Sleep Spent

I never use Caps Lock. It’s a stupid key, occupying prime real estate on the keyboard. I pretty much agree with the Sun layout, which switches the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys on the left side. (Having said that, I will note that it made switching between my Mac at home and my SunRay at work difficult when I worked at Sun several years ago.)

Anyway, I’m a pretty good typist, so I rarely turn Caps Lock on. It’s only ever by accident. Which is how I noticed this the other day:

How friggin’ SWEET is that?!? Let’s hope this catches on. One of these days, maybe phone support people (shout out to all my Service Desk homies!) will be able to stop asking wheter Caps Lock is on.

My iBook sends current to connected FireWire devices when it’s on, or when it’s asleep and plugged in. When it’s asleep and running on battery power, though, it doesn’t power the FW port.

This is the way it should be. This is great! No worries about killing the battery after leaving an iPod plugged in all night.

I was mentioning this to a friend who worked on the iBook a few years ago, and he said he actually had a hand in implementing this very feature differently on the 12-inch PowerBooks last year. I thought that was pretty neat. :-)

I discovered a few new bits of polish that I just had to share. First of all, it’s no secret that Open panels in Panther have become more like Finder windows. You can choose different views (via Cmd-2/3), you can use all the same shortcuts (Cmd-Shift-H/A/C), and you even have the same sidebar as a Finder window.

But did you know that my favorite little Finder window hack is also available to Open dialogs? That’s right: Cmd-Shift-G opens a sheet that will let you type in a path! It doesn’t appear to be exactly the same thing because, while the Finder allows you to tab-complete folder names and such, the Open panel does not. No worries, however, as this is very useful in and of itself. Say you were reading a webpage (as I was yesterday) and it suggested to you that you might take a look at some documentation installed with the dev tools on your machine (as it did). You could take the time to navigate to the the folder using the Finder, probably switching back and forth from Safari a few times for a long path, select the item and then Cmd-down. But who wants to do all that? From within Safari:

Triple-click the line and copy it
Hit Cmd-Space (You are running LaunchBar, right?)
Type “tex” and hit enter
When TextEdit opens hit Cmd-O
When the Open panel opens hit Cmd-Shift-G
Paste in the path and hit Return
The folder will be switched to and the correct file selected, so just hit Return again

(You could of course just open it with Vim from Terminal. That would be even faster.)

Wow, how fun was that!? Are you ready for another one? When using Cmd-(Shift-)Tab to tool around your list of open applications, did you know you can press Cmd-Q to quit the hilighted app and Cmd-H to hide it? You most certainly can. :-) Thanks to Philip for that awesome tip.

For that matter, I still can’t get over how useful it is to be able to select an item with the mouse cursor, especially when the cursor is dragging something. For some reason I find this more intuitive with the Cmd-Tab bezel than with the Dock. Perhaps it’s because the bezel is in the middle of the screen, and typically larger.

Thank you Apple!

Safari is the best browser on any platform. I am very secure in that statement. That’s why I use it every day.

Two tiny things I love about it:

1. You can type Cmd-Return in the URL bar to open the URL in a new tab. I use this when I chop off the end of a URL to move up a few levels, but want to keep the same page open. I remove the end, type Cmd-Return, Cmd-Shift-Right Arrow, and there I have my new page. The old one is still in place, and I can read them both.
2. The other thing also has to do with the URL bar. If you clear the field and then tab out of the it, it’s repopulated. That’s a smart-a address-a bar!

Of course, I still don’t like the fact that reloading a page where you’ve changed the URL in the URL bar loads the new URL instead, but you can’t win them all. (Apparently Steve himself said it should be this way. As such, it’s not likely to change any time soon.)

I use Macs pretty much exclusively these days, and sometimes I forget just how well thought out and usable the Mac OS is. OS X has gone through its awkward phase, and while there’s still more to do, it is unquestionably at the top of the User Interface heap right now.

An example: Background window manipulation.

I’ve decided to start posting new things that I discover as I’m using Apple’s products; little things that make me glad I use a Mac. The first one is the way iPhoto zooms.

If you any part of a photo selected and then use the zoom slider, iPhoto first crops the photo so the selected area is centered. Then, it proceeds to enlarge the picture, always relative to the center of the selected area. Smart, no?