Thursday, November 01, 2007

Leopard: CAPS anomaly fixed

UPDATE: It occurred to me that I had installed TypeIt4Me 3.2 this morning ... I feel like a jerk, but perhaps my faux pa will help someone else. A new feature in TypeIt4Me is "No DOuble CAps". Of course I assumed this was after an expansion, not in the typing of the expansion. Alas, it is in the typing, thus it has fuddled up CAPS in every app. Until I turned it off.

So this entry has turned into a TIP - if your attempts to type words in CAPS is failing, and you have TypeIt4Me 3.2 installed, UNcheck the "No DOuble CAps" option. :-)

Old entry below.

I deserve any frustrations at this point that I get from Leopard for being an early adopter. I know better. But I couldn't resist. Like the monkey getting his fist caught in a jar, here am I, caught with weird issues.

Suffice it to say, I've not had a blue-screen crash, but I have seen the Finder ... or some service fall to its knees a few times requiring a reboot. Odd thing here is that "Force Quit" has not worked much. Those apps I try to FQ kind of look at me and say "yeah, so what?" turn and ignore me.

The real fly in the ointment right now, as odd as this may seem, is typing and using the shift key. This has become a royal pain in the butt. Why? I'm a fairly speedy typer and make a lot of use of the shift key - not just at the beginning of sentences or when typing proper names, but when typing abbreviations like "PDF' (which I suppose is proper), or "GPS", or to CAP a word for emphasis.

In Tiger, and in XP, and in Vista, and in every other OS, and on every typewriter I know of, when you hold down the shift key, every letter you type will be in CAPS until you let go (assuming you've not pressed the CAPS LOCK key).

But not in Leopard. I only get the first letter in Caps ... if I hold shift down (like now) to type "GPS" I get "Gps" - you see, only the G is in CAPs.

So I figure letting go of Shift for the next letter, then quickly pressing before I type it will give me a capital P... but no. It is still lower case. Repeating that will sometimes give me a capital "P".

Same thing goes with punctuation. I type two quotes in a row and I get "' - not always, but enough that my typing speed is no longer in the 80+ wpm range.

I've looked at the keyboard prefs, and anywhere else I can think of, but I come up zeros.

Is anyone else having this problem? Occurs on my system in every single app - even here in Firefox as I write this entry. Happens in text input dialog boxes from AppleScript, you name it, it happens.

Apple cannot release a 10.5.x upgrade fast enough in my book.

In case you were wondering, I did an Erase and Install, then selectively restored my data (not using a backup program) as well as selectively copying or installing applications from backup or a new .dmg.