Betalogue

As a music lover, I collect, among other things, lots of bootleg recordings of live Prince concerts. Back in the pre-Internet era, I actually spent some of my hard-earned cash on bootleg LPs, CDs, and VHS tapes. But thankfully, with the advent of the Internet, it has become possible to build a very decent collection [...]

I have received more feedback about the issue with character-level formatting in the header of a Word document that I was working on the other day. Yesterday, I indicated that the problem had to do with the fact that the text in the header, even though it didn’t look any different from regular text, was [...]

I now have a partial explanation for the mad behaviour of the header text in a Word document that I described in a post yesterday. A reader has written to indicate that he believes the text in the header in that document is not actually regular text typed by the user, but a reference to [...]

Here’s the situation. I have an existing Microsoft Word document with a header that contains some text: I want to edit that header and replace the existing text with some text that contains a portion in superscript, like “July 4th” with the “th” in superscript. So I type the text and select the “th” portion: [...]

While I have a lot of respect for Brent Simmons as the developer behind NetNewsWire (although he sold it several years ago, and things have ground down to an ominous standstill since), I am afraid his latest column for Macworld is directly in line with everything that has ever been written in Macworld about Microsoft [...]

What is wrong with this picture? Well, I think it’s rather obvious: the document window’s status bar (or whatever it’s called in Microsoft parlance) is a big blob of solid black instead of displaying the various bits of information (page number, word count, etc.) and controls that it is supposed to display. Fortunately, resizing the [...]

To say that I am thoroughly disappointed with Apple would be a massive understatement. I am actually angry and disgusted. After months of testing and fine-tuning (?), the Mac OS X 10.8.3 update is out, and… it fails to fix the kernel panics that have been afflicting Mac Pro users with multiple GeForce video cards [...]

Macworld has a new column by Dan Moren and Lex Friedman about Apple’s use of “silent email filtering” for iCloud accounts. As John Siracusa notes, this is nothing new. Apple’s silent mail filtering “has been going on since the .Mac days”. But I suppose people need to be reminded from time to time. As a [...]

Long-time Betalogue readers know that I could write about how crappy Microsoft Word is all day long. However, there is only so much you can say before the sheer inanity of the thing makes you want to do unspeakable things to a Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer voodoo doll. At that stage, I guess you [...]

Last week, I wrote about the problem with shortened URLs in Safari’s History feature. A reader wrote to express his agreement and also mention similar issues he was experiencing with unresolved URLs from Google searches crowding his Safari history instead of the actual resolved URLs. I did notice, a couple of years ago, that, all [...]

Alright, if you are in Safari, go to this item posted by someone on Twitter (chosen randomly), and then click on the link provided in the tweet (pic.twitter.com/ozBCyAmJ). This should normally take you to a new window with the picture in question and the Safari window’s title bar and address bar should look like this: [...]

Many readers probably remember the harrowing tale of the hacking of the Apple ID account of Wired’s Mat Honan from August 2012. While my own experience qualifies as a tiny blip compared to his situation, I would still like to share it, because I cannot help but worry about it, especially since I myself was [...]

Sometimes I really do wonder how much Apple’s engineers still care about small details. OS X still has a decent level of polish, but there are also obvious, blatant flaws that should never have slipped through in the first place and that Apple seems to have no interest in fixing. Here’s a perfect little example: As [...]

There are two things in Word 2011 (admittedly, among numerous other ones) that are a constant source of irritation for me and that are so basic that it’s quite clear that Microsoft’s engineers have absolutely no clue about how people use their software in the real world, so much so that there is no hope of [...]

Sometimes I really feel as if I am somehow cursed. The reality is that I am just too reliant on modern technology, of course, but so is almost everyone else. And the thought that most people have to go through situations like the one I went through yesterday morning is, strangely enough, not particularly comforting. [...]