What NOT to do on a Mac with the Notes 8.5 beta
My SearchDomino story today has had a lot of hits and a lot of comments. As such, it’s not really a post I’d like to delete, and unfortunately I did just that.
You see, on the Mac, F9 is meant for Expose, a nifty little utility that shows all of your active windows on the screen at once. So, it’s annoying when you are in Notes and you want to refresh, and hit F9 only to show all of your Mac windows instead of actually refreshing. So, I wanted to figure out a way to turn that off. Low and behold, I think I find the right setting under the Keyboard preferences:
So I check that box and think it means that F Keys will act as F1 through F9 like their functions. Normally when you hit those keys in Mac they do their special function, for example F1 dims your screen and F2 brightens it.
Anyway, I checked that and while in Notes I hit F9 and still get Expose. So I’m a little annoyed and decide to do the same with F1 and F2 to see if they brighten and darken the screen. I hit them a couple times to realize that it didn’t actually brighten or darken, but rather deleted my blog entries. And I don’t mean mark them for deletion. They. were. gone.
So, not knowing how it happened (and not really caring,) I just copied all of my deleted entries and comments from the server copy and pasted them back into the local copy. I replicated back and then none of the comments showed up on the site… Arrrgggghhhh.
Got a quick code fix from Declan to re-link all the comments and ran it to save the day. So now after much panic and scrambling, I think everything is back to normal (although some comments may be out of order.) Anyway, Thanks to Dec for saving my ass, and be looking for the Re-Link Comments agent to be included with the next release of Blogsphere!
FYI, I don’t know how or why those keystrokes obliterated stories in Notes. Could it be the 8.5 beta? Something weird with that Mac setting in general? I don’t know, and frankly don’t care to find out again. Just thought you would like to know so you can avoid it too!
February 15, 2008 @ 2:29 am
That’s a nightmare, and I can’t say I’ve seen the F1/F2 issue before, but I just tried on my client (8.5 beta) and indeed pressing F2 does delete a document with no prompt for confirmation!
In terms of the Expose problem, the first thing I always do when setting up a new Mac is to remap the standard F9 Expose key to F10 so that I can use F9 for the purpose God intended… refreshing views in Lotus Notes.