Articles posted in May, 2005

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): ‘This name is already taken’

Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 • 8:39 am

Launch TextEdit. Create a new document. Hit “Save As…“. Go to a location already containing a folder called “MyFolder“. Click on the “New Folder” button at the bottom of the “Save As” dialog sheet. In the “New Folder” dialog box that opens, type “MyFolder“. Here’s what you get: That’s right. When you type the name […]

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Mail 2.0: What happens when you are composing plain text e-mail messages

Monday, May 9th, 2005 • 11:40 pm

The other day I noted a problem occurring in Mail 2.0 when using Spell Catcher X. Thanks to terrific investigative work by Evan Gross, the developer of Spell Catcher X, we now have a clearer idea of what’s going on… The bottom-line is that the text engine used by Mail 2.0 when composing e-mail messages […]

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EPL 2005: Day 36 (Arsenal 3 – Liverpool 1)

Sunday, May 8th, 2005 • 7:45 am

It was a game of two very different halves. In the first one, after a bit of a slow start, Arsenal beat Liverpool in every area and the visitors were indeed lucky to be only two goals down at the break. Then Benitez substituted a couple of players, but he also must have given the […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Spell Catcher X

Friday, May 6th, 2005 • 4:52 am

Minor problems with Mac OS X’s Input Menu (the optional menu on the right-hand side of the menu bar that can be made visible through a check box in the “International” preference pane) are nothing new, as many long-time Spell Catcher X users could probably confirm. Fortunately, such problems are usually temporary and usually follow […]

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Mail 2.0 and Spell Catcher X

Friday, May 6th, 2005 • 4:44 am

Mac OS X’s Mail application has changed significantly in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). Unfortunately, as is often the case, these changes come at the expense of some new incompatibilities. One such incompatibility is between Mail 2.0 and Spell Catcher X. While most of Spell Catcher X’s features work properly in Mail, there is one […]

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Smart folders: ‘Save As…’ command exists after all

Thursday, May 5th, 2005 • 11:30 pm

Yesterday, I complained about the absence of a “Save As…” command when editing a smart folder’s set of rules. Well, it turns out that there is such a command. It’s just that it’s, well, a hidden feature. When you are editing a smart folder, hold down the Option key and you’ll see the “Save” button […]

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Finder: Cursor has to be on folder icon or name in order to be able to drop item

Thursday, May 5th, 2005 • 6:26 am

This is something that I consider a flaw in Mac OS X’s interface. When you use the Finder’s colour labels to colour files or folders on your hard drive and when you view files or folders with such labels in a Finder window in View as List or View as Columns mode, the colour highlighting […]

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Smart folders: No ‘Save As…’ command

Thursday, May 5th, 2005 • 4:10 am

In Mac OS X 10.4, a smart folder is basically a set of rules saved as a “.savedSearch” document on your hard drive. You would therefore expect the interface for creating and saving smart folders to be similar to the usual Macintosh interface for creating and saving documents in any application. Unfortunately, it isn’t. For […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Folder contents synchronization issues finally solved

Thursday, May 5th, 2005 • 3:51 am

I don’t know how many Mac users have noticed, but in Tiger, the folder contents synchronization issues that plagued previous versions of Mac OS X have finally been solved. In Panther and in previous versions, you would quite often experience the following situation. You are in Microsoft Word and you create a new document and […]

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Champions’ League semi-final, leg 2: PSV Eindhoven 3 – Milan AC 1

Thursday, May 5th, 2005 • 3:37 am

How cruel. Eindhoven did everything right, and then allowed one Milan player to roam freely in their penalty area in the 90th minute and then it was all over. All this hard work destroyed by a single mistake. If you heard the ESPN commentators like I did last night, you probably noticed one of them […]

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Idea for the next generation of computers: automatic backups on a second internal hard drive

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 • 4:23 am

In my experience as a Macintosh technical support person, there are a few recurring patterns. One of the key topics that I have to discuss again and again with my clients is the issue of file backups. There are simply far too many computer users who never back up their files — and then they […]

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Champions’ League semi-final, leg 2: Liverpool 1 – Chelsea 0

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 • 11:55 pm

The funny thing about these Champions’ League games is that, even when the quality of the game is really poor, it is still compelling to watch, simply because of the dramatic tension. This return leg was a prime example. There was hope that we would get at least a half of decent football, like we […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Using raw Spotlight queries to fine-tune file searches

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 • 7:41 am

If you start using Spotlight seriously in Tiger (and you should), then you might soon find that the functionality available through the regular Tiger interface is too limited to meet your needs. For example, you can easily create a smart folder in the Finder that shows all files of type “Microsoft Word document” that were […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Don’t modify a file after attaching it to an e-mail message

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 • 6:52 am

I have just realized something about Mac OS X’s Mail that I wasn’t fully aware of and that has probably caused me to send the wrong version of a number of attachments over the years to my correspondents. I used to be a Eudora user. In Eudora, when you composed a new e-mail message and […]

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iPod photo Camera Connector: Doesn’t work reliably with media readers

Monday, May 2nd, 2005 • 11:52 pm

Apple has managed to screw up once more. When the iPod Camera Connector was announced, I thought it was the perfect solution for me. See, I have a Nikon Coolpix 5000, but its built-in USB jack is broken, so when I want to transfer pictures from my Compact Flash cards, I have no choice but […]

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