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Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

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Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#281
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or install a utility like RightZoom.

Thanks for the tip! I didn't know about RightZoom. Here are some little known Mac utilities I like: * MutableCode's Breakaway let's you configure separate audio volumes (including silence) for with and without headphones. * Stereopsis' Flux adjusts your display's color temperature to match the type of lighting in your room (e.g. daylight, halogen, fluorescent) to avoid the blindly blue glare in a dark room.

Separate volume bars for speakers/headphones are already maintained, no?

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#282
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? On a windows box, there's a key with "End" written on it. Much more guessable than fn+right arrow.

End? What does that mean? Does it quit the current app? Does it shutdown? I’m really confused! And this strange Home key, what’s that for? Going to my start page? Showing the desktop? Start menu? What’s going on?!

They way I learned it is, I pushed it to see what happened. Voila, it means end of line.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#283
post #232
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

End? What does that mean? Does it quit the current app? Does it shutdown? I’m really confused! And this strange Home key, what’s that for? Going to my start page? Showing the desktop? Start menu? What’s going on?!

I think learning that 'end' means 'end of document' is a lot more intuitive than fn+right.

The canonical shortcuts are Cmd-left/right/up/down, which move the cursor to the absolute left, right, top, and bottom of the document, respectively. This makes perfect sense.

Home and End behave differently, they move the viewport to the beginning or end of the document but do not move the cursor. They are like scrolling in that you don't lose your position. I'm not sure, but I think that page up and down (Fn-up and Fn-down) behave similarly. I never use these though.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alt+left or alt+right doesn't work for me in Terminal out of the box (I usually use iTerm2 where it doesn't work either) - do you need to change any settings (such as emulation, terminal type etc) to get at that?

It works for me right out of the box on a brand new Lion install. No settings have been changed yet.

Didn't realize that "alt" here meant the "esc" key.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#285
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't: > In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot. They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it. > When I click the Maximize bu…

The full-screen mode is terrible. It leaves everything but your main monitor completely empty, making it essentially unusable for anyone with multiple monitors. Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.

> Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.

If it was a real issue someone would have packaged up GCC or LLVM. There is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from doing this. The truth is that nobody actually minds installing Xcode to get a compiler. Or at least the few who do don't actually care enough to do something about it.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#286
post #16

There may be a good point hiding there, but I don't think he made it particularly well. He argues that OS X is getting worse. His specific complaint was that he couldn't find the Library folder to delete his mail. Two things to keep in mind: first off, people who set up Mail extremely rarely will want to delete their email. So on the list of use cases to optimize for, that one lives near the bottom of the ladder. Sec…

Overally I don't consider 10.7 being worse than 10.6, I'm ignoring Mission Control stuffs as I was ignoring Exposé. But there is one thing I find it maddening above all is the settings and behavior of Terminal.app, I understand _nothing_, this is insane. The behavior of Terminal.app is insane, it's even harder to explain since I fail to understand its logic.

Terminal.app barely changed between 10.6 and 10.7. I have the same settings I've had since 10.5, actually.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i tend not to use it for this very reason. i've wished, on more than one occasion, that a user could customize this action to be a "maximize vertically", as one could in gnome2. maybe i'm one of the few who actually used this, as it seems to have been phased out in gnome3. but i found it very useful.

You're not the only one to use vertical maximization. I really liked being able to middle-click the maximize button for vertical, or right-click for horizontal. It seems that's no longer the case in Gnome-3-hacked-to-look-like-Gnome-2-in-Ubuntu-11.10. I suppose it's replaced by Windows 7-style border dragging, but that's less flexible as you can only do maximize, left half, or right half.

Windows 7 actually supports explicit vertical maximization; dragging the top of a window to the top of the screen will maximize the app vertically but leave its width unchanged.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#288
post #127
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Save as" is usually used when you want to save it as a different file somewhere else, and most people have cmd-shift-s ingrained in their mind. This no longer exists and there's no excuse. Autosaving doesn't even do the same job.

I don’t think you understand. This is about paradigm shifts. Here is how it used to work: You open this old document because you want to create a new one and use the old one as a template. You either Save as right away or (much more likely) you edit for a bit and do a Save as at some later point. If you do this with auto save you are fucked. (Well, not really. There is now Versions, so starting with Lion this is fina…

A lot of programs have some kind of auto-save, here is how it works in Microsoft Word. While editing your document, it is auto-saved, but as a new, hidden file. When you manually Save, this new file overwrites the old, and a Save As does the same, but with the new name, not wiping the old document. You can argue that this is messy, and only a hack to get around the paradigm. It all depends on how people want to work, giving the program the responsibility to handle it.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#289
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never installed SW:tOR on a Mac, so I can't say for sure, but I've never corrupted my operating system by installing an application before. That kind of bullshit actually is the fault of the OS.

The guy does't sound like an advanced user and may be using a sledgehammer to pound in a nail. He's not complaining of bluescreens, he's complaining of corrupt registry keys, which can do as little as preventing the one app from installing the way he wants. Reinstalling Windows is a sledgehammer here. Looking up his error code, all he needed to do was reregister the library. If he's not an advanced user and so doesn'…

The technology has existed for decades to install applications without having to make potentially dangerous alterations to systemwide shared state. There's only so much you can blame on app developers. In the year 2011, shipping an OS that allows an application to corrupt the registry is just as stupid, if not stupider, than shipping an OS that allows the application to grab or generate arbitrary pointers into memory allocated to other processes.

No one should have to know what "reregister the library" even means.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#290
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to push a key and find out what it does compared to imagining a key combination and trying to figure if that key combination even does anything

Not only that but, as a new mac user, it seems like there are several common keystroke types. Fn+x, ctrl+x, alt+x, cmd+x, cmd+shift+x; maybe there's some logic behind it but i can't find any. It seems like the windows system is a bit more understandable. (if there's something obvious that i'm missing someone please tell me!)

Cmd: this is an important command we expect you to use a lot.

Shift-cmd: wow this program has a lot of commands that people want shortcuts for.

Shift-ctrl/alt: holy shit this program has a lot of commands.

Shift-ctrl-alt: this program is probably old enough to vote, and has a huge ton of commands

Alt: rarely used alone outside of terminal

Ctrl: see alt

Fn: NOT ON ALL KEYBOARDS. Used to force f-keys to output f-key codes instead of doing media control stuff, or to change cursors into page-up/dn/start/end.

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