Thursday, September 21, 2006

Lost Time

I'm learning more about my Mac by the minute. Actually, this particular lesson is one I had learned before and had forgotten, so I'm posting here so the next time I forget, I can come here and not spend three hours trying to "fix" my "problem".

You see in the image I've posted how the Documents folder has a thick, black border around it? For three hours this morning, that thick, black border appeared around every selected widget in every native Mac application running. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to turn it off. I even tried to use my favorite search engine to help me, but I couldn't figure out the magic combination of key words which would solve my problem. I tried things like "Mac border," "Mac highlight", "Mac assistive," but I never found anything that made any sense. I even tried reading the help manual (hey, I was desperate), but didn't see anything that looked right.

Know what it ended up being? You long-term Mac people probably already know.

It was the Mac's VoiceOver utility, which I had accidently turned on (Command-F5, for anyone who wants to know). I repeatedly missed finding this in the documentation and in my search results because I couldn't figure out why voice assistance technology would be drawing border boxed around widgets, but there you have it. Mystery solved, and I can go about my day now...

1 comment:

Darrin said...

yeah.. that's bizarre. after being in pc world for so long, mac's are just foreign to me. I still don't know why when I install firefox it shows up as a hard drive. i did manage to find out how to open up the CD tray on a G5 without having the special keyboard. That was fun.