Articles posted in June, 2009

Slow Mail application

Monday, June 29th, 2009 • 9:54 am

This one is a bit of a mystery to me. I have been using Mac OS X’s Mail as my e-mail client for many years now, and have slowly but steadily been accumulating an archive of thousands and thousands of e-mail messages in various mailboxes. I am always careful to remove attachments before filing messages […]

More »

Problem with NVIDIA graphics card: Follow-up

Friday, June 19th, 2009 • 11:43 am

Following my post on a recurring problem in Mac OS X 10.5.6/10.5.7 with my Mac Pro’s GeForce 7300 GT graphics card, I got a number of e-mail from readers. I also submitted the problem to Apple via the Bug Reporter page. And a couple of days later, I got an answer from Apple, saying this: […]

More »

Word 2008: Random renumbering of headings

Friday, June 19th, 2009 • 10:22 am

I positively hate Microsoft Word’s automatic numbering features. They have never worked as expected, they are a pain to edit and work with, and they tend to have a mind of their own. Consider the following situation: This is a section of a long document, where I have a heading with an automatic number (or […]

More »

More on full-page zooming in web browsers

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 • 2:56 pm

My blog post about the Full-Page Zoom feature in Safari 4 yesterday was Daring-Fireballed, which I don’t mind, except of course that it brings a higher-than-usual level of scrutiny, which in turns leads to a higher volume of e-mail, some of which intended to highlight perceived flaws in my reasoning or reporting. So I thought […]

More »

Spurious ‘OLE_LINK’ bookmarks in Word: Triggered by pasting as unformatted text

Monday, June 15th, 2009 • 5:09 pm

The last time I wrote about this long-standing bug in Microsoft Word for Mac OS X, I simply mentioned that it was still there in Word 2008, just like it was in Word 2004, and in Word X before it. (My blog does not go that far back!) I am pretty sure that one of […]

More »

Safari 4’s Full-Page Zoom: Impressive

Monday, June 15th, 2009 • 9:36 am

Like many other long-time Mac users, I suspect, when reviewing new pieces of software, I tend to focus on UI issues. They tend to play a big role in my decision to use or not to use a given piece of software. For instance, it might sounds crazy to some, but I can’t bring myself […]

More »

Safari 4 and the blue progress bar: Ignoring the needs of users in low-bandwidth conditions

Friday, June 12th, 2009 • 11:26 am

Ever since the Internet became an integral part of day-to-day computing, Apple has had a history of consistently ignoring the needs of users stuck in low-bandwidth conditions, for whatever reasons. I have been one such user since 1995, first because I was still stuck with a dial-up connection when many users were able to upgrade […]

More »

Mac OS X 10.5.6/7: Bug with NVIDIA graphics driver?

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 • 9:39 am

My three-year-old Mac Pro is equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics card and has two monitors connected to it, a 30″ and a 23″, both Apple models. Recently, I have started experiencing problems that seem to be related to the graphics card. I am not sure exactly when they started, but I strongly […]

More »

Mac OS X’s Mail: How to Quick Look attachments while composing a message

Friday, June 5th, 2009 • 10:05 am

The beauty about the Quick Look feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is that it feels so natural that you get the impression that it has always been there. Once you start using the Space bar to preview files in the Finder, it is quite easy to get into the habit of wanting […]

More »

Pages ’09: Wrong focus in Full Keyboard Access

Friday, June 5th, 2009 • 9:47 am

I always have Full Keyboard Access on on my machine, not because I suffer from repetitive stress injuries, but because I don’t like having to switch from the keyboard to the mouse and back all the time. Because of this, I tend to notice problems that might not be apparent to Mac users who do […]

More »

Pages ’09: Major problems with Find/Replace case-matching

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 • 10:10 am

The case-matching scheme used by Pages ’09’s Find/Replace feature is seriously screwed. When you switch to the “Advanced” tab in the “Find/Replace” dialog box, you have the option to check a box labelled “Match case.” If you check it, then Pages ’09 restricts the search to occurrences that match the exact case of the text string you […]

More »

Pages ’09: Problem with applying text colour

Monday, June 1st, 2009 • 5:41 pm

Generally speaking, Pages ’09 is pretty good when it comes to handling formatting options for heterogeneous selections. If, for example, you have a paragraph to which you have applied the “Keep with following paragraph” formatting option followed by a paragraph to which you have not applied the option, when you combine both paragraphs into a single, […]

More »

Pages ’09: Bug with ‘Replace’ command

Monday, June 1st, 2009 • 3:24 pm

There is a pretty significant bug with the Find/Replace feature in Pages ’09, which makes it rather difficult to trust the application to do the right thing when editing documents with styled text. Here is the scenario. Say you have a Pages document containing a paragraph of text in body style, followed by a paragraph of […]

More »

Extracting embedded pictures in Word documents

Monday, June 1st, 2009 • 10:19 am

Like I wrote in a blog post about InDesign earlier this year, pictures and Microsoft Word go together like oil and water, especially on the Mac. More often than not, when you get a Word document with an embedded picture on the Mac, it’s pretty much impossible to edit the picture, even though the same […]

More »

Spotlight: More shortcut tips

Monday, June 1st, 2009 • 9:55 am

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a keyboard shortcut for revealing a Spotlight search result in the Finder that I only found out about fairly recently. Betalogue readers have chimed in with a couple of other tips, so I thought I would share those as well. First of all, when you do a […]

More »