To be focused on the Mac

Almost every Mac OS X application has these two options under the application menu: “Hide Others” and “Show All”. I never have a good reason to use these, but now, I know what they are for. I figured when I watched Scott Forstall demonstrated Interface Builder for iPhone in the WWDC keynote video—he hide all windows from other applications to make the desktop uncluttered.

One of the inconvenience of using Mac OS X to me is that the desktop seems always cluttered by all the opening windows. In Windows, a window can be made maximised to make it occupy the entire screen and it is then locked in place. This thing doesn’t exist in Mac OS X. Mac just works this way. Some even go so far to proclaim that Mac users are more likely to multi-task. I have always believed that there is no native solution to this, as people have written many applications to free user from distractions (none of them is entirely for this purpose).

It turns out that when you want to work inside a single application, just click the “Hide Others” option, and click “Show All” to go back. There is a hack to make the Dock dims hidden applications’ icon.