Flutterby™! : on the menu 2005-04-14 16:37:05.846756+00

on the menu

2005-04-14 16:37:05.846756+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Mac observation of the moment: I can adapt to most of the quirks of this platform, many of these things are just different, and while I have my preferences I can adapt. The one thing I hate hate hate is the stupid menu bar and focus rules. That whole "gives you an infinitely tall target" thing may have won out when a 9" 512kx384k screen was the rule, but in this day of multiple monitors and two decades of mousing skills, having to go all the freakin' way over to the other screen to do something is beyond annoying. Worse is when I get over to the menu and realize that the app I was reading from didn't have focus. What do the Mac folks who are using those huge displays that have to have two DVI ports to drive them do?

(And what's with Safari's word wrapping in text boxes: Type in a multi-line paragraph, go insert something in the middle, see that line extend and not wrap. How utterly 1981.)

I really wish there was some way to have a second menu bar on my second monitor. (I have two 21" LCDs attached to my G5.) But, if you get all the way over to the main monitor and discover the right app doesn't have focus, just whack Command-Tab to bring up the app switcher window and then click the right app with the mouse.

Dan, you do know that you can move the menu bar to the other monitor, right? As Jerry pointed out, you can't have it on both, but if you're often finding that you'd like it on the other one, it's easy to move.

As for what app has focus, yeah, I also just command-tab. I have one of my trackball buttons set as an application switcher too, but a single command-tab (w/o a mouse click) will almost always get me where I need to be.

As for the Safari problem, I can't recreate that here -- it looks like the rewrapping works just fine OMM.

I like the menu-at-top because I always know exactly where it is, no matter how many monitors I have. Still, I use command key shortcuts most of the time.