| Mission Control | |
|---|---|
 | |
 Mission Control onmacOS Sequoia | |
| Operating system | Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or later andiPadOS 13 or later |
| Website | support |
Mission Control is a feature of themacOSoperating system.Dashboard, Exposé, andSpaces were combined and renamed Mission Control in 2011 with the release ofMac OS X 10.7 Lion. Exposé was first previewed on June 23, 2003, at theApple Worldwide Developers Conference as a feature of the then forthcomingMac OS X 10.3 Panther.[1]
Mission Control allows a user to do the following:
Exposé and Mission Control include three separate features for organizing windows and open applications:
In the first two cases, after Mission Control is activated, the user can select any window byclicking on it or selecting it with arrow keys and pressingEnter. Exposé then deactivates, leaving the selected window in the foreground. UsingApple Mighty Mouse, it is possible to select a window using the Scroll Ball, by scrolling in the direction of that window.
The keyboard shortcuts used for activating Exposé can be customized to be any of the function keys, the shift, control, option or command key, thefn key on Mac laptops, or even a mouse button on multiple-buttonmice (including Apple Mighty Mouse).
Different features of Mission Control can also be activated by moving the mouse to a'hot corner' of the desktop. This system is off by default; it can be enabled fromSystem Settings.
When Exposé first premiered in 2003, it could be controlled using the F9, F10 and F11 keys.
The Exposé shortcut keys were moved to the F3 key to make room for the "rewind", "play/pause" and "fast forward" keys. On Mac keyboards made after 2004, Exposé can be activated by using the F3 key or in combination with the command key, or on the trackpad of Macbooks supporting multi-touch interface. (However, F9, F10 and F11 can still be used for controlling Exposé with thefunction modifier key, or by enabling the "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" setting.)
OnMac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Exposé featured a new organized grid view and allowed users to activate Exposé from the Dock.
In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, some features ofDashboard, Exposé, andSpaces were incorporated into Mission Control. This gave an overview of all running applications just like "All windows" but grouped windows from the same application, and added a display of Spaces. Desktop view and application window view were retained, the latter under the name of App Exposé, and could be accessed through gestures on multi-touch trackpads.
Some users criticised Mission Control in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion for not offering an unobscured "Exposé" view of all the windows in single workspace: windows of the same application are always hidden in bundles. This issue was fixed inMac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, however, with a checkbox in the System Settings pane allowing a user to choose whether to group windows of the same application. Some features of Exposé and Spaces fromOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard did not return, however: it does not show the names of the windows displayed, nor does it return the added functionality provided byMac OS X 10.5 Leopard multiple desktops feature, known as "Spaces," which allowed users to drag and drop windows between desktops with a single click, and also allowed for larger thumbnail previews of each desktop in a 2D grid when in use.[2]
InOS X Mavericks, the linen-texture background in Mission Control has been changed into a dark-grey background, as a part of moving away fromskeuomorphism.
InOS X Yosemite, the dark-grey background has been replaced with a translucent background, lightly showing the desktop's background and the desktop no longer zooms out.
InOS X El Capitan, the grouped window by app view has been changed into ungrouped windows view by default and the translucent background has been changed to it being transparent that fully shows the desktop's background.
InmacOS Catalina,Dashboard has been discontinued, therefore removing Dashboard from view permanently (if it was previously activated) in Mission Control.
 | This section needs to beupdated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(March 2022) |
The "blob" was a hidden and undocumented interface to Exposé that was discovered by a member of the MacNN forums.[3] When clicked, it enabled the "Application Windows" mode. When Option+click, it enabled the "All Windows" mode.
Another undocumented feature of Exposé was for the show desktop function. It placed all the open windows in a small box on the screen that can be moved to anywhere on the screen.[4] This function had some bugs, such as after exiting the show desktop mode, the foremost window will not have a shadow and the user will not be able to move the window. However, this was easily fixed by using the show all function. It also had another bug that causes an area of screen the width of the minimised preview to become unresponsive to mouse clicks requiring the windowserver to be restarted.
Using theShift key, Mission Control can be activated inslow motion, as canDashboard and theminimise effect and several other animations. This is the same effect that was demonstrated bySteve Jobs during the unveiling of Exposé during the 2003 Worldwide Developers Conference.[5][6]
Similar effects are used on other operating systems.
Microsoft Windows 2.0 first introduced a window switcher in 1990. UsingAlt+Tab ↹, users could see a flattened view of all open windows. Every version of Windows since then has also provided this window switching functionality. Vista and Windows 7 provide an additional feature calledWindows Flip 3D, which has a broadly similar purpose. Flip 3D allows a user to flip through all open windows with a three-dimensional perspective. A downside to this method is that the front-most window covers a significant portion of the other windows, unlike Exposé. On the other hand, this allows the user to see the contents of the front-most window, while this can be difficult in Exposé, especially if the user has a large number of windows open. Vista'sDesktop Window Manager exposes a publicAPI that allows any application to access the same thumbnail representations that Flip3D uses, and so there are a number of third party add-ons that are able to provide Exposé-like functionality in Vista. A very few third-party applications, such as the Emcee Desktop Organizer, provide Mission Control-like organization of similar windows into visual "stacks," or support Windows 8's "Immersive" Apps.Windows 10 adds a very similar feature calledTask View which also includes multiple-desktop support.
Microsoft's Intellipoint Software for Microsoft Mice has a feature similar to Exposé[7] as it also works with live images of windows, rather than static representations.
Microsoft's Windows 7 introduced a feature called "peeking" that allowed a user to hover their mouse over an icon in the taskbar to reveal a small thumbnail depicting the contents of the application's window or windows.
Compiz andKWin are compositing window managers for systems using theX Window System. Both include plugins similar to Exposé - the scale plugin in Compiz and the present windows effect in KWin.Skippy also performs similar functions to Exposé.
Starting with version 3.0, theGNOME desktop environment has gained a new mode called "Overview", which is used to launch applications and manage workspaces. In this mode, windows are scaled and arranged in an Exposé-like fashion for quick switching.
For Classic or Legacy Macintosh systems, the free Finder Workspaces[8] offers functionality similar to Spaces.ChromeOS has a window overview mode[9] that shows a thumbnail of all open windows, available by pressing the 'window switcher' key or swiping up with 3 fingers on the trackpad. Windows in overview mode can be closed by clicking an associated close button, or selected by clicking on the window thumbnail, which also closes overview mode and brings the selected window to the foreground.
