I don’t mean to offend…maybe someone here can help me.

I gave up on Windows as our home computer platform for one reason: I got tired of supporting it!!! My wife would say on an almost daily basis, “It’s acting funny again…”

In many ways, it is hard to switch…slightly different shortcuts can cause frustration. But I have been happy with it overall. OS X is VERY stable. Indeed it is as solid as I believed it was for years before it was reasonable to switch.

But one thing really annoys me!!! OS X and Windows are not very customizable in terms of the basic elements of the user interface. In the past, overcoming this might have caused serious resource problems, but not today. Maybe I’m just a geek who used Blackbox for Windows for awhile and loved it! I don’t understand why that cool tiny piece of software has such a small following.

I think the current interfaces you get “standard” are fine for most everyday users. But for me, I wish I could access everything, and I mean everything (within reason) from a single context menu (on the desktop). And you should be able to access things however you want….everyone should. It should be as flexible as possible. I’ve been searching for such a thing for OS X with little success. Any insights?

I’m just anticipating something here…..I do use Quicksilver in OS X. :)

I agree… now that I use an iMac at work every day, there are some things about the UI that surprised me. I thought it would be easy to add my own custom actions to any right-click menu, for example. And many dialogs don’t respond to the Escape key as a way to back out of the dialog. Plus, I find the using the mouse a requirement for navigating message boxes and dialogs, as many of them don’t have a way to use the keyboard to cycle through the various options, etc. It doesn’t even come with a simple graphics editing program (a la Paint on Windows).

These are just odd suprises for what is otherwise a feature-packed OS.

Oh, here we go with the “Mac doesn’t have Paint” again… :)

You know what I’m going to say already but… I love Quicksilver. I really can do pretty much anything I can think of with just a few keystrokes, it’s free, it’s customizable, and it learns how you work. And you can use it much like a Linux-style context menu too… invoke it and use the left/right arrow keys to navigate your directory structure.

I think I need to explore Quicksilver deeper. :)

As Jeff said, OS X is “feature-packed” and impressive, but it is missing some goodies. I hope Leopard makes a big leap in this area.

I guess my hope in the next 5 to 10 years is that customizable user interfaces will become standard. I’m not even suggesting that Apple or Microsoft make it easy for end users to do; they could simply provide an interface for developers. More small companies; more work for developers :). I hope Apple leads the way on it; I doubt Microsoft will.

I did some poking around the free/cheap image editing for Mac universe last night, and Seashore looks promising for light image tasks. Haven’t given it a heavy workout yet.

Mike, yeah, I poked around with Seashore when I first started on Mac. It’s useful for, as you say, light tasks.

@sam- Check out iusethis.com. http://osx.iusethis.com/search?q=contextual

@Jeff- Regarding navigating message boxes by keyboard, I think this should work for you: 1. Go into System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts tab > select “All Controls” for full keyboard access in windows and dialogs. One thing that took me awhile to discover was when you want to select your choice in a dialog window, you have to hit spacebar instead of return/enter.

You’ll also probably want to get Witch which lets you switch to a specific application window instead of just the app. I use this because it also opens minimized windows. http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

Thanks Mike!!! OpenMenu X appears to be exactly what I’m looking for; I’m trying it out now.