TabExpose 2.0 Improves Spaces Support, Performance

Exposé is a killer Mac OS X feature that gives you a bird's-eye view of all your open windows. But what about getting a better look at all your open Safari tabs? This is the epic question that Cocoamug Software answered with TabExposé, a Safari add-on. A new 2.0 release brings some welcome enhancements.

As we've covered in the past, TabExposé does one trick very well: it allows you to spread your Safari tabs out into thumbnails with a slick animation, giving you a better glance at all the sites you have open. It can be invoked with a Safari toolbar button or a customizable keyboard shortcut.

TabExposé 2.0 brings some minor, though welcome, enhancements. It plays much better with Spaces in 10.5 Leopard, as it now displays only the tabs from the Safari window in the current Space. Performance has also been greatly improved for Leopard users as TabExposé now relies on a CoreDock API instead of AppleScript (though 10.4 Tiger users are stuck with AppleScript). Some bugs have also been fixed for 2.0, such as automatically putting focus on the keyboard shortcut window when opening TabExposé's preferences tab.

With this release, Cocoamug's developer Jean-Matthieu Schaffhauser decided to slightly raise TabExposé's price to €6.90, or about $10. "I need to," Schaffhauser lamented to me in an e-mail, but on the flip side, "it will let me feature my software in more application promos at the same time." Still, for tab-hungry Safari users, TabExposé is quite the useful plugin, and worth the price.