agreed. however.. when a player isn't online and you want to buddy them, macs tend to have a hard time doing so unless that player is online. I'm not sure if this is a universal problem for macs. but every mac I've got on has had that problem when I played on KGS. However, KGS is the easiest used so I don't use the other go servers out there (mainly because they don't have a way to use it with mac.)

The second biggest issue I run into, after broken copy-paste on the Mac, is that sending chat to a player is very indirect. If I'm not in a game with a player and they're logged on, I have to go to the EGR and then find their name in the hundreds of players logged on. Sometimes it's worse, and they're not a member of the EGR, and I have to add a room to my list.

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Occupy Babel!

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V should work on Mac, no? (I am not a Mac user)

For chatting with a user, if you go to User menu -> Leave message and the person is online, it will open a chat window, no need to go room hunting.

Yup. It's non-standard behavior and not clearly indicated in the app (I've talked to several people who didn't know it was possible to copy-paste in KGS). I'm not sure I have ever used another Mac app that used Ctrl-C instead of Cmd-C.

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Occupy Babel!

Perhaps documenting it better in the help files would be the way to go. As far as I know (once again caveat -- I don't use much Mac, and it's been quite a while since I've programmed any Java) it's a platform independence/Java issue. If I recall correctly, the Mac command button is treated like windows button and any other native menu button (as opposed to the ctrl button, which is pretty much the ctrl button anywhere). I mean, I'm sure there are workarounds out there, but I don't know how simple they are.


[Edit in realtime]-- Actually out of curiousity, I just did a quick google search and found this: http://www.csc.fi/blogs/software/mac-os ... gs-in-java apparently KGS is not the only person suffering from these issues (=

Ctrl+C/Ctrl-V on mac is annoying. You don't really think of copy and paste as application-specific shortcuts - they work the same on the entire system (on Mac, anyway), so the very idea of having them mapped to different keys for one specific application is alien and confusing. And it took me a while to discover that KGS had copy/paste at all, since they're not documented.

In all other apps I copy-paste from muscle memory, without even thinking what keys I press. In KGS I do that, get no result, stop, remember that the shortcuts are different, then actually look at the keyboard to find the rarely used Ctrl key. I would say this is the biggest usability issue on mac right now.

You may not think of copy and paste as application specific, but outside the Mac-user bubble, the rest of the world doesn't think of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V as system specific shortcuts. My muscle memory tells me that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V will copy and paste on any system... a heuristic which only fails on the Mac.

It'd be possible to make copy and paste work with command-c and command-v on mac systems. As someone that uses a Mac often, I'd prefer this. When I want to copy something from another application into the KGS chat window, I use command-c to copy, and control-v to paste into KGS.

That said, since I know that control-c and control-v work on the KGS client, I have no real problem with it. I just always have that split second thought, "oh yeah, I have to use control-c and control-v with this application".



You must not use macs much. If you did, your muscle memory would remember to use the command key in many situations where you would use control on a different OS, such as windows. I often multitask when using KGS, and all other applications that I run on a regular basis use command-c and command-v.

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be immersed

This offtopic is getting out of hand, but here it goes anyway:

Actually, UNIX/Linux style is ctrl+insert and shift+insert, ctrl+c and ctrl+v were recently introduced and there are some applications which do not support it.

ctrl+c and ctrl+v is "Windows way".

Perhaps, and it's possible that "outside the Mac-user bubble" Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts are just fine, but that doesn't change the fact that on the Mac they are a usability bug.

As an analogy, no matter how big a fan of the metric system you might be, it would be strange for a US-based company to require customers to use metric measurements.

Not to go too far into this threadjack, but a serious question for those Mac users --- How many other platform-indepenent java applications do you regularly work with, and do they have "Mac Standard" copy/paste functionality? From what I've seen in my brief search looking into it, the only way to really get Mac copy/paste to work in a GUI is if you rebuild a second look and feel from the ground up, detect the OS, and use the new look and feel if you detect a Mac (alternatively remap the keyboard?). It would appear Ctrl+C /Ctrl+V is not just a Windows thing, it's a Java thing.

I don't use any other Java applications. It's quite possible (but irrelevant) that they're all broken in the same way; I'm just reporting a bug with KGS.

However, you don't need to "rebuild a second look and feel from the ground up" to fix this. Apple describes the fix in this document: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ ... ation.html

I don't think that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is a java thing, because you can perform whatever action you want on whatever keys that you happen to listen to.

It also looks to me that wms has his own look & feel, anyway. At least it doesn't look like a run-of-the-mill swing app, for example (oh no, swing!).

In any case, you can add stuff to the system clipboard and get information from it programmatically, so you could setup whatever keys that you want to trigger such an operation without making a new look & feel, I believe.

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be immersed

- It's possible to adjust the warning time to lower, so that when it starts beeping/blinking you know it's time to make a move.

Ah, I didn't realize. I've only been using Linux for eight years. So perhaps KGS was a little parochial when it started up, but surely by now we can all accept that a variety of Ctrl-* functions are common to both Windows and Linux, whereas the 10% of the market that uses Macs have a different set of expectations.



Well, I've never seen anyone learn to do science with feet, pounds, slugs, and calories, so I'd assume that a huge amount of US-based product design is in metric units. We could say that this represents a usability bug, and that international journals should put out different editions for metric countries and English countries, but in practice being forced to do science in an alien idiom is the price we pay for having an idiosyncratic system of measurment.

Systems introduce conventions that applications then typically conform to. It's the most pronounced with the Mac, where there are really strong conventions, but it's true of every system (even Ubuntu, where I sometimes think that each application randomly shuffles the keyboard shortcuts). Imagine if a Mac user ported their app to Windows/Linux and created a menu bar that stays at the top of the screen.

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Occupy Babel!

That link is mentioned in the link I already posted, however the developer workaround doesn't work if you use Java's built in platform-independent UI components, they use their own keyboard shortcuts directly --



So you could define your own listener, but it would not be able to copy and paste from KGS text boxes.






I believe you are correct that wms made his own look and feel (though it is Swing....it even got featured in Sun's Swing Sightings years ago!), but that's not what the problem is...Using the Mac shortcuts at the look and feel level means you need a second look and feel with the new functionality (as well as the old one), otherwise you just reverse the problem (and windows users will have windows key + C and windows key + V instead of control + C and control + V). In order to get it to work for both systems you would need to have 2 look and feels with the different functionality and call whichever one was desirable for the detected OS. Likewise any changes made to the UI would need to be updated on both.

so.. from what I understand. Is it safe to say that when using a mac, you could use Control C and Control V to copy and paste instead of command? That's something I didn't understand when I first started using a mac so that would explain why I've been confused.

If this is correct, then my problem is solved on that level ^^

but is there a way to fix the buddy thing on a mac? or why is it different on a mac than a normal pc? could someone explain that?

One of my friends on kgs menyioned that one idea for improving kgs is to have an opponents list next to the buddies list. I wanted to throw this out here if anyone liked it enough to think it could be something one could add to kgs

In what way do you think its different?

It seems the same to me.