Articles posted in January, 2012

Word 2011: Formatting when cutting and pasting paragraphs

Sunday, January 29th, 2012 • 12:05 pm

Word’s behaviour when it comes to deciding what format to apply to pasted text has always been a complete, impenetrable mess that no ordinary user can ever be expected to fathom, which is why, whenever I can, I use the “Paste Without Formatting” command, even though — this is Microsoft Word we are talking about […]

More »

Word 2011: Split bar in background window

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 • 4:10 pm

As regular Betalogue readers know, Microsoft’s Mac software is full not just of bugs, but also of behaviours that do not make sense and fail to comply with the conventions that rule the Mac OS X user interface. The problems even affect things as basic as window management. I’ve already written about the fact that […]

More »

Dumbing down Mac OS X: Lion’s Address Book

Sunday, January 15th, 2012 • 4:45 pm

Mac OS X’s Address Book application has never been a particular good piece of software. In fact, I distinctly remember writing a pretty scathing blog post about the multiple problems with its “Edit” mode six years ago. (To be fair to Apple, most of the problems described in that post were eventually fixed, but it […]

More »

Dumbing down Mac OS X: Safari’s ‘Downloads’ window in Lion

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 • 12:45 pm

In Safari 5 in Lion, when you are viewing a web page and you click on a link to a downloadable file, the web browser triggers an animation that somehow “throws” the link into the “Show Downloads” button in the toolbar: Then the button image is replaced by a different one with a miniature progress bar: […]

More »