Here’s the thing that most people misunderstand about the macOS dock: it’s not a task switcher. What about the dock? Surely that’s kinda like the taskbar, right? Not really. The window I need may appear in the top left corner, but hey, now it’s in the bottom right! No wait, now it’s in the middle! It’s impossible to get into a state of flow thanks to its unpredictability. Worse, there’s no consistency to where each window appears. To do the same thing on a Mac takes about thrice as much time.įirst, there’s Mission Control, which forces all your open windows to fly into this patchwork collage that’s practically useless if you have more than ten windows open. At a glance, I can see all open apps, hover my cursor over an app to see open windows, then jump into the window I want. When the number of open windows get too many to count, I shift my eyes down to the taskbar. My brain already knows which three or four windows I used most recently, so I can multitask like a pro without missing a beat. On Windows, the alt+tab keyboard shortcut and the taskbar combine to create a productive and powerful app and window manager.Īlt+tab does one thing and one thing well: it lets me jump quickly to the most recent windows I have open in a split second. It feels more form than function, and that tradition continues wven with the new Stage Manager feature that’s about to make its debut in the next version of macOS. Let’s get my biggest peeve out of the way: window management on macOS is objectively horrendous. CONTEXTS - Bringing back true Alt+Tab and taskbar functionality I’ve condensed everything I’ve learned over the past few months migrating from Windows to Mac into this shortlist of must-have apps that will help to ease your transition.ġ. Thankfully, third-party apps came to the rescue. So after decades of using Windows, I had to rebuild my workflow from scratch. Even something as simple as organising files in Finder tripped me up. Many features that I’ve taken for granted on Windows simply did not exist. How hard can it be anyway? But the transition was more challenging than I expected.

Despite not being particularly fond of macOS, I was due for a laptop refresh and decided to move my entire computing life onto a 14-inch MacBook Pro. Years of owning an iPhone and the gradual creep of Apple services in my family - from iCloud to Arcade to Apple TV+ - finally chipped away at my resolve. This is especially so for consumers who have completely bought into the iOS ecosystem.

The new MacBook Air (2022) has dropped, and all things considered, it’s an amazing machine at a stunning price. Ever since Apple started making their own silicon, their machines have become increasingly compelling. Note: This feature was first published on 10 August 2022.

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