Apple has stricter rules about how application interfaces should work, so keyboard shortcuts tend to be a lot more consistent across applications, which makes them a lot more feasible and useful to learn. So, DO IT, you won’t regret it

There are many lists of keyboard shortcuts around on the web, but they contain both useful and useless ones, and since I know you are eager to get started, so I’ll give you only the essential ones and how they are used.

(I use weird characters in this post that may or may not show up unless you’re on a Mac.)

Here’s a quick overview overview over the symbols used for the most interesting keys on the keyboard:

Applications are not windows

Unlike Windows and Linux, OS X differentiates clearly between applications and windows; they are shown differently in the Dock, and you navigate between them in different ways.

Starting and stopping applications

The Dock shows a list of icons representing applications, folder shortcuts, and minimized windows. Any application running will show up in the Dock, but you can also set some frequently used applications to always show up there. It is important to note that differently from Windows and Linux application icons represents applications, and can show up whether the application is running or not; running applications are denoted by having a little light showing up below or to the side of the icon (depending on where your Dock is).

You can click on applications to start them or to switch them to the active application. You can click-and-hold (or right-click or ＾-click) to pop up a menu that shows some extra options, including quitting the application. Also hold down the ⌥ key to get the “force quit” option to kill misbehaving applications (it happens).

It’s easy to end up with tons of running applications without knowing about it in OS X, but they do eat up memory and slow down your machine, so I frequently scan for the little lights and quit applications I’m not currently using.

I usually also create a shortcut to the “Applications” folder in the Dock to make it easy to launch any application from the Dock.

Spotlight is a great way to find anything on your machine. I use it mostly as an application launcher. Press ⌘space to open up spotlight and start typing the application name; once the application you’re looking for is the highlighted search result, hit ↩.

Quitting the application is as easy as hitting ⌘Q. If the application is misbehaving you may have to use the Dock to force it to quit (see above).

Navigating between applications, windows, and tabs

To navigate between already running applications hold down ⌘ while pressing ⇥. You can also use the mouse to click on the application icon you want. You’ll find that the most frequently used application is moved to the left, so if you’re switching between two applications it becomes a matter of just hitting ⌘⇥ to switch.

Once you’re in the right application you can hold down ⌘ and press ` to cycle between the windows of the application. Alternatively you can hit the exposé key (same key as F3) to show all open windows of all applications and click on the one you want to go to.

Use ⌘{ and ⌘} to navigate between tabs in an application.

Opening and closing new windows and tabs

In most applications, ⌘N opens new windows and ⌘T opens new tabs.

Hitting ⌘W will close the tab you’re in, or the window you’re in if there are no tabs or this was the last tab.

Unclutter

There are many strategies to keeping your desktop clean in OS X: minimizing windows, using spaces, or hiding applications.

I much prefer hiding all applications that I’m not currently using. Hit ⌘H to hide an application and all its windows. Once you navigate to that application again, it will show itself.

Sometimes hiding all windows of an application is too much; you want to have some windows visible and some hidden. In this case you can minimize the windows you don’t need by hitting ⌘M. Click on the icons of the windows to show them again.

If you really want to focus on work, there are a few other ways to give more space to your application window:

1. Hit ⌘⌥H to hide all but the current application
2. Hit ⌘⌥D to show or hide the Dock
3. Hit the little rounded rectangular icon in the top-right of most windows to show or hide the application toolbar
4. Hit ⌘↩ to go fullscreen with the application, requires installation of Megazoomer
5. Install Spirited Away and watch applications automatically hide themselves when they’re idle

Weird characters

Note: some of these require you to turn on input methods and palettes from the “System Preferences -> International -> Input Method” tab. Keyboard shortcuts for weird characters does depend on the keyboard layout you have chosen; I’m using “US” in the examples below.

Another strength of Mac OS X is that it allows you to easily input many weird characters, even using the US keyboard layout. I use this a lot when I need to type my name with the Norwegian ø. The trick is to use a couple of modifier keys: the ⌥ key sometimes in combination with the ⇧ key. Even better to see which ones are available, turn on the “Show Keyboard Viewer” which will, in real time, show what characters you can expect when you use the modifier keys.

Other easily accessible keys this way are typographic goodies such as em-dash (⌘⌥-), en-dash (⌥-), ellipsis (⌥:), or compose characters with diacritics by prepending: ⌥E for ´, ⌥` for `, ⌥U for ¨, ⌥N for ˜, and ⌥I for ˆ.

Chinese users may be a bit disappointed by the ITABC pinyin input method. In that case you can try the input methods available for download through openvanilla.org. Also note that the keyboard shortcut to switch between input methods is ⌘space which conflicts with the keyboard shortcut for Spotlight (bummer, Apple). I have mine remapped to ⌥space.

If you need some really weird characters, check out “Show Character Palette”. It is an application that allows you to search for characters by name, browse characters by category, and see similar characters. You can also mark your most commonly used weird characters as favorites for easy access.

Other

Here are some other relatively frequently used keyboard shortcuts:

• ⌘S to save documents
• ⌘R to reload documents or pages
• ⌘I to open up dialog box to view/edit detailed information
• ⌘⌥H to hide all applications except the current one
• ⌘+ and ⌘- to increase or decrease font size
• ⌘F to find something, and ⌘G to find the next occurrence
• ⌘⌫ to (permanently) delete something without throwing it into the trash can
• fn⌫ to delete character to the right of cursor
• ⌘1…9 are application specific shortcuts used to jump to different list views (Finder, Address Book), jump to different tabs (Firefox, iTerm, Colloquy, Adium), jump to different mailboxes (Mail), jump to different bookmarks (Safari), or rate items (iPhoto)

Keyboard shortcuts having to do with editing is such a big topic I’m going to cover that in a separate blog post.

Apple has a full list of OS X keyboard shortcuts.

Based on that, here are 22 apps that I actually recommend to other iPhone users, as well as the reasons why I recommend them.

MOST USEFUL

These are the apps I find I use all the time, and they occupy the first two screens on my iPhone:

• Note2Self — An indispensable part of GTD is ubiquitous capture, that is the ability to quickly record down anything as you remember it; get it out of your head so you don’t have to worry about remembering it. You can use a pen an paper, or jot things down in a digital notebook, but none can compare with this: open Note2Self, lift the phone to your ear, say what you need to remember, then lower the phone again. Note2Self wil automatically email you an mp3 of what you said. The whole process takes only a few seconds more than actually saying what you need to say, you can do it with one hand, there’s no need to carry anything but your phone with you, and you won’t have yet-another-inbox to worry about. This is by far my most frequently used app.
• Evernote — The bundled iPhone notepad sucks, so I’ve started using Evernote for recording down reference information and stuff I just need to be able to look up every now and then. It syncs with the Evernote web application, and my Evernote desktop app.
• Things (OmniFocus) — As you’ve seen from the above two apps, I follow GTD, and as such I need a way to manage lists of tasks. Things is just that, and it sync’s (via wifi) with my Things desktop app. I generally keep todo items and shopping list items on Things, and more unstructured project information in Evernote. I also tried OmniFocus, which also has a desktop app that syncs, but it was just too much for me to get my head around. Things is beautifully simple.
• Tweetie (Twitterific, Twinkle) — If you’re into Twitter you will need a good Twitter client. I tried Twitterific and Twinkle, but Tweetie is incredibly compact, clean, and feature complete. It’s an example of great UI design.
  
• WifiTrak (WiFinder) — I am always on the lookout for new hot spots to potentially work from. Previously I used to open my laptop, look for available networks, try them out, discover that although they weren’t encrypted (with WEP or WPA) they had redirection pages in place asking you to pay up to use them. That whole process took a minute or two. Now I just open WifiTrak and it’ll scan all the networks, letting me know which are open, broken, closed, or have URL redirection on them. I also tried WiFinder, but WifiTrak has more features and a cleaner interface.
• 1Password — Gone are the days when you had one username and password to remember. I have more than 250 logins, so there’s just no way for me to remember them all. Most people reuse the same passwords 100s of times, eventually lose it to some phising or security leak, and get their MSN account hacked and used for spam. 1Password remembers all your accounts for you, can log you in automatically when you get to a login form, and can even store other non-login information like credit card stuff, all protected with multiple levels of passwords. I primarily use 1Password’s desktop client, but I frequently have to look up PIN codes etc on the iPhone version, which syncs with the desktop client, of course.
  
• Remote — At home, iTunes on my computer is my music system, and it’s set up to stream (via AirTunes) music to three sets of speaker systems scattered around the apartment. Apple’s Remote software allows me to connect to my computer’s iTunes from the iPhone, saving me a few trips up and down the stairs, or getting up from the bed to turn off the music before going to sleep.
• Instapaper — People send me links to stuff I should read all the time. I used to read them immediately, but that wasn’t good to my productivity at work. Then I started adding them to a “To read” bookmark folder, but I would never look at it. The problem was that in front of the computer I would always have other more important things to do, so I would never get to it. This app works in combination with a bookmarklet and a web service; any link you want to read later you just bookmark, adding it to your “to read” list on the web service, which then downloads it and strips off all graphics, leaving you just the bare bones text, perfectly suitable for reading on the iPhone on the go. I find I’m much more likely to catch up on reading when I have some time to kill.
• Midomi (Shazam) — I’m in a restaurant, or in a shop, and they’re playing some music that I really dig but can’t recognize. Midomi can grab 10 seconds of the music, filters out background noise, analyze it, and determine which song it is. It even lets you buy it from iTunes immediately. For extra fun, try to hum or sing a song to Midmi; it can usually figure it out. Although it’s supposed to do the same, I found Shazam less accurate.
• iChinese — There’s no better way to learn to write Chinese characters than this app! If I had had it while I studied Chinese I estimate I would have learned 2 or 3 times as many characters. Write characters, iChinese will tell you where you got them wrong, even correcting your stroke order.

SHOW OFFS

Although it happens less and less frequently these days, people that haven’t really seen an iPhone before are curious, and since I really enjoy the phone myself, I of course can’t help showing it off These are some of the most unique and fun apps I have:

• Ocarina — Turn the iPhone into a flute-like music instrument called the Ocarina. It has to be seen to be believed. Then, once everyone is oh-ing and ah-ing over this incredibly creative use of the phone, pop open the globe view to see streams of notes emanating from other places on the globe, in (semi) real time! See little lights everyone on the globe where the app has been installed, listen to the best tunes from people in a certain region… you get the point, pretty mind-boggling. See Smule’s youtube video for a great example.
• Bloom — Another great way to create music, this time ambient music, this time in collaboration with Brian Eno. It’s so simple, anyone can do it, and it does show off another iPhone first: multi-touch display. See youtube video.
• Pocket Guitar — While I’m on the go with musical instruments, why not show the iPhone can be a guitar! I never imagined this app. See youtube video.
• iFart — App Store sensation, #1 most selling app for a while. It draws some laughs. See if you can trick someone with the sneak attack fart.
• Sonic Lighter — The first app from Smule is the ultimate lighter app. Very realistic. Launched during the US presidential election, you can pick a red (Obama) or blue (McCain) colored flame for your lighter. This was the first app from Smule with the globe view, but this time the globe view shows red and blue flames around the world representing the flames of Sonic Lighters around the world; based on this it’s clear that the mid-west is the most red, whereas most of the rest of the world is blue. Oh yes, another important tid-bit: the globe view would only be possible with some kind of location-aware/ positioning service, another feature of the iPhone.

MOST FUN GAMES

Although the big game houses have pushed out amazingly feature-complete games such as SimCity, Spore, Monkey Ball, and Brothers in Arms, I never seem to have the 20+ minutes required to really get into those games. Instead, I find myself playing a lot of casual games that are easy to get into and easy to get out of:

• JellyCar — Weird but fun game — drive your squishy car through obstacle courses. My girlfriend loves to see the car spin out of control with the tires getting longer and longer until they fill the screen.
  
• Super Sniper — Great flow and atmosphere in this simple game. Find, aim, fire, find, aim, fire, faster and faster.
• Topple — Quite a polished block building game. Uses multi-touch to rotate pieces, and accelerometer to “cheat” by adjusting gravity. Kind-of an inverse Tetris: build as tall as you can as quickly as you can. Another cool building game with incredible flow is Tower Blox.
• Tap Tap Revenge — Sequel to one of the first iPhone games (Tap Tap Revolution), imagine Dance Dance Revolution but with your fingers. Throw in a simultaneous two-player mode and you have a few minutes of fun.
• Rolando — Very polished cute rolling game, probably inspired by the PSP game, Loco Roco. The sounds and graphics are so cute. See youtube video.
• Sally’s Salon — Similar to Diner Dash but set in a hair salon; serve your customers, make money, and expand your hair dressing franchise all the way to Hollywood. Nicely done game, perhaps most fun for girls though
• Fieldrunners (7 Cities TD, The Creeps, Tap Defense) — A Tower Defense game that is, as you can imagine, incredibly addictive. Most people are absorbed into the game within 2 minutes, and don’t emerge again until 1-2 hours later. There are many other variants of TD in the app store, but I’ve only played the ones listed, and I prefer Fieldrunners (though some friends prefer Tap Defense).

BUNDLED APPS

When looking at apps on the iPhone it’s not quite fair to only look at 3rd party apps from the app store. Here’s a list of the apps that come bundled with the iPhone, sorted by their frequency of use.

• SMS — I belong to the people that prefer to SMS instead of calling, so the SMS app is incredibly important for me. I love the way Apple groups conversations with someone into one scrollable screen, kind-of like what you get when you IM someone. Other than that, it is not a very strong implementation, and though it has the most common features (send to multiple people) there are a few major drawbacks: no cut ‘n paste on the phone, no way to save as drafts, no way to forward messages, and once you hit hundreds of stored messages the app starts slowing down. You can get emoticons / emoji through some 3rd party apps, but I guess this will be turned on by default on iPhones soon. There’s no MMS support, but I never used MMS anyways.
• Contacts and calendars — No phone is complete with an address book, and it’s quite common now for phones to have calendars. Apple’s implementation is very nicely done, and synchronizes with your computer when you sync the phone with it. For a killer feature, however, buy MobileMe and turn on over-the-air syncing; I love the fact that any changes to contacts or calendar items automatically, seamlessly, and quickly propagate between my phone and computer.
  
• Phone — This is a phone, but when I think about it, there are so many other things I use it for, the phone feature itself is far from the most frequently used one. Apple’s implementation is nice, but nothing special. Using the touch display is not not as convenient as phone with buttons when it comes to answering and making calls, nor is it as accurate or easy to do with one hand. That said, it still works great. For extra fun, assign a big photo to contacts and see the photo fill the screen when they call.
• iPod / Podcasts — I am a slow reader, so I’ve found that I can consume more news and stories listening to them instead of reading on the screen or in a book. Today there’s tons of books available from Audible, and the iTunes store has thousands of podcasts on all kinds of topics. I listen to a lot of the TWiT network’s podcasts.
• Clock — The alarm clock wakes me up every day. More convenient than Motorola’s, slightly less convenient than Nokia’s (after you learned the keyboard shortcuts to set it).
• Weather — Extremely quick and beautiful way to check the weather before you put on your hats and gloves.
• Safari - While not fast, web browsing on the iPhone is a pleasure compared to any other phone I’ve seen. Apple has in addition gone through several extra steps to make it possible for websites to create an experience similar to a native iPhone app; website links can be saved to the home screen, icons can be customized, and interfaces can be customized to better take advantage of iPhone features. Most big websites, e.g., facebook, amazon, google, already exist in “iPhone editions”; just surf to them on your browser.
  Mail — I use it when I have to check mail on the go. EDGE/GPRS makes this a bit of a pain, though, and without search it’s practically impossible to find emails for me.
• Google maps — Although GIS information for Beijing is broken/missing, the satellite view works, and when I’ve been traveling google maps have been of great use to verify that the cab driver is taking me the right way, checking distances, for finding things, and getting directions, be them for walking, bus, metro, or driving.
  
• Camera — The camera that comes with the iPhone is crap. I use it only when I have to.
  

That’s it! Welcome any comments!

• django-projectmgr it is a source code repository manager and issue tracking application. It allows threaded discussion of bugs and features, separation of bugs, features and tasks and easy creation of source code repositories for either public or private consumption. (Looks like an alternative to Trac, but in Django.)
• django-supertagging, an interface to the Open Calais service for semantic markup.
• django-massmedia, a multi-media management application. It can create galleries with multiple media types within, allows mass uploads with an archive file, and has a plugin for fckeditor for embedding the objects from a rich text editor.
• django-clickpass, an interface to the clickpass.com OpenID service that allows users to create an account with a Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Hotmail or AIM account.

The source code is released under the permissive Apache License, version 2.0.

(Thanks to Mike for making me aware of this!)

Stevie Ray Vaughan, not as good as you thought:

(APOLOGIES: I’ve decided against making the video public, so the video below will not work unless I share the video with you; just tell me your youtube account and I’ll share it with you.)

This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut

The good:

• It was great to see new Djangoistas, and it made me think there might even be enough interest for a Django user group in Beijing. There’s already a Python User Group in Beijing.

• I personally found it fun to get down-and-dirty with the core Django framework. It’s good to work with a system that has such a complete set of tests and documentation. It has a feeling of quality about it.

• I had never run Django’s test suite, nor had I looked at the their ticket system in detail. I think most people had a similar background. After the sprint I feel the barrier to contribute has been lowered, and I’m sure I’m not alone in contemplating doing some more contribution when I have spare time.

• We did knock out a few tickets.

The bad:

• Our timing was off. At GMT+8 we’re more than 12 hours ahead of Lawrence, KS, where the core developers had gathered. The next time we’ll make sure we start no earlier than the core developers. This time, however, we were massively off time-wise, and this had a couple of implications:

  • We were just getting ready to pick tickets when the Django site’s servers were shut down for routine maintenance, so for 2-3 hours we were struggling to keep active.

  • It wasn’t that clear what the actual status was for many tickets, and what was required to resolve them. With none of the core developers awake there weren’t anyone to ask either, so we were a bit stuck in many cases.

• Our office is in a Hutong (side ally), hard to find on a good day, so we usually ensure people have a phone number they can call for directions. This “detail” somehow slipped my mind until the last minute, so one person wasted a couple of hours looking for the office before giving up.

Overall it was good; we made new friends and had fun with Django and Python, and I’m already looking forward to the next sprint.

If you want to come, please post a comment to this blog and put your name on the Django sprint wiki page under the Beijing section, so that we can gauge how many are coming and keep informed if there are any updates.

(See also Exoweb planet for more information on Exoweb and our office.)

Want to hear and see his stuff?

His unique background makes for some unique songs, very geeky songs, like code monkey and lately Still Alive, the end theme song for the popular game Portal, which the villain artificial intelligence GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) sings. It’s one of the coolest and funniest songs I’ve ever heard. Here’s a really cool and cute remake:

And here’s the original “Portal” end theme, in which GLaDOS writes the lyrics in a terminal, accompanied by ASCII art. Very cool, very funny, and very geeky The portal trailer is also worth a look.

Also funny and catchy is Flickr, which has the problem of being completely non-sensical if you don’t also see the music video at the same time:

Other favorities are Digg the Code, Mandelbrot Set, A Laptop Like You, and Skullcrusher Mountain.

What are your favorite geek songs?