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Option-click to Hide Apps Quickly
This trick has been available in the Mac OS for years, but many people still don't know it. If you have too many windows cluttering up your screen, you can hide specific ones easily as you work. When you're in any application, hold down the Option key and click on another app's window, on the Dock, or in the Finder to switch to that other app and simultaneously hide all the windows in the previously current app.
Written by Adam C. Engst
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Gasseé Says Apple Played Chicken with MobileMe Launch
Former Apple product guru Jean-Louis Gasseé pins the responsibility tail on the MobileMe donkey in a long blog post in which he describes the machismo that leads to playing chicken with launches. Gasseé writes, "No one had enough brains and guts to risk humiliation, to raise a hand and say: Chief, we're not ready here, let's stop everything. As a result, MobileMe badly crashed on launch."
He goes on to explain why sync is hard, and why it's easy - despite Apple's many years in providing a kind of semi-working sync that I had many problems with - to underestimate the complexities of live reconciliation and coordination. Gasseé believes that Apple didn't eat other people's dog food: they didn't learn why BlackBerry is called Crackberry, and how Research in Motion (RIM) developed a reliable system that's used so broadly. RIM spent a decade tuning the system to where it's at today.
Gasseé was a critical figure at Apple in the late 1980s, and he had a heavy influence on the firm's product development. Through the 1990s, he ran Be, which developed an operating system that had many admirers (although few users) and some influence on Apple.
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