alternative |ôlˈtərnətiv|
adjective [ attrib. ]
(of one or more things) available as another possibility:
• (of two things) mutually exclusive;
• of or relating to behavior that is considered unconventional and is often seen as a challenge to traditional norms.
noun
one of two or more available possibilities.
By definition is an alternative.
If you don't accept it as an alternative is going to be a completly different argument.
You've obviously missed the point. If Mission Control is just a glorified Expose (albeit we don't know the final design) then it is not an alternative that wasn't already in place. Hence it is not an ADDED alternative, but a preexisting one. Using sophistry like "provided" is just a shell game to take away an option while pretending something new is replacing it.
The GUI in Mac OS X is not intuitive, not innovative, and these new refinements are not even really improvements. Here's why:
In Mac OS X to know what apps are open, you can currently glance at the dock. But one usually has an idea of what apps are open. Still, it is a good first order way of being aware of what's running. However, knowing which apps are open isn't really fine-grained enough. It's still only a general level of awareness. What you really need to know is what specific tasks you are working on e.g. files, windows, tabs, letters, documents, etc. These are found at the windows level of the GUI. People experience, interface with, and work within these specific windows, not apps.
Is there a way to know what specific windows and files are open in Mac OS X? Sure, Cmd tab, Expose, track pad swipes, etc. But all these features require you to DO something, some kind of motion i.e. clicking, swiping, typing, etc. Mission Control doesn't look like it is going to lessen the clicks, you'll still have to click, swipe or type to initiate Mission Control in the first place. What if you could tell what apps and what windows and what files were open without doing anything?
In Windows 7, for example, you can just glance down at the taskbar button and you instantly know what specific apps, windows, and files are open. There is even a truncated descriptor of the window or file name, which gives you more information. You don't have to DO a thing; no clicking, no swiping, no typing. When you want to move to another window, just point and click. If you want a preview, you just hover the mouse, you don't even have to clcik and hold. I spend too much time in Mac OS X toggling the Expose key to see what windows are open. You have to press the Expose keyboard button, then click it again to resume what you were doing. To move to another app or window, you press the Expose button, look for the window you want among the clutter, then click that window to bring it forward. (Or tab through apps, and then tab through windows). More movement and more effort. In short: it's clunky. And I won't even get into how much time I spend resizing windows because they open unpredictably, and trying to finesse the right bottom corner. Or manipulating windows around using Spaces (which has the added step of setting it up in the first place).
Apple, with its app-centric worldview that creates unnecessary clicking, swiping and typing, is behind the times. Microsoft figured out a long time ago that people work in windows, not apps. Which is why in Windows, a window is an instantiation of an app, not a subset of it. Maybe Lion will address some of these things, but I'm not holding my breath. When an OS has been developed over a decade and it still takes two steps to quit an app, then there is a design philosophy that seems stale.
