I spent considerable time this week as my MBA showed major quirks – the finder’s trashcan did not respond, clicking on the finder in the dock suddenly opened a second icon, while the finder crashed frequently. Running harddisk maintenance, correcting access rights, deleting several plists, experimenting with safe mode, even deleting PRAM and NVRAM – nothing helped until I replaced the finder.app with a clean copy from another Macbook.
So, I am learning quickly… Here is my current desktop using a rather simple dock that works perfect without any extra “spaces” or “exposes”. It is always visible on the right screen border (for a righthanded person) and used more as a permanent task manager if you run
$ defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool TRUE
$ killall Dock
to set the dock switching mode to ‘hide others’ by default. I don’t need any extra menu helper application that eat up memory – dragging the program directory to the dock and setting the action to “stack” gives immediate access to all remaining applications. The screensaver engine as well as the dashboard can be started here as well which avoids the accidental opening of the dashboard.
From all those windows managers (like Witch, Sticky Windows, WindowShadeX) I would give MondoMouse a try (or Zooom) that will allow quick movements and resizing from all corners.
So have fun! A well configured clean interface saves 15 minutes every day..