7 days on OS X

A few stray impressions, thoughts, and notes for myself regarding my first days as a Mac user. Some of these could probably be solved be reading the manual, but if OS X is intuitive I shouldn’t have to, dammit! ;)

• Where the heck is the @ symbol when using danish input?
• How do I navigate back and forward from the keyboard in System preferences (and probably elsewhere). The command + arrow keys only seem to work in Finder / Safari.
• How do I navigate the menu bar from keyboard? (Yeah, I’m not really that much of a trackpad/mouse fan - nor really a RTFM kinda guy).
• Can’t TextMate in-/outdent entire blocks of text at a time? :o/
• I had just gotten over my dropshadow phase when doing website design - I reckon I’ll be falling right back into that pit after using OS X.
• The brushed metal is a whole lot less annoying/obvious than I had feared.
• How do I open/run a document/application from the keyboard in Finder? I can navigate to it using arrow keys, but Enter just starts renaming it, not executing it. :(
• Dang, things look smooth.
• iTunes is going to cost me money…

Software I still have to try out

• Proteus - while iChat is close to the IM application I once started creating for Windows/Jabber, Proteus looks like it is exactly what I want. Adium could be a (free!) alternative.
• NewsFire
• NetNewsWire
• Some sort of backup method, not sure which to go with.
• Quicksilver - I still haven’t quite grokked what it is, but people are raving about it.
• Growl - looks interesting too.

Articles

A few articles I’ve found useful:

• Garrett Dimon: My Favorite Software
• http://maczealots.com/articles/applications/
• http://maczealots.com/articles/backup/
• http://maczealots.com/articles/hiddenfiles/

Hm, I could’ve just linked to MacZealots article archive, I guess.

Comments and Trackbacks

Apple + O to open files from finder

Apple + ] or [ to indent/un-indent in TextMate

Cheers! Exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

1) @ is on option-' on the Danish keymap (hint: enable Keyboard Viewer in Prefs -> International -> Input Menu)
2) not sure what you're asking here
3) Prefs -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard shortcuts has that as control-F2 by default
4) on a Danish keymap you probably want to use option-[shift-]tab
5) there are hacks to disable window shadows ;)
7) cmd-arrow down also works (which also descends into folders)