... was invented by Ray Ozzie who modeled it after the PLATO system at the University of Illinois.
For a long time (ca. 1990s), it was considered superior to Microsoft Exchange, until the Internet came along (i.e. became popular) and everything changed.
Notes was actually quite a clever piece of software during its heyday. No one else could do replication at the time. The only thing that people hated about it was its price: it cost too much for what it did.
This is due to Samba's inability to handle routed networks without a WINS server and/or tweaking your router. This is a known problem on Samba. See here for Tridge's take
I have the same problem... my machine only sees certain machines on the network at the university. The university runs a legacy Windows network. Nothing I can do about it.
1) Compatible control keys. Switching between Mac and Windows this drives me nuts. I have to consciously think "command-C or control-C?" It shouldn't have to be that way. And if you're running RDC or VPC and copying and pasting between OS X and Windows!! Sheesh!
The problem isn't the labeling, it's the location of the keys used. I had to use a Windows PC today and I kept pressing Alt-C to copy. This is why it's a problem. If it was simply a matter of labeling, no worries, mate. Apple - and the zealotry - need to concede that this battle is lost. Implementing this would rock many people's boats, so if Apple did make this change it'd have some serious domino affect on other keystrokes and applications that use them, but maybe it could be done with the switch to Intel, just to ease the pain slightly.
I think this is a matter of personal preference. The Cmd key actually makes a lot of sense -- it's much closer to the alphabets than the Ctrl key, so if you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, you don't have to strain your hands as much (particularly if you've small hands).
Ditto for people who use their Caps Lock keys as a Ctrl key. (You can actually activate this mode in Tiger).
2) Save button on toolbars. I don't think any of the Apple software ever gives you the option to include a Save button. Print button yes, Save button no. A little test - raise your hand if you save your work more often than you print it? Ah, so I'm not alone. Good. You can put your hands down. Thank you.
I suppose newbies might agree with you. Most of us use Cmd-S.
3) A multi button mouse. And you thought I'd say two. Why stop at two? Especially with things like Exposé, Dashboard and Spotlight. They're just crying out for single click activation from a mouse. Ok. So this isn't a Windows feature per sé, but still is needed.
4) Only show relevant file types in open and save dialogs. For those who like seeing every file that's every existed in their Documents folder, give them a checkbox to show all files. But personally, if I am opening a Pages file, I don't want to see all my iMovie, Excel, iDVD etc files. And OS X already knows which are which because non-related ones are greyed out.
Okay, I happen to think that the Mac OS X file dialog is pretty lame. Opening files requires too many mouse-clicks. In Windows, I can select a wildcard mask, and have autocompletion in the textbox.
Spotlight makes it slightly more bearable, but not by much.
Tab completion is nice, but only works for paths (to activate this, type / or ~ or Cmd-Shift-G, and tab away).
5) Sort folders to top of directory listings I know that we don't go folder mining as much since we got Spotlight, so I won't labor on about this one.
The only reason folders end up in the middle is because Folder starts with F. Heh heh.
But you're right.
6) More context sensitive help. I notice since I first raised this two years ago, more of it has crept into OS X. So I guess at least I can't be flamed for this one!
OS X doesn't have a very good help system I have to admit.
While I agree that the tone of the letter was perhaps not the most civil, I think it is the responsibility of a government to ensure that diversity is respected, insofar as it is possible.
Canada has an online filing system which explicitly supports all browsers, including fringe ones like Safari and Opera: http://www.netfile.gc.ca/browser-e.html
With something as universal as taxes, it is almost always a mistake to develop for one platform, even if it is used only once a year.
It also makes sense economically, because the cost of processing a paper tax return is significantly higher than that of an electronic tax return. Surely the savings gained from an electronic return justifies going with a more cross-platform solution? All it takes is a bit of foresight.
Re:So Call Me Old And Cranky
on
Effective C#
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Now, I'm not saying the above book is good (haven't read it, probably won't), but I do see the value of a book telling you about the best practices in the particular language you're interested in.
You know, I would venture to say not all programming concepts are necessarily always universal. That's because programming languages are abstractions, and abstractions can vary vastly.
Take an elementary operation: You might say a for loop is a for loop, but in languages like LISP we tend to use recursion.
In MATLAB, we tend to avoid for loops whenever we can; instead we vectorize and operate on the vector instead.
Most of the common constructs that we know have been shaped by ALGOL, but when you need to write something sophisticated in say, a declarative language, you pretty much have to think in a different way.
The difference in paradigms between C# and languages like C++ may be much smaller, but I can tell you, you'll find it easier to wrote good code in C# as long as you stop thinking in C++ and start thinking in C#. (I've tinkered with C# and I like a lot of ideas that are in it)
Recently I switched from perl to python for my text-processing needs, and I found that I had to switch my mindset completely, even though both languages weren't too different on the surface. I found that Python were optimized for different things than Perl.
Many people dismiss programming languages as merely different syntaxes for expressing the same ideas, but let's consider this quotation from A.N. Whitehead (co-author of Principia Mathematica, written with Bertrand Russell):
"""By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility... Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation."""
-- A.N. Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
I second that. I use Bibdesk and it is quite good -- very Mac like and much better than managing.bib files by hand. Furthermore it handles the.RIS (Endnote) and.BIB files that most electronic journal sites generate. I don't even type citations by hand these days - I just search for them on EngineeringVillage2 or Elsevier and drag the.RIS file into Bibdesk. Then I just drag the item into TeXshop and the citation is there.
As for porting it.... well, could be tough considering it uses the Cocoa framework.
However, since the poster is asking for a Linux solution, I can only think of web-based bib managers:
Cite-U-Like - a del.icio.us for journals, can export to Bibdesk. Refworks - if your campus has a subscription to Refworks, it's one of the best web-based bibliography managers around. It like the Bloglines of academic journals... well kind of...
As one user mentioned, VersionTracker is kind of the Freshmeat of Mac OS X. So is Macupdate.
Also, while Fink is pain at times (partly because of its Linux roots, and OS X is more BSDish), Mac OS X has DarwinPorts, which actually works pretty well.
10,000 bbls/day * $56 / bbl * 2 months * 30 days / month = $34,720,000 in extra savings.
$34 mil is really not that much money to a country. I wonder if the cost of changing systems over for the sake prolonging DST for that minute amount of savings is worth it.
You can do a search on search.msn.com and get an RSS feed for that search. You can presumably tighten the search parameters to get it to spit out whatever you want.
I have an RSS feed for a query of my own name (for vanity reasons).;-)
I'm not sure what the crawl frequency of the MSN bot is though.
I know about the mouse acceleration problem. Mac users may be used to it, but I was a long time Windows user before I switched and I can't stand nonlinear acceleration. Download this: http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13821
The only downside is this: I used v10, which doesn't allow you to define middle-click as middle-click. That may have changed in v11.
It works on any standard USB mouse.
Also agree about iPhoto (in iLife 4, haven't tried the new iPhoto). It is not my cup of tea.
As for mouse pointer, I remember seeing some utility on Macupdate.com that does it. But yes, Apple guards it's interface very tightly - you can't customize the interface too much. That's why there are such things as haxies. Still, I like the default look, so it doesn't bother me too much.
As for a tree view -- to do any serious file management, I just drop to command line and use Midnight Commander. Finder just isn't suited to complex file management tasks (you can't even move files using keyboard shortcuts -- you have to drag and drop, or Cmd-C and then delete the originals)
YOu know, a lot of people complain about the size of the.NET framework, but 65-100MB isn't really a lot of space considering what it does. The upfront size is off-putting, but the savings you get for it more than make up for it.
Ever notice how small most.NET programs are?.NET is the Win32 API done right (not least because of Anders Heijsberg).
Back in the day, we had to distribute Paradox runtimes with our applications, and it was a whopping 2MB file. But that also meant Paradox applications were absolutely tiny, which made it easy to deploy updates and stuff. This can translate to a lot of savings for enterprises running on Paradox.
It's always effortless to append, just open the file and save! I'd prefer in-place creation. The world's best feature, once you're addicted to it.
I suppose so. But I'm on the command line a lot, so I usually just vi newfile.txt when I need to.
I alternate between the command line, Finder and Quicksilver so I don't really need instant file creation in the GUI. But that's just how I am wired.
Quicksilver really does improve my overall Mac experience (speaking as someone who is devoted to the keyboard). This is true even when I'm on the command line. For instance, if I need to access a directory or file that's nested deep, I just access it on Quicksilver and have it dump the path onto the command line.
Cmd-F2 doesn't seem to do anything but beep for me.
It might be something else then... (I remapped mine and forgot what the default was). Just open your Keyboard system preferences, look under the Keyboard Shortcut tab, and Focus on Menu. You can also use that to define any number of keybindings for any application.
Is there a list of these shortcuts somewhere? 'Keyboard shortcuts' into help doesn't seem to give anything helpful. Thanks for telling me about Emacs bindings, it'll be create to use Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e for home and end.
There are some on Google, but no one seems to have compiled an exhaustive list.
Here's my little list of useful stuff: Mac OS X Usage Tips
Terminal Stuff top -u - process sorted by CPU usage killall - kill process by name open -a [filename] - open app anywhere on the system open -e [filename] - open filename with Textedit fstat - to find out what app is using a file netstat - check all net connections diskutil - disk utility hdiutil - disk image manipulation - convert to ISO format tail -f [filename] - monitor a file for increments/additions echo "test" > [filename] - write to file echo "test" >> [filename] - append to file nvram - access OpenFirmware values, or -p to list them. sysctl -a - kernel parameters. ifconfig - get CURRENT IP and other info on network interfaces.
Cocoa App shortcuts Ctrl-D - delete (Delete) Ctrl-K - kill to end of line (Kill) Ctrl-O - open new line underneath current line (Open) Ctrl-Y - yank from Killed (Yank) Ctrl-A - beginning of line (A = beginning) Ctrl-E - end of line (End) Ctrl-T - swap letters (Transpose) Opt-Delete - delete previous word Opt-Esc - autocomplete a word Ctrl-W - delete last word (cmdline only)
Hidden GUI stuff * Cmd-click on Title in app window- get path of the app (in Safari, get URL hierarchy) * icon of app on the Title is a proxy which can be dragged and dropped (cool feature). * Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-8 - Negative image * In a file dialog, type ~ or / and get a dialog box prompting full path. Useful for switching folders.
Interestingly, I have no idea what problem Expose is meant to solve. Insufficient eyecandy?
Exposé is good if you're working with many windows. It's particularly good if you're working with images or stuff you can visually identify quickly. This doesn't just necessarily mean it's only good for apps like Photoshop. I use Exposé extensively when I'm working with MATLAB. With it, I can have switch between the workspace, editor, System Identification Toolbox, Simulink and the MPC toolbox easily.
On XP, unless you have a two storey taskbar, a multi window program gets consolidated into one button, and it's tedious to switch between them because one never knows what's what from the abbreviated titles i.e. if they only say "Matlab - Sys..." or something like that.
When you have a lot of windows open, the productivity gain afforded by Exposé is non-negligible. It's not for everybody (especially not for UNIXy folks who swear by their desktop pagers) and not useful if all your windows look the same, but except for those cases, I would definitely say it is helpful.
I find just the opposite... When I'm using MacOS X, I have to think way to much about the program at hand. Say I'm browsing a folder and I want to put a file into it... I have to switch from the filer (which is way too much an app rather than a desktop environment) to the text editor, then type, then save, then find the folder in the minifiler if it isn't one of the default folders. I lust for the simplicity of ROX-Filer or even of Windows Explorer where you can just right click and choose 'New text file'!
I personally don't use that feature that much, but you're right, it's not really available on Mac OS X out of the box. On the other hand, if you already have an existing text file, it is effortless to append or prepend text to it. Take a look at a this.
Also, I haven't found out how you can switch between windows in a single application without using the mouse.
Cmd + `. You can redefine this if you don't like it. Want to reach for a menu? I think it's Cmd-F2 but I redefined this to Alt + `. OS X is highly keyboard enabled -- the dashed problem is finding out what the keybindings are. The list in the Keyboard Prefs only tell you half the story.
There are tons of Emacs bindings (Cocoa-only) plus other stuff that are not mentioned anywhere except on some blogs and books like David Pogue's Missing Manual.
Some bindings don't work universally which is a pain. But this is due to OS X's heritage - Cocoa (NeXT), Carbon (Mac), X. And to top it off, Microsoft uses its own bindings in the Office suite (which are not always analoguous to the Office/XP bindings - e.g. the key to edit a cell is F2 in Excel XP and Ctrl-U in Excel 2004)
And the absence of virtual desktops... I know there's hacks, but the system isn't designed for it, so it doesn't always work well.
I don't know, these Mac virtual desktops seem to be much better than any pagers I've used on any Linux machine. Really. You should take a look at them.... they're no different from X virtual desktops. I suppose they're "hacks" but they're so transparent that they could just as well be a part of the system.
And did I mention the way *some* options things are auto-apply, and *some* are manual? Coming from ROX/GNOME, where everything's auto (unless it's done in a different toolkit, so its obvious) this is painfully annoying. I don't understand what's so special about say iTunes that its view Options are manual apply, but the Finder's are auto.
True that. There are many subtle little UI inconsistencies in Mac OS X.
It's the accursèd menubar---it forces you to design applications, not windows/tasks/activities.
True, but I don't have a problem with that. This is kind of subjective, of course.
Of course, I have adapted quite well to some things. I now always remember to chose Copy when I want to Copy something, rather than expecting it to be done automatically.
Which is far more intuitive to me than the behavior in X. Especially if you only have one buffer. (Of course, with Quicksilver, I have n clipboard slots. Extremely useful when cutting and pasting many URLs).
I've also stopped trying to get windws to shade rather than minimise.
The most underused (and Mac-like) UI feature is Hide (Cmd-H). I was a minimize person until someone (I think it was Tim Bray in his blog) brought this to my attention. Now I use it everyday.
I find OS X forces me to focus on how I'm doing something, rather than what I'm doing. OS X isn't the be-all end-all of usability, just one inconsistently-followed schema.
I think you're right. There are many flaws in OS X which cannot be simply dismissed as being "stuff that are merely unfamiliar". Some things just don't make sense.
However, on the balance, OS X's UI is more usable than any other single OS that I've used. (Most OSes have some UI features that I like, but none except OS X just the right mix).
Slashdot Mirror
... was invented by Ray Ozzie who modeled it after the PLATO system at the University of Illinois.
For a long time (ca. 1990s), it was considered superior to Microsoft Exchange, until the Internet came along (i.e. became popular) and everything changed.
Notes was actually quite a clever piece of software during its heyday. No one else could do replication at the time. The only thing that people hated about it was its price: it cost too much for what it did.
... just use the CMS Matrix!
You're bound to find something that will fit your needs.
This is due to Samba's inability to handle routed networks without a WINS server and/or tweaking your router. This is a known problem on Samba.
See here for Tridge's take
I have the same problem... my machine only sees certain machines on the network at the university. The university runs a legacy Windows network. Nothing I can do about it.
I think this is a matter of personal preference. The Cmd key actually makes a lot of sense -- it's much closer to the alphabets than the Ctrl key, so if you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, you don't have to strain your hands as much (particularly if you've small hands).
Ditto for people who use their Caps Lock keys as a Ctrl key. (You can actually activate this mode in Tiger).
I suppose newbies might agree with you. Most of us use Cmd-S.
Get The Mouse.
Okay, I happen to think that the Mac OS X file dialog is pretty lame. Opening files requires too many mouse-clicks. In Windows, I can select a wildcard mask, and have autocompletion in the textbox.
Spotlight makes it slightly more bearable, but not by much.
Tab completion is nice, but only works for paths (to activate this, type / or ~ or Cmd-Shift-G, and tab away).
The only reason folders end up in the middle is because Folder starts with F. Heh heh.
But you're right.
OS X doesn't have a very good help system I have to admit.
While I agree that the tone of the letter was perhaps not the most civil, I think it is the responsibility of a government to ensure that diversity is respected, insofar as it is possible.
Canada has an online filing system which explicitly supports all browsers, including fringe ones like Safari and Opera:
http://www.netfile.gc.ca/browser-e.html
With something as universal as taxes, it is almost always a mistake to develop for one platform, even if it is used only once a year.
It also makes sense economically, because the cost of processing a paper tax return is significantly higher than that of an electronic tax return. Surely the savings gained from an electronic return justifies going with a more cross-platform solution? All it takes is a bit of foresight.
Apparently not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES#Security
Take a look at this:
Sapir-Whorf and programming languages
Now, I'm not saying the above book is good (haven't read it, probably won't), but I do see the value of a book telling you about the best practices in the particular language you're interested in.
... a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility ... Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation."""
;-)
You know, I would venture to say not all programming concepts are necessarily always universal. That's because programming languages are abstractions, and abstractions can vary vastly.
Take an elementary operation: You might say a for loop is a for loop, but in languages like LISP we tend to use recursion.
In MATLAB, we tend to avoid for loops whenever we can; instead we vectorize and operate on the vector instead.
Most of the common constructs that we know have been shaped by ALGOL, but when you need to write something sophisticated in say, a declarative language, you pretty much have to think in a different way.
The difference in paradigms between C# and languages like C++ may be much smaller, but I can tell you, you'll find it easier to wrote good code in C# as long as you stop thinking in C++ and start thinking in C#. (I've tinkered with C# and I like a lot of ideas that are in it)
Recently I switched from perl to python for my text-processing needs, and I found that I had to switch my mindset completely, even though both languages weren't too different on the surface. I found that Python were optimized for different things than Perl.
Many people dismiss programming languages as merely different syntaxes for expressing the same ideas, but let's consider this quotation from A.N. Whitehead (co-author of Principia Mathematica, written with Bertrand Russell):
"""By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that
-- A.N. Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
I got this quote from Code Complete, btw.
I second that. I use Bibdesk and it is quite good -- very Mac like and much better than managing .bib files by hand. Furthermore it handles the .RIS (Endnote) and .BIB files that most electronic journal sites generate. I don't even type citations by hand these days - I just search for them on EngineeringVillage2 or Elsevier and drag the .RIS file into Bibdesk. Then I just drag the item into TeXshop and the citation is there.
As for porting it.... well, could be tough considering it uses the Cocoa framework.
However, since the poster is asking for a Linux solution, I can only think of web-based bib managers:
Cite-U-Like - a del.icio.us for journals, can export to Bibdesk.
Refworks - if your campus has a subscription to Refworks, it's one of the best web-based bibliography managers around. It like the Bloglines of academic journals... well kind of...
Pybliographer looks promising too...
As one user mentioned, VersionTracker is kind of the Freshmeat of Mac OS X. So is Macupdate.
Also, while Fink is pain at times (partly because of its Linux roots, and OS X is more BSDish), Mac OS X has DarwinPorts, which actually works pretty well.
Lava Lamps:
http://www.lavarnd.org/what/index.html
... to buy low and sell high.
And jipes... google maps's sidebar got messed up by this update.
Also I found a problem with Sogudi. Whenever I tried to type a URL without a www, ie. "apple.com", the spinning beachball of death pops up.
I removed Sogudi, and everything works again. And yes, I finally noticed the speed improvement.
Boy this reminds me of DOS days:
XMS - eXtended Memory Specification
EMS - Expanded Memory Specification - uses page frames
Confused the heck out of most non-techies....
And then we had:
USB 2.0 Full-speed (12 Mbps)
USB 2.0 Hi-speed (480 Mbps)
And:
Victorinox - Original Swiss Army Knife
Wenger - Genuine Swiss Army Knife
Remappable Modifier Keys
e s.html
Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock to be super elite.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/newfeatur
Let's do a quick naive calculation:
10,000 bbls/day * $56 / bbl * 2 months * 30 days / month
= $34,720,000 in extra savings.
$34 mil is really not that much money to a country.
I wonder if the cost of changing systems over for the sake prolonging DST for that minute amount of savings is worth it.
Heh heh... the RCMP is not "le RCMP", but GRC (Gendarmerie Royale du Canada).
You can do a search on search.msn.com and get an RSS feed for that search. You can presumably tighten the search parameters to get it to spit out whatever you want.
;-)
I have an RSS feed for a query of my own name (for vanity reasons).
I'm not sure what the crawl frequency of the MSN bot is though.
I know about the mouse acceleration problem. Mac users may be used to it, but I was a long time Windows user before I switched and I can't stand nonlinear acceleration. Download this:
http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/13821
The only downside is this: I used v10, which doesn't allow you to define middle-click as middle-click. That may have changed in v11.
It works on any standard USB mouse.
Also agree about iPhoto (in iLife 4, haven't tried the new iPhoto). It is not my cup of tea.
As for mouse pointer, I remember seeing some utility on Macupdate.com that does it. But yes, Apple guards it's interface very tightly - you can't customize the interface too much. That's why there are such things as haxies. Still, I like the default look, so it doesn't bother me too much.
As for a tree view -- to do any serious file management, I just drop to command line and use Midnight Commander. Finder just isn't suited to complex file management tasks (you can't even move files using keyboard shortcuts -- you have to drag and drop, or Cmd-C and then delete the originals)
You could be right, i've never tried that.
But no, I meant Ctrl-C. For mode switching in vi.
On vi, many people use Ctrl-C in place of Esc, so their hands don't have to leave the alphabet part of the keyboard.
So no, Esc is not absolutely necessary.
YOu know, a lot of people complain about the size of the .NET framework, but 65-100MB isn't really a lot of space considering what it does. The upfront size is off-putting, but the savings you get for it more than make up for it.
.NET programs are? .NET is the Win32 API done right (not least because of Anders Heijsberg).
Ever notice how small most
Back in the day, we had to distribute Paradox runtimes with our applications, and it was a whopping 2MB file. But that also meant Paradox applications were absolutely tiny, which made it easy to deploy updates and stuff. This can translate to a lot of savings for enterprises running on Paradox.
It's always effortless to append, just open the file and save! I'd prefer in-place creation. The world's best feature, once you're addicted to it.
I suppose so. But I'm on the command line a lot, so I usually just vi newfile.txt when I need to.
I alternate between the command line, Finder and Quicksilver so I don't really need instant file creation in the GUI. But that's just how I am wired.
Quicksilver really does improve my overall Mac experience (speaking as someone who is devoted to the keyboard). This is true even when I'm on the command line. For instance, if I need to access a directory or file that's nested deep, I just access it on Quicksilver and have it dump the path onto the command line.
Cmd-F2 doesn't seem to do anything but beep for me.
It might be something else then... (I remapped mine and forgot what the default was). Just open your Keyboard system preferences, look under the Keyboard Shortcut tab, and Focus on Menu. You can also use that to define any number of keybindings for any application.
Is there a list of these shortcuts somewhere? 'Keyboard shortcuts' into help doesn't seem to give anything helpful. Thanks for telling me about Emacs bindings, it'll be create to use Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e for home and end.
There are some on Google, but no one seems to have compiled an exhaustive list.
Here's my little list of useful stuff:
Mac OS X Usage Tips
Terminal Stuff
top -u - process sorted by CPU usage
killall - kill process by name
open -a [filename] - open app anywhere on the system
open -e [filename] - open filename with Textedit
fstat - to find out what app is using a file
netstat - check all net connections
diskutil - disk utility
hdiutil - disk image manipulation - convert to ISO format
tail -f [filename] - monitor a file for increments/additions
echo "test" > [filename] - write to file
echo "test" >> [filename] - append to file
nvram - access OpenFirmware values, or -p to list them.
sysctl -a - kernel parameters.
ifconfig - get CURRENT IP and other info on network interfaces.
Cocoa App shortcuts
Ctrl-D - delete (Delete)
Ctrl-K - kill to end of line (Kill)
Ctrl-O - open new line underneath current line (Open)
Ctrl-Y - yank from Killed (Yank)
Ctrl-A - beginning of line (A = beginning)
Ctrl-E - end of line (End)
Ctrl-T - swap letters (Transpose)
Opt-Delete - delete previous word
Opt-Esc - autocomplete a word
Ctrl-W - delete last word (cmdline only)
Hidden GUI stuff
* Cmd-click on Title in app window- get path of the app (in Safari, get URL hierarchy)
* icon of app on the Title is a proxy which can be dragged and dropped (cool feature).
* Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-8 - Negative image
* In a file dialog, type ~ or / and get a dialog box prompting full path. Useful for switching folders.
Interestingly, I have no idea what problem Expose is meant to solve. Insufficient eyecandy?
Exposé is good if you're working with many windows. It's particularly good if you're working with images or stuff you can visually identify quickly. This doesn't just necessarily mean it's only good for apps like Photoshop. I use Exposé extensively when I'm working with MATLAB. With it, I can have switch between the workspace, editor, System Identification Toolbox, Simulink and the MPC toolbox easily.
On XP, unless you have a two storey taskbar, a multi window program gets consolidated into one button, and it's tedious to switch between them because one never knows what's what from the abbreviated titles i.e. if they only say "Matlab - Sys..." or something like that.
When you have a lot of windows open, the productivity gain afforded by Exposé is non-negligible. It's not for everybody (especially not for UNIXy folks who swear by their desktop pagers) and not useful if all your windows look the same, but except for those cases, I would definitely say it is helpful.
I find just the opposite... When I'm using MacOS X, I have to think way to much about the program at hand. Say I'm browsing a folder and I want to put a file into it... I have to switch from the filer (which is way too much an app rather than a desktop environment) to the text editor, then type, then save, then find the folder in the minifiler if it isn't one of the default folders. I lust for the simplicity of ROX-Filer or even of Windows Explorer where you can just right click and choose 'New text file'!
I personally don't use that feature that much, but you're right, it's not really available on Mac OS X out of the box. On the other hand, if you already have an existing text file, it is effortless to append or prepend text to it. Take a look at a this.
Also, I haven't found out how you can switch between windows in a single application without using the mouse.
Cmd + `. You can redefine this if you don't like it.
Want to reach for a menu? I think it's Cmd-F2 but I redefined this to Alt + `. OS X is highly keyboard enabled -- the dashed problem is finding out what the keybindings are. The list in the Keyboard Prefs only tell you half the story.
There are tons of Emacs bindings (Cocoa-only) plus other stuff that are not mentioned anywhere except on some blogs and books like David Pogue's Missing Manual.
Some bindings don't work universally which is a pain. But this is due to OS X's heritage - Cocoa (NeXT), Carbon (Mac), X. And to top it off, Microsoft uses its own bindings in the Office suite (which are not always analoguous to the Office/XP bindings - e.g. the key to edit a cell is F2 in Excel XP and Ctrl-U in Excel 2004)
And the absence of virtual desktops... I know there's hacks, but the system isn't designed for it, so it doesn't always work well.
I don't know, these Mac virtual desktops seem to be much better than any pagers I've used on any Linux machine. Really. You should take a look at them.... they're no different from X virtual desktops. I suppose they're "hacks" but they're so transparent that they could just as well be a part of the system.
Desktop Manager
Virtue
And did I mention the way *some* options things are auto-apply, and *some* are manual? Coming from ROX/GNOME, where everything's auto (unless it's done in a different toolkit, so its obvious) this is painfully annoying. I don't understand what's so special about say iTunes that its view Options are manual apply, but the Finder's are auto.
True that. There are many subtle little UI inconsistencies in Mac OS X.
It's the accursèd menubar---it forces you to design applications, not windows/tasks/activities.
True, but I don't have a problem with that. This is kind of subjective, of course.
Of course, I have adapted quite well to some things. I now always remember to chose Copy when I want to Copy something, rather than expecting it to be done automatically.
Which is far more intuitive to me than the behavior in X. Especially if you only have one buffer. (Of course, with Quicksilver, I have n clipboard slots. Extremely useful when cutting and pasting many URLs).
I've also stopped trying to get windws to shade rather than minimise.
The most underused (and Mac-like) UI feature is Hide (Cmd-H). I was a minimize person until someone (I think it was Tim Bray in his blog) brought this to my attention. Now I use it everyday.
I find OS X forces me to focus on how I'm doing something, rather than what I'm doing. OS X isn't the be-all end-all of usability, just one inconsistently-followed schema.
I think you're right. There are many flaws in OS X which cannot be simply dismissed as being "stuff that are merely unfamiliar". Some things just don't make sense.
However, on the balance, OS X's UI is more usable than any other single OS that I've used. (Most OSes have some UI features that I like, but none except OS X just the right mix).