Betalogue

Thanks to the feedback of numerous readers, I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on with the Accidental Caps Lock Defense feature in Snow Leopard: It still works for people with the aluminium keyboard (and not just for laptop users), but only in applications running in 64-bit mode.

Because I have a number of applications running in 32-bit mode, either because they are 32-bit only or because I need them to run in 32-bit mode (for compatibility with Spell Catcher X, which is not 64-bit yet) and these are the applications where I do most of my typing, I didn’t realize that the feature was still working in 64-bit applications until someone suggested that there might be something with my specific setup, with the third-party utilities that I run and so on.

Well, it’s not the third-party utilities, but it’s definitely something specific to my setup, which is that I type text in a fair number of 32-bit applications in Snow Leopard. (But the Accidental Caps Lock Defense doesn’t work in 32-bit applications where I don’t type much text either, such as Logic Studio or iTunes.)

I discovered this, because I switched to a clean user environment and wasn’t able to reproduce the problem, so I knew it was something with my user environment, and then for some reason I just thought it had to be something that had to do with the one major change in Snow Leopard, which is the introduction of the two modes, 32-bit and 64-bit.

So there you have it. Unless I am mistaken again, this time the problem has been narrowed down to a specific set of circumstances: In Snow Leopard, Accidental Caps Lock Defense no longer works for applications running in 32-bit mode. It only works for applications running in 64-bit mode.

It’s clearly a bug, but probably one that won’t be fixed any time soon (if ever), since obviously Apple’s priorities are in the 64-bit realm and they probably want everyone to migrate their applications to their mode as soon as possible (if past experience with similar transitions is any indication).

I’ll still file a bug report, and if it bothers you too, I suggest you file one as well.

Thanks again to all the readers who chimed in with their own experiences or suggestions.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.