2008 black MacBook with no external monitor hooked up. The oddest part is that it's not actually the speed of the animations causing the roughness - hold down Shift (to slow the animation) and there's still a notable roughness to the animations.
 
Penryn 2,4GHz Black Macbook here, 4GB of RAM and Intel X3100 graphics.

1) With both the laptop monitor AND and external 24" monitor simultaneously active, I experience all the problems mentioned above in addition to extremely choppy dashboard fade-ins and -outs (which degrade to a two-step process, almost).

2) With the external monitor alone all problems disappear, except for the "blue frame" issue, which persists and reminds me of the venerable "GEM Desktop" of the 80's running on Dr. DOS 7 (I challenge you: anyone here who remembers?).

3) I have not tried the laptop monitor alone as I finally have to get down to work!

Overall, this does not feel as much of a "refinement" as I expected. I truly hope Apple works on this soon because visuals do matter when you spend an entire day in a virtual environment.
 
On my MacBook Pro 15 (june 2007, 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT) the performance of Exposé is much much worse in Snow Leopard. I have a Dell 20" (1600 x 1200) connected and Exposé is so choppy I almost don't get any animation at all.

In Leopard Exposé was working well with smooth animations etc.
 
I can confirm that the 10.6.1 update has not addressed this bug unfortunately :-(
 
Well, 10.6.1 has still not fixed that blue box thing that I'm getting with Expose. Set one of the hot corners to ''show dashboard'' and one of them to ''all windows''. Show your dashboard then all windows with only one window open and at the bottom there is a blue box until the window goes over it.
 
I have another bug to report. After some time expose starts ignoring my dock, putting windows underneath it. My dock is positioned on the left. Also the blue highlight is a lot dimmer that normal, and is hard to see.

Quitting the Dock process in Activity Monitor, gets it back to normal. I'm having a hard time figuring out what's causing this.

I'm on a 17" MacBook Pro GeForce 8600M GT, 256MB VRAM, running a 24" external monitor in mirrored mode. I'll put up a youtube video of it next time it happens.

Edit: youtube video available soon, if not now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwKrd61XEdM
 
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