Betalogue

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

If you want evidence that Mac users are being somewhat neglected by Apple these days because all the focus is on iOS devices, you just need to look at Apple’s iWork productivity suite. We are approaching the back-to-school season for the 2012–2013 school year and the software is still stuck at version… ’09 — which stands [...]

One of the long-standing annoyances with computer software in general and Mac OS X software in particular is that, after all these years, there is still a strong American bias in many features. While Mac OS X is of course a multilingual OS and supports a number of “international” features, there are still system-wide or application-specific behaviours [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the annoying default behaviour of the “Link” inspector in Pages ’09, which is used to turn the selected text into a link: What’s annoying about it isn’t just that the “Link” inspector is the only way to create such a link, but also that, each and every time [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I asked in a blog post why Apple had decided to ditch the “Save As…” command in its Lion-optimized applications, including Pages ’09 and Numbers ’09. Today, I decided that I was not going to wait for an answer (which in all likelihood will never come) and that instead I should design [...]

After reading my recent post about using DragThing to further customize my Pages ’09 work environment by adding an application-specific dock that would function as a floating palette and provide buttons to execute run-only versions of the AppleScript scripts that I also use in combination with Keyboard Maestro to have convenient keyboard shortcuts for common actions, [...]

After I posted about customizing the Pages ’09 user interface with a DragThing dock that performs AppleScript scripts earlier today, I decided to further investigate the reason why I was unable to directly control the value of the “After Paragraph” text field in the “Text” tab of the Text inspector. I had the following script: tell [...]

A while ago, I wrote about my use of Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript to create a keyboard shortcut for formatting options like “Keep with following paragraph” and “Keep lines together.” With the default user interface in Pages ’09, the only way to access these commands is through the “More” tab of the Text inspector: When you [...]

In order to complete the picture of the custom-designed workflow that I described in my two previous posts: From Pages ’09 to the Web: An XML-based workflow From Pages ’09 to the Web: An XML-based workflow (continued) I think it would be a good idea to provide a few screen captures that illustrate the process in a [...]