Subject: Re: [Witch Talk] Lion support flakey at best - misses windows all the time

From: Rob Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 15:22:33 -0700

On Sep 2, 2011, at 3:02 PM, Nick Hibma wrote:

>> In 10.7, Witch may -- or may not -- be more prone to lose track of windows. We're investigating, and trying to figure out if there's a difference between 10.7 and 10.6 in that regard.
> 
> Loosing track of windows is a major problem for me (for example the VMWare (non-fullscreened) windows).

If you can notice when/where it happens, if it's tied to using Mission Control or full screen apps, anything ... please email me directly so we can try to replicate it here. That's the trouble we're having now: we can't reliably make Witch lose windows, but we think it is doing so more often than in 10.6. But it's hard to fix what we can't readily reproduce.

> I was describing the way I work. I was not requesting support for tabs or even panes in various applications. I can imagine that it is an impossible task eventhough it would be very welcome.

Tab support is one of the most-requested Witch features, though, so I wanted to let you know we understand the change in workflow for many users. At worst, we hope to support Safari and Firefox; at best, a more extensive list covering the popular tabbed apps.

regards,
-rob.

---

From: Nick Hibma <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2011 00:02:21 +0200

Rob,

Thanks for the extensive reply.

> As with Spaces in 10.6, Witch cannot "see" full-screen applications until you've activated the switcher panel within each full-screen application. That's because these full-screen apps are essentially in Spaces of their own, and there's no public API we can use to automatically look across all Spaces for all open windows.
> 
> It's annoying, but at the moment, there's no fix for that.

Ok, that does make sense, and perhaps shows where part of my problem comes from.

>> Is it just me, or is this the usual behaviour of Witch to loose track
>> of windows?
> 

>> very nicely while using Witch. I now use iTerm2 in 1 window (with
>> multiple tabs and panes), Safari in 1 window with tabs, in fullscreen
>> mode. If Witch cannot keep track of windows properly this becomes a no-
>> go very quickly.
> 
> Apple doesn't publish an API for tabs -- each developer creates them in his/her own manner, which means supporting tabs must be done on a program-by-program basis. We're looking into supporting some of the major tabbed apps in Witch 4, but as you can imagine, this is a time-consuming process, as we have to hand-code support for every program. If those authors change how they create tabs, Witch's support for that program will break until we can update it again.

One would wish all applications would support task switching like they do use Growl.

> As it stands now, Witch is indeed focused on switching windows, not tabs. As such, it may not be the best tool for your current usage pattern. We'll do our best to make it more tab-friendly in Witch 4, but I'm not sure exactly how many apps we'll be able to support.

I do have a lot of respect for the effort you are putting in. I have done lots of work on low level drivers and getting help from hardware vendors was hard to say the least. That has taught me a lot about the work people put in to go where no one else goes.

Keep on working. My problem is not your problem.

Nick

---

From: Rob Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 14:30:26 -0700

On Sep 2, 2011, at 2:55 AM, Nick Hibma wrote:

> Just now I looked at the witch switching pane and it displayed 1
> VirtualBox window as available. However there were a number of
> fullscreen apps running (iCal, Safari, OmniFocus). After switching off
> Witch even more applications appeared (in the Apple Command-Tab

regards,
-rob.

---

From: Nick Hibma <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 02:55:17 -0700 (PDT)

I'm not quite sure as to what is happening, but in Lion I have trouble
seeing all windows in the list of all open / minimized / all windows.

Just now I looked at the witch switching pane and it displayed 1
VirtualBox window as available. However there were a number of
fullscreen apps running (iCal, Safari, OmniFocus). After switching off
Witch even more applications appeared (in the Apple Command-Tab
display): VLC, TextEdit. No wonder my machine is slow and running out
of memory with all that stuff open.

As it is, Witch has become unusable for me, I bought Witch because I
used many windows (the Unix way) and switching between them worked
very nicely while using Witch. I now use iTerm2 in 1 window (with
multiple tabs and panes), Safari in 1 window with tabs, in fullscreen
mode. If Witch cannot keep track of windows properly this becomes a no-
go very quickly.

Please contact me personally if you need more information. I would be
more than happy to help debug and test this issue if someone at Many
Tricks is interested to resolve this.

Nick