As you may have noticed by now, Exposé is a very powerful addition to OS X. After you've used it a few times, you'll really wonder how you managed all your open windows without it.
But Exposé gets even more powerful if you have a multi-button mouse. As seen in the screenshot, when you plug in a multi-button mouse, you gain a new panel in Exposé prefs -- a panel that allows you to assign the Exposé activation buttons to your extra mouse buttons. I use a five-button Intellimouse Explorer, and I think it's the perfect companion for Exposé. I assigned the left-most button (under my thumb) to the "All windows" key, so a simple thumb click shows me all my open windows. I assigned the "Desktop" key to the scrollwheel button, which is always close to one of my fingers. Finally, I assigned "Application Windows" to the right-side mouse button, as I use this Exposé feature the least (though it's still quite easy to activate).
Now, when I'm using the mouse to do something, I don't have to take my hands off of it in order to view my open windows, file documents, or flip between application windows -- it's all right there on the mouse.
Read the rest of the hint for the trick on assigning the Exposé buttons while running the Intellimouse software -- there's a little Catch-22 you have to work around...
As noted, if you're running the Microsoft Intellimouse software, you may find that you can't assign the buttons in Exposé itself -- when I had the MS Mouse set to "none" for my extra buttons, assigning them in Exposé did nothing. Instead, I had to use the Intellimouse software to assign the mouse buttons to keystrokes -- F9 for arrange windows, F10 for application windows, and F11 to show the desktop. However, this is where you run into the Catch-22 -- to assign these keys, you have to be able to press them. But if you press them, then Exposé activates! The solution? Use the Exposé preferences panel to temporarily re-assign the activation keys -- I set each of them to Control-FKey (just hold Control before choosing the pop-up). Then you can assign them as needed in the Intellimouse software (to the original F9 - F10 - F11 keys), and return to Exposé and get rid of the modifier keystrokes. It's actually much easier to do this than it is to describe the process of doing this!
With Exposé and a multi-button mouse, you'll quickly find yourself addicted to the power of this very useful window management tool.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031023125229612