Slashdot Mirror

I have a 2010 Macbook Air. Performance did get worse with each update of OSX and I was told that El Capitan would be better but I didn't notice an improvement. Lately, Chrome has been burning up the machine which goes to 100% and full fans when opening more than a few tabs... some weird stuff there so I switched back to Firefox. My UI comments are in comparison to Linux (I haven't used Windows for 15 years). My reference to toy UI refers specifically to the "skeumorphic" UI which I find childish and counterproductive.

Now I KNOW you're lying!

For the last two or three major revs., OS X has almost completely removed the skeumorphic and "lickable" 3-D-ish design elements. In fact, Scott Forrestal was basically fired over the design war between his love of skeumorphic UI and Jonny Ive's love of "minimalism". Ive won. So, unless you are talking about certain design elements in Logic Pro, you will be hard pressed to find many skeumorphic applications in El Capitain.

I did enjoy Spotlight at first but for some reason later updates to it have made it almost useless. I used iMovie occasionally but, again updates made it confusing and difficult. I avoid iTunes like the plague but it (and iCloud) keep intruding.

You aren't very smart, are you?

Spotlight has actually gotten better, and they have improved the interface in El Capitan. But apparently you can't handle ANY change whatsoever.

As for iMovie, I disliked the new UI at first, but they actually SIMPLIFIED it. Once I messed around a little, and did a little online searching, I found that it is, overall, a little better than before. Having said that, I was pretty glad that Apple still offers iMovie HD 6 for download. Install that, and you will be right back to that old familiar iMovie.

Don't like iTunes? DELETE IT. Done. And the only time iCloud "intrudes" for me is at startup, when it prompts me for a password. I click "Cancel", and that's the last I EVER see of it. But, if you find even that too "intrusive", you can completely tell it to go away:

Adjusting iCloud Settings in El Capitan

Now wasn't that hard? It took me about 30 seconds on Google...

I appreciate OSX Unix roots but the substitution of the "Command" key for the standard Control key for some (but not all) functions is something that just keeps irritating me.

If you are referring to Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Redo, as a person that goes back and forth between OS X and Windows, that is the hardest thing to retrain. HOWEVER, you have it exactly backwards; those concepts ( and the keyboard shortcuts therto) actually ORIGINATED ON THE MAC in 1984 (and in fact, might even go further back to the Lisa). It is the OTHER OSes that COPIED THE CONCEPT, but didn't have the Mac's Command Key; so THEY Substituted the Control Key for Apple's Command Key.

Next time, learn some history...

And although you CAN reassign MOST keyboard shortcuts in OS X in the Keyboard Preference Pane in System Preferences, the shortcuts above are a bit more "intrinsic". HOWEVER, the last time I tried to do that was in OS X 10.2, so they might be more well-behaved at this point. having said that, the tool "Keyboard Maestro", while not free, could even reassign the "editing" keys; so you might want to check it out.

And actually, it is INDEED much easier now. You don't need Keyboard Maestro at all...

The "Finder" program has been inexplicably crashing since El Capitan. I just don't understand how they can screw up a simple basic file list.

Maybe because it is much more than that. You really ARE dull, aren't you?

The simple answer is Peter N. Lewis's excellent "Keyboard Maestro" http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ . I started confusing Emacs keyboard combinations with OS X's native (like always pressing C-x, C-s to save a document even when written in TextEdit). It is remarkably configurable and before long your Linux keyboard shortcuts will work on your Mac. Note of caution though, OS X's native Keyboard Shortcuts (System Prefs, Keyboard & Mouse) are really unstable and keep on getting forgotten - Keyboard Maestro's might occasionally get confused but are never lost!

Yep, same here, save that I'm using an Apple Extended Keyboard, the original.

There's an application, Keyboard Maestro , that really lets you get down and dirty when it comes to remapping keys and adding keyboard macros.

So my Extended has volume control keys, as well as eject for both optical drives, browser reload, and the insanely complex online banking password.

Coupled with USB Overdrive , and the Preference Pane for the Griffin PowerMate, anything that makes noise (QuickTime, VLC, iTunes) can have it's volume controlled from the scrollwheel or PowerMate, as well as the keyboard.

The Apple Extendeds. Best. Keyboards. EVAR!

Myself, I use a 22 year old Apple Extended Keyboard, via the Griffin iMate ADB to USB adaptor, on my 1.42 Ghz G4 Dual Processor PowerMac, running Mac OS X 10.5.3.

I have had exactly ZERO problems with this arrangement.

After using the Extended for all these years, today's "modern" keyboards all feel like I'm poking at slab of Silly Putty.

As for the commentor who likes having volume control keys, well, my 22 year old keyboard has them as well. COMMAND-ARROW works in just about every app that has a sound function. Although, as I use a Mac, I have used USB Overdrive to map the volume control in ALL my media players to the scrollwheel in my mouse and to the Griffin PowerMate rotary controller. Also, tapping the PowerMate mutes in all my media applications.

My keyboard has 16 function keys, via Keyboard Maestro I have some of them programmed for use in individual applications.

So, for the cost of an ADB to USB interface found on eBay and some shareware fees, my ancient keyboard (which, by the way, works as perfectly as the day it shipped from the assembly line) has all the functionallity of these new "keyswitch"/"buckling spring" keyboards with their "media keys" and "eject keys" have two DVD drives in my Mac. F12 works the top drive, OPTION-F12 works the bottom drive. Those are my "eject keys".

I have 6 more Apple Extendeds in the closet, all from Goodwill/Salvation Army. All of them work perfectly.

As long as there are ADB to USB interfaces, I'll be using an Extended on the Macintosh.

And to all my nerd brothers and sisters still using "M" keyboards (and Extended/Extended II, of course), I stand in solidarity with you!

what I really want is to be able to hit (for example) control-alt-F1 and get a full-screen command line

On the single button issue - my question to you is, what other laptops have done three (or even two) buttons well with X-Windows? I greatly (and by greatly mean will expound at length) prefer the single button with chording that OS X uses on laptops. it just makes more sense to me, feels pretty natural, and eliminates a lot of chances for keyboard designers to put buttons in the wrong spot. I cannot think of a better mechanism for a UNIX laptop to incorperate multiple-button mice than to allow for chording.

On resizing, X is nice - but you can have that method back if you really need it. I'm actually not quite sure what you need to resize a window for often that is not generally taken care of by the zoom button... but if you really need to be able to hit a key and resize a window you can use a program like Keyboard Maestro. Myself I used X-Windows for a long tme before and don't really miss that aspect of X-Windows as I generally settle windows and then they live at a size they are at pretty much the whole time.

On both Windows and OS X you can achieve focus-follows-mouse, which I used to use all the time on X-Windows myself. The problem is that there are some aspects of the windowing system that do not play well with focus-follows-mouse, at least on Windows - I figured out how to turn that on but quickly decided it just did not behave in a friendly way, and reluctantly had to abandon it.

Interestingly when doing a little research for focus-follows-mouse on OS X I found a href="http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/general/computing/faq /os/os_x/opt/" this page, which I think you may like - one intersting aspect is a command to turn on focus-follows-mouse for Terminal windows only:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

Basically what I would say is that you need to spend more time researching utilities that help you gain shortcuts and quick workflow you feel you have lost - just about everything is there. Personally I do not use a lot of them because for many things I do the Mac workflow as it is does it for me, even though I used to be a very heavy consumer of all sorts of interesting customized window managers.

You can of course always resort back to X11 for terminal (or other windows), but keep digging and I think you'll find a lot of cool tricks with what is there already.

What I'd really like to see Apple do is document all the Dock APIs and allow it to be replaced with third party alternatives. For example the program DragThing performs much better than the Dock in many ways. There are better Command-Tab style application switchers, such as KeyboardMaestro. These great third party alternatives cannot truly replace the Dock until more of the workings of the Dock are documented.

There's one more stumbling block: Apple has been migrating more functionality into the Dock (for reasons that are unclear to me). For example, with Jaguar, the Dock owns the Desktop. It's responsible for painting the background image, and handling clicks on the Desktop. Pre-Jaguar this was handled by the Finder. This means that much more than Dock functionality is lost if the Dock is disabled.

Consider this: OS X comes with an alt-tab action, but it cycles through all windows in a circular list, rather than using a stack like Windows or most X11 window managers.

Probably you'd want to download Keyboard Maestro -- this gives you tab'ing using a stack rather than a cyclic list.

You can't really expect every little bit of the default installation to work exactly as you'd prefer, sometimes you have to tweak the settings yourself or download utilities that add the missing functionality -- I'd assume the same is the case for unix...