Saft lets you rearrange tabs and even drag and drop them between windows. It's pretty cool--everything just works the way you'd expect, even with forms or whatever.
I don't mean to be negative, but it's a shame that there's a million other "little things," and another million "big things," keeping Firefox from behaving like a real Mac application. It barely even deserves a place in the Applications folder alongside aesthetically pleasant, tastefully designed applications like Safari. Again, I don't mean to be negative, but anyone who buys a Mac and then installs Firefox on it should just take their computer back to the store for a refund.
Not really. Contextual menus use the wrong font; menu selections don't blink; default buttons lay corpselike, not pulsing; the preferences are all fucked. Even with OS X-ish themes, things are still just weird enough to feel, well, creepy. You know the uncanny valley? It's like that, with Firefox's strange simulacra of Aqua controls. I don't mean to be negative.
Dude, Safari's had drag-and-drop tabs forever, with the right extension. I don't mean to be negative, but I guess I just don't understand why you'd want to ruin the polished look and feel of the Mac desktop by launching a grotesquely incongruous monstrosity like Firefox.
Not to mention the complete lack of Keychain support. There's a billion other things wrong with Firefox on OS X, big and small. I don't mean to be negative, but the Mac version of Firefox just seems inelegant beyond repair. It's like it got cobbled together from leftover parts from Gnome and XP's Luna.
So what, if the vast majority of websites don't bother styling them? Form controls can default to Aqua without compromising the spec. In other words, there's no need for controls to be ugly if ugliness isn't specified in the HTML, and even then, you can handle it the elegant and tasteful way:
Some controls are going to naturally discard the Aqua look if you "fall off the cliff" by customizing the control to the point where the Aqua look can no longer be maintained, e.g., if you set the border and background of a button. Others, like checkbox, are going to refuse to "fall off the cliff" unless you explicitly turn off the -khtml-appearance property. The choice of when to disable the Aqua look is going to be chosen to match other browsers (and Internet Explorer in particular).
I don't know why I know this, but Kerry's a Mac user too (despite whatever he might have said in response to a certain stupid question in primaries season). And so is John Edwards, for that matter, as well as Pablo Picasso, if he'd only been alive, and this girl, and Richard Hatch, and Columbia graduate Famke Janssen. God forbid any of these beautiful, progressive people should need to file a claim with FEMA.
"You try playing a first-person shooter with your left hand on shift, A, S, D, and the right half of the space bar, and see how quickly you get carpal tunnel."
So you're stuck with the defaults, I take it? What kind of game doesn't let you change your key mapping?
Anyway, if the idea of being able to backspace without moving off home row is so offensive to you, just remap both sides to [space]. I don't buy the premise that the "standard" keyboard layout on which typewriters eventually converged represents the pinnacle of keyboard design, and especially not for computing, where deletion and revision is much more common.
Hitting the key under your thumb doesn't take fine motor control, so it's nothing like having to use, say, the mouse with your non-dominant hand. Would it really be that hard to relearn? Maybe a little harder than learning something like the variouspositions of the \ key, since you use it a lot less than space and delete, but then again maybe a little easier for the same reason.
It's my impression that we backspace a lot more on the computer than anyone ever did on typewriters. When you're hacking away on an old Underwood, you're careful about the keys you hit. Not quite so much these days when you don't have to X out all your typos.
Hehe. I know someone else who works at IBM, in Westchester, and commutes every day... from Manhattan. And I've got another friend whose commute is a 2-block walk to her office in Chelsea. Like you say, different strokes.
If I can ask, why is IBM encouraging you to work from home? Is this somehow a cost-saving measure for them (if so, how), or is it a perk of employment at the company?
"The best move is the big promotion to low cost region, because they almost always give you a pathetic raise, but you keep your big city salary."
Yeah, but... then you have to live in a "low cost" region, which is a pretty nice euphemism for hell. Would they pay for a private jet back to the city on nights and weekends?
Nothing lasts forever in the face of nature, but you can certainly delay the inevitable, and you can certainly make it less painful. Buildings may collapse and roofs may fly despite any human precautions, but the widespread flooding could have been prevented, as could have been the scale of human suffering. Training for evacuations, building stronger levees, proactively keeping streets and buildings raised above sea level--these are ongoing forms of insurance that can turn catastrophic devastation into manageable devastation. Californians insure against earthquakes and mudslides. The Northeast insures against terrorism and other potential disasters like snowstorms. The Gulf Coast happens to suffer from hurricanes, and I expect defending against them (as much as possible) will turn out to be as worth it for them as defending against earthquakes and blizzards is for Americans elsewhere.
The comparison is this: It was just as difficult, or as easy, for the Dutch to engineer protection for their coasts sufficient to weather just about any storm they expect, as it will be for us to engineer protection for New Orleans, and the rest of the Gulf Coast, sufficient to weather a Category 5 hurricane. The problem hasn't been engineering per se, it's been (in both cases) that it took a major disaster to provide the political impetus for such a project.
Keep the French Quarter but move everyone else upstream? You might as well cut off your legs in the hope you'll still be able to run the marathon. Even the most touristy neighborhood needs a lot of residents, caterers, groceries, distributors, and everything else "behind the scenes" to support it.
Much better would be to raise the city above sea level, invest in flood control, and let the delta rebuild itself naturally. If there's going to be a port in that location, there'll have to be a port city to sustain it.
I saw a keyboard once that split the spacebar in half. Your right thumb was still on the spacebar, but the left thumb was over the delete key (that's backspace for you beige-boxers).:-) Using that keyboard was great--i's too bad the idea was never picked up widely.
Cost of living is lower, but earnings potential is also lower. Furthermore, I'd be more scared to go out at night in the middle of nowhere than at home in Manhattan. What happens when you get into an accident on a deserted country road? Can you rely on people being around to help you out? Can you rely on people being on the street 24/7 to deter people from breaking into your home?
I almost mentioned Grapher, but to be honest, it's even worse than Calculator. Maybe it's more capable, but the interface is total shit, and it's certainly nowhere near as capable as Graphing Calculator is/used to be.
Calculator.app is next to useless. Apple needs to resurrect the old Graphing Calculator, the one that used to be shipped with every Mac from 1994 until OS X. It's
e.g. To open Photoshop, I tap ctrl, then hit p, s, return. To open a file in TextEdit, I tap ctrl, t, e, then drag the file onto the TextEdit icon that appears. To google from any application, I tap ctrl, g, space, my query, return. This thing unleashes the power of your keyboard--you can do pretty much anything in just a few keystrokes. I don't know if any such tool exists for Windows or any open-source desktop environment, but I'd be glad to hear if it does.
Yeah, and in none of these examples has Apple ever used advertising or product content to call attention to the disagreement at hand. I can't even think of an instance when Jobs or any other executive has publicly bashed a party they feel is to blame for an end-user inconvenience. The closest it's gotten, perhaps, is Jobs implying that music labels don't understand the futility of DRM. The rest has always been up to the rumor mill and Apple's adversaries to fill in.
Actually, Chicago used to be quite prone to flooding from Lake Michigan, which was only a couple feet below street level. The city's roads and streets were impassable every winter because they would freeze over, and impassable every spring because the rain would turn them to mud. Unlike New Orleans, however, Chicago made the decision to raise its streetlevel by up to 14 feet, thus lifting itself out of the muck and greatly reducing the city's susceptibility to flooding. Not only were streets and sidewalks rebuilt on vaulted arches, but entire buildings were also lifted from their foundations by mechanical jacks, even as people within them went about their business as usual. This was done back in the mid-19th century.
Why New Orleans never followed Chicago's lead is something I'd like to know.
Okay, New Orleans was built at sea level, only to subside under the weight of the built environment. Why, then, didn't anyone take action to raise the city back up before the inevitable occurred? The idea isn't as crazy as it sounds. Chicago did exactly that between 1850 and 1880--raise its street level by up to 14 feet with vaulted roads and sidewalks, and jack up all of its buildings, inch by inch, to match. A building's occupants often weren't even aware it was being raised until they left work in the evening.
So how come wasn't this done in New Orleans? Lack of funds? Engineering problems? Structural instability?
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Saft lets you rearrange tabs and even drag and drop them between windows. It's pretty cool--everything just works the way you'd expect, even with forms or whatever.
Why would you go back to the Firefox page after you've already downloaded it? Ideally, you'd never have to.
Seriously, though, are any of those "GrApple" themes up on the site? The server's telling me they're not available.
I don't mean to be negative, but it's a shame that there's a million other "little things," and another million "big things," keeping Firefox from behaving like a real Mac application. It barely even deserves a place in the Applications folder alongside aesthetically pleasant, tastefully designed applications like Safari. Again, I don't mean to be negative, but anyone who buys a Mac and then installs Firefox on it should just take their computer back to the store for a refund.
Not really. Contextual menus use the wrong font; menu selections don't blink; default buttons lay corpselike, not pulsing; the preferences are all fucked. Even with OS X-ish themes, things are still just weird enough to feel, well, creepy. You know the uncanny valley? It's like that, with Firefox's strange simulacra of Aqua controls. I don't mean to be negative.
Dude, Safari's had drag-and-drop tabs forever, with the right extension. I don't mean to be negative, but I guess I just don't understand why you'd want to ruin the polished look and feel of the Mac desktop by launching a grotesquely incongruous monstrosity like Firefox.
Not to mention the complete lack of Keychain support. There's a billion other things wrong with Firefox on OS X, big and small. I don't mean to be negative, but the Mac version of Firefox just seems inelegant beyond repair. It's like it got cobbled together from leftover parts from Gnome and XP's Luna.
Yeah, it does. The adblocker's called PithHelmet. There's dozens of other extensions available, most of very high quality.
So what, if the vast majority of websites don't bother styling them? Form controls can default to Aqua without compromising the spec. In other words, there's no need for controls to be ugly if ugliness isn't specified in the HTML, and even then, you can handle it the elegant and tasteful way:
Naturally, that's how WebKit behaves. Ugliness has no place on the Mac desktop, even on the web.
I don't know why I know this, but Kerry's a Mac user too (despite whatever he might have said in response to a certain stupid question in primaries season). And so is John Edwards, for that matter, as well as Pablo Picasso, if he'd only been alive, and this girl, and Richard Hatch, and Columbia graduate Famke Janssen. God forbid any of these beautiful, progressive people should need to file a claim with FEMA.
"You try playing a first-person shooter with your left hand on shift, A, S, D, and the right half of the space bar, and see how quickly you get carpal tunnel."
So you're stuck with the defaults, I take it? What kind of game doesn't let you change your key mapping?
Anyway, if the idea of being able to backspace without moving off home row is so offensive to you, just remap both sides to [space]. I don't buy the premise that the "standard" keyboard layout on which typewriters eventually converged represents the pinnacle of keyboard design, and especially not for computing, where deletion and revision is much more common.
Hitting the key under your thumb doesn't take fine motor control, so it's nothing like having to use, say, the mouse with your non-dominant hand. Would it really be that hard to relearn? Maybe a little harder than learning something like the various positions of the \ key, since you use it a lot less than space and delete, but then again maybe a little easier for the same reason.
It's my impression that we backspace a lot more on the computer than anyone ever did on typewriters. When you're hacking away on an old Underwood, you're careful about the keys you hit. Not quite so much these days when you don't have to X out all your typos.
Hehe. I know someone else who works at IBM, in Westchester, and commutes every day... from Manhattan. And I've got another friend whose commute is a 2-block walk to her office in Chelsea. Like you say, different strokes.
If I can ask, why is IBM encouraging you to work from home? Is this somehow a cost-saving measure for them (if so, how), or is it a perk of employment at the company?
"The best move is the big promotion to low cost region, because they almost always give you a pathetic raise, but you keep your big city salary."
Yeah, but... then you have to live in a "low cost" region, which is a pretty nice euphemism for hell. Would they pay for a private jet back to the city on nights and weekends?
Nothing lasts forever in the face of nature, but you can certainly delay the inevitable, and you can certainly make it less painful. Buildings may collapse and roofs may fly despite any human precautions, but the widespread flooding could have been prevented, as could have been the scale of human suffering. Training for evacuations, building stronger levees, proactively keeping streets and buildings raised above sea level--these are ongoing forms of insurance that can turn catastrophic devastation into manageable devastation. Californians insure against earthquakes and mudslides. The Northeast insures against terrorism and other potential disasters like snowstorms. The Gulf Coast happens to suffer from hurricanes, and I expect defending against them (as much as possible) will turn out to be as worth it for them as defending against earthquakes and blizzards is for Americans elsewhere.
The comparison is this: It was just as difficult, or as easy, for the Dutch to engineer protection for their coasts sufficient to weather just about any storm they expect, as it will be for us to engineer protection for New Orleans, and the rest of the Gulf Coast, sufficient to weather a Category 5 hurricane. The problem hasn't been engineering per se, it's been (in both cases) that it took a major disaster to provide the political impetus for such a project.
Keep the French Quarter but move everyone else upstream? You might as well cut off your legs in the hope you'll still be able to run the marathon. Even the most touristy neighborhood needs a lot of residents, caterers, groceries, distributors, and everything else "behind the scenes" to support it.
Much better would be to raise the city above sea level, invest in flood control, and let the delta rebuild itself naturally. If there's going to be a port in that location, there'll have to be a port city to sustain it.
I saw a keyboard once that split the spacebar in half. Your right thumb was still on the spacebar, but the left thumb was over the delete key (that's backspace for you beige-boxers). :-) Using that keyboard was great--i's too bad the idea was never picked up widely.
Cost of living is lower, but earnings potential is also lower. Furthermore, I'd be more scared to go out at night in the middle of nowhere than at home in Manhattan. What happens when you get into an accident on a deserted country road? Can you rely on people being around to help you out? Can you rely on people being on the street 24/7 to deter people from breaking into your home?
I almost mentioned Grapher, but to be honest, it's even worse than Calculator. Maybe it's more capable, but the interface is total shit, and it's certainly nowhere near as capable as Graphing Calculator is/used to be.
Calculator.app is next to useless. Apple needs to resurrect the old Graphing Calculator, the one that used to be shipped with every Mac from 1994 until OS X. It's
"I prefer it over taking my hand from the keyboard and using the mouse..."
You heard of Quicksilver?
e.g. To open Photoshop, I tap ctrl, then hit p, s, return. To open a file in TextEdit, I tap ctrl, t, e, then drag the file onto the TextEdit icon that appears. To google from any application, I tap ctrl, g, space, my query, return. This thing unleashes the power of your keyboard--you can do pretty much anything in just a few keystrokes. I don't know if any such tool exists for Windows or any open-source desktop environment, but I'd be glad to hear if it does.
Yeah, and in none of these examples has Apple ever used advertising or product content to call attention to the disagreement at hand. I can't even think of an instance when Jobs or any other executive has publicly bashed a party they feel is to blame for an end-user inconvenience. The closest it's gotten, perhaps, is Jobs implying that music labels don't understand the futility of DRM. The rest has always been up to the rumor mill and Apple's adversaries to fill in.
Actually, Chicago used to be quite prone to flooding from Lake Michigan, which was only a couple feet below street level. The city's roads and streets were impassable every winter because they would freeze over, and impassable every spring because the rain would turn them to mud. Unlike New Orleans, however, Chicago made the decision to raise its street level by up to 14 feet, thus lifting itself out of the muck and greatly reducing the city's susceptibility to flooding. Not only were streets and sidewalks rebuilt on vaulted arches, but entire buildings were also lifted from their foundations by mechanical jacks, even as people within them went about their business as usual. This was done back in the mid-19th century.
Why New Orleans never followed Chicago's lead is something I'd like to know.
Okay, New Orleans was built at sea level, only to subside under the weight of the built environment. Why, then, didn't anyone take action to raise the city back up before the inevitable occurred? The idea isn't as crazy as it sounds. Chicago did exactly that between 1850 and 1880--raise its street level by up to 14 feet with vaulted roads and sidewalks, and jack up all of its buildings, inch by inch, to match. A building's occupants often weren't even aware it was being raised until they left work in the evening.
So how come wasn't this done in New Orleans? Lack of funds? Engineering problems? Structural instability?