Switching of a different nature

Windows has a great window/application switching system that works via alt-tab. You hit alt-tab, then a window comes up in the middle of the screen showing you your open windows, displayed in their stacking order--so the foremost window is at the beginning of the list. This is good. Hitting alt-tab again moves a selector to the next window in the stack. So far, so good.

Mac OS X doesn't do this. It's application/window switching is terrible. For one, cmd-tab doesn't switch windows. It switches applications. In fact, it doesn't even switch applications well. OS X doesn't need to tell you what applications you currently have open, because those that are open have little black arrows underneath them in the dock. So, what cmd-tab does is change the active application to the next one in the dock, going from left to right.

This sucks.

Enter, at the suggestion of Marc Liyanage, LiteSwitchX, an application that seems to have fallen prey to current pressures to a) use the spelling "lite" instead of light to denote streamlinedness, and b) insert an "X" somewhere in the product name. Anyway. What LiteSwitchX does is make application switching Not Suck (a technical term, I'll have you know) in OS X. How so, you ask?

Well, it knows about window stacking, which is a godsend. No longer do you have to switch applications by whatever order they appear in the dock (which is so arbitrary you might as well be tabbing through applications from least number of vowels in their name to the most), but you can actually switch according to the way their windows are stacking on the screen. What else? Well, it's been Aquafied, which means that it too is lickable, what with a user-resizeable window area to show you your currently open applications. The real clincher, though, is that it's free. Hopefully Apple will at some point include this functionality in OS X itself (and not butcher it)--and possibly with a little more recompense than was offered to the developers of Watson.

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