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As most, if not all, of you know, I am a Mac user through and through. I have not had a PC since I was in high school and it was so frequently the reason for countless re-writings of school papers and assignments, that I would have probably, even then, not considered myself a “PC guy”.

Yes, Macs are the standard for the graphic design community, they are sleek and obviously designed by someone with design sense, and they were like that before they were “hip”. Lately, (and I stress lately, since even though I have owned this particular Mac for over three years it was only early this year that this feature was brought to my attention) I have been particularly enthralled with the Exposé feature. For those not familiar with it, it allows you to zoom out and view all your open windows by moving your mouse to a designated corner of the screen.

I use this obsessively, like someone who checks his or her watch too frequently, so today, I will turn the lenses of my Ridonk-a-vision to myself, because when I looked at my Exposé screen this morning, this is what I saw:

pick a window, any window

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 13 windows open. I wish I could say that was the end of it, but each of the Firefox windows have 11 and 15 tabs open, respectively, which brings the grand total to 39. You might start to think this is a bit excessive, but I should also mention, this was after I CLOSED several other windows. Creating an image for a response to Chuck’s blog allowed me to add four or five more windows to the mix.

I’ve always joked that I have mild ADD and I’ll admit that I’m kind of a pack rat (Thanks Dad). This Exposé feature, coupled with the ability to open multiple tabs in a single Firefox browser window (most browsers now do this), seem to capitalize on these two short-comings. Being able to save all my tabs and open them  upon opening Firefox again, only adds to the build up. “But I might need that phone number on that web page I opened a weeks ago” (and haven’t touched since). If I get bored with one window, I leave it, and zip to another until I get stuck, then I more again. It’s like a round robin assembly line, where, eventually, everything gets finished, and for creative work, I find it’s pretty effective.

Before these features I would have ended the chaos ages ago, I would have been overtaken and would have gone on a window closing rampage. It’s actually kind of refreshing when my computer accidently comes unplugged and I inadvertantly drain the battery. I start the computer up again, and it’s like a clean slate, free from all the trivial matters from the past. Of course I immediatly set to filling the slate with a ba-zillion windows again, which doesn’t take long.  Though it appears cluttered, I’m still able to find everything, so what’s the problem?

Now, if only someone could come up with an Exposé feature for the desk my computer sits on. I could just put my hand on the corner and everything on the desk goes flying onto the wall, seperated neatly. I pick out that one paper out I need to locate, and everything else tumbles back to the desk, in the exact disorder it was in before. Just think of how much more junk I could save….