Articles posted in June, 2012

Adobe InDesign CS6: ‘Package…’ command causes crash

Thursday, June 28th, 2012 • 7:50 am

Yet more fun with crappy Adobe products… Will the situation ever improve? Right now, on my Mac Pro 2009 running Mac OS X 10.7.4, if I open a publication in InDesign CS6 and then use the “Package…” command to create a complete package that I can send to the printer, I get an application crash […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: SMTP servers and network failure

Saturday, June 23rd, 2012 • 2:31 pm

Sometimes the sheer stupidity of how Mail handles (or rather cannot handle) network failures just boggles my mind. A couple of days ago I heard that people using one particular ISP in our area (the cable company Eastlink) were experiencing a general system failure and did not have any Internet access for several hours. Then […]

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Grand Robert: Disable splash screen

Friday, June 15th, 2012 • 9:19 am

Another annoyance in the Grand Robert application that I have been discussing on this blog lately is that, each time you launch it, the application displays a modal splash screen on top of the application’s main window, which has to be manually dismissed with a mouse click before you can start using the application. (The […]

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Black fields in Grand Robert: Fix finally here

Friday, June 15th, 2012 • 9:11 am

This morning I got an e-mail from the Le Robert developers indicating that an official fix for the problem with the black fields was finally available. As an added gesture, they indicated that the fix included the very latest version the Grand Robert application, presumably with a few more entries and updates compared to the […]

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Word 2011: Grep search incompatible with Track Changes

Friday, June 15th, 2012 • 8:53 am

Yesterday I was revising a long report and want to change the format used for date ranges by replacing the regular dash with an en dash. In other words, I wanted to replace all occurrences of a date range like “2010-2011” to “2010–2011.” And of course I wanted to do the exact same thing for […]

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Word 2011: Pasting plain text and underlying formatting

Thursday, June 14th, 2012 • 8:26 am

Here is another one of the thousands of ways that Microsoft Word manages to annoy the user by not doing what is expected and what makes sense based on the user’s actions. Take this following situation: I am in the middle of a sentence that is in italics and I want to insert some plain […]

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Recurring “Safari can’t connect to the server” problem

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012 • 2:05 pm

How fun. All of a sudden, my copy of Safari (5.1.7, under Lion 10.7.4) has started acting up. It works fine for a while, and then all of a sudden, when I click on a link, I get the dreaded “Safari can’t connect to the server” error message: Once this happens, Safari can no longer […]

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New Mac Pro: Still hope

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012 • 9:47 am

Like many other “professional” Mac users, I suspect, I was quite disappointed with the recent WWDC announcements. I love my iPad, but more iOS-like features in OS X don’t do a thing for me. A MacBook Pro with a Retina display is great, but it’s still early days and it will probably be a long time […]

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Word 2011: Split bar, scrolling position and insertion point

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 • 9:29 am

Here’s a quick experiment. Open a multi-page Word document in page layout view (what is now called the “Print Layout” view mode) and scroll down to the end of the document. Then locate this control at the top of the scroll bar on the right-hand side: This is the control that you can use to […]

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Adobe Acrobat Pro: Useless progress bars

Monday, June 4th, 2012 • 7:40 am

This has got to be the stupidest, most useless piece of visual feedback from a Mac OS X application that I have ever seen: This is what I get when I ask Adobe Acrobat Pro to save a large PDF file as a Word document, using OCR to extract the text if needed. And it […]

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