Anand. Use a mouse with a thumb button, bind the thumb button to Expose (normally f9). Now you can either click then re-click on the window of you choice or click-hold and find the window you need then let go to bring it to the front.
Also keep in mind that most emacs key bindings work in any text field in OS X. Here's the ones I always use:
CTRL-f Forward character CTRL-b Backward character CTRL-a Front of line CTRL-e End of line CTRL-n Next line CTRL-p Previous line CTRL-d Delete character under cursor CTRL-k Delete to end of line CTRL-t Transpose characters (AKA twiddle characters)
Wow. I've learned some useful tips reading the blog and comments here... and I've owned dozens of macs and read other popular mac forums every day. This is very cool... Thanks all!
I was just wondering how you like the keyboard. I'm thinking of getting an Apple Keyboard for my PC and was wondering if you use the stock one or if you got the new wireless one?
The reason is appears smoother on Windows is because Windows doesn't render the text fully during a scroll. If you scroll through a page in Windows that consists of just text, you'll notice that the text gets blurred to shit. It's very difficult to actually see what it is. Mac OS X maintains the sharpness during the scroll. On Windows, it's kind of a motion blur effect.
This kind of design philosophy is apparent throughout both operating systems. I see a LOT more tearing when I'm dragging a window in Windows, while such tearing is almost non-existent on OS X (except on extremely slow machines). Hell, if a Windows box is being bogged down, you can wipe the screen white just by dragging a window around. This very rarely happens in OS X. Apple sacrificed snappiness for appearance, I suppose you could say.
The good news is that each successive release of OS X has gotten significantly faster on even 2 or 3 year-old hardware. I'm betting that 10.4 is going to continue this trend. Glad to hear you've had a positive experience, Anand.
The ideal Exposé setup for me is using my Logitech MX-500. The middle three buttons (the ones in addition to the scroll wheel) are mapped to Exposé functions. It's so much faster than going to the keyboard.
And while some people may argue that Exposé replaces virtual desktops, I'd say that the two complement each other very well. I've got four virtual desktops, and I use them in combination with Exposé; it's really a very sweet deal. And I retain my forward/back browser buttons and scroll wheel (I use the scroll click to open new tabs).
OT: PLEASE drop some more hints on the NV40 vs. R420 debate! Many fanATIcs have already given up on this battle, believing NV40 has 16 pipes and 200+ million transistors. Will NVDA walk away with the crown this time, are we looking at another horse race?
pbrics68 said: "also, if you are using the scroll buttons to scroll, it is advancing at one line at a time per the key-repeat rate"
This is true, and found scrolling to be MUCH better after I went into system prefs->keyboard and mouse and maxed out the keyboard repeat rate. Really big difference. As somebody else said, the rate of scrolling increses the longer you have a key or buttom pressed. With the repeat rate maxed, this actually works quite well.
I have an intellimouse explorer on my mac, and i have the 3rd click (scroll wheel click) mapped to Exposé All Windows, the 4th click, and desktop to 5th click. Life doesn't get sweeter :D
A recommendation for MenuMeters for OSX. It shows the entire system activity in the menu bar in realtime, including cpu graphs, disk, memory, and network activity. Clicking on the each of the items gives even further system activity. I can't imagine a power user running OS X without a system visual.
I downloaded FireFox on PC the first day it came out. I think I like it better than IE 6, the keyboard shortcuts, the extra themes... plus I just like the way it renders pages better.
I highly recommend setting your scrolling to "Scroll to here" in the General pane of System Preferences (I think that's its location).
That way, when you click in a scroll bar, instead of advancing one page at a time, it immediately advances to where you clicked. Very nice.
Also, if you are using the scroll buttons to scroll, it is advancing at one line at a time per the key-repeat rate. However, if you hold in the Option key while using the scroll buttons, it advances at one page at a time.
Setting Expose to screen corners is a HUGE productivity enhancement because you can drag and drop items from window to window or desktop using Expose - Brilliant! Also, I hope you've discovered springloaded folders in the Finder.
If the desktop clutter is bothering you, check out Desktop Manager, it's a freeware utility that allows you to have multiple 'virtual desktops' on your display. Quite handy, FAST and stable, from what I've seen so far. You can find it on macupdate.com. The transitions as you switch from one virtual desktop to another are astounding!
I believe that there is no FTP uploading in the Finder because FTP cannot be accessed on-demand like normal writable media. If an FTP server was treated like a Samba share, how would a program access arbitrary bytes in the file, if the protocol only allows that the file be transfered in full? The answer would seem to be some sort of wacky local-caching mechanism, which I'm sure somebody at Apple is working on.
I believe RBrowser has this sort of edit-in-place functionality from FTP.
<blockquote>Memory usage has gone up tremendously on the G5, especially now that I'm doing more and more work on it. Right now I'm at 2.57GB used with 1.43GB free; I originally thought that a user like me could get by on "only" 2GB but it doesn't seem like that's the case. Maybe if I wasn't so liberal with my multitasking I could get by with 2GB, but that's not gonna happen anytime soon :)</blockquote>
If you're leaving a lot of idle apps open, this isn't surprising. OS X will keep stuff in physical memory as much as possible. It won't start paging _anything_ out until RAM is full. So it's quite possible that with just 1 GB you might get more or less the same performance as you do with 4.
There are some good primers on how this works here:
I tried using hot-corners for Expose for a while, but I just couldn't get the full hang of it. It seemed like I would just hit the corner and Expose my screen exactly when I wasn't expecting it. Perhaps if there was a delay of about .1 or .2 seconds before Expose kicked in, then it would be a lot better for me. When I'm normally using my computer, I guess I throw my mouse to the corner to turn up to the dock on the side of my screen. A (very small) delay would alleviate this.
Disk Utility actually can make an ISO file, it just doesn't tell you. If you rip the CD as a "CD/DVD Master", it will be in ISO format, but just not named correctly(it'll be .cdr). All you have to do is rename the file to .iso and you'll be fine(this is important, since Nero recognizes files by extension). MacOS X itself recognizes(and burns) ISO images, along with DMGs and Toast imagines.
The command you saw is really for converting traditional DMG images, which record the structure you're imagining as a compressed HSF+ system; converting it to ISO allows you to burn it in more traditional programs like Nero, which supports the HFS+ file system, but doesn't recognize the DMG container or compression.
Smooth scrolling is a weird beast in OS X. It was introduced in 10.3 and I don't like it. The way it behaves is rather odd. It tends to speed up the longer you scroll. So it will start out slow, and then speed up.
Text rendering in general in OS X is slow, and that's part of the reason scrolling is not as fluid as it is on Windows. One of the things Apple spent quite a bit of effort on in OS X 10.3 was optimizing text rendering speed. So believe it or not, but things were a lot slower in OS X pre-10.3 in the text rendering department. What OS X gives up in speed, it gains in flexibility. The OS X GUI may not be as "snappy" as Windows, but then again it offers tremendous flexibility as we've seen with the magnifying dock, genie effect window miniaturization and Exposé. I often sit down at my Windows XP PC and wish my Mac was as "snappy" in the GUI department. This is likely a problem that will never be addressed directly but be solved with much faster hardware that masks it.
Regarding Safari's slow rendering speeds, I have heard an argument that it is not actually slower. I haven't tested this theory out but some Mac users swear that it is true. According to their theory, Safari actually renders the page faster than Firefox. However, they say that people perceive Firefox to render the page faster. Why? Because Safari will only display elements that are completely downloaded whereas Firefox will display elements as they're being downloaded. Also, Safari's progress bar is tremendously long and prominent which makes users focus on it more, whereas in browsers such as Internet Explorer the progess bar is small and hidden in a corner. The page may *seem* to be completely rendered in IE (the user might not notice the progress bar as much) but in reality only be partially-done. I haven't actually taken out a stopwatch yet to see if there is any validity to these claims. I think there is no getting around Safari's lack of multi-threading though. If you've used tabbed browsing, you have no doubt noticed that with multiple tabs open, Safari can stall as it awaits the completion of one of the tabs web pages. This is frustrating and hopefully it will be addressed in later revisions of Safari.
Once in command-tab mode, you can use the ~ (tilde) to go backwards (rather than holding command+shift and tabbing). By default command-~ will cycle through windows though, so it's not exactly intuitive as it requires hitting command-tab once, but useful nonetheless when switching to hidden apps.
"Granted, you can't hit 'Del' and hop into the BIOS at startup but if you don't like the way a particular application behaves you can change it."
Well, there is the Command+Option+O+F at startup to get to open firmware. It's not as user friendly as the last PC BIOS I dealt with (a keyboard controlled GUI) but in addition to doing useful things you can do stuff like play Pong :: http://members.aol.com/plforth/ofpong/ ::
"Memory usage has gone up tremendously on the G5, especially now that I'm doing more and more work on it. Right now I'm at 2.57GB used with 1.43GB free"
I do believe that Mac OS X will cache as much as it can. You probably have every application you've ever used cached right now. I'm curious about how much difference you'd notice in actual performance if you just left it at 1 or 2 GB. (Though it sounds as if the psychological effects of using all your RAM all the time would be pretty strong on you.)
"I'm also finding that I don't like the default mapping of the Exposé functions to F9 - F11. I want something closer since my hands are never around the F-keys, much less the F9 - F11 keys. Luckily that's a trivial change, I just have to figure out what I'd like to map them to."
Mouse buttons. Example. pick up an object such as an image from your web browser or bit of text. Click-hold the show-all exposé mouse button. Move the cursor the the window you'd like to place the object in. Unclick.
Really, i wish i had six mouse buttons for that. I use all three of mine for other things ATM. but i did give up one for the show-all feature for a while and it was great. But I needed my middle button back so that i could use it for opening web links in a new tab behind the current tab.
Once in command-tab mode, you can use the ~ (tilde) to go backwards (rather than holding command+shift and tabbing). By default command-~ will cycle through windows though, so it's not exactly intuitive as it requires hitting command-tab once, but useful nonetheless when switching to hidden apps.
instead of using f9 for "all windows" i just use the lower left corner as an "active screen corner" and instead of f11 for desktop i use lower right. i've found it quite handy - especially since i have an ibook and don't use a mouse.
instead of using f9 for "all windows" i just use the lower left corner as an "active screen corner" and instead of f11 for desktop i use lower right. i've found it quite handy - especially since i have an ibook and don't use a mouse.
I'm a keyboard junkie also - this is why I love OS X. Despite this, I couldn't find a good shortcut for the Expose keys, lne that I can just hit, without reaching up to the top of the keyboard.
I found the 'hot corners' is just made for Expose. Since you basically need the mouse to choose a window, I set the bottom-left hand corner to 'show all windows' and the bottom right corner to 'show desktop'.
I use this constantly and it is much, much quicker than keyboard shortcuts for me.
That's not what Anand was talking about. He wanted to make an image of the disk so he could send it to Canada. That's why he needed to use Disk Utility.
And the proper term is Finder-based FTP, not GUI-based. No one really knows why Apple kept this limitation from Jaguar. Besides, Transmit is a great example of a native OS X app.
To access the G5's OpenFirmware (closest thing to BIOS on the Mac) hold Command + Option + O + F. This takes you into a command line interface used to check hardware and such.
You can use Apple's CHUD Tools to change processor setting on the fly, it's part of Apple's Developer Tools package.
Glad to hear you Mac experience is going well so far.
Anand, have you tried mapping Exposé to your screen corners and using the mouse to trigger it? I find that to be easier for me, since the F keys on Apple's keyboards aren't divided into groups of 4 like a PC keyboard. That makes it harder to quickly put your fingers on the right keys.
I have show all windows mapped to the top left corner, show application windows mapped to top right, and show desktop mapped to bottom left. Quickly flicking the mouse to a corner has my windows flying all over with ease.
As far as switching through apps, if you hit Cmd(apple)-Tab and mouse over the application's icon, then release cmd-Tab, the application will be brought to the front. Much better than tabbing through however many apps you have running. Also, if you hit "H" while over an app's icon, it will Hide the app, and if you hit "Q" while over an app's icon, it will Quit the app.
...forgot one thing: the CD icon will have "CDR" on it before the disc is burned, so you can tell a writable blank apart from a read-only regular disc.
I'm not sure why you're using Disk Copy to make CDs. Just put it in the drive and do it from the desktop. The Finder will prompt, it'll mount as a removable disk, and you can start copying files to it. Instead of ejecting, the Trash will turn into a burn icon, or you can use "Burn Disc.." in the File menu, or use the toolbar button, or the little burn button in the sidebar. Single-session ISOs are burned.
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48 Comments
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, March 1, 2004 - link
CliffAsk and ye shall receive, hit refresh :)
Cliff - Sunday, February 29, 2004 - link
need a new blog...i know you're probably studying, but i have less to do to avoid studying with no new content (-:sheer - Sunday, February 29, 2004 - link
Anand. Use a mouse with a thumb button, bind the thumb button to Expose (normally f9). Now you can either click then re-click on the window of you choice or click-hold and find the window you need then let go to bring it to the front.Arshad - Sunday, February 29, 2004 - link
Anand, sorry there are no powerstrip-like programs available for changing engine/memory clocks on the video card.sjk - Saturday, February 28, 2004 - link
Re: "emacs" keybindingsSee http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Con... for more info.
KKT - Saturday, February 28, 2004 - link
Also keep in mind that most emacs key bindings work in any text field in OS X. Here's the ones I always use:CTRL-f Forward character
CTRL-b Backward character
CTRL-a Front of line
CTRL-e End of line
CTRL-n Next line
CTRL-p Previous line
CTRL-d Delete character under cursor
CTRL-k Delete to end of line
CTRL-t Transpose characters (AKA twiddle characters)
vailr - Saturday, February 28, 2004 - link
Are the forums down?argod - Saturday, February 28, 2004 - link
type this on your terminal. and restart Dock.appdefaults write com.apple.Dock pinning start
defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -boolean yes
galactusofmyth - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Wow. I've learned some useful tips reading the blog and comments here... and I've owned dozens of macs and read other popular mac forums every day. This is very cool... Thanks all!Crim - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I was just wondering how you like the keyboard. I'm thinking of getting an Apple Keyboard for my PC and was wondering if you use the stock one or if you got the new wireless one?Damien Sorresso - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Oh and as for smooth scrolling ...The reason is appears smoother on Windows is because Windows doesn't render the text fully during a scroll. If you scroll through a page in Windows that consists of just text, you'll notice that the text gets blurred to shit. It's very difficult to actually see what it is. Mac OS X maintains the sharpness during the scroll. On Windows, it's kind of a motion blur effect.
This kind of design philosophy is apparent throughout both operating systems. I see a LOT more tearing when I'm dragging a window in Windows, while such tearing is almost non-existent on OS X (except on extremely slow machines). Hell, if a Windows box is being bogged down, you can wipe the screen white just by dragging a window around. This very rarely happens in OS X. Apple sacrificed snappiness for appearance, I suppose you could say.
The good news is that each successive release of OS X has gotten significantly faster on even 2 or 3 year-old hardware. I'm betting that 10.4 is going to continue this trend. Glad to hear you've had a positive experience, Anand.
Damien Sorresso - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
The ideal Exposé setup for me is using my Logitech MX-500. The middle three buttons (the ones in addition to the scroll wheel) are mapped to Exposé functions. It's so much faster than going to the keyboard.And while some people may argue that Exposé replaces virtual desktops, I'd say that the two complement each other very well. I've got four virtual desktops, and I use them in combination with Exposé; it's really a very sweet deal. And I retain my forward/back browser buttons and scroll wheel (I use the scroll click to open new tabs).
GTaudiophile - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
OT: PLEASE drop some more hints on the NV40 vs. R420 debate! Many fanATIcs have already given up on this battle, believing NV40 has 16 pipes and 200+ million transistors. Will NVDA walk away with the crown this time, are we looking at another horse race?CeeTwo - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I always!!! call it the "open apple key" (you can find the "closed appe key" on several devices in my museum of ancient technology in the attic.)Anonymous - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
low-fi said:"Have you tried Launchbar yet?! ;)"
OMG YES!
http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/
I bet you don't make it 24 hours without paying for this.
Anonymous - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
pbrics68 said:"also, if you are using the scroll buttons to scroll, it is advancing at one line at a time per the key-repeat rate"
This is true, and found scrolling to be MUCH better after I went into system prefs->keyboard and mouse and maxed out the keyboard repeat rate. Really big difference. As somebody else said, the rate of scrolling increses the longer you have a key or buttom pressed. With the repeat rate maxed, this actually works quite well.
low-fi - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I have an intellimouse explorer on my mac, and i have the 3rd click (scroll wheel click) mapped to Exposé All Windows, the 4th click, and desktop to 5th click. Life doesn't get sweeter :DHave you tried Launchbar yet?! ;)
JG - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Hi!if You would like to dwell into OpenFirmware, check here ...
http://www.openfirmware.org/
/
lookmark - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Or, if you're not a menu extra hound, Apple's Activity Monitor does a great job detailing system activity.mugwump - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
A recommendation for MenuMeters for OSX. It shows the entire system activity in the menu bar in realtime, including cpu graphs, disk, memory, and network activity. Clicking on the each of the items gives even further system activity. I can't imagine a power user running OS X without a system visual.If I'm not mistaken, I think it's also freeware.
wassup4u2 - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I downloaded FireFox on PC the first day it came out. I think I like it better than IE 6, the keyboard shortcuts, the extra themes... plus I just like the way it renders pages better.Sandy McMurray - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Try FTP Droplet II from SubRosaSoft for drag and drop FTP uploads.http://www.subrosasoft.com/thestore/product_info.p...
Brazuca - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Anand,Maybe it's time you try that great utility, Launchbar. You seem to have a good idea of the X experience, but now you can start adding things on.
I'm a stickler for simplicity, so I rarely install 3rd party add-ons unless they are done right. Launchbar almost makes the GUI into a CLI.
Anonymous - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I know it's not a good solution, but you can upload using FTP without downloading any new software. Just use the `ftp' command from the terminal.pbrice68 - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I highly recommend setting your scrolling to "Scroll to here" in the General pane of System Preferences (I think that's its location).That way, when you click in a scroll bar, instead of advancing one page at a time, it immediately advances to where you clicked. Very nice.
Also, if you are using the scroll buttons to scroll, it is advancing at one line at a time per the key-repeat rate. However, if you hold in the Option key while using the scroll buttons, it advances at one page at a time.
Setting Expose to screen corners is a HUGE productivity enhancement because you can drag and drop items from window to window or desktop using Expose - Brilliant! Also, I hope you've discovered springloaded folders in the Finder.
Crim - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Damn. I only have 256mb of memory...:(I'm glad your liking the Mac experience, I think I'm going to get an Apple keyboard to use with my PC.
xype - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Anand: try mapping Exposé to something like Ctrl - Shift - Middle mouse button. I have it ctrl/alt/cmd - shift - mmb and it works ok for me.Krishna Sadasivam - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
Anand:If the desktop clutter is bothering you, check out Desktop Manager, it's a freeware utility that allows you to have multiple 'virtual desktops' on your display. Quite handy, FAST and stable, from what I've seen so far. You can find it on macupdate.com. The transitions as you switch from one virtual desktop to another are astounding!
-Krishna
Anonymous - Friday, February 27, 2004 - link
I will always call it the Apple key....always!!.....ALWAYS!!!!!!!! ;-) :PRoss Anderson - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
I believe that there is no FTP uploading in the Finder because FTP cannot be accessed on-demand like normal writable media. If an FTP server was treated like a Samba share, how would a program access arbitrary bytes in the file, if the protocol only allows that the file be transfered in full? The answer would seem to be some sort of wacky local-caching mechanism, which I'm sure somebody at Apple is working on.I believe RBrowser has this sort of edit-in-place functionality from FTP.
the best - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
HEY PEANUT! It's not called the "Apple" key, it's called the "Command" key.
"Apple" key is so 80s man. Get with it peanut.
=p
bakshi - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
<blockquote>Memory usage has gone up tremendously on the G5, especially now that I'm doing more and more work on it. Right now I'm at 2.57GB used with 1.43GB free; I originally thought that a user like me could get by on "only" 2GB but it doesn't seem like that's the case. Maybe if I wasn't so liberal with my multitasking I could get by with 2GB, but that's not gonna happen anytime soon :)</blockquote>If you're leaving a lot of idle apps open, this isn't surprising. OS X will keep stuff in physical memory as much as possible. It won't start paging _anything_ out until RAM is full. So it's quite possible that with just 1 GB you might get more or less the same performance as you do with 4.
There are some good primers on how this works here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Co...
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performan...
Anonymous - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
Why does Anand refer to his computer as a "PowerMac G5 2000"? Does he mean the dual 2GHz? Apple doesn't use that naming convention.tl - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
I tried using hot-corners for Expose for a while, but I just couldn't get the full hang of it. It seemed like I would just hit the corner and Expose my screen exactly when I wasn't expecting it. Perhaps if there was a delay of about .1 or .2 seconds before Expose kicked in, then it would be a lot better for me. When I'm normally using my computer, I guess I throw my mouse to the corner to turn up to the dock on the side of my screen. A (very small) delay would alleviate this.ViRGE - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
On the subject of CD imaging:Disk Utility actually can make an ISO file, it just doesn't tell you. If you rip the CD as a "CD/DVD Master", it will be in ISO format, but just not named correctly(it'll be .cdr). All you have to do is rename the file to .iso and you'll be fine(this is important, since Nero recognizes files by extension). MacOS X itself recognizes(and burns) ISO images, along with DMGs and Toast imagines.
The command you saw is really for converting traditional DMG images, which record the structure you're imagining as a compressed HSF+ system; converting it to ISO allows you to burn it in more traditional programs like Nero, which supports the HFS+ file system, but doesn't recognize the DMG container or compression.
GL - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
Smooth scrolling is a weird beast in OS X. It was introduced in 10.3 and I don't like it. The way it behaves is rather odd. It tends to speed up the longer you scroll. So it will start out slow, and then speed up.Text rendering in general in OS X is slow, and that's part of the reason scrolling is not as fluid as it is on Windows. One of the things Apple spent quite a bit of effort on in OS X 10.3 was optimizing text rendering speed. So believe it or not, but things were a lot slower in OS X pre-10.3 in the text rendering department. What OS X gives up in speed, it gains in flexibility. The OS X GUI may not be as "snappy" as Windows, but then again it offers tremendous flexibility as we've seen with the magnifying dock, genie effect window miniaturization and Exposé. I often sit down at my Windows XP PC and wish my Mac was as "snappy" in the GUI department. This is likely a problem that will never be addressed directly but be solved with much faster hardware that masks it.
Regarding Safari's slow rendering speeds, I have heard an argument that it is not actually slower. I haven't tested this theory out but some Mac users swear that it is true. According to their theory, Safari actually renders the page faster than Firefox. However, they say that people perceive Firefox to render the page faster. Why? Because Safari will only display elements that are completely downloaded whereas Firefox will display elements as they're being downloaded. Also, Safari's progress bar is tremendously long and prominent which makes users focus on it more, whereas in browsers such as Internet Explorer the progess bar is small and hidden in a corner. The page may *seem* to be completely rendered in IE (the user might not notice the progress bar as much) but in reality only be partially-done. I haven't actually taken out a stopwatch yet to see if there is any validity to these claims. I think there is no getting around Safari's lack of multi-threading though. If you've used tabbed browsing, you have no doubt noticed that with multiple tabs open, Safari can stall as it awaits the completion of one of the tabs web pages. This is frustrating and hopefully it will be addressed in later revisions of Safari.
Anonymous - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
I didn't read your CD comments closely enough. Nevermind. :-)Anonymous - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
Once in command-tab mode, you can use the ~ (tilde) to go backwards (rather than holding command+shift and tabbing). By default command-~ will cycle through windows though, so it's not exactly intuitive as it requires hitting command-tab once, but useful nonetheless when switching to hidden apps.Anonymous - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
"Granted, you can't hit 'Del' and hop into the BIOS at startup but if you don't like the way a particular application behaves you can change it."Well, there is the Command+Option+O+F at startup to get to open firmware. It's not as user friendly as the last PC BIOS I dealt with (a keyboard controlled GUI) but in addition to doing useful things you can do stuff like play Pong :: http://members.aol.com/plforth/ofpong/ ::
"Memory usage has gone up tremendously on the G5, especially now that I'm doing more and more work on it. Right now I'm at 2.57GB used with 1.43GB free"
I do believe that Mac OS X will cache as much as it can. You probably have every application you've ever used cached right now. I'm curious about how much difference you'd notice in actual performance if you just left it at 1 or 2 GB. (Though it sounds as if the psychological effects of using all your RAM all the time would be pretty strong on you.)
"I'm also finding that I don't like the default mapping of the Exposé functions to F9 - F11. I want something closer since my hands are never around the F-keys, much less the F9 - F11 keys. Luckily that's a trivial change, I just have to figure out what I'd like to map them to."
Mouse buttons. Example. pick up an object such as an image from your web browser or bit of text. Click-hold the show-all exposé mouse button. Move the cursor the the window you'd like to place the object in. Unclick.
Really, i wish i had six mouse buttons for that. I use all three of mine for other things ATM. but i did give up one for the show-all feature for a while and it was great. But I needed my middle button back so that i could use it for opening web links in a new tab behind the current tab.
Anonymous - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
Once in command-tab mode, you can use the ~ (tilde) to go backwards (rather than holding command+shift and tabbing). By default command-~ will cycle through windows though, so it's not exactly intuitive as it requires hitting command-tab once, but useful nonetheless when switching to hidden apps.charlie - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
instead of using f9 for "all windows" i just use the lower left corner as an "active screen corner" and instead of f11 for desktop i use lower right. i've found it quite handy - especially since i have an ibook and don't use a mouse.charlie - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
instead of using f9 for "all windows" i just use the lower left corner as an "active screen corner" and instead of f11 for desktop i use lower right. i've found it quite handy - especially since i have an ibook and don't use a mouse.thePurpleGiant - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
I'm a keyboard junkie also - this is why I love OS X. Despite this, I couldn't find a good shortcut for the Expose keys, lne that I can just hit, without reaching up to the top of the keyboard.I found the 'hot corners' is just made for Expose. Since you basically need the mouse to choose a window, I set the bottom-left hand corner to 'show all windows' and the bottom right corner to 'show desktop'.
I use this constantly and it is much, much quicker than keyboard shortcuts for me.
Jon - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
That's not what Anand was talking about. He wanted to make an image of the disk so he could send it to Canada. That's why he needed to use Disk Utility.And the proper term is Finder-based FTP, not GUI-based. No one really knows why Apple kept this limitation from Jaguar. Besides, Transmit is a great example of a native OS X app.
To access the G5's OpenFirmware (closest thing to BIOS on the Mac) hold Command + Option + O + F. This takes you into a command line interface used to check hardware and such.
You can use Apple's CHUD Tools to change processor setting on the fly, it's part of Apple's Developer Tools package.
Glad to hear you Mac experience is going well so far.
jasonsRX7 - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
Anand, have you tried mapping Exposé to your screen corners and using the mouse to trigger it? I find that to be easier for me, since the F keys on Apple's keyboards aren't divided into groups of 4 like a PC keyboard. That makes it harder to quickly put your fingers on the right keys.I have show all windows mapped to the top left corner, show application windows mapped to top right, and show desktop mapped to bottom left. Quickly flicking the mouse to a corner has my windows flying all over with ease.
boomer - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
As far as switching through apps, if you hit Cmd(apple)-Tab and mouse over the application's icon, then release cmd-Tab, the application will be brought to the front. Much better than tabbing through however many apps you have running.Also, if you hit "H" while over an app's icon, it will Hide the app, and if you hit "Q" while over an app's icon, it will Quit the app.
Billium - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
...forgot one thing: the CD icon will have "CDR" on it before the disc is burned, so you can tell a writable blank apart from a read-only regular disc.Billium - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link
I'm not sure why you're using Disk Copy to make CDs. Just put it in the drive and do it from the desktop. The Finder will prompt, it'll mount as a removable disk, and you can start copying files to it. Instead of ejecting, the Trash will turn into a burn icon, or you can use "Burn Disc.." in the File menu, or use the toolbar button, or the little burn button in the sidebar. Single-session ISOs are burned.