Archive of February 2009
Firefox bad, Safari badder?
John Gruber accuses Firefox of being a “Bad Mac App”…
It looks like you can customize menu key shortcuts using the Keyboard Shortcuts panel in System Prefs, but the custom bindings don’t work, and the factory shortcuts continue to apply, even though they no longer appear in the menu bar.
He’s obviously never tried to do the same thing in Safari, where though the custom binding do work, the factory shortcuts also continue to apply, even though they no longer appear in the menu bar. So mostly the same as Firefox. Are we going to see some Safari bashing on Daring Fireball? Unlikely.
The reason I know this bug also exists in Safari is that I had to change the next and previous tab shortcuts to match those of Firefox, namely Cmd+Option+Right/Left and I wanted this to disable the utterly stupid shortcut of Cmd+Shift+Right/Left which everywhere else in the OS and in every other app selects text to either the beginning or the end of a line. For some unknown reason Apple decided to make this switch tabs in Safari, however if your caret is in a text entry field, the address bar, the search bar or you have anything on a page selected then this shortcut goes back to its normal, systemwide behaviour of selecting. The stupidity of this decision is easily demonstrated by hitting Cmd+T to open a new tab, and then trying to switch back to the one you were on using Cmd+Shift+Left. You can’t as the caret is in the address bar of your current window. You now have to reach for a mouse, click somewhere making sure to not accidentally select anything and then hit the shortcut.
Before the comments, I know that you can also use Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab but that combo is differently placed between my Macbook Pro keyboard and my Aluminium wired keyboard. And I know that I can use Cmd+Shift+SquareBrackets but the square brackets are easily missed. My arrow keys are Fitt’s Law compliant, I want to use them to change tabs, Firefox got this right, Safari got it wrong.
So is Apple’s own Safari a “Bad Mac App”™ for suffering the same bug as Firefox and ignoring systemwide shortcut conventions?
05:03 PM | 0 Comments | Tags: safari, firefox, browsers, bugs, shortcuts, daring fireball, apple, bug, stupidAppbeacon UX
This is me attempting to log in to appbeacon.com
This is where I get taken to once I’ve actually managed to log in…
If I’m logging in to a site that is supposed to help me find good apps for the iPhone, I don’t want to read a blog post about server problems. I want to see a list of apps.
When I do eventually find a list of apps, I can’t cmd click on them to open them in new tabs, there’s obtrusive javascript that hijacks my click and loads the new page in the tab that I’m already on. So then I try to leave a comment and this is what I get….
There is just so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start. I’ve already logged in, you know my name and email address yet there’s name and email fields, a “log in to comment” button, a “log in to comment” link and a fucking “post using OpenID” link! I’m already fucking logged in.
11:18 AM | 0 Comments | Tags: appbeacon, ux, shit