I have never, and will never, understand the way Mac applications have the desktop showing in the background.

I don’t want to see the desktop. For several reasons…

1. In my opinion, the desktop is not a good place to work from. It’s fine for just dropping the odd thing temporarily, but if you have all your work on the desktop, to access it you have to clear everything out of the way so you can see the desktop. Then you have to look around the whole screen to see the contents (in some cases, the folder may even be off the screen!). Then you have to double-click the folder to open it. Why bother with all this when the Finder lets you easily access any folder with one click? Oh, and working on the desktop also means your work is on the same drive as the operating system, which is slower and less secure.

2. If your desktop wallpaper isn’t black, or grey, then the colours are going to put you off your design!

3. I just find it really cluttered and confusing being able to see other apps/the desktop while I’m trying to work. I don’t like clutter. I don’t have any toolbars or palettes open in InDesign. I just want my screen to be filled with the document. The “Mac” way is like bad feng shui — I don’t feel “secure” when I use an application, I feel lost.

4. On a Mac, if you click on the desktop for any reason, you are likely to lose the contents of your copy buffer. (Not sure if this still happens, but it taught me to never click on the desktop while working on a Mac.)

If it were up to me, InDesign documents would not be in a window at all, they would just fill the whole screen and you’d have tabs to move between documents.

I’ll admit, I prefer PCs.

More importantly, I think you need to investigate Expose and a multi-button mouse. I set button 5 up to be Show Desktop and button 4 to be Show All Windows. (And Control-button 3 to be Show Dashboard).

Through Expose, you can swoosh around through all your open windows or grab something off the Desktop with ease and speed. An example would be a picture file you need to attach to an email. Button 4 to click to the window you need, button 1 down (ie, left click) and HOLD to pick up the file, button 4 to fan out your windows so you can choose your Mail message again and then let up on button 1 to drop the file as an attachment into the email.

EDIT: And FWIW, I am sort of against the frames thing because it splits the userbase into those who like it and those who don’t. Which means I have to dictate a preference so that our stations remain interchangeable. More pain for the IT mgr.

thanks for the option-click tip, certainly will help me cope.

ray

I do training and consulting work. Many, but not all of my clients are Mac based. While it’s really not that big a deal to use a Windows version for demos and training I like the idea of having the best of both worlds especially if one of those rare O/S based issues arises.

If I simply click the desktop when visible it makes the Finder the current application but it doesn’t hide InDesign. I won’t be able to see the desktop.

Option-clicking make the Finder active, and HIDES InDesign, showing the desktop.

That keyboard shortcut works in any other Mac OS X application, but actually goes back to Mac OS 9 or earlier.

There are of course other ways of getting to the desktop but that one is strongly embedded in my memory.

Dave

What about using two monitors, by the way? With the Application frame turned on, how does this work? Does it work at all (giben that the two monitors are of different sizes…)? (I’m not having the final version, as we Europeans still have to wait for whatever reasons :/)

Adobe needs an Officer Barbrady posting in their forums: Nothing to see here people… move along.