Betalogue

The one thing I hate the most about cloud-based computing is the sense that I have lost control, that the computer does things on my behalf with very little input or feedback, and that things can fairly easily go wrong. And so I tend to avoid it like the plague. That said, as a tech [...]

Here is a telling example of everything that is wrong, in my opinion, with the current state of the music industry. Yesterday, I was listening to an Etta James mixtape from 2009. The mixtape included one song that I particularly liked, titled “Quick Reaction & Satisfaction”. So I decided to try and find more about [...]

Apple has just released an update for iTunes 11 (iTunes 11.0.1) and I am glad to report that it appears to include improvements for two of the issues I mentioned last week. First of all, the View › Column Browser submenu is no longer disabled when the sidebar is visible. And then the egregiously bad [...]

I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s definitely something that is not right with Safari’s Resume feature in Mountain Lion on my machine. Well-behaved OS X applications follow the “Close windows when quitting an application” setting in System Preferences › General: If the option is not checked, when I re-open those well-behaved applications, [...]

In recent years, using iTunes to manage my music library has always been, for me, a major exercise in frustration. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death has always been part of my experience using iTunes. While some aspects of iTunes’s performance levels have actually improved in iTunes 11 (notably the execution of AppleScript scripts, generally [...]

Last week, I wrote that iTunes 11 can no longer open playlists in separate windows. This creates annoying limitations for those who, like me, are used to editing playlists in separate windows while looking at their music library in their main iTunes window. In particular, I wrote: So now if you want to, say, copy [...]

This one is a major disappointment for me: As far as I can tell, it’s no longer possible to open anything in a separate window in iTunes 11 (except for that new “Downloads” window, of course). It used to be that you could double-click on a playlist’s icon in the source list/sidebar to force iTunes [...]

Very interesting. Having a separate “Downloads” window is apparently too complicated and not user-friendly enough for Safari, but it’s a perfectly good idea to add one to iTunes: Sometimes you really do wonder whether there’s anyone over there who cares about consistency.

Here’s the first glitch I’ve encountered in iTunes 11 on my Mac Pro: When the sidebar is visible (“View › Show Sidebar”) and the source is a specific playlist rather than the default “Music”, the “Column Browser” submenu is greyed out and inaccessible. If the sidebar is hidden and the source is a specific playlist, [...]

As a professional translator in Canada, I am constantly referring to the TERMIUM database, which became accessible free-of-charge a couple of years ago as part of the Language Portal of Canada. One thing I do not like when using on-line databases, however, is having to retype things. Whenever I have to look up a term, [...]

Ever since I upgraded to Mountain Lion (at least I think that’s when it started), I’ve been experiencing this weird glitch in Numbers ’09, with table cells that are formatted using a yyyy/mm/dd date format. The cell looks OK when I select it: But then as soon as I enter it to edit it, I get [...]

In Lion (OS X 10.7) and Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), Mail has a bug that, for certain types of e-mail accounts at least, causes the application to fail to identify sent messages containing attachments as such. The paperclip icon never appears in the message list, and the “Remove Attachments” command is greyed out, even [...]

Pages ’12 obviously does not exist at this point in time. There have been no news about a new version of the iWork suite for OS X in years, and for all we know we might not get a significant update for another two or three years. Yes, the situation is that depressing. This cannot stop [...]

As far as I can tell from the way Word 2011 runs on my machine, Microsoft’s Mac Office developers have once again demonstrated their crass ignorance of foreign language issues. Since 1990, there are two alternate spellings in French, the “traditional” one and the “rectified” or “new” spelling. The changes introduced in the new spelling affect [...]

I don’t know about this iCloud thing. I really don’t know… I was away on a business trip earlier this week and had taken my iPad along. While browsing in Safari with the iPad, I noticed that my bookmarks bar contained two copies of a folder that I call “My Sites”, which contains bookmarks for [...]