simple things

A friend told me yesterday that the root account in OSX is disabled by default. As I'm used to Linux, this seems very bizarre to me. Apparently, it's designed that way so as to not confuse the millions of Apple lemmings for whom a root is only something that might trip them on the race to the cliff where the next gadget is waiting. Anyway, this account can be activated. I don't know how yet, but I'll find out.

The same friend gave me company last night. We had what might not unreasonably be called a geek date, setting up and testing Bluetooth and Bonjour file sharing, hostile desktop take-over, video chat with iChat with our google accounts, and more. All worked flawlessly, once we had deconvoluted the half dozen networks flowing through the air simultaneously.

I was impressed with iChat, which was simple to use and very capable with the camera built into the frame of the screen, though screen sharing was furiously confusing and theater mode suffered from poor image quality. If you use certain distortive effects, you will inevitably make your counterpart burst out laughing. Great for making up after a fight.

Other things are, despite Apple's unrelenting marketing and the lemmings' fervent belief to the contrary, very far from simple. Try resizing windows. Assume your window is in the lower right corner of the screen and you want to extend it to the top left. What's the simplest way of doing this? Apple thinks moving the mouse to the title bar, clicking and moving the window to where you want its top left corner to be, releasing and moving the mouse to the bottom right corner, clicking again and resizing the window to where the bottom right corner was when the whole operation started. Fair enough?

Keyboard shortcuts are an ambiguous matter. They are designed to make you work more efficiently. I love Option-U to get umlauts. Then there are old standards like Apple-S to save, Apple-P to print, stuff like that. Works as long as things don't get too complicated. Under Windows, the only three-key combination in my repertoire is Alt-Ctrl-Delete to bring up the task manager. There are others like Context-W-F, which creates a new folder, something I would love to be able to do quickly but could never be bothered to remember. Apple takes it one step further. There are several four-key combinations like Shift-Command-Option-Esc to force quit the current application or Control-Option-Command-Eject to shut the system down promptly. I might even try to remember these two, but I'd argue all the while that their complexity is a bit excessive.

Lastly, and I present this as a good thing, I've found the combination that emulates the delete key. Press function and backspace simultaneously to get the desired result. Wouldn't having a dedicated key make this a bit simpler? I'm just glad they didn't emulate A by pressing fn B.