Another Leopard Annoyance

March 29, 2008 · 7 Comments

In Tiger, you could cmd-tab and then use the arrow keys to move back and forth between apps. In particular, you could run off the end of the apps and wrap round to the other end of the app list. In Leopard, you can no longer do this. If you're on the first app, you have to arrow right to the last app, you can't just arrow left and wrap around. I had become very used to that so Leopard has broken a fundamental workflow that was almost "muscle memory". Bah! On the plus side, I really like the Leopard UI and I'm getting to like Spaces. I'm hoping I'll love Time Machine (when it finally finishes backing up my 120Gb of stuff). I also took the opportunity to take .Mac for a test drive. Not sure whether I'll spend $100 a year on it but the whole "Back to my Mac" thing seems very cool...

Tags: osx

7 responses so far ↓

1 Joe Rinehart // Mar 29, 2008 at 2:49 AM

Yeah, the wrapping bit really irked me. I've sorta made up for it by getting used to command-tab then using the touchpad to cursor over what I want to shift to.

Time machine is worth the price of the upgrade alone.

Two features I've loved are stacks and spaces. I've got all my dev stuff (Eclipse, Aqua Data, VMWare Fusion, etc.) in a single grid-style stack at the bottom, and it's all set to open upper left. Everything from iWork is in another stack, opening lower-left screen. "Comm" apps (Mail, iCal, iChat) open upper right....and so on. Makes it easy to keep my dock small and keeps each screen focused on its kind of task.
2 rob // Mar 29, 2008 at 7:43 AM

I know its not the same (and you probably already know this), but I think cmd+shift+tab will move you backwards through the list.
3 Sean Corfield // Mar 29, 2008 at 8:38 AM

@Rob, true, and both that and regular cmd+tab will wrap end-to-end but that's not my "muscle memory workflow", unfortunately.
4 sal // Mar 29, 2008 at 11:20 AM

Sean,

so you finally switched your dev(primary) machine over huh? I've still yet to do this... But yes on my laptop I'm loving leopard... I haven't started using stacks yet, but, I'm loving "Quickview" or whatever it's called, I'm also loving the performance improvements in spot light. I've actually un-installed quicksilver due to the upgrade in spotlight...

Do you have CF8 installed? And if so, are you having the same difficulties as many people...? Did you have to compile your apache connector and all that good stuff...? Having to start CF via CLI or via an applescript/automator...?
5 Sean Corfield // Mar 29, 2008 at 1:52 PM

@Sal, yes, I finally gave in - and if it wasn't for having to rebuild /home it would have been pretty smooth. I use QuickSilver for a lot of keyboard-based automation, such as FTP'ing files and navigating websites so Spotlight doesn't come close.

As for ColdFusion 8, I can't comment, other than to say Adobe has publicly stated they are working on an update that will bring full support for Leopard and 64-bit systems...
6 BL // Mar 30, 2008 at 1:01 PM

If you find the default OS X task switcher is too limited the check out Witch : http://www.manytricks.com/witch/ it allows you to cycle through minismised windows, as well as cycling all the way through the list.
7 Sean Corfield // Mar 30, 2008 at 2:05 PM

@BL, looks interesting. Not sure how well it would really work for me since I typically have lots of applications open, each with several windows (and most of my apps are configure for tabbed use rather than separate windows).

Right now I have 23 apps open in six Spaces (and that's not everything I normally use).

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