It’s rare for Apple to change the way people work on Macs, but that’s precisely what the company is trying to do with Stage Manager on macOS Ventura. At first glance, it’s just a quick visual way to switch between recently used apps. But after testing Ventura’s first public beta last week, I think it could also solve windows management issues that have plagued Macs since OS X debuted 21 years ago. Or maybe I’ve always hated the Apple Dock.
In addition to Stage Manager, Ventura also has many updates that should make life a little easier for Apple users. Mail gets the biggest review, but there is also better collaboration with Safari tab groups, as well as much-needed features in Messages. At the very least, it’s a much more expansive update than last year’s Monterey one.
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Stage Director: Make Sense of Mac Madness
In my nearly two decades of using Mac, as a college student, computer support worker, and tech journalist, I’ve never found the OS X Dock very useful. Of course, when it was first released, it was a great visual update on the simplistic Windows and Linux taskbars. (I remember being amazed that a Dock icon could display a running video.) But on its own, the Dock is a confusing mix of shortcuts and running application indicators, which reviews at the time as well. they criticized.
If you want to find a specific Safari window, for example, you need to press Control, click the Dock icon, and select it from the drop-down menu. In comparison, much uglier Windows XP allowed me to focus on specific applications (and their panes) with a single click on the taskbar. Perhaps aware of this peculiarity of usability, Apple introduced Exposé in 2003 as an easy way to see everything you’re running at once. Since then, I’ve religiously assigned hot corners to all the Macs I’ve used to enable Exposé-specific features (one corner shows everything that’s open, another shows me windows just for my current app, while one another takes me directly to the desktop). Who needs a confusing Dock when you can have a vision of God from your whole system?
It’s fast advancing almost twenty years and we have Stage Manager, another on-screen tool for jumping between your apps. But while it may seem like an additional clutter of the screen, its main function is to help you focus on cluttering the screen. When you select a recent application in Stage Manager, it centers that application on the screen and causes other windows to disappear. Press the application shortcut again and go through the open windows.