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Before OS X, and even in the first version or so of OS X (when it used the Dock for switching instead of the bar of icons that pops up), built-in app switching with the keyboard in Mac OS was miserable indeed. You apparently found yourself the wrong solution, though. What you should've been using was LiteSwitch, which does pretty much everything the OS X keyboard switcher does now, except it did it several years ago, and it still runs on at least as far back as 7.5, from what I remember. Plus it's free now (the non-OS X version, that is), and they even released the source at some point. It's rather nifty.

Having to select the application window before I can quit it using the application menu. Or I have to right click on the dock icon to quit. Annoying still.

OK, use Splat-Tab (Apple/Command/Cloverleaf, call it what you will) to switch between apps. When you get to the one you want, hold down Splat and press Q. It quits the application. Press H instead and it Hides it. There's more of these...

Hope this helps.. It seems this is OS X 10.3 only, so you might want to check out LiteSwitch X which does the same thing.

Mark

Wow, that was the second on topic-post... :-)

For myself, running OS X (Panther), it's:

1. LaunchBar
2. Default Folder
3. ASM
4. LiteSwitch (I use Adobe apps and don't want to learn new selection-tool-switching habits)
5. FruitMenu
6. WindowShade
7. Little Snitch
8. Net Monitor
9. Eudora
10. Mozilla


slide

MaxMenus is a way to make everything available via a keystroke or a menu.

Sherlock never really impressed me- until I tried the latest version

It's still here, and they still offer it for free, even if they didn't develop the original code.

Cha info
Cha blood ftp

It's still here, and they still offer it for free, even if they didn't develop the original code.

Cha info
Cha blood ftp

If you look on Proteron's site here stated in really large type is "Dear Apple: You forgot some important features" and showing in particular the "switch and hide others" feature. This is pretty funny unto itself, but you see the entire design of the Proteron site is completely ripped off from Apple!

Was this just a brilliant last minute stroke of inspiration, or planned publicity stunt? Either way it's well earned and well deserved. Bless you Proteron and I hope everyone buys a copy of their MaxMenu's.

So, "switch and hide others"? I'd love to see this as part of Apple's Switch Advertising Campaign? I'd love to make Windows disappear!

For Apple-Tab, go to http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx. That'll take care of it.

Liteswitch helped make cmd-tab very useful for me.

The Finder is much faster in 10.2, probably mostly due to Quartz Extreme. It does still feel slightly sluggish when doing some things. Usually when you start to do a task, then once you're doing it it is fast.

I'm pretty fast in Windows explorer, I have to be navigating between hundreds of source files. I've learned just about all the shortcut keys and my hands move to wherever is fastest to accomplish a given task, mouse or keyboard. When I started working on the mac I was frustrated by the amount of mouse effort I had to expend. If my hands are on the keyboard and I need to do some UI navigation I don't want to have to use the mouse. I call that poor UI. I know there are probably keys there I don't know about, but they certainly aren't readily apparent in the help files. The tab between controls functionality windows has seems to be largely missing. I'm not incapable of learning new shortcut commands, I just need to be able to find out what they are without installing 4 third party applications that add them.

First, there are a fair number of shortcut keys that one can learn to speed things up. I got my first Mac recently and have learned many of them because I've got a laptop, which makes mousing even more painful for me.

Second, there's a number of utilities out there to improve the Finder's functionality. I would highly recommend LiteSwitch X if you miss the way Windows handles alt-tabbing. If there's something you don't like about the Finder, someone has almost invaribly written something to fix it for you, including the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts. VersionTracker is a good place to start for that. I know there's one or more freeware apps that provide you with the ability to assign shortcut keys, so you might want to check that out as well.

All that said, I do wish that the Finder were somewhat more responsive, and that it came with more configuration options out of the box. I've noticed that many of the builtin MacOS X option panels are extremely dumbed down and don't provide GUI access to a lot of the more complicated options that exist in some of the underlying applications (samba and ftp are two that spring to mind in this category).

Also, I use LiteSwitch X. It's a free app that allows you to switch between apps using Alt-Tab.

It works not as well as Alt-Tab under WIndows, but I like it better than Command-Tab.

Yup. There's a company called Proteron that sells a great suite of MP3 and MP2 (and vorbis!) codecs that work to convert of records. Just have to pipe your audio feed into the audio-in port on your Mac and start encoding. Its really that easy. Check out this link to N2MP3 Pro.