Getting to the dock in Lion's full screen mode
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has streamlined full screen mode for many apps. Full screen mode get you in a distraction-free where the menu bar and the dock are hidden you only see one window covering the whole screen. Getting to the menu bar is easy: move your mouse pointer at the top and it’ll reveal itself. The dock is as easy: move your mouse pointer to the bottom and let it slide back… or is it?
Something funny is going on here. If you move the mouse pointer at the bottom, nothing happens. If after getting at the bottom you stop, then try to get further down, then you’ll see the dock slide into view.
That’s a clever fix for the problem of reaching a UI elements at the bottom of the screen without having the dock slide it to obstruct whatever we wanted to reach. But I can’t stop wondering whether it’s just too clever. How are normal people supposed to discover this trick? Won’t it just look like some odd erratic behaviour? Time will tell…
Comments
With anything but a track point, that’s the normal action for scrolling way down.
bcs: But once you’ve put the pointer at the bottom, would you think that doing that gesture once more will help make the dock appear? I question the discoverability of that gesture.
You can also invoke the dock by scrolling all the way to the screen edge, then slowly pull away from the edge. I find this behavior even more unexpected. So much so that I can’t figure out if it is a bug or not.
Ah, I had no idea that this existed — I’ve been three-finger-swiping to the normal desktop and using the dock from there!
(I guess that helps with your discoverability argument, too).