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 ;.;

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.