mac geekiness

[egypturnash]

A few thoughts while reading the giant, ultra-geeky Ars Technica review of OSX 10.4.

Yay! At long last! Finder windows in OSX 10.4 show changes the instant they happen! I miss this from OS9 at least once a week.

I really hate that the new "Spotlight" search thing uses apple-space as a shortcut, though. This will make me and every graphics type grumble: apple-space is the HAND TOOL ZOOM TOOL, damnit. Hold it down and drag around in your Photoshop or Illustrator document - or most graphics tools I've encountered - and the cursor becomes a hand magnifier, and you can navigate the document quickly. The suspicion is that Spotlight picked up this summon key from tools like Launchbar and Quicksilver, which also use apple-space by default - thankfully, Launchbar (I still use it, despite Quicksilver apparently being what the Hip Kids use these days. I have LB well-trained...) let me change it to apple-esc, which conflicts with nothing, and pleasantly reuses the old reflex I had on the Amiga for amiga-esc to launch a shell.

Yes, I'm a geek sometimes.

Earlier tonight I drew blasphemy. Two different strains of blasphemy, both of which feel like they really want to be quick and dirty show bibles. Well, the second one kinda wants to be a comic book as much as a show. Ashy gets much blame for the development of both.

(Okay, my hand knows the key sequence for 'dragging hand' and 'magnifier', but my brain doesn't. Anyway. My main point is, so much for "Macs are only for graphics!" if a standardish graphics meta-key like this is stepped on by a new OS feature.)

Comments

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

I never used the apple key to hand-drag - space-drag on its own works fine :)
Apple-escape is my Proteus hotkey (brings my IM windows to the front, jumps to next message), whereas I now have Ctrl-space as my quicksilver key, which is a bit awkward, but I'm sure I'll learn to live with.

Dammit, it's nearly midday and Tiger hasn't arrived yet! >.<
yes, I'm a geek too ;.;

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, my bad: apple-space is the magnifier. Which is equally annoying to suddenly have eaten by something. "Lemme zoom in here. Apple-space, drag to choose the area... er? it's not?... what? oh. fuck. okay, where do I change this? if I can't this app goes. now." Anything that interferes with the navigation that's hard-wired into my fingers for the primary "useful" use of my machine goes.

I haven't drunk the Quicksilver kool-aid; I still use Launchbar. And I still definitely use the finder for some stuff - click the finder icon, hit the 'working' folder shortcut, the current year, and dig around for a graphics source file... but all my mucking happens by typing apple-esc, [2-3 letters of the character I want], return!

I'm not pre-ordering Tiger or anything; I know Sammi said she was planning to get the home license for here, since there're now three operative Macs here, and, um, something like four or five Cubes in various unknown states. Stacey collects them, i think.

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

Of course, if you were an I18N geek, you'd know that apple-space is the "switch input mode" key....

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Obviously, whoever wrote the first fast-search-launch-thing that Worked Well and used apple-space as a default (thus making all such tools decide to use it) was neither into international text nor into graphics apps!

[nigel.livejournal.com]

I've been using Tiger on "Little Mac", my faithful, Blue Dalmatian iMac for a couple of months now. (Yay for BitTorrent.) The thing that surprised me the most was how similar the interface looked to the latest Longhorn release candidate. It bugs the hell out of me too, because I honestly can't tell who's ripping off who at this point. :/ Regardless, I'm really impressed with it. It's been a bit buggy (Which is to be expected with any Alpha release.), but I still think it's the best point-upgrade to OS X so far. I can't wait to get the stable, official version.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I look at news on new OSs now and then; usually the reviews are pretty much lists of the marketing foof. And I'm just not interested in beta OSs - I don't want to tweak my machine constantly any more.

The new look doesn't do much for me, either; I agree that the one showcased in Mail 2 is ugly.

Now what would be really cool would be a Q2DExtreme-aware version of Illustrator... though a lot of basic functionality isn't available in Q2DE yet. But there could sure as hell be a Q2DE-aware Flash player. That'd be a very nice thing indeed.

[nigel.livejournal.com]

Operating Systems are kind of a hobby of mine. I always play around with the new ones when I can, but If I'm actually using the box for more than just wanking around and exploring the OS, I use stable versions. (Swappable hard drives are the OS tinkerer's best friend.) The old ones are fun too. I still waste an embarrassing amount of time playing with CP/M, Commodores, My Apple ]|[, etc. I even have an old 486 Laptop with a copy of OS/2 Warp installed still.

Vintage geekery is fun.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I never use the windows button on my computer. All it ever does, when combined with any key, is bring up the stupid windows start menu. I just hold down Z if I want to get to the zoom controls in illustrator.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I've heard of people rippling the WIndows key from their keyboards. I'm not sure there's an equivalant for the apple-space-drag-around-does-zoom-marquee (apple-space-click does zoom-click) and apple-drag-is-the-hand on Windows. I know most of the meta keys for changing the pen tool into its sub-tools and the arrow are there, but changed around to drive your muscle memory crazy if you try to switch back and forth like I did at one point when I was working on a piece in downtime at work...

Mostly, I think the alt key takes the place of the Apple key for menu shortcuts in the Windows world. Or maybe control. You can tell I don't use them much.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I wanna see the blasphemy!

[dasnarrenschiff.livejournal.com]

Go to Spotlight preferences and there's two boxes for redefining the shortcut keys.