[Brad]

Well, it looks like a number of these have already been answered. Let's see what is left...

Originally Posted by deuce868 2. What is with the Safari and the fact that you can’t tab into anything but text and textarea boxes.

As Luca said, go to System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts and enable Full Keyboard Access. This is actually the correct behavior, inheriting your system settings instead of a local variable. If you want to tab between everything on the web page and not just form elements, open Safari's preferences -> Advanced and check the "Press Tab to Highlight" option.

Originally Posted by deuce868 Why do programs not actually close when you hit the X? Can you change that setting?

I'll expand on what Luca said. Ready for a rant? Okay, here goes...

Mac applications are designed to work differently than Windows applications. In Windows, the window itself is the document and is the application. If you close the document, you close the application. Poof, gone. On Mac OS, however, the document and the application are logically separated. You can have one application handling several documents, one document, or no documents, one application handling several windows, one window, or no windows. This actually makes better sense than the Windows Way when you think about it.

Here's a Computer Science perspective that might help. I can't immediately remember a design pattern that fits this concept perfectly, but MVC and Observer comes to mind, sort of. On Windows, each window is all of the MVC or both the observer and the subject. When you close a window, you're not only closing the view/observer, but also the model-controller/subject that talks to it. When you destroy an instance of a view/observer, though, it shouldn't destroy the rest! That's precisely what Windows does. On Macs, however, the window is more so just the view/observer. A document or view does not equate to an entire application! An application is an object that processes tasks. A window is a view for some data that belongs to the application. Simple as that. You shouldn't have to re-instantiate and destroy the application object every time a single task starts and completes, especially if the application is capable of doing many different things (like most applications are).

The Mac way actually has a number of benefits besides just being more logically correct. Leaving an app running without a document means you still have access to the menu bar items without having a document open. Take a web browser, for example. Say you want to view your bookmarks. The Windows way means that you have to keep a web page open to get access to this functionality. Why? How does that make sense? The application should be abstracted away from the document views; the former shouldn't require an instance of the latter simply to exist. The Mac way also means for conserving resources. Allowing a single application to handle multiple documents means less memory is needed for multitasking. Remember when Internet Explorer actually offered this as an option, whether to run it as one instance or multiple? Allowing the application to remain active also means not having to wait to reload the whole binary and its components every time you want to do something.

Windows actually tried to implement something like this with MDI. MDI allows you to run an application, you guessed it, without any documents open. You also get a global menu bar (like Mac) instead of one bolted to each of the document windows. Last I recall, Photoshop is an MDI app. Microsoft Office used to be MDI too. Microsoft's MDI implementation was poorly designed and suffers an assortment of UI usability problems, though, and is generally shunned by developers.

Anyhow, that's the long answer (or part of it). The short answer is, no, you cannot change this behavior.

Originally Posted by deuce868 3. BBEdit isn’t that great.

I agree completely.

Originally Posted by deuce868 5. Does Mail support imap labels at all? I can’t seem to find a way to use them but I always use the generic ToDo and Important labels in my Windows mail clients like thunderbird.

Not that I know, but I've never seen anyone use IMAP labels either.

Originally Posted by deuce868 6. Is there a keyboard shortcut for the + button? I see one for minimize.

Unfortunately, no.

Originally Posted by deuce868 7. Can anyone suggest a program that would allow me to program the extra buttons on my MS bluetooth mouse? I managed to get buttons 4/5 to be expose items, but I would also like to set the scroll wheel left/right to min/max functionality.

USB Overdrive is one third-party solution.

Take note of ShadowOfGed's comment that the green button is not maximize! It's "resize" and is supposed to do the following:

If the window does not snugly "fit" the content, resize to fit. Else, restore the previous size of the window.

That's how it's supposed to work. This implementation generally works better, again, with the way Macs are designed. Mac OS strongly encourages multitasking and has pervasive drag-and-drop implemented. If an application is maximized, multitasking and drag-and-drop are seriously hampered because you can't get to anything else since it's all covered by your one giant window.

As Luca said, though, you'll find that as of late there are many applications that lazily use the Windows maximize method or do something even more bizarre. This can no doubt be attributed to the recent influx of Windows and Linux developers to the Mac user base who don't understand the correct conventions. However that may be, you should still keep in mind not to expect the resize button to mazimize content to the screen.