I have been using my Mac now for quite a while and I have used one at various times throughout my computer beginnings. One thing really irks me though and that is moving the focus on buttons on dialog screens with the keyboard.

On Windows its simple and intuitive to do simply press tab and you can cycle through the buttons.  On a Mac its needlessly complicated on what is generally a vastly more intuitive operating system than Windows. It gets even worse if you own one of the new aluminium keyboards as you have to add the fn function key into the equation.

So for anybody who does not know, or just can’t be bothered to look up the keyboard shortcuts, if you want to cycle through the buttons on a mac you have to enable the option in the keyboard shortcut preferences, here is how to do it:

When you get a dialog box popping up, in this instance, one from firefox, you press control and f7. This will turn on the preferences to enable you to move between buttons with the tab button. If you own one of the new keyboards you will have to press control -> fn-> f7. You only have to do this once by the way.

Now when you press tab you will see the blue shadow appear around the buttons. You would think that you can now just hit enter or return and you will select the highlighted button, well if you thought that you would be wrong, you have to hit the space bar, very intuitive eh!

But never mind at least its simple to move between tabs in Safari, what’s that? it isn’t… aww shit