Bremsstrahlung

I wish to meet the Apple employee responsible for programming the Mac OS X application switcher component of the Dock respond to the down arrow key key by dropping the user into hellishly unresponsive lag and just scream wordlessly at him or her for a duration equivalent to my perception of the time I'm kept waiting while my machine thrashes around madly to re-render every window of every open application.

I like to leave a lot of windows open particularly in Safari¹. I have enough RAM for it, and thanks to the combination of minimizing them and hiding applications it works pretty well actually.

I hate Exposé. It does nothing useful to me, as even though some other idiot clever designer hamstrung the window cycling behavior in recent versions of the OS, I still prefer to use it to get to the window I want quickly and fairly easily. It particularly pains me to watch people who haven't used Mac OS for very long lured into using Exposé. The way it typically looks is that they know exactly what window they want, but when they invoke Exposé, they get a pile of thumbnails too small to easily distiguish, so they waste as much as a few seconds (on every window switch) mousing over thumbnails randomly and reading the names until they find the one they wanted. Often they still get the wrong one and have to go through the process again. This mostly seems to happen among sets of large windows whose contents differ visually in fine details, like a pair of maximized Xcode windows. Glancing at the code (if its large enough to be legible) lets a person who's in the middle of working on it know exactly which window it is. The thumbnails, though, hide all the clues useful for identifying such windows.

I my particular case I not only don't want to use Exposé, but having it try to come up is a disaster. It's very hard to for a process to lock up Mac OS by trying to use up all of the CPU resources. It's easy, though, if you use up all of the graphics resources. It doesn't matter whether another process can get scheduled to run on the CPU if it can't display anything on the screen because somebody has grabbed all of the video RAM to, say, copy the buffer of every window, visible or not, extant in the system. The other problem is that it's really easy, while switching applications, to brush the down arrow key in the course of using the left and right keys. If you do, and you have too many windows open, even if they're hidden, Exposé will try to render them all, bringing your machine to a total stop, at least as far as any real productivity is concerned, until it finally finishes.

My computer doesn't need a 'grind to a halt' button. I really wish I could get rid of it.