Hacker News Reader

Comment by Semiapies | Hacker News Reader

Talk about multi-touch reminds me of a friend's perennial complaint, "The future of interfaces seems designed to screw me over."

He has a congenital deformity of the arms, but he can type (and is one of those clacky-IBM keyboard fetishists). With his feet, he can use mice and controllers. But multi-touch systems are beyond his ability - while he can pivot and shift to type remarkably quickly, he can't get more than one hand on something at the same time. Worse, each hand is effectively only one digit for him.

And then, there are the folks who don't even have his degree of dexterity.

I can't help thinking that it might be a good thing for general interface designers to consider the implications of disabilities for users of these designs, instead of shrugging that off onto providers of interfaces specifically for the disabled.

View on HN

Without disagreeing, I also don't think it makes sense to discount potentially massive improvements in user interfaces merely because a portion of the population cannot use them.

No, but his problem actually points to this being a problem for anyone.

It becomes a problem when the machine requires all of my dexterity just to accomplish a given task. I dislike all Apple products specifically because they require mouse operations to accomplish things where Linux and MS interfaces tend to have keyboard shortcuts.

In my experience, OSX has much better thought-out keyboard shortcuts than Windows does. A simple example: you'd like to force-kill the focused application. In OSX, you type command-option-esc (one hand), return, return (other hand). I don't know what it is in Vita, but in XP, it would require quite a bit of mousework.

Did you (all of you not just andreyf) seriously manage to degrade the discussion on the GUI into a OSX vs. Windows debate? Or perhaps my expectations are just way too high..

Straw, camel back... sorry

Keep expectations high and the community will self-correct.

Sorry :(

I can think in several counter examples:

In mac os x, - how to show the desktop with a keyboard shortcut ?

- how to maximize/minimize/restore a window with a keyboard shortcut (on windows you can press Alt+spacebar, and then x/n/r) ?

- how to efficiently copy/move files in finder with a keyboard shortcut ?

- how is better thought the fact that when you are in finder and then you press enter, you are going to rename a file? because in order to open/execute on a file you must press command+O...

And finally, the operation you asked can be performed on windows by pressing ctrl+shift+esc, and if you are in the process tab, spelling the first letters of the procname, then press delete and confirm.

"In mac os x, - how to show the desktop with a keyboard shortcut ?"

F11

"- how to maximize/minimize/restore a window with a keyboard shortcut (on windows you can press Alt+spacebar, and then x/n/r) ?"

There is no such thing as maximize in OS X. Minimize is command + m. I'm not sure how to restore with the keyboard.

"- how to efficiently copy/move files in finder with a keyboard shortcut ?"

Command + c is copy and command + v is paste. Command + x is cut, but there are rules governing when one can cut that I don't understand.

You can restore (in Snow Leopard, at least) by activating Expose, using the arrow keys to select the minimized window, and pressing Enter. It's not as simple if you've hidden the application's window set with Command+H, however (I still don't understand the purpose of that shortcut myself.)

It's not that much more complicated to show a hidden app - Ctl+F3 to activate the Dock, use the arrow keys to select the App and hit return.

how is better thought the fact that when you are in finder and then you press enter, you are going to rename a file? because in order to open/execute on a file you must press command+O...

You should be careful of "windows bias" (or whatever, I just made up the term). Just because we do something one way in windows, does not mean its better, just what we are accustomed to.

The folks who say the Macintosh has better short-cuts don't get the fact that in Windows you can do anything with the keyboard, on the Macintosh, there are many things which you cannot do with the keyboard.

Respectfully, it seems like every time I see this comment it's from a Windows power user who's not that familiar with OS X - can you please provide an example?

Application switching - what's the equivalent of alt-tab? Including resizing Restoring a minimizing application.

-- Selecting an arbitrary menu item Arrowing through a menu is key for me. I'm writing from memory but last I recall working on a mac, the menus were strictly mouse only.

-- What's the equivalent of the start button, giving a list of available I can select with the keyboard? I remember not being able to navigate the launch bar with the keyboard, only the mouse. And at that time, I Googled for a while for help on this.

Off the top of my head:

alt-tab == ⌘-tab

Restore == Ctl-F3, arrow key to window in Dock, return

Arbitrary menu item, depends:

Application Menu (left-handside text menus) == Ctl-F2, type enough unique letters to identify the menu (or use arrow keys), return, type enough unique letters to identify the item... repeat till you get to the item you want. If this annoys you, you can implement your own keyboard shortcuts in any native application.

Status Menu (right-handside icon menus) == Ctl-F8, arrows, return.

Equivalent of the start button? Not quite sure what you mean - activate Spotlight ⌘-[Space], type app name perhaps?

I assume you mean Dock when you say launch which is activated by Ctl-F3.

The only one I don't know how to do is fine-grain resizing of a window. If you use OS X though, you'll realise the UI paradigm isn't focused on fine-grained window control though.

A few keys to get to a few menu items really doesn't work since you have to remember them. In windows, you can use the alt key to both arrow through the menu AND to learn the specific hot-keys.

Plus I actually suspect that a many application don't implement the keys you've mentioned since I was definitely at-sea in my efforts to use any keys.

But thanks, I'll have more ammunition the next time I'm stuck Osx-land.

Actually, the keyboard shortcuts do work; I'm pretty comfortable saying that since I use the OS everyday. Also, your suspicions are wrong - every native application implements these shortcut keys.

Don't take this the wrong way, but Windows skills don't translate to other platforms. OS X will feel different, weird and limited if you're not familiar with it as it doesn't do things the way you're used to.

To be honest, I rarely use most of these shortcut keys because I define my own.

A basic example is that it's two keys to start a VPN session on my machine as that's something I do frequently.

A more complicated one is as at the moment I'm doing work on a site that includes screenshots of itself, I have a shortcut key defined that takes a series of screen grabs from different pages in Safari at the appropriate size, converts them to PNG and sticks them in the appropriate folder. Huge time saver.

In short, it seems to me OS X can do anything with a keyboard shortcut that you'd like it to.

Application menu items are searchable with the Help/Search widget, which can be opened with cmd-shift-/.

And if you really want to do fine-grained resizing, just install MercuryMover.

MercuryMover is another $20 add-on.

Lock the computer.

No default. On my computer it was Ctl-F8, Ctl-L which was setup using the built-in Keyboard short configuration tool. Most of the time I just used hot corners though. That said, I no longer work in an environment where I need that kind of functionality so that combination no longer works.

If it's that much at issue, you can configure Mac OS X for full keyboard control as well.

Since XP, when an application froze the window itself would render in spite of the frozen/omitted contents. So when the titlebar got an ending "(not responding)" tag it is easily closed with one click of the close button, then another of "end now" as confirmation.

And there's always alt-f4.

In XP, control-shift-escape (almost the same key combo as OSX) brings up the task manager, where you can kill whatever you want using the keyboard. By default, it comes up with the current application selected, so you can press tab then space to kill it.

As this can all be done with one hand, does XP therefore have better thought-out keyboard shortcuts than OSX? ;)

in XP, I dunno if there is a quick way. But Ctrl+shift+ESC brings up Task Manager. Arrow down to the task you want to kill. Hit the other crazy menu key that MS added to keyboards (the one between the right Alt and Ctrl whatever it's called) and choose how you want to kill the task, hit enter.

Other than the arrowing down bit, it's about the same.

I'd be against that; on the other hand, I don't buy that trying to make an improvement for more people than just the fully-dexterous and ten-fingered means some massive sacrifice.

For that matter, I'm dubious that an interface that needs ten fingers to handle shifting between applications constitutes any massive improvement for anyone.

Right. I use ten fingers to type. Sometimes I don't even use all ten. If I feel like being lazy, I'll type with one hand. Sometimes I scroll my trackball with a single finger while taking a drink of coffee. I don't want all ten of my fingers on an interface at all times.

That is a really good point. The software of any future interface will have to include support for older devices and techniques. But this may perhaps be a good thing because it would motivate the specific design of devices that will be more efficient for the disabled simply because it will no longer be possible for them to use the multi-touch interface.

Have dictation systems (like Dragon) gotten any better at switching between dictation mode and command mode?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com