hoakley February 26, 2022 General, Macs, Technology

Saturday Mac riddles 140

Here are this weekend’s riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: This multilingual stone is the master translator of code.

2: Go in a mini to Lowestoft before driving the whole way to Leeds, and return early.

3: Losing fat for operating on universals.

To help you cross-check your solutions, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

4Comments

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1

markbot2zero on February 27, 2022 at 12:17 am

Dear Howard,

I don’t know if this qualifies for a “riddle,” but —

I just noticed that in the Finder and App dropdown menus, the keyboard equivalents (listed off to the right in the menu) are, well, wrong. And they always have been, since the first Mac.

Take Command C, for example, to copy.

It’s not really Command C, it’s Command c. (A lowercase c.)

If you literally use Command ‘C’, you have to first hold the Shift Key down. But that’s a whole different combination. And it doesn’t copy. I don’t think it does anything.

This appears to be true for all the keyboard command equivalents. Strictly speaking, they should show as lowercase. They’re always uppercase.

OK, I get it, it’s a convention that’s been around since 1/24/84. You don’t hold the Shift Key down when you’re using keyboard shortcuts — unless the Shift Key symbol is explicitly included.

(And when it is included, interestingly enough, it’s always at the beginning of the combination, that is, to the left, as it is on an actual keyboard — or at least on the left hand side of the keyboard. That’s another convention, used by Apple, for example, here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

When multiple keys are part of a combination, they’re listed in the same order as they are on the left side of a keyboard. This is intuitive, and makes sense, most people being right-handed, using their left hand to execute keyboard input and the right to use the mouse or trackpad. I just never noticed the convention as such. I’ve just used it without thinking about it.)

In fact, I’ve just never noticed any of this before. Maybe it’s only a riddle for me.

Would not be the first time.

Best,

-Mark

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- 2
  
  hoakley on February 27, 2022 at 4:05 pm
  
  Thank you. Although I understand exactly where you’re coming from, take a look at the keys on your keyboard. If I were to tell you to press Command and q, you should be baffled, as there’s no key labelled q at all. This is because all the alphabetical keys use capitals, so the shortcut is actually Command and Q, exactly as shown in the menu.
  Of course, it makes no sense that the keyboard keys are named in capitals, rather than lower case characters, but they are, hence the menu shortcuts.
  Howard.
  
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3

markbot2zero on February 27, 2022 at 7:06 pm

Ah, yes, of course — thank you, Howard.

A convention of the QWERTY keyboard, no doubt, and that ain’t going away.

Speaking of baffled, this was triggered for me by a panicked client who somehow got Chrome into Full Screen mode and couldn’t get out, or back to Finder.

Unlike Apple apps, you can’t just hit ‘esc’ in Chrome to get out of Full Screen. Non-Apple apps appear to be idiosyncratic in this regard — perhaps because Apple has never declared a standard behavior? In Firefox, you can hit escape to bail out of Full Screen. And in Firefox, but in no other apps that I’m aware of, SHIFT-COMMAND-F behaves exactly like CONTROL-COMMAND-F.

(That’s when I thought, “Isn’t SHIFT-COMMAND-F actually just COMMAND-CAPITAL F?” And that led me down the rabbit hole.)

In Chrome (a browser I loathe) if trapped in Full Screen you have to either hit CTRL-COMMAND-F (which appears to be an Apple standard Full Screen toggle) or force the cursor to the top of the display so that the menubar (reluctantly) drops down, enabling you to click “View” and “Exit Full Screen,” or click the little green dot.

Neither of these are intuitive, and for many of my older clientele, with arthritic fingers on keyboards and trackpads, they are physically as well as mentally taxing. So Full Screen Mode is Purgatory, if not a circle in Hell. I often shut off all Keyboard Shortcuts for my clients, which are on by default and usually cause a mess. I turn mine off too, but my cat inevitably walks on my keyboard and creates havoc.

I understand that in Monterey — finally — you can opt to have the menubar displayed in Full Screen mode, rather than disappearing as it does in earlier macOS versions. Why this wasn’t baked in from the beginning, and why the interface engineers decided to include it is one of those mysteries that will never be solved.

Thanks for reading. This is theraputic for me.

-Mark

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- 4
  
  hoakley on February 27, 2022 at 10:58 pm
  
  Thank you.
  The lack of support for the Escape key to bring you back from full screen mode is a shortcoming in Chrome, not in macOS or AppKit. I checked with my apps, which use AppKit throughout and do nothing special to deal with full screen mode, and they all support the Escape key for that, without my having to write a single line of code for that feature.
  So it is a standard behaviour, but non-standard apps like Chrome don’t implement those behaviours properly.
  Howard.
  
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