OSNews

Windows used to be better than Mac with keyboard support, and had the upper hand for a long time. This changed when OS X came out however, and Mac very definitely now has the upper hand especially in recent OS X releases. If you compare Mac's keyboard navigation to that found in Vista and Office 2007 there is absolutely no contest, OS X blows them out of the water. This is coming from someone who uses the keyboard 100% of the time out of necessity. I've yet to see any GUI match the consistency in regards to using the keyboard that OS X now has. Sure, the keys may not work the way you'd expect on other GUIs like windows (page up/page down, for example) but they are consistent throughout. Further, the sheer number of shortcuts in OS X itself is astounding, and first letter navigation works just about everywhere including menus and toolbars. Believe me this does matter if you are using the keyboard 100%. In recent years Windows has become a nightmare to navigate in some areas with the keyboard, and office even worse. Some parts of Vista's interface are downright clumsy and awkward for keyboard users--the new control panel and start menu just to name two. This doesn't mean it is not doable, because it is, but it's very clunky and sometimes horribly slow. Parts of the new control panel, for example, require me to tab through about twenty times to get to the item I want, and there's no shortcut other than switching to classic mode. This is not the best of ideas, as MS has indicated that classic modes are going away, so I do not want to take the easy way out . The devil's in the details, as they say, and OS X has paid very good attention to detail in this area, whereas Microsoft seems to have lost sight of it for the time being.