I receive a lot of mail from users who have great ideas for features they’d like to see added to The Tilery. Some of The Tilery’s best features have been ideas suggested by users, and if you have a new idea for a feature, I’d love to hear from you. But first please read the following list of suggestions I’ve already received. You may save us both some time by checking to see if your idea is already well-known to me.
The wish-list features discussed in this chapter are:
• More Control Over Application Hiding
• Different Modifier Keys
• Quitting Applications
• Notification
More Control Over Application Hiding
You can hide the current application by option-clicking a tile to bring forward a different application, and you can select Always Hide Others to hide all other applications whenever you click a tile. In addition to these existing features, many people would like to be able to select certain applications and have them either always be hidden or never be hidden.
I think this would be great, and I think I know a way to do it cleanly and safely. If so, this feature will definitely appear in a future release.
A related feature would be to dim the icons of applications which are currently hidden. The Application menu does this, and it would be nice if The Tilery would do it, too. Again, I think I know a way, and I will add the feature in the near future if it works out.
Different Modifier Keys
Just plain clicking a tile brings an item forward. Option-clicking also hides the outgoing application. ⌘-clicking merely selects the tile and enables some of the Tile menu items. Shift-clicking temporarily disables “Always Hide Others.” That’s a total of four different ways to click to produce different effects, and it’s hard to remember them all. Some people would like to use different modifier keys than the ones I chose, and would like it even better if they could change them to taste.
Unfortunately, I don’t have complete control over the effects of these keys. Option-click is the troublesome one: it is interpreted by the system, not by The Tilery, and it can’t be changed. Any time you option-click a window of a background app, the system (not The Tilery) will hide the frontmost application. Holding down other keys at the same time (such as Shift-option-click or
‚åò-option-click) has the same effect.
Shift-click and ⌘-click are under The Tilery’s control. But it’s much less useful to be able to change those when option-click can’t be changed; about all you could do would be to swap what they do, and that’s not much use. For this reason I’ve simply left the feature out.
Quitting Applications
Some people have asked to be able to make an application quit by clicking its tile in some special way. This wouldn’t be difficult to do, but I am running short of “fancy clicks” and I think I’d better conserve the remaining ones for more popular uses that may arise. (See “Different Modifier Keys” above.) And anyway, it’s not hard to click a tile and type ⌘Q to make an application quit.
Notification
When an application in the background needs to say something important to the user, it can make the Application menu icon flash, place a special “diamond” or other mark by its name in the menu, and/or make a special sound. It would be nice if the application’s tile also displayed that same “diamond” mark, or was otherwise distinguished in order to show that the application needs user attention. I am not certain if this feature can be safely added to The Tilery; but I will be investigating it, and it may appear in a later version.
