One of the drawbacks of ultra-mobile computing is a lack of screen real-estate. The native 800x480 displays interpolated up to 1024x600 still don't offer users the 1280x768 widescreen displays they've become used to at home. MacOS has this neat feature called Exposé which, among other things, has a hotkey to tile your open windows and select them from the list. I always thought that feature would be nice on an ultra-mobile, but come on: When is Apple going to release a SLATE TABLET?I was reading Lifehacker in my RSS feeds and came across this article introducing Dexpot. The focus of the application is simple: virtual desktop management. By itself, that is a selling point for many users. Especially when the sale is "free for personal use." On the UMPC, however, I decided to use a feature of Dexpot to recycle my unused LaunchPad button and make it into a window manager.
First: Download and install Dexpot from the link above. Look through the settings and find the features you would like to use.
Second: Go into the Tablet and Pen Settings in the Control Panel and reassign all the buttons you wish to turn into Dexpot buttons into something more obscure, line Window+FunctionKey.
Third: Configure Dexpot to recognize the function key mappings to the features you wish to use.
Enjoy! I created a little video to show off "Window Catalogue," what I consider to be the most useful feature on an ultra-mobile. Take a look:
3 comments:
It looks nice. But I've never been a fan of any task switchers that are slower than Alt-Tab. Just because I'm switching tasks doesn't mean I want to take a coffee break ;) Expose on a higher end Mac is a smidgen slower than Alt-Tabbing, but it's pretty darn fast.
So are there any tweaks you can do to make it run faster? As you know, UMPCs aren't exactly laden with horsepower. And how does it perform in a scaled display resolution. I've found that a lot of apps that get by with sloppy painting start acting very odd with lots of repainting when you are running at a non native resolutions at least on my i7210.
Regarding the Apple Tablet, the answer is very probably never. Indeed a) Steeve Jobs his highness said it in his iPhone talk b) the Modbook is a modified iBook with a wacom digitizer... The representative was saying that they were allowed to do so because Apple was not willing to develop any tablet.
Too bad though...
wow that is sooooo lame.
ubuntu feisty with the beryl window manager kick arse over this thing.
im running a 1.6ghz 512mb 400mhzfsb.
did you see how long it took to render all the open windows? more than 1 second is too long.
beryl is isntant. its live too.
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