If you’re in the market for purchasing a text editor for the mac you might want to check out Textmate also. It’s a little cheaper than BBEdit, and is lacking a few of the features you mentioned, like S/FTP integration. It does, however, support regex searching and there is a bundle for it which adds some kind of diff support.
Your didcription of using a mouse made me laugh. I just had a mental image of the mouse sneaking away from you and running off the edge of the table. 
I have two track balls (and I think, 5 other kinds of mice) in a drawer somewhere. I just couldn’t seem to control it properly. So, I guess you can picture me falling off the track ball, unable to balance my own hand. :rolleyes:
Ha! My mighty mouse will let me track upwards, but not scroll down–I’ve blown until I’m blue in the face and bupkus.
I don’t understand half this thread, but I appreciat it nonetheless. I didn’t know that I didn’t need Adobe for my MacBook. I generally like my Mac, but I don’t know how to use it very well, yet. I plan on taking some classes once I have some free time.
I dont’ like that in Safari I have to access the File menu, then click “back” to go back one page–in FF, all I do is click on the green arrow.
I like my Mighty Mouse, except that the damned track ball goes wonky and then comes back for no good reason (it has stayed wonky this time–think I need a new one). I’ve owned my Mac for one year. I have the Mac help plan or whatever it’s called–that’s been good.
I think every system and every computer is going to have some hitch or pet peeve–they’re a lot like cars when you think of them that way.
It’s the worst at work. The desk that I sit at has two monitors, and the dock is vertical against the left edge of the left monitor. The keyboard is on a pull-out tray with a secondary surface that pulls out of that for the mouse (kinda like this one ). The mouse surface tends to creep as I’m working, becoming narrower and narrower as it slides itself back into the keyboard tray. So now here is the situation: narrower than normal already-small mousing surface. I grab a tif file off the desktop on the right side of the right monitor and begin dragging it over to the Photoshop icon. Or, the trash. Anyway I have to get all the way across two monitors and over half the time I run out of mouse surface before I get there. Even sliding the tray back out all the way doesn’t always give me enough extra to make it across, so I have to go back, position the mouse at the veeeery far right edge, try again… headdesk
You know that if it’s a optical mouse, you can just keep the mouse button down and lift the mouse back to the other side. In fact, with the optical mouse, it doesn’t even have to touch the desk, as long as it’s close.
:eek: Go to View -> Show Address Bar. That should fix your problem. If not, check out View -> Customize address bar, and that has the back and forward buttons if for some reason they are not hanging out on the address bar already.
Also there are hot keys for going back and forward but I can never be bothered. You can look them up if that’s your bag.
One annoyance I had with Safari is that it isn’t as easy to find extensions for it as for FireFox. The one single most import extension I use in FF is Adblock – it is necessary in order to retain my sanity. I finally ended up buying a thing called Pith Helmet for Safari that does the same thing (and it does it very well). Now that I have the crap filter on, I enjoy using Safari.
I love my Mighty Mouse – especially because it’s a Bluetooth device and all I need to do is switch it on and it works, with no dongles or anything. The “squeeze the sides” button is kind of hard to activate, so I really don’t use it.
The roller is so much better than other mice I have used, when it doesn’t have grit in it. Fortunately, I haven’t had serious problems with mine yet.
I agree about the annoyances – they exist everywhere, and if someone had posted a Windows thread, I would have come up with an equally lengthy gripe list about Windows.
My biggest peeve with my Mac - the keyboard navigating. I’m used to ctrl + shift + arrow keys to select multiple things, ctrl + arrows to move around, ctrl + home, end, page up or down, etc. My Mac keyboard has almost none of this functionality.
Dashboard is useless.
Excel and Word for Mac were a big waste of money. They run so SLOOOOOOOOWLY on my shiny, fast new-ish Mac, and I don’t have the same functionality in them that I was used to in their native versions. What do you mean I can’t control select to select lines that aren’t adjacent? That’s pretty basic to Excel. And don’t pop everything out of being hidden if I select things that include hidden lines. You hide it until I tell you it’s un-hid - I AM THE GOD HERE!!! ( )
And my pictures are being organized in some way that makes no sense to me at all. I’m starting to get a grip on how to organize those - I’ll have to spend an afternoon with all the various photo applications and get everything straightened out some day.
Problem is there is no “button” to speak of, it’s one of those ones where the whole mouse is the button, so by lifting the mouse off the table, you unclick the button.
I had that problem and I poked around on the Mac support site and the discussion boards; I don’t remember where I found it, but get a damp cloth, turn the mouse over and use the cloth to roll the ball until it starts functioning again. I have a bad habit of eating at the computer, and this gets the grit back out of the tracball.
Heh. I had to reread that–my first thought was “huh? Eating at the computer gets the grit out of the mouse??”
After being pretty much a life-long Windows user, I prefer OS X in every single way to XP except for one thing:
In XP, if you have a folder of images, you can just double-click to open the first image in whatever XP’s image preview program is (Image & Fax Viewer or something) and then use the arrow keys to switch to whatever other image files are available to preview in that directory.
In OS X, you have to highlight all the pictures you want to open in Preview to scroll through them.
That’s a pain in my ass, but, other than that, OS X is a dream.
Sure it does. Slightly different keys. Option-Shift-Arrowkeys to select multiple things, Option-Shift to move insertion point (usually from one word to another), Command-Arrowkeys to move insertion point (left-right arrowkeys to front or end of line, up/down arrowkeys to go to top or bottom of document or paragraph depending on app).
We had it first. If you don’t like the fact that the keystrokes aren’t identical, blame johnny-come-lately Windows for deviating from the standard practice.
Ditch infantile iPhoto and Preview, and install GraphicConverter. Right-click any folder full of images, go to the GraphicConverter contextual menu item, submenu “Show in Browser” or “Show in SlideShow” depending on whether you want to select which pic from a raster of thumbnails to show next or just have it proceed through all the pix in the folder.
Edit of my reply to featherlou (sorry, waited too long to be able to edit the original):
Sure it does. Slightly different keys. Option-Arrowkeys to move insertion point (left-right = from one word to another; up/down = start or end of paragraph), Command-Arrowkeys to move insertion point (left-right arrowkeys to front or end of line, up/down arrowkeys to go to top or bottom of document or paragraph depending on app). Add Shift to any of the above to select instead of just move.
We had it first. If you don’t like the fact that the keystrokes aren’t identical, blame johnny-come-lately Windows for deviating from the standard practice.
I don’t use iPhoto (I use Aperture), but I’ll have a look at GraphicConverter. The thing I like about XP is I could click on a photo in the desktop, and then right arrow through that level without having to select a folder specifically. Will GraphicConverter work on folders with mixed content? Or do they have to be full of graphics.
There was one more annoyance with OS X I just thought of: Flash card readers are not hot swappable. With XP, I just plug in and out the CF cards without having to dismount or anythign. With OS X, if I try this, I get a big red stop sign saying I have to “Eject” the media properly. First time I did this, I screwed up the formatting on a CF card from a paying job. Luckily, I just had to purchase some Flash recovery software to get it back, but still, it was quite the annoyance.
Seconded.
Well, GraphicConverter is now on my list of Top Ten Things to Download After Getting My New Computer, along with OpenOffice, Firefox, NVU (or a better freeware HTML exitor and site manager, and a bunch I haven’t thought of. 
WOOHOO! Once I learn all these, I will be a maestro on the keyboard again! (You’d think after typing for a living for over 10 years, at some point I’d stop making typos, but no, not so much).
The biggest problems I’ve had on my two year old iBook have been related to the case itself. I’ve tripped over the cord so many times that the power input (the piece that connects the cord to the laptop) is now badly bent out of shape, which makes plugging it in difficult. I know that the new ones have the magnetic cord, which should be better.
Also, the screen does not seem to fit nicely in its case. When I open the iBook, I can almost feel it struggling to open, and there is a small crack between the screen and its case. I love the OS but I feel like for the money I paid the package should have been a bit sturdier.