Three very common keyboard function that I use is to copy/paste/cut. For my hands, I found it more comfortable to use the CTRL key instead of the COMMAND (apple) key along with c/v/x. To change the key binding:

create/modify the file: ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

with the following:

/* ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict */
{
"^z" = "undo:";
"^x" = "cut:";
"^v" = "paste:";
"^c" = "copy:";
"^a" = "selectAll:";
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* Home */
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /* End */
"\UF72C" = "pageUp:"; /* PageUp */
"\UF72D" = "pageDown:"; /* PageDown */

}

Applications that uses the Cocoa AppKit text edit objects (i.e. TextEdit). However, not every application will necessarily support this. I noticed that Firefox does not which is very annoying.

For more details, http://xahlee.org/emacs/osx_keybinding.html is very useful.

To swap ctrl and command in Firefox/Thunderbird edit ‘ui.key.accelKey’ to 17 (about:config in Firefox, advance config in Thunderbird). Specifically, you can use one of the following:

17 Control (windows style)
18 Alt (unix style)
224 Meta (Mac OS command).

Download the image here.

Firefox 3.5 is out and since those of us working on the web usually have multiple versions of the browser installed, having an icon with the version number on it makes it easier to identify the instance we’re loading.

This is inspired by http://browserversionicons.com/firefox/

With the icon from Mozilla.

Instructions for running multiple instances of Firefox are here.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358#sunbird

Looking in the contrib directory on mozilla will often show pre-built binaries for different OSs that isn’t listed on the web site.

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.9/contrib/linux-x86_64/

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/calendar/yahoocalendar/sync/sync-05.html

On OSX, I disabled font-smoothing and switched to using the Tahoma font using TinkerTool because they look clearer to my eyes. In order for Firefox to follow the system setting, you have to set gfx.color_management.enabled to ‘true’ in about:config.

I think this setting is for Firefox’s advance color management feature which means it will effect Firefox’s performance a little bit when enabled.

Create a new Firefox profile using the Profile Manager (i.e. ff2):

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager

Then launch Firefox 2 with the new profile:

/Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P ff2 -no-remote

Create an apple script using the Script Editor to have a launch icon:

do shell script “/Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P ff2 -no-remote &> /dev/null &”

Save as “Application Bundle” and check “Run only”.

Some icons with version numbers can be found here: http://browserversionicons.com/

Firefox 3 no longer saves its bookmark to an html file by default so things like Quicksilver can’t index it. To re-enable it, go to about:config, set browser.bookmark.autoExportHtml to true and restart Firefox

IT upgraded my MBP to Leopard so I had to go through the process of reinstalling my apps. It’s a lot simpler to do this on OSX/Unix then on Windows since apps pretty much have to install its settings and user configurations in the /Users/ directories because otherwise they will need write permissions.

However, I did have to reinstall my apps which meant looking for them again. I figure I’ll just list them here so that in the future it’ll save me time.

GeekTools – to display information such as my calendar and notes on the desktop
Firefox 2
Firefox 3
Versioned icons for Firefox
Thunderbird
MacPorts – the joys of UNIX!
Sidenote – unobtrusive notepad
Quicksilver
OpenProj – to be able to read/write to Microsoft Project files.
Adium – multi-protocal IM client
Colloquy – IRC client
VLC – media player
Tinker Tool – exposes hidden settings. I use it to turn off Apple’s anti-aliasing and changing the system fonts
Tahoma (font)
Synergy – Allows using one keyboard to control multiple computers.
Eclipse IDE
Xcode
Flip4Mac

Commercial

Parallels/VMWare Fusion
Microsoft Office
Adobe Photoshop
OmniGraffle

I’ve now had a few more days to use the MacBook and OSX 10.4. The first day was mostly getting familiar with the environment and it wasn’t until the second day that I started to migrate data from my Windows XP notebook.

The migration turned out to be simpler then I expected. Part of the reason is that I tend to use open source applications which are often developed for multi-platforms so the data transfers easily.

For example, you can copy Thunderbird mail, settings and extensions directly from the Windows location (C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\) to it’s OSX equivalent (~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/. The same can be said for Firefox.

Users of GAIM/Pidgin will most likely use Adium on OSX and since they share the same foundation, their IM archive share the same structure so just copy the “logs” directory over.

I then copied over “My Documents” to “~/Documents” where by default it is recognized by Parallel’s XP instance.

All-in-all, getting everything over to the Mac has been pretty easy. I’ve found most of the apps I needed to have an OSX versions although I’ve still not found a good note taking program like Evernote (I’ll give Yojimbo a try). I’m also still trying to understand how to configure the system to give me some of what I’m used to in Windows (such as displaying image thumbnails for graphic files).

Some annoyances with OSX include the sensitivity of the track pad. I tend to use my right hand fingers to move the pointer around, but my left hand stays near the keyboard. The track pad often senses my left hand and gets confused.

The keyboard on the Macbook Pro is pretty good, but I’m more used to where the CTRL (in the case of Macs, the Apple key) so there is some finger gymnastic action. The lack of a second mouse button is also annoying to a Windows/Linux user spoiled by the convenience of it. I’ve always wondered if Apple is just too proud to admit someone else could come up with good interface ideas and that’s why they’ve stuck with the one button mouse.

The biggest annoyance is the screen and font! OSX’s font rendering especially its anti-alias/font smoothing is plain fuzzy to my eyes and the Macbook screen makes it worst when you’re not looking at it from a specific angle. This is a controversial topic as can be seen here and here, so I won’t talk about it much here. A lot of it is personal preference, of course, but I’ve always had a hard time with the softness around some of the anti-alias text. I wish they just soften curves instead of everything. I don’t understand why a solid dash line isn’t just a solid black, for example.

I figured what I can do is just turn off anti-aliasing (Apple calls it font smoothing) or select a different system font. Then I found out that Apple seems to be to headed down the road of less user customization by restricting what fonts the system uses, etc. I read it was to make sure that users don’t confuse the brand by customizing the UI to not look like OSX… I’m not sure if that is true, but I was surprised by the lack of customization available to the user.

My eventual solution was to download a small app called TinkerTool which exposes many of the hidden settings available but not exposed by Apple in the preferences tool. I was able to tell OSX to not use font smoothing for text greater then 12pt, to change the default fonts (not all parts of OSX respects this setting nor do all OSX apps, but so far it’s been ok), and to use the Tahoma font instead of the default OSX font:

TinkerTool > Font Smoothing: “Turn off font smoothing for font sizes 16 pt and smaller”
TinkerTool > Fonts:
System: Tahoma, 13pt
Application: Tahoma, 12pt
Messages: Tahoma, 13pt
Labels: Tahoma, 10pt
Help Tags: Tahoma, 11pt

So now that I got my data over, my most essential apps installed, and the UI is not giving a headache to look at , it’s on to the fun part of customizing the environment to suit my working habits!