The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish I'd started using Macs sooner.
It's pretty decent but the fact that I can't type an arbitrary unicode character has been a huge annoyance of mine since I switched from Windows/WSL to Mac.
They have shortcuts for Í, Î, and Ï but not for many commonly used characters like arrows
You can add the "Unicode Hex Input" keyboard layout, which lets you enter BMP characters by holding down Option and entering its code point in hex (similar to the hex entry on Windows). Expanding the Emoji & Symbols pane minitech mentioned also lets you browse by category (e.g. arrows), and you can customise the categories and add a full Unicode character picker (not limited to BMP like the Windows Character Map) there as well.
It's very easy¹ on MacOS to make yourself a custom layout with the characters you commonly use. Personally, I put arrows on ⌥⇧HJKL, vi-style.² (Doing so for Linux is a little more work, as xkb is more complicated and less capable.)
Aside from the solutions other people have mentioned, if you have often-used symbols, you can set up a text replacement in keyboard settings. For instance, I have :x: for the multiplication sign.
Control+Command+Space or Fn+E or Edit > Emoji & Symbols if you know the character’s name. It’s not very convenient for repeated use, but it gets the job done in a pinch.
Yeah it's not great. Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it. Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol
> Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it.
You can remap Fn/Globe directly to it if you want. It's also accessible from the Input menu bar item if you show that.
> Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol
Are you using the expanded Character Viewer window[0], or the default collapsed Emoji & Symbols pane[1]? Because the expanded Character Viewer lets you customise and reorder the categories[2] (though that doesn't affect search), including adding a full Unicode view[3]. And they both default to the search bar when opened (though the Character Viewer opens unfocused for some reason).
This specific key combination is not US keyboard specific.
I like how they managed to group characters that are formally similar by binding them to the same keys.
I appreciate that the designer of the layout clearly attempted to make some kind of mnemonic connection to the degree they could. Makes it easier to discover and remember the key-combos, even without a cheat sheet.
That's c-cedille here, because to write English fluently you need to be able to type French loan words like façade—but not quite so often as someone in Switzerland, probably (especially so in some parts of the country!) so I assume you've got it somewhere even more prominent on your keyboard.
Not a parent, but sharing my experiences as a kid.
GameMaker (https://www.yoyogames.com/get) was my gateway drug to programming. It's an environment for making games that covers everything from programming the game logic, to designing game "rooms", the sprites and sounds in one package.
I was introduced to the software by my father at roughly the age of 9 to 11 and we did the introductory tutorial together. After that, I continued messing around mostly on my own.
What in hindsight turned out to be quite brilliant, was that GameMaker supports both drag-and-drop programming and scripting. I was able to start off by using drag-and-drop, but quickly realized that scripting was the way to go for more complex logic. The combined environment made it a rather smooth transition, as I only had to add the scripting part to an otherwise familiar graphical environment.
It seems like GameMaker is still around, so that can definitely be something to check out. Making games is fun and I remember having great times in the community, too.
The Faroe Islands were part of Norway for 800 years until about 200 years ago. Nordic territorial rivalries continue to exist as friendly banter (for now).
Solving a problem with technology does solve the initial problem, but at the same time it introduces new ones.
There has been a naïve belief that the Internet would be an all-positive force, which it is not. For instance, we used to have a constant lack of information, now there is information overflow. Content consumption used to be synchronous (people watched the same broadcasts, live), now content consumption is asynchronous.
The problem is that our old tools and concepts to navigate the world around us don't work in this new era anymore, not that the development in itself is inherently bad. Real problems have been solved.
Interesting. When I changed my Apple ID region I couldn't do it without canceling my subscription first. Just canceling wasn't enough though, as my current subscription period wouldn't end until later. I had to contact customer support to have them terminate my subscription prematurely to switch regions immediately.
After switching regions I also switched back to Spotify and I haven't bothered using it since. I just went back to check in the Apple Music after reading this—surprise surprise, all my playlists and songs are gone too.
Yeah, we had to wait until our Apple Music subscription expired too.
In general the country switching experience seems pretty sub par: if you had just purchased a year long app subscription (I believe some apps can offer that), your options for changing country would either be to forfeit your purchase by calling up to terminate the subscription, or wait an entire year for it to expire...
Some of these aspects are rapidly changing. Since a new player, Jio, entered the telco market a couple of years ago prices on prepaid subscriptions have dropped significantly. All the telcos have be forced to offer cheap monthly packages which easily contain over a gigabyte of data per day plus virtually unlimited calls and texts. This for a mere 2-4$ per month which many people actually can afford. With the unlimited calls to all operators there's no need for dual SIM cards any more. Telcos also offer their own video and music streaming services (such as Jio Music) which are included in the monthly plans, reducing the need to pirate music as storing them locally. With extensive 4G coverage and over a gigabyte of data, per day, there's little need to download everything.
In India, the people who can afford an iPhone typically have pursued higher-level education. With almost all higher-level education being taught in English, iPhone owners will also likely be proficient in English.
Also most people, especially in the cities, who are middle-middle class or richer tend to send their kids to primary and secondary schools taught in english.
Salary levels don't say anything about social mobility. Social mobility is about how easy it is to climb to highly paying jobs such as software engineering for people from underprivileged backgrounds.
There seems to be evidence that Americans overestimate social mobility in the US while Europeans underestimate social mobility in European countries. In practice, European countries also perform better in that regard. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/02/daily-...
I have used the same keyboard, SwiftKey, for the past couple of years. Whenever I write a new word that is unfamiliar to the keyboard it is saved to a personal dictionary. By now, it knows very well what words I use and the autocorrection rarely fails. It is instead quite handy as it corrects my mistypings when writing quickly.
Hyphen -: -
En Dash –: alt -
Em Dash —: alt shift -