Switching to Mac: General Annoyances
Posted by mikeg on November 13, 2008
This post will probably be updated pretty frequently as I run into issues and hopefully find solutions
- (very high) No Alt+ accelerators which makes navigating dialogs using keyboard impossible. Very frustrating as I try to use keyboard as much as possible. This is spell check dialog and on Windows I can completely control it using keyboard
- (low) I really like the idea of applications being packaged up as a single file, but the process of installation is not very clear (until you do it a few times). You usually download a DMG file (think of it as a “virtual hard drive” that Mac OS will mount). In most cases you will see something like this and you have to figure out that you need to drag Skype icon onto Application icon.
- These applications are handling this process much better than many others:
- (low) No hibernate support — I found hibernate very useful when traveling and wanting to preserve all my open apps, but at the same time not waste battery in “sleep mode”
- (very high) Completely insane selection mechanism using Shift key. Watch this first. Here is what you are seeing: I have selected “Picture 8″ and while holding down Shift Key, I use Down-Arrow key to select files below (9, 10, 11). Then I realize that I don’t need number 11 and I press Up-Arrow, but instead of deselecting 11, it selects 6. Bizarre… being a software developer things like this always make me wonder what business case they were trying to solve by implementing this behavior…
- (very high) Delete behavior in Finder: let’s say you are looking through pictures using Quick View (Command+Y) and decide to delete one of them. Instead of jumping to the next picture (which sounds very logical to me), it jumps to the top of the folder and I have to find my place again. Very frustrating
- (medium) Application centric window switching — probably the first “computer productivity” habit that people learn on Windows is Alt+Tab. On Mac you also have to master Command + ~ which will switch windows within the application. I am pretty good with the keyboard and I still have to remind myself that I need to use different keys, can’t imagine that this is a very clear concept for regular users.
- Lennart Regebro spent significant time looking into resolving this and recommends the following:
Finally I then discovered Witch, a utility to set up window switching in a quite flexible way. Currently I retain the Mac style application switching on Cmd+Tab, and have Witch set up to switch the windows within an application with Alt+Tab. If you want to remap Cmd+Tab to switch between all windows, then haha, you can’t, OS X doesn’t allow that, unlesss, you use another tool, called PullTab, which in turn requires a framework called APE to be installed. With this Cmd+Tab gets available for remapping by Witch as well.
