Why does steve jobs hate the keyboard?

Looked I've chimed in many times here telling people to buy a mac over a pc. For the most part, I still think that is probably the best move for most people.

However, for those who like the keyboard:
Why is everything on a mac only accessible via the mouse?!

Ok, you can do stuff without using the mouse. But seriously. Give me a windows box with no mouse. No problem. Give me a mac with no mouse and...uhh...at best it is a pain.

Any other keyboard people out there that know some sort of add on to the mac to make it more keyboard friendly?

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asked on Dec 3, 2008

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I used to be a keyboard person and I guess I still am... sort of. It's getting harder and harder to use the keyboard on Windows. Vista makes it really hard - or maybe I don't know Vista as well. I'm a Windows guy. I'd like to be a cool, Mac person but, well, Windows is just easy because I know it. Maybe now is the time since almost everything I do is a web app now.

#1 - posted on Dec 6, 2008 (12:39 pm)

I agree, Mike. That's one of the primary reasons I still don't have a Mac. I'm so much more productive and less frustrated when I can choose between keyboard and mouse, depending on where my hand is. Macs are great but I really wish they'd change that.

I hope you find some good add-on software that enables keyboard access to everything. The only suggestion I can give you is that I'm pretty sure Safari has a preference to let you use the keyboard to tab through links on web pages. But I realize that's not sufficient--it's just one program.

#2 - posted on Dec 7, 2008 (7:01 pm)

I'm so with you guys. Roy and I had a typing contest way back when. I could have a shortcut-key contest any day ... except not in Office 2007, which has ruined shortcut keys.

#3 - posted on Dec 8, 2008 (6:25 pm)

Ben you are so right about Excel 2007. It is horrible! What was wrong with the shortcuts that they had to make them impossible to use! I guess we just can't win either way.

#4 (reply to #3) - posted on Dec 9, 2008 (1:06 pm)

At some point I was also a keyboard person, especially when I spent ungodly hours coding away at the comp sci lab (yeah, there was a time when VPN-ing into your school was not available :-)

I guess the application that changed all that for me was the browser. You can probably tab your way around any web page, but I think with the newer mice letting you scroll horizontally and vertically it is much easier and faster to find and follow links.

Command line aside, the overall OS graphical environment on Windows and Mac is a lot easier to navigate with a mouse also. From a usability perspective, you would probably agree that when Apple was designing their OS they were not thinking of people having to memorize a large amount of sometimes extremely cryptic keyboard shortcuts.

So, I guess it all boils down to what you want to do, but if you really want to avoid the mouse, you can always use some type of macro recorder utility like QuickKeys (http://www.cesoft.com/download/docs/QuicKeysX3-UserGuide.pdf) and create your own shortcuts.

CTRL+S

#5 - posted on Dec 10, 2008 (8:42 am)