Articles posted in August, 2011

Address Book: No button to add a new card when looking at a group

Friday, August 26th, 2011 • 3:46 pm

Sometimes the shortcomings in Apple’s user interface work are positively mind-boggling: What is wrong with this picture? It seems quite obvious to me. I have my list of groups on the left page with one particular group selected (“Computer” in this case), and the list of this group’s members on the right page. What if […]

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Mail 5.0: No longer deselects message after removing attachments

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 • 6:30 pm

In Lion, Apple has finally fixed a long-standing problem with message selection in Mail. The specific symptom was that, when you selected a message containing an attachment and then chose the “Remove Attachments” command in the “Message” menu, Mail would indeed remove the attachment from the selected message, but then it would also deselect the […]

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iCal 5.0: Repeat Alert button no longer supports old-fashioned menu pull-down

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 • 9:52 am

I am an old-school Mac user. This means, among other things, that I learned how to use a mouse at a time when the only way to pull down a menu on the Mac was to click and hold, and then, while holding the mouse button, drag the mouse pointer down the menu to the […]

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Mail 5.0: ‘Next Alternative’ shortcut with Canadian CSA keyboard

Monday, August 22nd, 2011 • 9:06 am

It’s happened again… There is a long history of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts failing to work properly for users of non-U.S. keyboard layouts because the keys involved in the shortcuts are located in a different place on their keyboards. There was a problem with the shortcut for the “Cycle Through Windows” command in Snow […]

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My experience installing Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)

Sunday, August 21st, 2011 • 6:09 pm

The more experienced I become, the less inclined I am to rush and install major software upgrades as soon as they are released. I used to be an early adopter, but things have changed. I have been bitten by a few nasty bugs, I have gradually lost some of my patience with software issues and […]

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BBEdit 10.0.1: Fixes project window issues

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 • 9:08 am

As I wrote in another post a couple of weeks ago, unlike previous upgrades, the BBEdit 10 upgrade has not exactly been painless for me. One thing that was particularly problematic for me was the changed behaviour of project windows. I have a project window that opens by default at startup on the left-hand side of […]

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Safari 5.1: ‘Find’ feature fails to find substrings… by default

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 • 6:25 pm

Quality control seems to have taken a hit at Apple lately… Take this situation: As you can see, when I ask Safari to look for the text string “iece” in the web page, Safari fails to find any occurrence of the text string, even though it is clearly there as a substring within a word […]

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Word 2011: ‘Find Next’ fails to find text in boxes

Monday, August 8th, 2011 • 3:39 pm

How is one supposed to do reliable, professional-quality work in a piece of software crap such as Word 2011? Even with the best intentions, even with the best level of personal discipline and work ethics, it is simply impossible. Why? Because Word’s features are simply completely unreliable. Try the following. Create a blank new document […]

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Word 2011: Keeps switching windows back to main screen

Monday, August 8th, 2011 • 3:15 pm

In the past couple of weeks, I have, once again, been forced by my work to use Microsoft Word 2011 instead of Pages ’09 as my word processor, and I just cannot believe how painful it has been… Microsoft’s developers obviously do not care about quality control or otherwise they would not let so many bugs slip through […]

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