Lack of official standards, lack of certifications (not everywhere thankfully), and the relative youth of software as a profession all lead to a bit of a "will wild west" industry. I don't fault the developers themselves mind you, but it will take time (probably a few decades) for things to settle.
This is one of the things that pisses me off about MacOS. Every other majot OS out there at least offers a good failsafe keyboard navigation built in to each UI component. In a pinch, the keyboard is your friend, at least until your pointing device is back up.
MacOS: lol, sorry, bluetooth settings require a pointing device to add a new one. Keyboard navigation? Sure. It worked up until this part, but we didn't bother to allow the add button to be selectable. Why? Reasons.
It wasn't on the page linked above but on this page [1] at the bottom it reads:
> To quickly turn Full Keyboard Access, Sticky Keys, Slow Keys, or the Accessibility Keyboard on or off using the Accessibility Shortcuts panel, press Option-Command-F5 (or if your Mac or Magic Keyboard has Touch ID, quickly press Touch ID three times).
To your credit, this does indeed work, but I won't retract my point. It's super-kludgy to go through everything like this, and I definitely can't leave it on all the time. I'm spoiled by the innate tab, shift-tab options of other operating systems. Ironically, when I tried to turn on the accessibility feature just through keyboard nav of Settings, I failed to get to the checkbox (there is at least a global Accessibility shortcut...if it's switched on).
I'm at a loss to explain why this particular navigation issue shows up in the Settings app. Other, less critical parts of the OS actually work fine.
Hilariously, I was once trying to install MacOS to a HP university laptop, hackintosh style, and got into a situation where after hours of kernel panics and boot configurations I finally got far enough to see the MacOS install screen on the display!
I did not have working trackpad or usb, but undeterred I continued with keyboard navigation through the install menu, going further and further, partitioning and formatting drives and whatnot, until finally I hit the language selection dropdown, one of the last steps in the install process. This screen, although simple, did not have keyboard accessibility. I tried everything I could but never got the mouse to work, and was stuck at the language select. Frustratingly the screen also played some weird pop music full blast which I never was able to lower the volume of.
I still think somehow they knew, that they were mocking me, knowing that the trackpad would always work on a real mac, and only kids with too much free time would be stuck on the final step of the install process...
Interesting. Did this change in the last decade? I remember MacOS as being very keyboard-friendly out-of-the-box and awesome for automating GUI. But then again, the last MacOS I used was 10.6, around 15 years ago. And I heard automating GUI suffered in recent versions. So they lost on the keyboard-abilities too, I guess.
The worst for me is being able to select the non-default option in an alert window. Sometimes CMD + 'the first letter of the word in the button' works, but that's like a 30% chance. How is there not a standard for that? I'd even accept the arrow keys + Enter at this point.
This is a nice tip! This does not work for MacOS alerts that want you to enter data (like a file name to save), but I will be using this and the other guy's CMD + . (period) tip as much as possible in every other scenario.
This is a great tip that I didn't know about. Thank you. It doesn't work for Numbers, since I need to DELETE not Cancel the file changes, but I'm sure it'll work in a ton of other places.
(Edit: Just tested this in numbers, works fine. In cases where the button isn't correctly tagged as a "delete" button it might not -- in that case, cmd-<first letter of button content> will almost always work.)
Allegedly, for the Mac mouse the reason is so that people can't use it permanently plugged in, because cables are ugly and against "the Apple philosophy".
My cordless beard trimmer doesn’t run when plugged in, so you have to wait for it to charge before using it. When getting ready in the morning, you can’t sit around for an hour waiting for it to charge enough to function.
I mean from an EE perspective it makes some sense, because you save some on circuitry (not like a lot in absolute cost, but your cordless beard trimmer probably doesn't have a lot of margin).
So the real reason is probably just to make it cheaper. (Well maybe not in the Mac case)
Yeah in case of the beard trimmer it's because it uses quite a lot of power so you need a beefy adapter to run it. These often still use NiMH cells and trickle charge with 100mA or so.
For a mouse this is all irrelevant because it uses so little power that it can easily be powered by a regular USB.
Also, many bathrooms don't have sockets anyway. At least not nearby (and cooper is expensive too these days)
Supposedly it's by design. The justification being something along the lines of "you're doing it wrong" if you have to drag the cable around while mousing.
I had a first generation Mac mini, and I was playing around with mouse settings and accidentally changes some setting that basically disabled my mouse. The problem was the button or control to change it back didn't work via keyboard. I eventually recovered but came very close to wiping the machine.
It's not ALL bad, when I recently replaced my 2012 MacBook Pro with a 2024 Air M3, I was pleased to see that Apple FINALLY allows tabbing in system pop menus for things like Save, Delete, Close and selecting those options with the Space bar. Not sure when that was added as default behaviour, but I always found this frustrating coming from Windows. The interesting thing is that precisely one app I used on the 2012 MBP - Ableton Live Digital Audio Workstation - always allowed keying through popups flawlessly - so the underlying capability was there.
I wonder if VoiceControl can be turned on without a mouse, and then one might be able to use VoiceControl to add a pointing device without currently having any pointing device.
I’ve only tried VoiceControl very very briefly and it was a bit difficult to get it to do what I meant that it should do, I seem to remember. But might be worth trying it a bit more.
I will piggy-back on this and ask similarly for how to get gud at proofs. My math is OK, by my ability to perform proofs is barely passable. I don't know what I did wrong on college in the related courses, but I would love to rectify it at some point in my life.
Scale is really where things start. Small communities can be taken care of, and frankly they tend to be more fun. Big ones go off the rails quick as more things have to be automated and delegated.
100% agreed on small communities being more fun. One of the worst times to moderate the server was when a YouTuber known for troll-y content made a video with his friends. The video was really funny, but his fans kept logging on for MONTHS bringing a similar borderline-trolling energy. It was rough.
Our community EXPLODED after some viral TikToks in March 2020, and for the first time in almost a decade we had to start implementing new guards against bad behavior at scale (automatically muting new accounts that join with VPN's, for example). Luckily that's mostly died down, and only the good-faith folks have stuck around!
What really gets me sometimes is when the dream comes with a 'historical context' that serves as a false memory. For example, dreaming I'm on a ship, and I 'remember' that I've been on it for months.
If you can afford it, and that's your passion, great. But (at least in the states) you are instead a student with a doctorate degree now in play and saddled with a lot of student debt (150k average), I'm not sure it makes sense. That unfortunately is roughly 77% of folks out there (at least as of 2020).
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