Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. I learned 2 tricks to using Spaces in OS X today that I had not known before. One is that you can use Spaces in conjunction with Expose. When I first switched to using a Mac, Expose was too much for me to learn because I thought it was a lot of features to learn at once, so I disabled the keyboard shortcut to invoke it. When I started using Spaces I mapped Spaces to F13 because I use the function keys F1 through F12 a lot in Windows applications. So today I mapped F14 to Expose, and I can now press F13 followed by F14 to instantly see representations of every window in every Space—nice! The other trick I learned is that you can drag a window's title bar to the edge of a Space, wait about 2 seconds, and you'll be switched into the next Space in that direction. I discovered this on my own when dragging a window and pausing near the edge of the current Space. This discovery was disorienting at first. To someone not familiar with Spaces, it's probably very frustrating. The pause-and-switch feature doesn't work diagonally yet, but that's only a geek's disappointment. Also, this feature doesn't work with windows that have tiny titlebars. (I don't know what you call these tiny-titlebar windows.) e.g., it will work for a Get Info window, but it won't work for a Multiple Item Info window or a Mac Help window. I don't know when Apple introduced those non-standard, tiny-titlebar windows, but I think the way they implemented them is a mistake because I often find myself pressing Command+W thinking that that window will close when instead some other window I didn't want to close will close. Or, nothing will happen if there are no other windows open in the current context. The tiny-titlebar windows can also appear and disappear depending on whether the application has focus or not, but this doesn't happen consistently. For example, a Multiple Item Info window will disappear if you switch from Finder to another application, but a Mac Help window won't. I find them very frustrating. Essentially, Apple created a new kind of window that behaves inconsistently with the behaviors of itself and the regular class of windows. I don't know what a better solution would be, but the current one is not to my liking. More work with Danny's website—lots of wrangling with IE. I gave up trying to fix one particular CSS problem—IE is a headache! More research for offsite personal backup. Carbonite seems to have a Mac beta but you can't sign up for it. Left a message for Wysz, who began using Transport in May, asking him for an update on how that's going. New Year's Eve party at Danny, Drew, and Phil's. sneeper confirmed that what I discovered on December 9 was common—that nothing tells you after you do a full restore with Time Machine that you need to go back to Time Machine preferences and turn it back on when you're sure everything is restored.