how far have mac's made it into large installations?

Wed Apr 27 16:39:04 PDT 2011

On 4/27/11 2:34 PM, Jeff Younker wrote:
> On Apr 24, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Jim Hickstein wrote:
>> On 2011/04/24 15:44, Steve Acheson wrote:
>>> yeah, and iTerm on OSX does it too.  The problem is that those of us
>>> multi-button mouse X11 weaned users understand efficiency in the UI.
>>> Select in one app, move the mouse, paste.   I constantly forget that FF
>>> doesn't do copy-on-select and end up pasting something else in my target
>>> window.
>> I got over focus-follows-mouse on Mac OS X during Public Beta -- though this thread did remind me of the mental struggle involved; the OP has a point about that. 
> Everyone here talks about focus-follows-mouse as an all-or-nothing interface feature.  OSX is a combination of focus-follows-mouse and click-to-focus.  Actions that modify the contents of a window are click-to-focus, and actions that are non-destructive (e.g. scrolling) are focus-follows-mouse, but the focus-follows-mouse operations don't alter window layering.
>
I guess I'm just used to being able to have my windows layered such that
I can select/copy in one window and move the mouse and paste into
another window without having to click the mouse and force the window to
front.  If you need to cut/paste several lines, it gets annoying have to
bring the windows to the front just to select and then copy and then
find the window you want and then paste, etc.  Especially if I have
multiple windows of a single app open, then sometimes having to pick the
right one (yeah, I know about expose, but that to me is a workaround for
having my windows have to be at the top of the stack to be able to
interact, other than scrolling).  And lets not even bring MS apps on
apple into the discussion (where you have to click on the header bar to
bring it to focus, or it's inability to follow spaces locations, etc).
> I'm actually quite partial to this approach as it lets me read from multiple reference windows while maintaing my primary focus.  It works really well for writing.
>
Yep, I can see that.  If I mostly only needed to type into a single
app/window, it would probably be okay for me.  But I have multiple
emails, multiple browsers with multiple windows with multiple tabs,
multiple iTerm sessions, Previews, CoRD windows, etc.  Perhaps I'm
multi-tasking too much (and as all studies have shown, multi-tasking in
humans is actually just doing a bad job at switching between single-tasks).
> I'm also very happy with with usage of the multi-touch trackpad as the primary input device.  While I found single touch trackpads annoying, you'll have to pry my magic trackpad out of my cold dead hands.
>
Agreed, multi-touch trackpads have almost made up for the lack of 3
buttons, but I'm WAY more efficient with a real 3 button mouse than I am
with the trackpad...  Especially in WoW or Lotro!  :-)
> -jeff