Archive for the 'Macintosh' Category

iOS 7: Unreliable sharing by email

Saturday, December 21st, 2013 • 4:42 pm

I recently bought an iPad Air to replace my old, first-generation iPad, and this means that I have finally been able to upgrade to iOS 7. iOS 7 is a very mixed bag as far as I am concerned (I have to agree with Jared Sinclair, for example), but if there is one thing that has been […]

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Streaming with iPad and Apple TV: Is it worth it?

Thursday, December 5th, 2013 • 4:56 pm

I’ve resisted the (moderate) lure of the Apple TV device for quite a while. First, I had the excuse that my Internet connection was not good enough. In the imaginary world of unlimited bandwidth in which Apple products appear to have been designed, 1.5 Mbps (local wireless service) did not quite cut it. For the past […]

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Troubleshooting an old Apple Cinema Display

Saturday, November 30th, 2013 • 3:48 pm

I had a pretty interesting troubleshooting experience yesterday. My wife has been using my old 2006 Mac Pro in her store, with my old 23” Apple Cinema Display. Now this is a display that I bought a long time ago, back in 2002 to be exact. Back then it was quite expensive (over $5,000 CDN […]

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OS X’s Mail 7: Can’t replace saved attachment in its ‘Downloads’ folder

Friday, November 29th, 2013 • 4:05 pm

It used to be that one of Apple’s distinctive features when it comes to computing was its ability (and indeed its willingness) to sweat the details. Nowadays, more often than not, its distinctive features include a newly found ability to mess up the details. In Mavericks’s Mail 7, as in previous versions of Mail, you […]

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Word 2011: Use Keyboard Maestro to fix command-G madness

Monday, November 18th, 2013 • 4:50 pm

I have finally had enough. Word 2011 might be highly customizable (compared to Pages ’09, for example), but there are still behaviours that are completely non-sensical and cannot be altered. One of my pet peeves is the non-standard use of the command-G shortcut. In most OS X applications, it means “Find Next”. In MS Word, it […]

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iBooks App: PDF documents treated as second-class citizens

Monday, November 18th, 2013 • 4:02 pm

Now that iBooks is also available as a desktop app in Mavericks, I find myself wanting to use it for more than just purchasing e-books from its store on the iPad. I also want to use it as an alternative to Safari’s “Reading List” feature, by saving long web articles as PDF documents for reading […]

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OS X’s Mail: How to manually restore plug-in compatibility

Saturday, November 16th, 2013 • 5:56 pm

Most of the time, when Apple comes up with system updates that modify the Mail application, the changes cause Mail to reject installed third-party plug-ins (known as “bungles”) by moving them from the “~/Library/Mail/Bundles/” folder to the “~/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled)/” folder at launch time. This happens even if there is no known compatibility issue between the […]

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Mail 7: Saving multiple attachments now requires multiple clicks

Monday, October 28th, 2013 • 9:11 am

Apple’s engineers have a strong tendency of being unable to leave good enough alone. In the previous version of Mail, if you received an email message containing multiple attachments, there was a way to save all these attachments with a single click. You could just use a single click on the “Save” button in the […]

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More on Pages 5

Saturday, October 26th, 2013 • 10:23 am

Since my previous post on Pages 5 was mentioned on Daring Fireball, I have received quite a bit of feedback, both directly and indirectly. I’d like to address some of the issues about my post and this situation that were raised in that feedback, in order to clarify, as they say, “where I am coming from” […]

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Pages 5: An unmitigated disaster

Thursday, October 24th, 2013 • 8:45 am

Dear oh dear. They really have done it, haven’t they? They have taken what had evolved into a rather decent word processor / page layout application and have eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk, and I honestly have no idea for whom this latest version of Pages […]

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Safari in Mavericks: PDF downloading when native display is off is broken

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013 • 5:56 pm

I have been posting small notes about my experience with OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) on my Twitter feed, but this one warrants a longer post — if only to properly express my indignation. For months now, I have been testing the newest version of Safari 6 as part of my AppleSeed membership. And right away, I […]

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Word 2011: Issue with text selection in right-aligned table cells

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013 • 10:21 am

In Word 2011, if you have a table with cells where the text alignment setting is “Align Text Left”, and if your cell in empty, when the cell is selected, the selection highlighting and the mouse pointer look like this: If you then click once anywhere in the cell, Word 2011 deselects the empty cell […]

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Adobe InDesign CC: Selection colour and responsiveness affected by transparency of linked PSD file

Wednesday, August 14th, 2013 • 9:05 am

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a new problem introduced in InDesign CC that involves the presence of a link to a PSD file on the page. Thanks to the feedback of Betalogue reader and fellow InDesign user Lars P., I am now able to confirm that the problem is more specifically linked to the use […]

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Adobe InDesign CC: Presence of PSD graphic affects selection colour and responsiveness

Tuesday, August 13th, 2013 • 3:38 pm

It’s an inevitability: Every new version of a major software title introduces new bugs. I’ve just encountered one in InDesign CC, and it didn’t take an inordinate amount of sleuthing to identify its source. The problem surfaced when I started working on a publication designed by a client, which I am expected to translate, with […]

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Fix for kernel panics on Mac Pro with multiple GeForce cards: ATI Radeon HD 5770

Thursday, August 1st, 2013 • 9:08 am

In the summer of 2012, Apple started seeding early builds of the OS X 10.8.2 update. As a member of the AppleSeed program, I was able to test these early builds. I quickly noticed (as one would) that they introduced a serious new bug that caused frequent kernel panics on my Mac Pro, up to […]

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