Macintosh Woes

Posted: January 5, 2011 | | Categories: Miscellaneous

I've been doing a lot of work on the Macintosh lately. My employer gave me a Windows laptop, but when I started doing more mobile development, they gave me a 17” MacBook as well.

What's funny about using the Mac for me is how hard it's been for me. Not because I'm uncomfortable with the Macintosh or the Mac OS - I was an old Macintosh user, I used a Mac before I ever used an IBM PC. No, the issue for me is the keyboard.

When I taught Novell and Lotus Notes classes, my server was always off in the corner of the classroom on a little table. Because of the size of the table, I never had much room for a mouse, so I got very (very, very) used to using the keyboard to get a lot of things accomplished.

On the Macintosh, many of the keys I'm looking for are just missing.

I'm an INSert key guy. Copying is Ctrl-INSert. On the BlackBerry Simulators, you use the INSert key to bring up the BlackBerry menu.

I also miss the End key and the Home key. As I navigate around on a web site or in a word processor, I used those keys to get to the top of a document or to the end of a line.

Also frustrating is the loss of the delete key. In word or in other applications, I'm constantly deleting the word to the right of the cursor using Crtl-Del.

I'm also finding that I have difficulty moving the cursor from word to word in the word processor of choice. I'm so used to using Crtl plus the arrow keys to skip words.  I know you can still do some of these things with corresponding keys on the Mac keyboard, but I find that the implementation of some of these features is inconsistent between applications. Ugh!

I'm excitedly waiting for Henge Docks to release their dock for the Macbook Pro 17” - once that happens, I can plug this thing into my KVM and have a full IBM keyboard to use.  I've been waiting for months and there's been little progress.  Not sure why they're not releasing products.

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