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

[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.