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

[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.