#MISSION CONTROL MAC NOT WORKING WINDOWS#

Each pop-up menu offers choices like Right Mouse Button and Middle Mouse Button. If your mouse has more than one button, you see a second column of pop-up menus in System Preferences ( Figure 4-9). If you have a laptop, you’ll also find out that you can tap the Fn key alone for Mission Control-and this time, it’s a great choice, because Fn otherwise has very little direction in life. This would work only for hunt-and-peck typists who never use the Shift key on one side. Actually using the Shift key to open Mission Control is a terrible, terrible idea, as you’ll quickly discover the next time you try to type a capital letter. That is, instead of pressing F9 to open Mission Control, you could simply tap the Shift key. These pop-up menus also contain choices like Left Shift, which refers to the Shift key on the left side of your keyboard. That’s how you can make Shift-F1 trigger Mission Control, for example. If, while the pop-up menu is open, you press one or more of your modifier keys (Shift, Option, Control, or ⌘), all these F-key choices change to reflect the key you’re pressing now the pop-up menu says Shift-F1, Shift-F2, Shift-F3, and so on. Within each pop-up menu, for example, you’ll discover that all your F-keys-F1, F2, F3, and so on-are available as triggers. The other three-“Application windows,” “Show Desktop,” and “Show Dashboard”-correspond to the three functions of the older Exposé and Dashboard features, described later in this chapter. The first, Mission Control, lets you specify how you want to open Mission Control. To view your options, choose →System Preferences and then click the Mission Control icon. You can reassign the Mission Control functions to a huge range of other keys, with or without modifiers like Shift, Control, and Option. Mission Control combines all three of those features-Exposé, Spaces, and Dashboard-into one.

#MISSION CONTROL MAC NOT WORKING WINDOWS#

Now, if you’ve ever used earlier versions of OS X, you may remember three other window-management features: Exposé, which also served to shrink windows so you could find them Spaces, which provided virtual side-by-side monitors and Dashboard, which presented a gaggle of tiny, single-purpose apps on a single screen. It’s fast, efficient, animated, and a lot of fun. You click the window or program you want, and you’re there. Now you feel like an air-traffic controller, with all your screens arrayed before you. The concept is delicious: With one mouse click, keystroke, or finger gesture, you shrink all windows in all programs to a size that fits on the screen ( Figure 4-8), like index cards on a bulletin board, clumped by open program. Mission Control tackles this problem in a fresh way. You’ll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the “deck.” And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop-to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or to eject a disk. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your Dock, trying to find the window you want. These days, however, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be like herding cats. (Apple borrowed this idea-well, bought it in a stock swap-from a research lab called Xerox PARC.) In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing windows was easy this way after all, you had only about three of them. In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative, and extremely effective.

Mission control mac not working