Does no one use the Home or End key anymore??!!

There is a fatal flaw in the Macbook Pros. Delete, PageUp, PageDown, Home, and End are two-key, key-strokes. How can you just leave off these keys?

Am I the last person on the planet that still uses them?

The worst part of this mistake is that not a single cursed application on OS X uses the same keystrokes to perform those functions. For example:

In Safari, to page down, you use Option+DownArrow. To go the end of the document, you use Cmd+DownArrow.

In XCode, there IS NO shortcut for page down. WTF?

Without Regard for the People Who Care

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, who I have mucho respect for, linked to an article about how the Java support in the lastest version of Mac OS X is terrible. He then makes a very irresponsible statement:
“I fail to see why anyone (other than Java developers themselves) would care.”

The problem with this statement is that you should care. Why? Well, because you are a Mac user. It will take a bit to explain. Humor me.

There are many upon many businesses out there that support the Mac platform ONLY because their Java applications will run on a Mac. But this isn’t the complete reason. Hear me out.

Now, these businesses aren’t Google, Microsoft, or IBM. You probably haven’t heard the names of these businesses, let alone the names of the software they provide. They certainly aren’t household names, and your mom and dad aren’t using their applications. But they do represent a significant base of development energy. These are the guys that make it possible for the little guys and the medium guys to do business.

<Read on…>

Fix Home and End Keys on Mac OS X

Nothing in this world makes less sense then how Apple decided to make Home, End, Page-Up, and Page-Down work.

I’m not sure where, when, and why this started. But on every other modern day operating system, these keys work like this:

- Home -> move the cursor to the beginning of the line
- End -> move the cursor to the end of the line
- Pg-Up -> move the cursor up the length of the viewport
- Pg-Dn -> move the cursor down the length of the viewport

Now I don’t know why I am even repeating these descriptions. As much as the sky is blue and earth is below our feet, everyone knows what these buttons do.

Unless you are on a Mac. <Read on…>

The alternative to Yahoo and Hotmail

For the longest time, I have offered my friends phatness.com email addresses. Everyone wanted one. No one kept one. The problem is that the webmail applications offered by hosting providers have never been able to compete with any of the free webmail providers out there. Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. The closest we ever got was Horde. While it is light years ahead of what was out there, it just didn’t come close to the established providers.

Now, we have our answer. Round Cube is a webmail system that even in its pre-release, blows the doors off of everyone else. I’ve been using it now for a month and find it heavenly. There are a few bugs and missing features but I still use it. That’s how good it is.

jEdit is my savior…?

As with any programmer, I have a set of tools I use on a frequent basis. Coming from a Windows background, you need a powerful text editor for basic tasks. It needs the ability to read files coming in from Unix as well as Windows, hopefully has the capability to run external programs, an easy interface for working with large file sets, and maybe syntax highlighting.

If I’m on a *nix machine and coming in over a terminal, I will be using Vim. When I’m on Windows, I used to use EditPlus. Now, I’m finding myself more and more on different operating systems but working with the same set of files. So I decided to see what was available that was cross platform and didn’t run in a terminal window.

jEdit rose to the top. However, I had a few issues to get past. The first and foremost being the non-native look and feel of a Java Swing application. Not a java application, but a Swing application… Important distinction.

<Read on…>

Burning ISO files on Windows

It seems ridiculous that although Windows will burn cds from within Explorer, it doesn’t know how to handle ISO files. What a crock of shit! You mean I am going to have to pay to burn this ISO of Linux I just downloaded?!

Well, luckily, there is a relatively new and free program released that does one thing only and does it well. ISO Recorder integrates seamlessly with Explorer and doesn’t install any extra crap that you don’t care about.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm