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J.P.,

How do you remember all your F's? What does F9 do? I don't know. Most of my F keys seem to adjust screen brightness and sounds.

If I drag a file to an app icon in the dock it opens up. what's wrong with that?

I don't have the ability mentally to write three messages all at once, so I don't have a problem with this. What's wrong, if you want to drag a jpg as an attachment from the desktop to the mail pane with actually going to the desktop and dragging it to the mail pane? How is that difficult? I just don't understand!

This works with ANY file of course.

Do you work in full screen mode all the time? Is that the issue here? Can you not see your desktop while working on your mail? Why not just make your application windows smaller and drag directly from the desktop to save wear and tear on your F keys?

If I want to take a file from a particular folder, I will open said folder and drag the icon from there onto the mail window. Or a jpg from there onto a Word document. Or a text clipping onto Excel. It's easy AND logical.

Edit: I have just booted the PowerBook and can confirm that what you have described doesn't work.

F9 turns down the backlight to the keyboard.

I have a Mail window open with a new mail waiting to get an attachment. I hit F11 (and had to go to Sys Prefs to set up Expose so that it would zoom all app windows not just windows in the front app). I clicked on a file and dragged it onto the new mail that I could see Expose'd. Drop it off an "Bingo" - nothing happens, despite the fact that the new mail window has gone pink.

Hitting F11 after it's gone pink does nothing either. If I click F11 while trying to drag the file from the desktop, it just opens the new mail window and won't let me drop anything onto it. There's nothing actually "grabbed". In fact, you can't actually grab ANYTHING from the Desktop at all, the desktop is not accessible through Expose. When in this process am I supposed to hit F11 again?

No matter how I set up SysPrefs for Expose, I can't get access to the desktop.

BUT, minimise the main Mail window so that the new blank mail is visible, go to the Desktop and drag the file onto the new mail pane and drop. There it goes. Attached. Piece of cake.

The amount of time I have spent trying to get the Expose thing to work means that I could have emailed all my stuff and attachments by now and be enjoying a pint. As it is ...

So, c'mon then. How have you got your Expose settings set up so that

a) F9 doesn't dim the keyboard (maybe this is different on a desktop - I still haven't worked out what F9 was supposed to do in your method above) and

b) you can get access to the desktop so that you can fly between windows and do the process that you describe. If it's so much better than just dragging a file from the desktop onto the application window, I'd be delighted to learn.

Cheers.

Just got in from the office.

None of the above work on this iMac either.

andybarton,

"How do you remember all your F's? "

Because I use 4 of them and remembering 4 keys isn't too tricky. Laptops do have different defaults for things like dimming the screen but they're fairly easy to setup using System Preferences.

I don't know what you're doing but believe me it does work and it's not particularly complicated. I've a video of it working below (beware it's 9MB and large, you'll need to make your Safari screen pretty big):

Exposé Video

In this video I'm in Mail, press F11 to get to the desktop, grab a file and then press F9 to see all my windows. Then I hover over the message I want and drop the file. Then I move into Pages, hit F11 to get to the Desktop, grab the file then hit F11 to get Pages back, whereupon I drop the image in.

If I wanted to do that straight from the Desktop without using Exposé I'd have to make sure all my windows were fairly tiny and I quite like actually having reasonably large windows (and a lot open at once).

JP.

Apple Certified System Administrator

J.P.,

Hey I'm out of range for a day and the conversation gets all interesting

Yep you're right, it works if you press F12 after starting to drag the text

As for the ability to use F11 and dragging a desktop based attachment to mail - this is great

I've been using 10.2.8 for the last 2 years and only 10.3 since the new laptop in Feb and hadn't fully grasped what exposé could do (it was great enough for me to be able to view all open images to selct which one to work on in detail)

As for using F11 to select a file and then going straight to F9 to see all open windows - app panes etc - that is actually insanely great (will probably use that a lot - thanks)

I may use Dashboard a bit more - now that drag and drop is possible - but stiill think that having the info in view whilst working in another app is usually more useful

thanks again for the 'heads up'

andybarton,

I'm with you on the mostly gimmicky nature of dashboard - style over substance as far as I'm concerned

But Exposé works for me - even on the laptop

and drag and drop did work via dashboard once i (knew) to hit F12 while still holding the mouse button down on a semi-dragged item (phew)

agree that it's not exactly intuitive - but maybe Apple are now at the point of including sooooohhhh much in terms of what is possible - that it cannot all be intuitive (?) there's only so much anyone can intuit

PS: the inability of Photoshop to load images that should have been passed to it - happened to me after Tiger upgrade - all it took was a Photoshop reinstall (no uninstall nec' first)

I found that files transferred from PhotoMechanic didn't open even though Photoshop was opened

and also from the finder (this was all on my Powerbook - but the same thing didn't happen on the desktop Mac)

nom,

All in all, Apple has turned into a Gimick rather than Substance product producer and it's more evident than ever in this botched mess called Tigger. Apple has seriously lost direction and it's not accidental that it conincides with Jobs preoccupation with the iPod and selling other people work .... music. Fortunately I cloned my Panther install to another drive on my G4 Dual 1.42, because I've taken off Tiger in disgust.

Apple hasn't MADE a product which they sell in over seven years. Everything is out for bid to the lowerest price on the contract. There are two different companies making iBooks right now and only one is reputable and that is Quanta. One can only assume the crop of problematic iBooks with failing LCD comes from the "other" company based in China. My brother's 12-in G4 1.2Gig has gone back for repairs twice already. now he has to exchange the faulty battery that might explode.

I long for the simplicity and speed that OS X 10.1.5 had. I run it on an old G3 PowerBook, it never crashes and launches / quits in half the time as Panther on my new G4 PowerBook 1.5Gig. Apple should change their motto to "Think Gimicks"

nom,

None of this F-stuff works for me.

I must be doing something wrong...

JP hasn't told me how his F-prefs are set up, but they're NOT the default and they're NOT the way mine are.

Intuitive it certainly ain't.

andybarton,

They ARE the default and the only reason yours are different is because the laptop layout is slightly different because of the specialised F keys.

"I must be doing something wrong..."

You think? What actually are you doing? Can you get Exposé working at all? Saying it's not intuitive is ridiculous, very few shortcuts in computing are. Apple+Tab is a great shortcut and lots of people use it but there's nothing particularly intuitive about that particular key command.

JP.

Apple Certified System Administrator

websterphreaky,

10.1 was slower, crustier and crashed more often than 10.4. That's not just opinion, that's quantifiable and if you've got a machine running otherwise then there is something wrong with that install.

JP.

Apple Certified System Administrator

J.P.,

Hmm, guess you believe your dead reckoning is more accurate that my stop watch, huh? And you've been keeping track of how often my 10.1.5 install has crashed to make your FOOLhardy statement.

Perhaps it was YOUR installation of 10.1.5 was faulty, cause your unfounded observation based on MY actual experience is pretty foolish. I hope you don't often run around telling everyone that you know everything. It's pretty narcissistic.

J.P.,

Your video explained this operation very well. Thank you. And thanks for taking the trouble to record this. If I had the software, I'd record one of my own to prove to you that it doesn't work on the Powerbook, but I've never used it before, so won't miss it now.

I know that you favour a one button mouse, and are therefore used to using modifier keys to enable you to do things. I use a two button mouse (unless away from my desk with the PB), so am not used to holding down a key while mousing around.

andybarton,

You don't have to hold down any modifier keys, is that what you're doing? You start dragging, then briefly press the key, then continue dragging. They're key presses, not key holds.

JP.

Apple Certified System Administrator

andybarton,

Don't know what it is on your laptop, but F9 activates exposé on my newish PBG4

maybe you've got some other software conflicting with the system defaults??

I don't really get the use of F10 though - it merely darkens screen around the foremost window, and makes text in that window very blurry (in safari at least)

Edit- Oh right it's and expose of just the foremost app's open windows - maybe I should check things out in Help a bit more often than I have been of late

websterphreaky,

I don't agree with you on this at all, generally - I think apple just keep pushing what's possible more and more

Spotlight has been really useful for me already - saving me hours of time on one occasion - and enabling me to find a password hidden in a myriad of e-mails on another

I find 10.4 to be pretty quick for me on my 2 yr-old Powermac G4 - I never did run 10.1 - only moved to OSX when I got the Powermac G$ which came with 10.2.6

I think dashboard was just something leapt upon by Apples software engineers as a 'cool' new way of doing things

in some ways it is - and it's a nice way of hiding lots of apps you don't want to clig up ypur Dock with

but for me lots of the apps would be more useful as stand alon mini apps that sstay on screen as you typ or browse in another app

I do not go along with you on the notion of Apple changing the motto to "Think Gimmicks" as lots of what they bring out has been REALLY useful for me in my work

But i think it's possible to criticise certain things in an OS without having to take an anti-Apple stance

J.P.,

"Yes, that's a MUCH more mac-like way of doing it."

"How exactly?"

Because that's how I expect it to work.

Anndra,

So you think they should implement a non-consistent method contrary to the HIG because you personally think that that's the most obvious way? If they did that for everything they'd have ditched the container model in favour of a windowed model and we'd have a maximise button that maximises to screen rather than content.

JP.

Apple Certified System Administrator