Blog · Productivity
The glance tax.
Nobody times a window switch, because a window switch is fast. Cmd-Tab is a tenth of a second. Mission Control is a gesture. The Dock is right there. So the cost hides, and it hides in the same place every time: your eyes.
Cmd-Tab draws a row of icons in the middle of the screen. Your eyes go there, read left to right, find the app, and then, if the app has more than one window, you press Cmd-` and read again, this time with no picture at all, just the window changing under you. Mission Control shrinks everything to stamps and asks you to recognize a document at a tenth of its size. The Dock is at the edge, where nothing you are working on ever is.
Then the part nobody counts. Your eyes come back to the work, and for a moment you find your place again. A line, a cell, a cursor. Small. Also a few dozen times a day.
Open where the eyes already are
The spiral opens around the pointer. Not near it, around it: the hub sits under the cursor and the cards curl out from there. The pointer is almost always close to what you are looking at, so the switcher appears in the part of the screen you were already reading. No trip out. No trip back.
The cards are built to be recognized rather than read. Each one is tinted from its own icon. A browser window shows the icon of the site inside it, so three Chromes stop being three identical logos. The name sits in the hub for the card under the pointer, and only for that one. The rest stay as pictures until you want them.
Recency per window, not per app
The tax Cmd-Tab hides best is the second one. It takes you to the app, and then you pay again to find the window. VortexFlow keeps recency per window, so the card that is already selected when the spiral opens is the exact window you left, even if it is another window of the app you are in. Hold the button, let go, you are there. Most switches end before the spiral has fully drawn.
When you do need to look, the looking is short. When you need to read, you type instead: three letters narrow a desk to one card.
What we are not going to tell you
We are not going to tell you it saves twenty-three minutes a day. We do not know your day. We know that a glance and a return trip have been removed from something you do constantly. Try it for a week. Count how often you look up.