| Thursday, October 8, 2009 |
  Oh many things | 
Posted - 10/8/2009 12:19:37 PM | Actually I have many things about which to comment. Instead of bunching the whole mess up into one post, I'll just make several posts. That'll at least give the impression that I'm posting prolifically to the Bargain Basement Blog.
First off, I got a Macbook. My little Mac Mini decided to make an unscheduled exit from the land of the living, so I decided to choke two ducks with one applecore and replace my little Acer with a Mac laptop. Apple was selling "refurbished" (which is what I think they call their existing stock of laptops after one of their "we've got a new laptop, and it's for sale. . .RIGHT NOW" press conferences), so I ordered one.
So far I'm happy with it. It had a couple of annoyances that I was able to fix with software. First off, the backspace key is in the right place but is named "delete" and the delete key is named. . .nothing because it doesn't have one. I found a couple of little gizmos online that'll remap keys (and you need a couple because the eject-key has key-repeat disabled), so I now have the mostly-useless "eject" key acting as the delete key. It's right above the mis-named backspace, so my fingers figured it out in short order.
Next, the Mac Finder does a good job of not telling you anything about where you are. If you're in a folder, it seems to want you to think that that folder doesn't actually have a path to it but exists somewhere in space. Vista tried to do the same thing, but it had a checkbox in the settings that let you turn off that nonsense. Turns out MacOS has some similar Explorer-ish bits in the finder that let you know exactly where a folder is, but not only are they turned off by default, but they're unable to turn on easily. Enter a nice free app called "secrets" that gives you access to lots of tweaks, some pointless and some really handy. So that's fixed.
Finally (cover your ears, fanboys), I was able to turn off the 3D in the dock and de-centered it. I gotta agree with Tog here that some parts of the dock have sacrificed usability for cuteness. Much of what allows people to "connect" with their user interface is the stuff that you don't have to think about. Things like icons that you can instantly recognize (which is why I'm annoyed that the Flash and new FileZilla icons look similar even though a second glance shows them to be different). And one problem with the dock is that it is centered. And that means that adding a new icon to the dock by running a program shifts all of the icons iconWidth/2 pixels left and right. And my little position-sensing brain must adjust itself.
On my Windows 7 machine, the leftmost icon (next to the immovable start-orb) is Firefox. It's been there for months. I can practically hit it without thinking. It never moves. I don't have to search the bottom of the screen for it. I don't have to worry if it's shoved over a few positions because other stuff is running. It's just there. It's definitely one of the things that Windows 7 got right, and I wish Apple would do Microsoft a solid and steal some of the things it got right.
And guess what's now the leftmost icon in MacOS next to the immovable Finder icon. That's right, Firefox.
(oh, and if you like the Windows 7 toolbar, somebody found a little hack that lets you shove the recycle bin into the right corner, which was another of Tog's dock complaints. It's here).
Now that those little bits are fixed, I quite like my little Macbook. I wish it had a free paint program that was as nice as paint.NET, but I haven't yet found one. OpenOffice works just fine.
No problems here.
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Comments
 | johnhattan GDNet Reviews Lead
Member since: The dawn of time
From: Southlake, TX | |
Posted - 10/8/2009 1:41:41 PM | Actually I found both of those. TextWrangler is great. Pixen is almost there, but I'm picky.
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 | Ravyne
Member since: 2/26/2007 From: Kirkland, WA | 
Posted - 10/11/2009 10:10:08 PM | Nice tips. I too have a macbook which pulls double-duty at my sole Mac and sole laptop. I've got XP pro on bootcamp (which I'm booted into 95% of the time), but I'm itching to install the New OSX and Win7, once I can get a hold of windows 7.
I'm also really digging Win7's super-bar. The ability to see each open instance (or tab) is great to find applications quickly, and the ability launch new instances is really quite handy as well. Combined with the ability to pin applications there, regardless of whether they're running or not, is excellent. The super-bar is so good, that it's replaced my old trick of creating shortcut-menus (with no labels and small icons) and tucking them at the top of the desktop with auto-hide and always-on-top set.
I'll definitively be be giving your desktop tricks a try.
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 | Trapper Zoid GDNet+
Member since: 5/20/2005 From: Melbourne, Victoria | 
Posted - 10/12/2009 10:16:55 PM | Someone suggested Paintbrush to me a while back, but I'm not sure how well it holds up to Paint.NET. I tend to use GIMP, Inkscape and ArtRage (not free) for my art needs now (and occasionally Pixen when I want to go all pixelly).
I got annoyed by the dock when using full screen art apps, so I've now set it to be on the right and hidden by default. That means it takes me several seconds to display the dock and find the right tiny icon in the horde I've got catalogued there, but it's not as if I constantly open and close apps. It's usually easier and faster to just use Spotlight and type in the first few letters of an app, click return; presto, it's open.
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Posted - 10/8/2009 12:29:52 PM