2005-05-09 16:18:51.633657+00 by Dan Lyke 11 comments
I'm preferring the Mac to Windows, but there are still a lot of features X and Linux provide that I miss. One point in favor of the Mac, however, is the existence of the Faith Converter 1.8:
Found an admirable tome but it's in praise of the wrong god?
The premier theological plagiarism solution for OS X, Faith Converter converts text between twenty-seven different religions...
[ related topics: Religion Humor Macintosh ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-09 17:36:22.435803+00 by: DaveP
I'm wondering what you're missing from Linux/X. You can install the full X11 package, and I've only found one or two things in the ports tree (from Open/ Free/Net-BSD) that don't Just Work.
So if there are things you're missing, I'm curious what they might be. Maybe a guy could make a buck updating a port or two...
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-09 18:20:52.543189+00 by: Dan Lyke
Mostly it's little touches:
I'd be more happy with the X stuff provided under Fink if the cut/copy/paste integration with native apps was better. And I'm finding inconsistent behaviors with dealing with extra mouse buttons, such that I'm back to trying to discover the 80 or 90 key mouse that is the normal way of interacting with the Mac (ie: chord the mouse with the keyboard) rather than have the simplicity of the 5 button mouse (left, right, center, up, down) on X and Windows.
Speaking of which, if I ever find the person who implemented the scroll wheel code on the Mac we are going to... have. words. period. The fact that scroll wheel behavior is non-linear and so huge makes it almost useless for reading long web pages, because how far the text jumps depends on how fast I scroll, so that five ticks down, five ticks up can leave me in a completely different place in the document.
#Comment Re: [Entry #7902] Re: made: 2005-05-10 02:06:02.336986+00 by: John Anderson
Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com> writes:
> * Even though I have two windows and lots of screen real estate, I > miss virtual workspaces.
See Desktop Manager. Like you, my brain doesn't work right without workspaces; this makes that particular pain go away.
cheers, john. -- "You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep." - Navajo Proverb
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 02:40:04.111793+00 by: Dan Lyke
Wow. Desktop Manager is totally cool. Thanks. And its preconfigured desktops are even named by my work styles.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 13:11:55.94199+00 by: DaveP
For the mouse, I use a MS Intellimouse Explorer (the big old 5-button one) and the MS driver. USB OverDrive is a better driver, probably. Both will let you control the scroll wheel acceleration behavior.
For the "send to back" and such on windows, I find that command-backquote to cycle windows usually gets me where I want to be, and it's a left-hand key-combo. Since I right-hand mouse, left-hand key- combos are part of my mousing repertoire.
I agree that X/Fink would be better with better cut/paste, but I'm afraid that one's just going to take time.
The mouse-cursor stuff is bogus, yes. I'm not sure why apps get confused as often as they do, but I want to bonk the responsible developers with a clue-by-four. I wish I could figure a way to fix that without having to get inside all their applications. The single thing I miss most from Mac OS <X is the ability to patch broken applications by writing an extension. I did a lot of that back in the day. Much more difficult with protected memory, but then again, nobody else is patching my machine with broken code, so I accept it.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 14:28:11.968142+00 by: markd
If you want to do to app-specific, and system wide patches, check out APE (APE) or if you to get at a lower level, mach_inject and mach_override (mach_inject). If they're cocoa apps, you can also load bundles by using the spelling services. (I haven't done it myself, but it'd probably be easier than mach_inject, and cheaper than APE)#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 15:15:44.542528+00 by: Jerry Kindall
Mouse cursor stuff is just often wrong.
I can't say I've ever seen anything remotely like this. In fact, fiddling with Firefox right now, I just can't get it to misbehave that way.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 15:36:51.029094+00 by: Dan Lyke
Bring up this page non-maximized in Firefox, position the mouse cursor over the text input area (not just plain text) to get the I-beam cursor. Go off the left edge of the input and the Firefox window. Cursor stays as I-beam.
In fact, it does this over text with no left margin, too.
Stock 10.3.9 as shipped from Apple, no OS extensions that I know of loaded.
Basically, it looks like the menu bar doesn't count as a window, and because there's no notion of anything but the foreground window having control, nothing else ever resets the mouse. As an application developer, it seems that you not only have to set the mouse when it enters a region, but you have to do some intelligence to reset it when it leaves.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 18:05:25.523548+00 by: Jerry Kindall
Nope, can't reproduce that. Of course, I just upgraded to 10.4 yesterday, so maybe it would have happened before that -- in any case, I've never noticed any problems with the pointer in the last three years of using OS X. For example, the cursor does change to the SPOD when you pass it over a window of a non-foreground application that has locked up, so clearly it's not just foreground applications that can affect the pointer.
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 18:47:53.732075+00 by: markd
Does the mouse thing happen in anything other than Firefox? I've seen some UI funkyness in Firefox that I don't see elsewhere (copy/pasting the wrong thing happens all the time from FF for me)
#Comment Re: made: 2005-05-10 19:08:10.940068+00 by: Dan Lyke
I thought so, but I'm unable to reproduce it with anything else I've got open right now. I did notice that it seems like a function of speed over the boundary areas, and all the other apps I'm running this moment have larger borders areas than Firefox...