I see that Jeremy Zawodny has switched away from Mac, at least partially. One of his reasons is also my #1 gripe with OS X, the primitive keyboard access to application functions. Windows and modern Linuxes both do a much better job of this than OS X. Apple refuses to worry about this because, they say, we’ve done the research and it shows that you pitiful peasants just think keyboarding is faster, mousing is faster and we can prove it. I personally don’t believe it. When I, for example, want to flip a photo 90° right (or left), it is quicker in PaintShop Pro to hit CTL-R, R (or L), Enter (and if I’m flipping it the same way as last time, I can skip the R/L) than it is in PhotoShop to grab the mouse and go through two levels of cascading menus. Since I persist in believing this, am I a jungle-drumming anti-scientific primitive? Well, once I tried to track down the experimental evidence, only it doesn’t seem to be online, and the one time I found an abstract (this morning I looked again and couldn’t find even that), it said something about measuring the responses of “a variety of users across a variety of operations”. Well, I don’t give a flying flapdoodle about a variety of users and a variety of operations; I care about the things that I do all the time, and by definition, I am an expert at the things I do all the time, and every time Apple makes me reach for the mouse, I swear. I work for a company that would really like me to switch to another desktop [Update: or maybe this], and if I do, this persistent stupidity about keystrokes will probably be the #1 cause. [To all the helpful people who’ve written me about OS X’s “Full Keyboard Access”, thank you, I know about it, compared to the state of the art on Windows and Linux it’s a toy.]
