where is my keyboard viewer?

so i'm surfing the web looking for a good bar to host my friend's upcoming birthday party at.

(at which to host? bah, there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition. in fact, the other way to say that "bar to host my friend's upcoming birthday party." changes the meaning substantially, making the bar the host of the party. the at which to host is just flimsy. some talk on this from the times and other smart folks.)

one of her favourites is the bruckner bar in the bronx. so i googled them and checked out their website. some really awesome music started playing! south american north atlantic caribbean sounding or maybe mediterranean yumminess! (if you wanna hear it, its here: brucknerbar.com)

i wanted to know what it was called and to check my hearing of the lyrics, so i googled it - and found it is called "Para Xo" by Moreno Veloso. But the o in Xo has an accent. I can NEVER remember how to type those on my mac. (it should be simple, option-' (the single quote) should bring up a meta-character-modifier waiting for the next vowel to add an / accent to it. the shortcut is inexplicably option-e then the character. á é í ó ú. for the \ accent it is sensibly option-` (upper left keyboard). for ~ tilde, it is option-n (ñ õ). for umlaut its option-u ü ö ï. for circumflex its option-i. îûâ. å is option-a. so these aren't really too intuitive but maybe they speed up typing for heavy users of the accents. i still think the / accent should be on option-'. (currently that makes the æ ae character.) and i don't see what would be wrong with using option-shift-" to meta the umlaut : (or maybe option :) and for circumflex why not option-6?

anyway, its again maybe just getting used to something that is not intuitive.

so i googled "how to type accents on the mac" and got this great website telling me about all kinds of neat things like the keyboard viewer and how to use the shortcut keys to type accented characters and stuff. and how in OS X the keycaps program is gone, replaced by keyboard viewer, and how to bring up the new one and stuff.

so i follow the instructions - system preferences / international / input menu and check the box next to 'show keyboard viewer."

all good - spotlight or searchlight or whatever doesn't recognize "keyboard viewer" but it still got me to system preferences... and typing keyboard viewer into system preferences's (ha!) search box does recognize keyboard viewer, so i'm psyched. but when i get to the intl / input menu, to my surprise there is NO keyboard viewer checkbox!

What?

double take - how could it be missing? back to google. did they take this away in 10.5.1? the article was referring to 10.3.9 so maybe something changed. google here, google there, finally find some dude in italy who fixed this by deleting some files and restarting his mac and stuff. apparently, apple is telling everyone who has this problem that they need to wipe their hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

hello! macs suck!

maybe not - maybe support just sucks, or apple are just unwilling to admit the plethora of common problems the platform has, so they ignore them. i'm sure they will try to fix this stuff, but, guys, fix your advertising! this is a complex operating system and its got a whole lot going on under the hood. you can paint over it, but it is NOT simple. and definitely NOT more stable than other competing systems. NOT more intuitive, NOT easier to use.

so that kind of pisses me off. they oughta revise their ads to focus on true positives of the mac, like the included software. they risk this kind of backlash. long time mac users are accustomed to problems and know how to work around them and so they aren't bothered by them.

i made the switch looking for all that stuff the ads promised, and i haven't found it yet.

still love the "mag-safe" power adapter though. hate the isight camera with no cover. not crazy about the white epoxy case. gray would've been much better i think.

cheers!