Windows to Mac tips part 3: switching between apps

If you're used to alt-tab on Windows, then you can use cmd-tab on MacOSX to switch between applications. Note that Windows switches between all open windows for each application, whereas the Mac only switches between applications. If you wish to switch between windows within one application then you need cmd-backquote (cmd-`) although I've found that this doesn't work in all apps.

There are more MacOSX keyboard shortcuts on the Apple support site.

The music of my childhood

Read about Tony Hart who died at the weekend and listen to The Gallery on Vision On music (aka Left Bank Two by the Noveltones)

Review of Office 2007 contextual spelling checker

It's worth having a read of Thierry Fontenelle's commentary on Graeme Hirst's review of Office 2007 contextual spelling 

checker to see what the trade off between precision and recall means for users of a word processor.

Developing your alter-ego online

I spotted this in a strange place, but Computer Shopper report that "psychologists have carried out studies that suggest that people are using social networking websites to develop an alternate identity, and are gradually growing into the personas they create. They explained that social networking sites are beginning to serve as a self-development tool for young people discovering their own identities."

From this I found a link to the papers from the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA, for the academic reports behind the news.

BBC News: Pupils can beat safe net filters

According to Ben Geoghegan: Pupils are using special websites to hack out of their school computer network while in the classroom. They then access social networking sites and even hardcore pornography.

BBC News: School computer firewall fears

There is concern some schools are not doing enough to stop students accessing unsuitable websites.

Settlement of the lawsuit against Google for its Book Search program

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities blog reports his first impressions of the Google Books Settlement. The agreement focusses on in-copyright but out-of-print books and on access to the Google Books collection via libraries ...

The Text Technologies blog focusses more on the authors' side of things ...