I always love when I find a keyboard shortcut alternative to mouse clicking. It means just a little less strain on my right wrist, which at the ripe old age of 24, is starting to feel a little bit of a tingle from the 10 years of mouse wear and tear. It also means I don’t need to use the dreaded mighty mouse (the only Apple product that I hate).

I’ve recently discovered a few very handy text editing shortcuts in OS X that have cut my “mouse time” down dramatically. All of these keyboard shortcuts move the cursor using a combination of COMMAND, CONTROL and the LEFT & RIGHT ARROW keys:

NOTE: If the SHIFT key is pressed with any of these shortcuts, it will highlight text from the current cursor position to where the cursor was moved.

After finding about these simple shortcuts, I wonder how I didn’t know about these earlier.

2 of my favorite shortcuts in Textmate for for code editing are:

I spend a lot of time in stylesheets, so I make use of the block code commenting keyboard shortcut when I’m troubleshooting CSS.

There are a ton more shortcuts I didn’t mention here that I use. For more keyboard shortcut goodness:

• Mac OS X Shortcuts
• Textmate Cheatsheet

What are your favorite shortcuts?

We are all in agreement here, right?

So why are websites forcing me to use their mobile-friendly version of their website? (Amazon and Bank of America, I’m looking at you).

It’s true that the majority of iPhone users may prefer the mobile-friendly version of a website. My point is, my iPhone is capable of seeing the “real” internet without any extra effort on behalf of these companies. So, let it be my choice. Give me the option to switch to a mobile version if I so desire.

Let me decide how I want to experience your website on my iPhone, whether it be the “real” way or the mobile way.

When the first iPhones started rolling out at the end of June, I had no plans to get one right away. After all, I was a Verizon customer still under contract, so not only would I have to pay a hefty $600 for the iPhone itself, I would have to fork out $175 to cancel my Verizon contract. I’d thought I’d wait to hear what problems the early adopters a.k.a. “beta testers” would have with the highly coveted super gadget.

Every 5 minutes I would get a twitter update about how great the iPhone is at this or that.

“Blah blah blah,” I said.

I still had myself convinced not to get one…that was until I held one in my hands. 2 weeks later, I broke down and bought one.

So after playing with it a few days, here is my mini-review of the iPhone:

Things I like:

• Activation was incredibly easy, and there was no “setting up” the iPhone, Address Book, iCal, and Mail synced with the iPhone and I was good to go.
• The user interface is incredibly solid for a 1st gen phone. There’s not much of a learning curve if you are a mac user or any user for that matter.
• The touch screen is very bright and shines right through all fingerprints
• For how small the screen is, I’ve had no major problems with browsing the internet. Zooming in and out, and scrolling side to side with your finger is so much easier than with a mouse.
• After a couple days, I could type faster on the on-screen keyboard than I could on a phone keypad.
• iPhone software updates will come directly from Apple via iTunes. Improvements will come in increments.

Things I Don’t Like:

• No iChat—obviously a business decision as there wouldn’t be much use for text messaging anymore.
• No Feedreader—Yea, I can use Google Reader, but I use RSS for as many things as I possibly can, and you can’t reach password authenticated feeds with google reader.

Obviously the good things by far outweigh my small quibbles. The iPhone is very solid for a first gen device, and it’s only going to get better with time.