Snow Leopard (Build 10A394): Dock Exposé and Chinese trackpad input

Today I updated my Snow Leopard installation, which I obtained during WWDC this year, to build 10A394. This build finally has Dock Exposé, and… what can I say, it’s spiffy.

With multiple windows open for an application, say Safari, I can simply click and hold on the app’s icon in the Dock to enter the mode. Windows seem to be arranged almost grid-like, rather than the somewhat haphazard arrangement seen in Leopard’s application Exposé. Moreover, you can see the context menu for the Dock item. What bothers me, however, is that you can’t drag and drop tabs in Safari from one window to another in this way. In fact, you can’t drag the tab outside of its current window, apparently.

Stacks has also been improved, as outlined in the WWDC keynote. You can scroll through contents in Stacks, although only in Grid mode, and even navigate through folders without going through Finder. This has been around since the WWDC developer preview, but I don’t think I got the chance to check it out until today.

One more thing, that I was eager to test, was trackpad input for Chinese characters. This feature was around since build 10A354:

Activated with Ctrl-Shift-Space (as you can see), it hovers over everything else, and the mouse becomes tied to the input area, which means if you want to switch windows or applications, you better use the keyboard. On the sides are options that you choose by tapping on the corresponding area on the trackpad. Inputting characters is as simple as just “writing” on the trackpad itself.

Text recognition show you its best guess on what you’re writing. Options on the left change depending on the situation, but it will always have the “clear” option (the backspace arrow with the X). The second option is “space”, which changes to “others” if there are more than four best-guess characters and the third is “next line”.

Smart thing is, after you choose the best-matching character, the left-side options change:

Here, I had already written and chosen “的”. You’ll see that Snow Leopard then shows possible follow-up characters for it. So I could choose the second character on the right to immediate input it and get “的確” (“certainly”, if you’re curious). The bottom-left option changes into “stop contextual guess”, or something like that (I stink at translating Chinese sometimes).

Neat, isn’t it? For the most part, yes, but there’s a couple of gripes I have with this.

You can’t move the trackpad input window. There’s no way to reposition it on your screen, so if the area that you’re typing/writing in happens to be blocked, like part of my window when I was writing up this very post, it’s a bit difficult to see what you’ve written so far. The window is translucent, but it also blurs out whatever’s behind.

Second, while using this, your mouse goes bye-bye. Because you’re using the trackpad for this, obviously you can’t move the cursor and write simultaneously on the same input device, so Apple just said “disable the mouse completely white in this mode”. It’s a reasonable decision, if the trackpad was your only mode of input. But at this moment, I’m using an actual mouse, and with the cursor out of commission, I’m left navigating my way around my desktop with my keyboard. If there was some way of using the input window while allowing mouse control if such an external device was connected, or a toggle to go into mouse mode, then I could drag the input window around to whereever I wish, so I can address the first issue.

Third, and this may be just me, there’s no documentation. It took me a while to figure out that you select options by tapping on the corresponding area on the trackpad. I wasted a good ten minutes trying to select them with a by-then non-existent cursor. Maybe I’m just an idiot :P.

So these are my first impressions with Dock Exposé and Chinese trackpad input. Now I can happily write Chinese on the computer without relying on my diminishing knowledge of Pinyin or looking at an image of the Chinese keyboard layout to try Chinese (because that’s just annoying and clunky. And I do believe there are several different keyboard layouts for Chinese. Yeck) 好棒!