Articles posted in June, 2010

Adobe InDesign CS5: Visual feedback while exporting as PDF

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 • 10:21 am

In InDesign CS4, when you opted to export a publication in PDF format, while the exporting was in progress, you would get this: In my experience, these two progress bars were, generally speaking, rather useless, because InDesign would typically jump from one end to the other with little indication of progress in between. But at […]

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Too fast for Firefox

Friday, June 25th, 2010 • 9:39 am

This is another example of how Firefox for Mac OS X fails as a Mac application and feels like it suffers from an unacceptable lack of polish. I often copy a web address (URL) to the clipboard and then want to open a new window in my browser, paste the URL, and instruct the browser […]

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Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): Changing Crash Reporter settings

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 • 4:55 pm

I am really getting sick and tired of Mac OS X’s Finder, Quick Look and Preview crashing on me all the time while browsing collections of PDF files on my hard drive. I’ve talked about this problem before and unfortunately, I still haven’t found a solution. I still get multiple crashes every day while using […]

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Broadband at last

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 • 4:17 pm

It’s hard to believe it’s taken so long but yes, today is the day that my home office has finally been hooked up to a decent Internet service provider, namely the rural broadband service offered by Eastlink in mainland Nova Scotia. After surviving for ten years (until 2006!) on dial-up and then having to bite […]

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InDesign CS5: Poor quality control

Monday, June 14th, 2010 • 6:00 pm

For the past few weeks, I have been using the latest version of InDesign (CS5) to do the layout of an academic review published by our local university. This has given me the opportunity to use the software in a more in-depth fashion and to compare it with my experience doing similar work with previous […]

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Fixing Mac OS X’s Preview: Home and End keys that work all the time with Keyboard Maestro

Thursday, June 10th, 2010 • 2:56 pm

When it comes to viewing PDF files, I much prefer Mac OS X’s own Preview application to Adobe’s own monstrosity known as Adobe Reader (to say nothing of the beyond-atrocious Acrobat Pro). Preview launches quickly, it offers high-quality font smoothing, and the latest version (5.0.x, in Snow Leopard) has an improved tool for selecting and […]

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Address Book: Workaround for defective ‘Go to My Card’ command using Keyboard Maestro

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 • 11:47 am

Earlier this year, I wrote about this flaw in Mac OS X’s Address Book where, if you have the results of a search currently on display in the application, the “Go to My Card” command fails to work. Now I would like to share a quick workaround that I designed using Keyboard Maestro. I created […]

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iTunes: Keyboard Maestro macros for selecting music library and showing all artists

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 • 6:33 pm

Over the years, I have developed certain habits when it comes to using iTunes to manage my music library (which is my primary use for iTunes). Ever since Apple added more view options, I have been using a column-based set-up, i.e. with the Column Browser visible on the left next to the sidebar, with two […]

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About the non-standard indeterminate wait cursor in Photoshop CS5

Monday, June 7th, 2010 • 3:41 pm

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about a shockingly bad UI choice made by the Adobe engineers who developed the new Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) series of applications. As I wrote in my post, when you do certain actions that require the user to wait until they are completed before he can resume […]

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Interface Grand Robert et Robert & Collins: Keyboard Maestro à la rescousse

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 • 12:01 pm

J’ai déjà eu l’occasion de parler des aspects extrêmement frustrants de l’interface utilisateur des logiciels du Grand Robert et du Grand Robert & Collins pour Mac OS X. Aujourd’hui, j’ai des solutions à proposer. Grâce à Keyboard Maestro, il est en effet possible de contourner certains des aspects les plus exaspérants de l’interface de ces […]

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Improved ‘Find’ command shortcut for iTunes (and Address Book)

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 • 2:58 pm

Yesterday, I wrote a post about using Keyboard Maestro to assign command-F as a shortcut for selecting iTunes’s search field in the toolbar. As I noted in my update after receiving e-mail feedback from several readers, it turns out that there is a built-in shortcut for selecting the search field in iTunes, which is only […]

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LATEXT: ‘Stay With Me Tonight’ (MP3, 06:10)

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 • 11:12 am

“Stay With Me Tonight” (MP3 file – 160 kbps – size: 7.0 MB – duration: 06:10) More LATEXT music here.

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Assigning command-F to the search feature in iTunes with Keyboard Maestro

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 • 10:41 am

As far as I can tell, iTunes has no built-in shortcut to enter its “Search” field in the toolbar: There is also no menu command for it anywhere in the iTunes menu bar. If you want to use the keyboard to enter this “Search” field without having to use the mouse, the only built-in option […]

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