- Joined
- Jun 22, 2008
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- Your Mac's Specs
- 15-inch Early 2008; Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo; Memory 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 10.7.5
I've been using a Mac for a couple of years now, and felt exactly the way you do. Used to feel... It's interesting though, how people will be really quick to reply with snippy answers which don't help at all, and only serve to boost their ego's and feed a nasty fire. You probably should have tried to keep a cooler head in terms of how you stated your questions, simply because some people here really love to answer with meaningless double talk. It annoys the heck out of me. But let me try and help you a bit. I'm actually going to start with one of your last entries because it will be of great help to you.
I'm sure you can program your mouse to behave in the same fashion as it did with Windows. You might have to install the software or drivers though. I can't recall at the moment because my mouse isn't setup for this laptop yet. (It's my second MacBook Pro )
I have to finish in a follow up post. Too many characters for one post
Doug
- When alt-tabbing, individual windows aren't shown. If I have 3 firefox windows, it won't show them, or the contents, and alt-tabbing to a minimized window doesn't bring it up! ***?[/qoute]
If you have 3 windows opened but minimized, all three windows are going to be in the dock. Click the one you want. The last window you were working with is going to be the window which pops back up once you CMD+Tab it. Which brings me to the fact that you CAN actually bring a window up with CMD+Tab. You have to actually hold the CMD key down and when you get to the app you want to work with, take your finger off of the tab key and while still holding CMD, hit the option(alt)key and then release the CMD key.
Now, want an even spiffier way to do this, and with added coolness (ie;with the added bonus of being more efficient) ? Bind certain apps to specific spaces ! I just started utilizing this great feature, and it really saves time and makes things more neat overall. In system preferences again, go to Expose/Spaces. Go to the Spaces tab. (Now please refer to the attachment picture at the bottom of this post) I have set up 6 spaces vs the standard 4. I use specific spaces for specific types of apps.
For instance, I have my 5th space reserved for my photo editing applications such as Lightroom and PS. Do this how ever you'd like. But here's the cool part.. Once this is set up, you now no longer have to CMD Tab with the option key ! Now you only have to CMD +Tab to the app you want, and when you let go, it shoots you over to the app in the appropriate space. Niiiice.
- On Windows, if I want to resize a window, I drag from any edge (top, bottom, either side, any corner) and get it done. On OS X, it seems like the only way to do it is to drag the bottom right corner, then I have to move the whole window, then drag from that corner again. Maybe there's some button to hold down or something, but I haven't found a way to do it. To me, that isn't intuitive. That's obnoxious.
I couldn't agree with you more on this point. It's a weakness in the OS. Truly inefficient way to get that task done. Unfortunately, this seems to be a trait of Apple, where they just want to be different for the sake of being different, totally ignoring other methods of doing things because they too closely resemble the Windows way of doing things. Stupid though, because, this is how it's done in modern flavors of Linux, as well. Sorry to say, it does look like we have to 'deal with it'.
- On Windows, if I hit the X on a window, it's closed. Shut down. Gone. On a Mac, if I hit the orange minus button, it gets minimized. Great. If I hit the red X button, it...doesn't close!? It just gets minimized? What is that. What's the difference then between the orange minus button and the red x button then? I have to hit command Q or something, or File>Close...seriously? How is that intuitive and not annoying?
I had to get used to this, but after time, it makes sense to me now. To be honest, it's no more or less efficient than doing it the Windows way. Here's how it works: When you open a program, it stays open until you Cmd-Q it. If you want to keep the window in the mac version of task bar, you simply minimize it. And now here's their logical way of explaining the red x.
If you red X something, you close the window, but not the application because... the next time you open a new window, it will open that much faster, opposed to re opening the entire program again. Sure, it's only a few seconds shaved off its time, but some people are really anal about stuff like this.
- If I want to get straight to my desktop on Windows, I hit the desktop button in the taskbar. Simple. On Mac, I haven't found a way to do this. I have to minimize every window that's open. That's tedious, especially when I have a dozen windows open.
There are more than a few ways to skin this cat, actually:
System preferences>keyboard And Mouse OR Expose & Spaces. In both of these preference areas, are ways in which you can customize functions such as what you're asking to do. Sure, I understand... just mousing to the system tray and clicking on 'Desktop' is simple and to the point, but we do have to remember, this isn't Windows.
From within Keyboard shortcuts, there is the shortcut string for the Desktop. It's F11. However, I have my F11 key default for the system volume. I can of course hold down another key (fn) in conjunction with the F keys, which will then activate the special features shown on the keys, but I prefer it the other way around because I have other ways of getting to the desktop on my MacBook Pro. For me, I use the track pad by swooshing four fingers in an upward motion, and it brings me directly to the desktop. Can't do that in Windows. ;P Or, if I wanted, I could set one of the four corners of my desktop as a hotspot for desktop activation. I could just drag the mouse to any corner I wanted (all four if I wished) and would be on the desktop.
You can also re-configure the pre-defined keyboard shortcuts. Just double click on a specific one, and tap the keys you want bound. F11 is the standard shortcut. Or as said before, fn+F11 if you use the special functions as default like I do. But you can set it to something like Shift+Cmd+F11.. whatever. Just make sure that the new shortcut isn't already set for some other function.
Please take a LOT of time to explore and experiment within system preferences. You won't break anything, or bog any system resources down. Apple dumbed down a lot of things in order to make certain resources available to its end users, with the knowledge that it was safe to do so. And this is the biggest difference between the two OS's. In the end, it may or may not suit your personal tastes. But please give it time. It took me a long while to get used to things, but once I did, I found that I was no longer fixing or fidgeting as I did in Windows (well sometimes, but in a good way), but rather, getting work done.
- This is just personal taste, but on Windows everything looks different. Apps have their own look and feel to them, with different colors and such. On OS X, everything is bland and the same. Same grey ugly title bar thing at the top of the screen. Some people like the unified look, I personally think it's bland and terribly dull. Windows seems to have a lot more flavor to it.
Apps in Widows all feel and look different because they are designed and implemented by third party developers whom don't conform to any standards. This method mainly fails Windows when it comes to finding and fixing bugs which cause either the program or the OS to stall, work slowly or crash. You're right, this has nothing to do with looks, but is related because third party devs design their apps to fit in with Apple's OS architecture in every way possible, in order to maintain stability and such. Yeah I agree that in the looks dept, it may be dull this way, but I'm on my computer to work, not opine over how my overall experience might be lessened because of window spaces looking similar.
However, I'm fairly sure that there are apps out there which could alter the looks of windows. Check into that.
-With Windows, I feel like I have more viewing space of a page or window if I maximize it. With the Mac's Dock, I feel like I'm losing some window real estate. Maximized windows have the doc below it, and a bunch of extra space around the sides of the dock shownig the desktop. Nit picky, but it annoys me.
I WISH and PRAY that Apple would implement a way to automatically hide the main menu bar. I too hate wasting screen real-estate. I also hate not being able to go full screen with certain apps such as Firefox. Some apps ARE able to go full screen though, such as Lightroom, so there's no doubt that other apps do this as well.
As for the dock, there is an auto hide/show dock feature. System preferences once again. Also, you can change the size of the dock with a mouse click and drag(or finger pinch on the trackpad with the Macbooks). I have it set for auto hide/show. No problems there.
(quote]- If I want to scroll around a page, I can middle click the mouse scroll wheel on Windows and move the mouse up or down. On a Mac, doing this brings some sort of app picking program. I can hold down Command then middle click, but that seems annoying to me, like one more tiny extra step.
I'm sure you can program your mouse to behave in the same fashion as it did with Windows. You might have to install the software or drivers though. I can't recall at the moment because my mouse isn't setup for this laptop yet. (It's my second MacBook Pro )
I have to finish in a follow up post. Too many characters for one post
Doug