It’s harder to observe here because the two modal tasks are competing with each other, but the task switcher UI is a window, as are each of the application icons included within it. While in screen capture mode, press Cmd-Tab to bring up the task switcher UI. Not just contextual menus – click the menu bar and then invoke the camera icon. Every single icon in the dock is also a window, and if you bring up a dock item’s contextual menu, you’ll see that it’s a window, too. With the Dock visible, cruise over to just touch its edge. (Thanks to Will Koffel for pointing this out at the last Boston CocoaHeads). Any applications you’ve installed that use the NSStatusItem API will appear to the left of Apple’s menu extras, and each of these status items you will see also comes with a window. While Spotlight’s icon gets its own window, all of Apple’s menu extras share a single window (within which you can cmd-drag such extras around to sort them). Move the cursor up to the menu bar and observe that most of the menu bar is a single window. Without clicking the mouse, simply move this camera icon around your Mac’s UI, watching as it highlights the various windows that it sees.
Unless you’ve configured otherwise, press the space bar once to switch to “window grabber mode.” You’ll see the mouse cursor change into a clunky (definitely film, not digital) camera icon.Press Cmd-Shift-4 (a shortcut whose history can be traced to FKEY resources, lightly documented in the old-ish Inside Macintosh books).They just don’t look like windows.Ī fun and easy way to experiment with this phenomenon is to put the Mac’s built-in screen capture facility into “window grabber” mode.
#Adium web camera full
An average user looking at their desktop, with all Finder windows closed, would answer “none” to the question “how many windows are open?” But there are dozens if not hundreds of windows being displayed in part or full on a typical Mac user’s screen.
#Adium web camera mac os x
In the years since Mac OS X was first released, the basic “Quartz Window” has been increasingly used as the workhorse element in providing the glitzy UI features we take for granted. Most Mac users and many developers don’t realize how extensively windows are used in the composition of the overall UI experience on Mac OS X. (Note: The title of this entry is an homage to Aldous Huxley’s classic Doors of Perception.)