Tab Keyboard Navigation - How to make the Mac not suck for power users

Written by Alex

I now present to you the first in an infinite part series of How to make the Mac not suck for power users. This episode is on enabling tab keyboard navigation throughout the system. It’s also my first video posting ever, so give me some slack.

Moving to the Mac (about a month ago when I purchased a new MacBook) has been kinda lame because of the lack of power features and UI elements I’m accustomed to on Windows. I’ve since found ways to overcome a lot of these limitations. Among other things I’ll eschew blog about, I’ll be generating some posts and some videos on How to make the Mac not suck for power users.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Mac OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Tab Keyboard Navigation - How to make the Mac not suck for power users”

  1. Adam Says:
    March 25th, 2008 at 9:24 am

    Wow, here I am a all certified in Mac OS X by Apple and I must ashamedly admit my ignorance to that setting, despite also having the same gripe when switching to the Mac. It really would be nice to have a setting I could switch on to underline the letter for a shortcut key so you know you can press Command+D for don’t save.

  2. Alex Says:
    March 25th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    Yeah, I don’t know if Apple really wants you to know about the feature because (1) it’s off by default and (2) it doesn’t really work well in all apps… for example, you’ll sometimes see artifacts around buttons in certain dialogs so it can be hard to tell which button is highlighted. In addition, some applications/dialogs don’t even support it!

    I guess it’s a problem when you don’t have a feature like this built in from day 1… your development tools, legacy applications, ui guidelines, best practices, etc don’t have it in place. Score one for Windows foresight. :)

    – Alex

  3. Steve Says:
    April 7th, 2008 at 9:16 pm

    This is the single best mac tip I have ever seen since switching to Apple 5 years ago. I’ve always wanted this, and here it was all along! Thanks very much, I’m sharing this with all my friends and family who’ve switched as well, since I’m sure they’ll use the tip! Great work.

  4. Bob Says:
    April 7th, 2008 at 9:32 pm

    Sorry, this is picky, but I am an English Prof- eschew doesn’t mean what you think it does. Hope this comment helps.

  5. Mark Says:
    April 7th, 2008 at 10:07 pm

    Excellent!

    I’ve always been a Mac user & happily used QuicKeys for navigation assistance, but I was frustrated about these issues in OS X too.

    Thanks! Very useful and much appreciated.

    -Mark

  6. Alex Says:
    June 24th, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    Thanks Bob, I guess this is the problem with being dependent on the computer for communication… i.e. spell check and grammar check. I’ll fix my embarrassing proof of an inadequate vocabulary.

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