Hello Mac, Bye Bye Hash Key?
Just a couple of days ago saw the acquiring of my new Intel MacBook. It wasn’t many hours into using my new piece of hardware that I set myself back to work - some web-design and CSS work was in dire need of completion.
Now, there are a few keys that have been moved around on the Mac keyboard compared to my old laptop, and it’s still not unusual for me to have a hunt around the keyboard for a button that I need. The most interesting situation came, however, when it was time to define some CSS elements requiring the компютри втора употребамебелиHash Key.
My usual reflex didn’t insert a #, so my eyes headed south. A minute passed and I scanned every key afore me. No sign of a hash - I must have missed it, so I look again. Nothing! Luckily, a friend of mine has a mac, so knows that the ‘intuitive’ short-cut is infact Alt-3.
However, had I not had that support there, I would’ve been rather aggravated. I hope this saves someone some hair-pulling at a later date!
Otherwise, my experience with the MacBook has been sterling. It runs very smooth, and most interestingly - everything integrates exceptionally well - even integrating with windoze. If I click on Network Shares, the drives appear instantly, and doesn’t freeze my entire PC just to browse these shared folders. PDF’s no longer freeze my browser, and I can use Firefox just to remind me of my old laptop.
More to come at a later date - but my current mission is to program a Dashboard Widget and some Cocoa demos to see what Mac Development is like.
Someone did a poster that was all of the key combinations required to get the various symbols and suchlike on a mac. No idea where it is though, my brief googlings got me nothing.
Comment by Pink — January 14, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
I’ve never had to use the hash key yet. One good key combination that surprisingly many long-term Mac users don’t know about is that you can zoom the entire screen by holding down Ctrl and scrolling.
Do the new MacBooks come with Leopard now?
One app that I feel Mac OS is sorely missing is a quick PDF reader similar to Foxit Reader on Windows. It’s either the heavyweight official Acrobat Reader or Apple’s crap Preview program. I think there were some attempts to develop an OSX version of Foxit Reader but it has never come to much. That would be my request for a Cocoa app.
Comment by James — January 15, 2008 @ 11:57 pm
Ha - That was me! I told you where the mysterious hash key was
That kept me guessing for ages when I needed that (and you do need it a lot when writing CSS). There are various other weird ones such as apple+alt+shift+4 then press space and click to take a screenshot. Genius!
@James - Leopard has quite a decent PDF viewer built in. It’s just preview but they’ve updated it a bit. You can also use quick view when browsing folders and it’ll load up a PDF in about a second which is quite good compared to the time it takes Adobe to open one!
Comment by Ben Dodson — February 27, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
There is a post on a mac4noobs blog containing many of the different key combinations and symbols. http://mac4noobs.blogspot.com/2008/05/missing-keys.html it helped me out.
Comment by Kieran — May 26, 2008 @ 7:59 pm