I have already had the opportunity to report on multiple bugs in PowerPoint for Mac OS X involving text selection over the years. Just do a search for “PowerPoint” in this blog to get an idea. Here’s another one to add to the list. Let’s say you have a typical PowerPoint slide that looks like this: And [...]
Ever since I upgraded to Lion last summer, I’ve been dealing with the usual, seemingly unavoidable collection of bugs that each and every major OS upgrade brings. What has been particularly irritating about the phenomenon this time around is that today, six months and several incremental OS updates later (we are currently at Mac OS [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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: [...]
When I switched from MobileMe to iCloud a couple of months ago, it all went relatively smoothly for me except for one thing: bookmarks syncing. As I reported back then, as soon as I turned bookmarks syncing on in iCloud’s preference pane on my Mac Pro, I started experiencing the constant crashing of a background [...]
When you launch Word 2011, the first thing you see is this: Notice anything? Allow me to make it clearer for you: Or: Unless Word 2011 is lucky and its splash screen happens to appear on top of a fairly uniform background, you inevitably get ugly see-through effects that make it look as if the [...]
I am not sure why, but I am going through a phase where any encounter with a software bug on my computer leaves me with a feeling of intense frustration. I just cannot believe that I have to live with so many bugs that affect my work on a daily basis in my computing life, [...]
Here’s a pretty good illustration of the difference in quality/polish between an application such as Microsoft Word 2011 and Apple’s own Pages ’09. In both applications, you can define paragraph styles for various things in your documents, including headings, sub-headings, etc. When you define a paragraph style for a heading, you usually want to make it [...]
Here’s something about Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) that I don’t get: Yes, this InDesign file was downloaded from the Internet. But how does that make it an “application”? And I don’t get this just for InDesign files. I get it for all kinds of other media files, when they are downloaded as part of a Zip [...]
Adobe’s applications have all kinds of quirks related to Adobe’s developers’ unwillingness or inability to follow appropriate standards and make sure their Mac applications behave like normal Mac OS X applications. The latest one I have encountered has to do with the Clipboard shortcuts (command-C, command-V) within “Save As” dialog boxes. If, for example, in a [...]
In my experience, speed and noise are the two trickiest, most subjective aspects of personal computing, especially for power users. Some people can’t hear fan noises, or they don’t notice them, or they don’t care. Others can be driven mad by hums and whines, even if they are not loud at all. As for speed, [...]
Either there is something seriously wrong with my machine, or there is something seriously broken in the preview column in column view in Lion’s Finder. More often than not, when I select a picture file in a Finder window in column view mode, I get something like this: And that’s if I am lucky. If [...]
I’ve been a .Mac/MobileMe user for a long time, even though I have never been entirely convinced that it was worth the expense. But there’s not much point in discussing that particular issue anymore, since the launch of iCloud and the looming closure of MobileMe services are making it irrelevant. What is relevant, however, is [...]