Big IDEA

I got a MacBook Pro; now what?

27 September 2007

When Apple talks about switching, it’s usually about people switching from Windows to OS X. I use Windows (some) at work because I have to, but I’m primarily a linux (Mandrake, now Ubuntu) user. I am really happy to be able to use bash and run the scripts I wrote for various Blackboard jobs out of the box; however, there are many things about OS X that caused some head-scratching.

1. Apple-tab cycles through open applications, but not open windows. This is a problem if you have more than one browser or word processing window open because you have to manually move the windows around anyway to find the window you want to bring to the front. Fix: Use apple-˜ (tilde) to cycle through windows of the application you select. For example, apple-tab to bring up NeoOffice, then apple-˜ to cycle through the open NeoOffice windows.
2. Tabbing through forms on a web page doesn’t work as expected. In Gmail, I write my message, hit tab to get to the Send button, and hit enter. On the Mac, however, hitting tab doesn’t focus the send button! Fix: System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, tick the box at the bottom to press tab to move keyboard focus between ALL CONTROLS.
3. Applications minimized to the dock do not come to the desktop when apple-tabbing through applications. I can’t find any keyboard shortcut that will bring a selected application’s window to the desktop from the dock. Fix: apple-h instead of sending to the dock. Apple-h hides applications; the benefit is that when you tab through applications, hidden windows pop right up.
4. There’s no applications menu! OK, the Windows start menu is just bad, and you can’t really expect me to put launchers for my apps in the dock, and opening a Finder window to get to the Applications folder is just a bit ridiculous. I want my Gnome applications menu back with categorized apps like Internet, Office, Sound & Video etc.! Fix: No free fix. For $5 I could get MoofMenu, but I’m settling for TigerLaunch for now. No, you can’t create folders, but I’m just putting the apps I use that aren’t already in the dock in it. This one still makes me sad . It’s not that I couldn’t spend the $5, it’s the principle of the thing!
5. In a terminal, the home and end keys don’t work to move the cursor to the beginning/end of the line. Fix: None that I can find. Arghhhh!!!
6. Spotlight doesn’t show text snippets or previews of search results. I took our campus phone list from an Excel file and converted it to CSV and then created individual text files for each employee so I could type in a name and get the phone extension right away. This works great in google desktop and Tracker, but not Spotlight. Fix: SpotInside show text snippets. It’s only inconvenient in that I have to open SpotInside to search rather than just apple-space to get to Spotlight. Apparently preview in Spotlight will be a feature in Leopard.
7. Only one desktop? Fix: DesktopManager has to do for now. Again, this is apparently addressed in Leopard and they call it “spaces.”
8. I was hoping that since OS X is based on FreeBSD, they might do something sensible like automatically add selected text to the clipboard so the user can just highlight text with the mouse and then paste it, preferably with a middle-mouse click or apple-v. Fix: None that I know.
9. I can’t add applets to the panel, or arrange things in the panel?

Finally, a plea to all non-linux developers: allow users to take advantage of the mouse scroll wheel. In Gnome on linux I can scroll up pages that are not even focused. For example, say I’ve got a web page open on top of a text document. I can just put my mouse over the text document and scroll up and down, even though it does not officially have the focus (it’s not even on top). Also, I can just mouse over the volume control and scroll up and down; why do we have to click in every other OS?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my new mac; I’m just particular about how things should work.