The first thing that I had to try and figure out when getting the Apple was the keyboard short cuts, my busted wrists situation makes me a total keyboard junky, I try not to touch the mouse at all. This is somewhere that Apple really needs a big slap on the head because its horrible.
For instance, to get to the Google search box in Safari is a 3 key hotkey combo, get real! Apple is not only creating todays funky hip yuppy look but they are creating a whole lot of jobs for unskilled labor of the future looking after people whose hands are completely destroyed from using this Operating System for years.
The idiocy of Safari shortcuts are somehow mitigated by the fact that you can create shortcuts for bookmarks, so I’ll create ^K shortcut to launch the Google bookmark, it’s lame but should work. For all the Safari shortcut goodness look here, it also mentions about bookmark hotkeys.
In general Apple’s approach to UI consistency is to make things as inconsistent as possible. Each app behaves differently, has different keyboard controls, looks differently etc.
For instance you have your Brushed Metal apps – think iTunes – apart from being ugly and bloated they let you drag the whole window around by grabbing onto any metal surface and dragging, thats quite nice. Then you have a completely different style for apps like the System Preference, TextEdit etc. Now with Tiger a new ‘Plastic’ look is appearing, specifically the Mail.app is now completely different from anything else that came before. Also the spotlight search box is completely inconsistent with the design of the rest of the desktop.
Mostly there is a feel of stuff being patched on. I remember outside the town I grew up there was a guy who always built onto his house. As I grew older so the house grew, but he always did in slightly different designs and colors and real soon it looked pretty screwed up, that’s pretty much the feeling I am starting to have about OS X and the applications coming from Apple, it’s as if they are still trying to find the right way, I just hope when they do find it they will make everything look and behave the same.
Any way, I digress, the point to this is, here is a doc with loads of OS X shortcuts, even covering useful things like how to avoid Startup Items from loading at boot time using obscure keyboard shortcuts (hold in shift during the progress bar! how intuitive). Don’t sue me when after using this for a few years you need someone to help you go to the toilet because your hands are useless.
UPDATE:I tried the Safari bookmark shortcut thing with mixed results, it just does not always work consistently. So after some more hunting through the menu’s I saw there is Edit -> Find -> Google Search …. as an option. This is great news because OS X lets you remap hotkeys in menu in the keyboard preference page. Details on that here. Now I have command-k as a hotkey for accessing the Google box and things are looking better.
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