People who don’t use keyboard shortcuts.
I typically have 5-8 programs open at once, and yet I still think ALT+TAB (multiple times as neeeded) beats the pants off of even a single click in the Taskbar. :shrug: It’s all in what you’re used to … there’s no right way or wrong way.
Maybe if I were still in graphics or web design, and my hand was on the mouse more often, I would feel different.
Ctrl+Tab in Firefox. May be the same in IE (some of IE’s other tab-related keyboard shortcuts are the same, so . . . )
It is.
Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown, on both a Mac and PC, on FireFox at least. Works in Excel, too.
And of course, multiple tabs means multiple threads, which means answering late after everyone else by time I get here.
Oh, there’s the disconnect. I don’t use the task bar (and the Mac doesn’t even have one). The task bar is a horrid, horrid design whereby everything crowds into a tiny space until the point of uselessness.
Instead, I pick on the single window that I need, because at least a part of it is off to the side where I can get to it. Alt-tabbing doesn’t work when you have multiple documents – you only get to the application and still need to pick the window. In some horrible implementations, Alt-tabbing brings all windows to the front.
At work, I’m all about shortcut keys (Windows). That’s really the one advantage of Windows compared to the Mac, and a feature that I miss on Mac OS X.
Oops. You would hate me then. I learned but I have short fat fingers and I end up with far more typos and it takes longer to correct said typos than it is for me using the hunt and peck method.
And actually I hate people who comment on my lack of typing skills and then proceed to show me the correct way to type and end up wearing out my backspace key correcting all of their mistakes showing me the correct way to type.
I feel better now. 
Interestingly, Alt-Tabbing DOES work in Windows in exactly that scenario.
EDIT: you know what, though – even when I was working full-time on Macs (college, and the 6-7 years afterwards doing graphic art), I still never liked having multiple windows overlapping and having to click thin edges and all that. I closed/opened files a ton, and just kept most things at full-screen. And I learned all things computing first on a Mac. :shrug:
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Thanks, all, for the tip about CTL+TAB for switching between IE browser tabs. Don’t know how I never learned that on my own given my lurve of keyboard shortcuts … but glad to know about it now 
Doesn’t work in Windows IE, but is hugely helpful in Excel. That’s an Excel shortcut that I once knew, and forgot about somehow. Thanks much! 
If you’re not a stenographer or similar, touch-typing from the home row is totally unnecessary. However, IMHO, using only two index fingers makes practically any word processing incredibly laborious.
My solution? A hybrid – basically weakish touch-typing with six fingers (thumbs and pinkies mostly excluded, with some exceptions). 30-40 WPM is fast enough, thanks
Add me to the list of those who hate screen-touchers. My spouse almost does this, and it drives me absolutely insane every time he does. He wants to show me something, so he moves in with his finger about a millimeter away from the screen to point. “Don’t touch the screen!” I order. Then he gets mad at me: “I’m *not *touching it!” So why the heck do you have to move your finger so close that if something startles you, you’re going to touch it? Just point from an inch or two away and save my peace of mind, dammit!
Other thing I hate is people who don’t put passwords on their wireless routers. Last night during my WoW raid, one of our healers was having problems because her internet was running slow. “People are stealing my wireless!” she told us. Several of us (almost in unison) said “Put a password on your router!” “But I don’t know how!” she wailed. sigh
I think many of the annoyances mentioned in this thread are the result of ignorance. And while everyone must start at the same ignorance level, many people do not progress beyond it.
This is why people use the “X” button to move from one program to another, why they don’t use shortcut keys (what are shortcuts? What’s a “control”?), and why they type a URL in a search box rather than an address line (their address line is invisible and the search engines don’t want you to know about it). I see many long-time users who do not understand the directory structure, cannot copy a file, and cannot perform the most basic windowing tasks like moving or sizing a window, or opening an application without closing another.
And that’s where I depart from these people. The first thing I do when confronted with a new tool, gadget, device or program is:
- See how it compares with my previous knowledge and find out the similarities
- Explore how it works, poke around and see what happens
- Keep my eyes open for alternate and better ways of doing things and listen for tips from others
In other words, I attack the problem rather than letting it attack me. I think that philosophy works.
I once had a boss who refused to right-click. Ever. I never got him to tell me why. Drove me nuts watching him use Microsoft Office.
My current one is people who seem to be trying to be as vague as possible when answering troubleshooting questions. This is problematic when providing tech support over the phone.
Me: What happens when you try to print?
Them: It doesn’t work.
Me: Do you get an error message?
Them: Yes.
Me: What does the error message say?
Them: It doesn’t work.
Me: Do you print by hitting the “Print” icon, or by going to File - Print and choosing your printer from the list?
Them: I’m printing like I always do.
And so on and so on.
Huh? I use Windows, every, single day. The only time alt-tab works the “correct” way is with non-MDI applications. For all of the MDI stuff, you still have to alt-tab to the application, then Ctrl-Tab (some programs) or Ctrl-~ (other programs) to cycle through your documents.
In the corporate world, there are still a LOT of MDI apps out there.
:shrug:
Dunno.
I wholeheartedly disagree. When I’m doing layout work, InDesign fills my entire 24" main screen so I can see two side-by-side pages or zoom in and tweak things easily. Many of my complex spreadsheets fill the entire screen. My email application frequently fills my 19" second monitor. I usually maximize Photoshop, although when I’m working with multiple images, I’ll often tile or overlap those.
Clearly, you have good eyesight. Mine is starting to degrade a bit, and after a long day staring at a computer screen, I want things BIG.
Depends on what kind of work you do. I’m a writer. I really hate it when my typing can’t keep up with the flow of ideas from my brain, and I type 90+ WPM.
A couple of weeks ago I sent my boss a Word file in a Zip file. He opened the email in Outlook, opened the Zip file, then opened the Word file. He then spent several hours editing it, then saved it, and closed it. Then he spent the next hour trying to find it. He called me in a panic. He had opened it directly from the email without saving it first, which causes it to end up in a temp folder used by Outlook for attachments. But he couldn’t find it in that folder. Someone else figured out there was yet another layer, a temp file used to manage the zip file. So he finally found his file, but it has always been my standard procedure to save a file before I open it from an email, for just this reason.
When I was doing contract work at the IRS a couple of years ago an email was sent to a very large mailing list, something like info pertaining to laptops to a list of laptop users. It turned out that many people on the list did not have laptops. So many people replied to All that it did not apply to them. Well, then you have people doing Reply All to tell people not to Reply All. This went on for a week with over 200 messages before it finally died out.
Despite constant reminders, my wife has failed to grasp the concept of quitting the App on our Mac. She just uses the Red X on the Doc window.
So I’ll get on there after she’s been using it and Safari, Word, XL, PPT, Entourage, Preview, iTunes, Quicktime, Flip4Mac, Fish (rolleyes), will all be running with no doc windows.
I also used to work with someone that somehow kept managing to accidentally rename test files on our Network. Her solution was to rename them “OOPS RENAMED - SORRY!” Yeah, that’s really helpful.
Suddenly the MRU can’t find it, File | Open can’t find it, and going to the Finder listed several files all slightly renamed “OOPS - RENAMED” “ACCIDENTALLY RENAMED” “SORRY - RENAMED” to avoid naming conflicts, so you pretty much had to open all of them to find the one you were looking for, and since these were test files attached to bug reports you could easily open one that causes a crash, but not the crash you were assigned.
Note I said “used to.”
No, I have to wear reading glasses these days 
You’re overlooking some of the context provided by my first post, wherein I mentioned people using large monitors at low resolution, i.e. 800x600 on a 19" monitor). The larger monitor wasn’t allowing them to see any more than they were seeing on their old 17" or 15" monitors that they also ran at 800x600 — they were seeing exactly the same thing, only bigger (and more pixelated).
When I work in Photoshop, I of course work with the app in “full screen”, because I want to see as much of my image as possible at once, while being able to keep the image at “actual size” (especially since many filters look different when the image is zoomed in or out).
But for things like browsing the Web or reading e-mail, I don’t need full-screen apps. I stretch my browser and e-mail client windows vertically, simply to reduce the amount of scrolling I need to do. But I don’t stretch them horizontally so much. I mean, trying to read the SDMB with my browser stretched out to 1680 pixels wide just makes for extremely long, hard-to-track lines of text, unless you’re also zooming the text to 18+ points as well. And this posting window doesn’t get any wider when I stretch the browser window (though Safari 3 added a handle to the lower-right corner of text-input boxes so that I can manually make it as big as I want).
Here’s a screenshot to show how I take advantage of my monitor’s size to allow quick and easy access to everything I’m doing.
People who don’t simplify the subject line in emails.
A big part of my job is specification review. Many of our customers send specs for the same projects, and send them to sales with a subject line of “price request”. If there is a spec, Sales fwds it to me for review. Sales has been told approximately six thousand times to CHANGE the subject line to read “RFQ - Project Name - Location”, so I can at least search the inbox for the Name or Location. It takes maybe fifteen/twenty seconds to do this. Apparently no one in Sales has the time :mad:.
I just love getting an email that has “doc.233994.221” as a freakin’ subject. Yeah, *that’s *gonna be helpful :rolleyes:.