We also want to bring along some albums of our photos from the past couple of years to show to our family and friends.

The iPad is a great device for bringing albums of digital pictures and sharing them with other people. Its screen is big enough that you can have several people sitting around it and looking at the pictures. (The iPad also supports a variety of AV cables to connect to TVs.)

As for digital pictures taken while on vacation, the iPad can act as a storage device on which you can import pictures from your digital camera. For this, however, you need to purchase the iPad Camera Connection Kit separately. It is an extra expense, but is worth it if you want to import pictures from your camera while on the road, in order to look at them, show them to other people, etc.

My wife’s camera has an 8 GB SD memory card which holds thousands of pictures in high-quality resolution, but my own camera only has an 500 MB Compact Flash card. So it was particularly important for me to be able to import my pictures and delete them from my card.

The iPad and the iPad Camera Connection Kit provide a good solution for this. The iPad Camera Connection Kit consists of two items: an SD card reader that you can use to plug an SD card directly into the iPad’s connector, and a iPad-to-USB adapter that you can use to plug the USB cable from your camera into the iPad’s connector.

In my case, the mini-USB port on the Coolpix 5000 no longer works, so I have to take my Compact Flash card out of the camera and use a separate card reader to retrieve its contents. This works with the iPad-to-USB adapter as well. I was able to use my old USB card reader to connect my Compact Flash card to the iPad, and the importing process worked as well as it did with my wife’s brand new camera. Everything was slower, but that was probably due to the age of both the Compact Flash card and the USB reader, which are probably not up to the latest performance standards.

As soon as you connect a camera or a card to the iPad using the iPad Camera Connection Kit, the iPad launches the Photos app and shows you the pictures available for import. You can then opt to import all pictures or select the ones you want to import. Once the importing process is complete, you are given the option to either delete the pictures on the camera/card or leave them.

It should be noted that the pictures are not converted during the importing process. They are transferred in their original format/resolution, even if it exceeds the requirements of the iPad’s screen itself. This is of course important if you want to use the iPad as temporary storage before importing the pictures on your desktop or laptop computer.

Once you get home, when you plug your iPad into your computer, after the syncing and backup processes are done, the iPad appears as a source in iPhoto and you can import all the photos that were imported on the iPad in iPhoto on your computer, as you would from a digital camera.

The iPad is also capable of importing and playing movie clips. My wife’s Canon PowerShot SD1300 shoots video that it records in AVI format, and the iPad can both import the clips and then play them back on the screen in the Photos app. (They do not show up in the Videos app. They are only available within the Photos app.)

With newer cameras, the iPad correctly shows pictures taken in landscape or portrait orientation with the correct orientation whatever the iPad’s screen orientation is. But with older cameras, including my Coolpix 5000 and my mother’s old Panasonic unit, the Photos app seems unable to detect the correct orientation and shows portrait-oriented pictures in landscape mode, which is slightly annoying.

What makes things even more annoying is that the only way to fix this is to rotate each picture manually in the Photos app. And the button for doing this only gives you one option, which is to rotate counterclockwise. I found that, in most cases, this was the wrong option and a button to rotate clockwise would have been much more convenient. Unfortunately, with the iPad, there is no Alt or Option key to press to change the orientation of the rotation. So in order to rotate clockwise, you have to tap the “Rotate” button three times in a row.

In addition, the button right next to the “Rotate” button, which is used for sharing pictures, looks too much like a button for rotating too, with its curved arrow, and on more than one occasion, I tapped that “Share” button when I meant to tap the “Rotate” button:

The problem with the orientation of pictures is probably beyond Apple’s control, however. It looks to me like the orientation of the picture is not part of the metadata included by the camera in the picture file itself on older cameras. The iPad cannot “guess” the orientation of the picture if the information is not stored in the picture file’s metadata.

Apple could make rotating a picture clockwise easier in the Photos app, however. And some kind of simple batch processing for multiple pictures would be welcome too.

When it comes to sharing pictures while on the road, you can use the “Share” button mentioned above in the Photos app on the iPad. When you click on the button while viewing a single picture, the Photos app offers to share that particular photo. When you click on the button while viewing an album or your entire library of pictures, the Photos app lets you select the pictures you want to share. (Strangely, you can also use that same “Share” button to delete a batch of pictures. I am not sure that deleting qualifies as a form of “sharing,” but that’s the way it is.)

Unlike the sharing feature in iPhoto, however, the “Share” button in the iPad’s Photos app does not give you any options for adjusting the size of the picture(s) before e-mailing them. This is unfortunate, because it means that you cannot share pictures with people stuck with a low-bandwidth Internet connection without clogging their connection with high-resolution, bandwidth-intensive pictures. So be aware of this when you share your pictures by e-mail from the iPad.

I also don’t see any option to create albums on the fly on the iPad itself. The pictures that you last imported from a camera or card reader show up in a temporary album called “Last Imported,” but after that, all pictures are lumped together in an album called “All Imported,” and you’ll have to wait until you get back home and import your pictures in iPhoto to organize them into albums. (The iPad’s Photos app also lets you view your pictures as “Events,” which works like the same function in iPhoto and helps when you have a large number of imported pictures.)

There is also no way to view any of the file information for pictures in the Photos app: file size, date created, other EXIF metadata, etc.

Transferring albums of pictures from iPhoto to the iPad for viewing and sharing on the iPad is straightforward. It is all done in iTunes under the “Photos” tab for the iPad.

Finally, I should note that, as soon as I got back home and plugged my iPad back into my computer, iTunes proceeded to do a complete backup of my iPad, which took quite a while, because it included all the digital pictures that we had imported on the iPad during the trip. I thought it was a bit of a waste of time and space, but then, when the iOS 3.2.2 update caused a complete failure of my iPad this morning and I had to restore it (a process which destroys all the data saved on it), I sure was glad that I had such a backup and was able to restore most of my iPad’s data, including the imported pictures.

Still, if you are concerned about space issues, you should know that the iPad backups are stored in your home folder, at:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

The backups are created using proprietary file formats (.mdinfo and .mddata files), but iTunes can use them to restore most of the data on your iPad after it has been erased. If you are sure that you no longer need these backups, I suppose you can erase them from the location above to free up some space in your home folder.

Since the update had come out while I was away and was not brand new, I assumed that it had already been installed by a large number of users and that, if there were any problems with it, they had been noted and fixed. So I proceeded to install the update.

The downloading process went fine. But as soon as iTunes started installing the update (in the background, while I was doing something else), something went wrong, and I mean really wrong.

All of a sudden, I had the following image on the iPad’s screen, which had become unusable:

And iTunes was telling me that my iPad was in an unusable state and that I had to “restore” it.

But when I proceeded to try and restore the iPad, I got this:

It was not looking good. I tried again and again, and each time I got the same unhelpful error message. I started to be seriously worried, especially since we hadn’t yet imported all of the digital pictures that we had taken during our trip and stored on the iPad.

After a quick on-line search, I found this page in Apple’s Knowledge Base:

“Update and restore alert messages on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch”

The number of different things to try listed on that page was not exactly reassuring, but I noticed this tip in particular:

Restore on a different computer

If the issue is not resolved with the above steps, try to restore using a different computer. Ensure that the computer you use has USB 2.0 ports, the latest version of iTunes, and that you connect directly to the computer.

So I plugged the iPad into my wife’s MacBook Pro and started the restoring process. iTunes had to download the latest system update again, which took an hour. Then it started installing it, and much to my relief, it didn’t encounter the same failure as the one I was experiencing on my Mac Pro.

I let it complete the updating process, and finally I had an iPad that was working again. All my data was gone, of course, but fortunately iTunes had done a complete backup of the iPad the day before, and I was able to use the “Restore from Backup” option in iTunes on my Mac Pro to recover the data from the backup.

(I find it rather confusing that the same verb, to restore, is used both to describe a process that erases all the personal data on the iPad and reinstalls the latest iOS, and to describe a process that brings the personal data back.)

In particular, the “Restore from Backup” process brought back all the pictures that we had imported in the Photos app, which was my main concern. It also restored all my mail, contacts and calendar settings, but failed to restore the actual contents of the mailboxes for the various e-mail accounts that I had on the iPad.

This was not a problem for received mail, since I had copies of all of it on my servers or on my desktop computer, but I did lose all the messages that I had sent from the iPad during the trip, because most of my e-mail accounts are still POP accounts and sent messages for POP accounts are not stored on the server, only locally on the device used to compose and send them.

I didn’t send too many messages during my trip and if I really need copies of them I can ask the people I sent them to. So it’s not a huge issue. But it is still frustrating that the iPad backup does not include messages composed and sent on the iPad for POP accounts. (I will discuss all Mail-related issues for the iPad in greater detail in a forthcoming post.)

All in all, I guess I would say that this was a slightly scary experience, but that the backup strategies recommended and provided by Apple worked reasonably well and helped restore my confidence somewhat. I will still be wary about future iOS updates and will make sure that I have a complete backup and no crucially important information on my iPad before installing any new updates.

For this trip abroad, I took the plunge and decided to acquire an iPad and travel with that instead of the usual laptop. I wasn’t planning on spending much time on-line and felt that the iPad, based on its feature list and other people’s experiences described in various forums on-line, would be sufficient to meet most of my and my wife’s computing needs during the trip.

In the next little while, I am going to write a series of posts describing our experience with the iPad as our main computing device for two and a half weeks abroad. I will call this series “iVacation Chronicles,” and here is the first instalment.

This instalment has to do with my preparations for this trip more than with the trip itself. Because the iPad has no Ethernet port and requires a wi-fi connection for Internet access, I anticipated that we might at times require a portable wireless router in addition to the iPad itself. So I also purchased an AirPort Express.

My idea was that, even if we ended up not needing it during the trip, I would use it to extend our wi-fi network at home anyway, which, because of the layout of our house and the location of my primary router (an older AirPort Extreme base station) in my office at one end of it, does not extend as far as I would like it to.

And indeed it turns out that we didn’t need the AirPort Express during the trip. We stayed in several different locations, but all the locations had some form of wi-fi connectivity, which worked seamlessly with the iPad in every case.

So my comments here will be about the configuration and use of the AirPort Express before and after my trip.

When I first got it in early July, I configured it to “participate in a WDS network” and act as “WDS remote,” thereby extending the range of my existing wi-fi network at home. It worked fine.

Then prior to my trip I wanted to change its configuration so that it would work as a primary wireless router for an Ethernet-based Internet connection during the trip. I figured that I’d better do this prior to my departure, because there obviously was no iPad app available either from Apple or from a third-party to change the configuration of an AirPort base station wirelessly while on the road. I didn’t know whether I would have access to a “proper” computer in order to change the configuration while on the road.

But I also didn’t really want to lose the current configuration altogether. I was planning on bringing the AirPort Express back after the trip and using it again to extend my existing wi-fi network at home.

After doing some research on-line, I found out that there was indeed a way to “save” the current configuration of the AirPort Express. For this, I had to use the “Profiles” feature in AirPort Utility, which can be accessed via a pop-up menu at the bottom of the window while editing the device’s configuration manually:

Unfortunately, the user interface for this feature and its use in a real-world context are not really very intuitive. As you can see in the image above, there is no “Save…” command and you have to go through the “Manage Profiles” screen to save the current configuration and create a new one.

I eventually managed to save my current configuration under the name “Maison.”

And then, of course, in order to create the new configuration, I had to mimic the conditions under which I would want to use the AirPort Express as a primary router while on the road. So I turned off my other wi-fi devices and connected my Internet connection directly to the AirPort Express, then used my wife’s laptop to change the configuration and save it under the name “Travel.”

I checked to make sure that the iPad worked fine with the AirPort Express in this new configuration and then unplugged the AirPort Express and packed it up along with an Ethernet cable and a plug adapter for France. (The AirPort Express itself contains its own power supply, which supports voltage values between 100 and 240 V and frequencies between 50 and 60 Hz, so all you need is a plug adapter.)

As indicated, after we got to France, I never had a chance to even use the AirPort Express. So when we got back home yesterday, after unpacking everything, I proceeded to plug the AirPort Express back in and attempt to change its configuration back to “Maison.”

Unfortunately, the AirPort Express in its “Travel” configuration never even showed up in AirPort Utility in the list of available devices on the left. Even after I unplugged my main router, the AirPort Express remained invisible. Of course, it had its blinking amber light on indicating a configuration error, but I still expected it to show up in AirPort Utility.

One option was to once again mimic the conditions on the road by plugging my Internet connection directly into the AirPort Express, but instead I elected to simply use an Ethernet cable to connect the AirPort Express directly to my computer.

Then finally the AirPort Express showed up in the list of devices with its amber light, and finally I was able to use the “Profiles” menu to change its configuration back to the “Maison” profile that I had saved before leaving on vacation.

After that I updated/restarted the AirPort Express, unplugged the Ethernet cable, moved the AirPort Express back to its location in the house where I wanted to use it to extend my wi-fi network, and plugged my main router back in.

Thirty seconds later, I was back in business, with all the wi-fi devices (including my Time Capsule backup) back on and showing a solid green, and everything working as expected again.

Still, this experience leads me to make three observations:

1. If at all possible, Apple should provide a utility app for the iPad to configure an AirPort base station wirelessly while on the road. I don’t know if there are technical obstacles that prevent Apple from offering such an app, but if there aren’t, then such a utility should be provided as a free app via the App Store.
2. The user interface for using and managing profiles in AirPort Utility needs to be improved. Wireless devices should show up in the list of devices in AirPort Utility even when they are not properly configured or have a configuration that conflicts with the existing configuration of other wi-fi devices in the vicinity, and the user should be able to change the profile of the conflicting device without having to unplug other devices or otherwise change (even temporarily) the physical set-up of his existing wi-fi network.
3. In the same vein, I feel that it should be possible to change the configuration of a wireless router such as the AirPort Express without necessarily having to mimic the actual anticipated set-up and apply the changes. One should be able to create a profile and save its settings without being required to apply them right away to the base station.

Other than that, the AirPort Express is a nice, compact device which can fairly easily be taken on the road and I am glad that I have it for future trips, but also as an extender for my existing home network.

In essence, the presence of the table of contents renders many scripts unusable, because, when a table of contents is present, AppleScript fails to compute the offset of the current selection in a document if that selection is located anywhere after the automatic table of contents. This means that, if you attempt to manipulate the selection in any way via AppleScript, your script ends up manipulating some range of text somewhere higher up in your document.

Needless to say, it is a rather irritating and dangerous bug, because if you forget about it, you might not notice that your scripts are doing stuff to sections of your text outside the current (visible) selection.

Back then, I wrote that, typically, in my workflow, I insert the automatic table of contents near the end of my work on a document, so it’s not a huge problem. But it still causes me grief, because once I have inserted the table of contents, I have to remember that I must refrain from using any of the many scripts that I use (via Keyboard Maestro) to customize the Pages ’09 user interface and make it more efficient. I have to remember to switch from a keyboard-based approach (which relies on my scripts) to a mouse-based approach (which is quite tedious and repetitive).

So today I decided to see if I couldn’t devise a way to work around this bug.

After all, I have already had to alter my AppleScript scripts for Pages ’09 to work around another limitation in Pages ’09′s AppleScript support, namely the fact that many AppleScript commands and properties do not work when the current selection is text inside a table or in a footnote.

There, the solution was to resort to GUI scripting. Could I use the same kind of workaround when the selection was text coming after an automatic table of contents?

The answer was yes, but only if there was a way to test the Pages ’09 document to see if it contained an automatic table of contents. My idea was that I would test for this, and if the document did contain a TOC, then I would switch to the GUI scripting-based approach in my script.

But of course, it was not immediately obvious to me that there was a way to test for this. On the contrary, when I explored the AppleScript dictionary for Pages ’09, all I found was a command for inserting a TOC. And that was it.

So I posted a query on the AppleScript forum at Apple Discussions, and I soon received an excellent suggestion from regular contributor Pierre L., which was to test the paragraph styles currently in use in the document to see if any of them was a TOC style.

By default, Pages ’09 uses styles called “TOC Heading 1,” “TOC Heading 2,” and so on. I always use these default styles (customized to my liking), so all I had to do was to test to see if the paragraph styles currently in use in the document included, say, “TOC Heading 1.”

And here is what I eventually came up with as an improved script for toggling the “All Caps” formatting option on and off, for instance:

tell application "Pages"
	tell front document
		set myStyles to name of paragraph style of paragraphs
		if myStyles contains "TOC Heading 1" then
			my toggleAllCaps()
		else
			try
				set mySel to (get selection)
				if capitalization type of mySel is all caps then
					set capitalization type of mySel to normal capitalization
				else
					set capitalization type of mySel to all caps
				end if
			on error
				my toggleAllCaps()
			end try
		end if
	end tell
end tell

on toggleAllCaps()
	tell application "System Events" to tell process "Pages"
		tell menu bar 1
			tell menu bar item "Format"
				tell menu "Format"
					tell menu item "Font"
						tell menu "Font"
							tell menu item "Capitalization"
								tell menu "Capitalization"
									try
										set myMark to value of attribute "AXMenuItemMarkChar" of menu item "All Caps"
										if myMark is "?" then
											click menu item "None"
										end if
									on error
										click menu item "All Caps"
									end try
								end tell
							end tell
						end tell
					end tell
				end tell
			end tell
		end tell
	end tell
end toggleAllCaps

As you can see if you compare this script to my previous version, I had to make the following changes:

I moved the GUI scripting-based approach to toggle “All Caps” from the main script to a separate toggleAllCaps() subroutine, because I would now have to be able to call it in two different places in the main script.

Then I started the main script by inserting a test to see if the paragraph styles currently in use in the document includes the “TOC Heading 1” style.

If the document does, then my script switches to the GUI scripting-based approach and calls the subroutine.

If not, then the script attempts to use the approach based on Pages ’09′s built-in AppleScript support. If that fails (because the selection is inside a table cell or a footnote), then the script also switches to the GUI scripting-based approach and calls the same subroutine.

Et voilà.

Now all I have to do is update all my other scripts (for applying paragraph and character styles, etc.) using the same approach. After that, my scripts will no longer apply the desired formatting changes to the wrong text in documents that contain an automatic TOC.

Thanks to Pierre L. for his help.

Since I knew that this particular behaviour was handled by a setting in Safari’s preferences, I went there to check if, by any chance, the installation of the 5.0.1 update had caused Safari to change that setting.

But the setting (under “Tabs”) had not changed. It still said: “Open pages in tabs instead of windows: Never,” as before.

Yet obviously Safari was now opening pages in tabs instead of windows.

Fortunately, the fix was pretty simple. I simply manually switched the setting from “Never” to “Always” and back.

And after that, Safari started behaving properly again, opening new pages in new windows rather than new tabs.

I thought I’d mention this glitch here in case other people experience the same problem.

The only controls I get for previewing the file are those:

My question is simple: Where is the volume slider?

There is a volume control on the left, but it is a simple mute button that only lets you turn the sound on or off. That’s it. As far as I can tell, there is no option to turn the volume up or down.

This is rather irritating for me, because my main volume is usually set pretty high, and my default volume for music playback in iTunes is significantly lower.

So when I try to preview a music file in the Finder with Quick Look, the volume level is usually way too high. And the only option I have to turn it down is to use my keyboard’s function keys to turn the main volume level down.

Given that I have an Apple aluminium keyboard where the volume keys are special functions of the numbered function keys and that I use these function keys for all kinds of things besides their special functions, I have the “User all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” feature ON in System Preferences, under “Keyboard.”

This means that, when I want to use my aluminium keyboard’s F10 and F11 keys as volume keys, I also have to hold the Fn modifier key down.

Needless to say, it’s not something that I do all the time and it always takes me a couple of seconds, during which the audio previewed by Quick Look is blasting in my ears. And then when I am done previewing the file, I have to turn the main volume level back up, otherwise my volume level in iTunes is now too low.

At some point, I did actually find a way to change the volume of the Quick Look preview itself without altering the main volume level at all. But it required switching the Quick Look preview to full screen by clicking on the icon with two arrows on the right. Then the controls would change and I would get a volume slider as well. But I can no longer reproduce this with MP3 or MP4 files, so I am not sure with what file type I was able to obtain this volume slider.

In any case, the omission of the volume slider in the Quick Look preview is very puzzling. Given the wide variety of volume levels that you get from various files recorded from various sources, it is unavoidable that you will need to adjust the volume level of Quick Look previews quite frequently. And having to do so by adjusting the main volume level of the machine, which affects all other applications as well, is quite absurd.

I am all for keeping things simple and not cluttering the screen with all kinds of superfluous controls, but this is taking it too far.

In my last post, I wrote that switching to “Airplane Mode” would alleviate the problem, which indicated that the problem was linked to the iPod touch’s wireless features (all of which are turned off when in that mode).

After reading about the problem some more and getting some feedback from Betalogue readers, I can now confirm that I am able to eliminate the battery-draining problem and restore the battery life that I am used to on my iPod touch without switching to “Airplane Mode,” by simply changing the “Fetch New Data” feature in the Settings app, under “Mail, Contacts, Calendars,” to “Off.”

In my case, this means turning the “Push” setting to “Off” and the “Fetch” setting to “Manually.”

I believe that, if you use any other settings for this “Fetch New Data” feature, iOS 4 keeps the iPod touch’s Wi-Fi connection live at all times, even when the iPod appears to be asleep. And that’s what eventually drains your battery in much less time than it used to with previous versions of the operating system.

Now, it’s still unclear to me whether this is a feature or a bug. I have received feedback from a Betalogue reader who has submitted a bug report to Apple about this (via Bug Reporter) and the feedback he’s received from Apple appears to indicate that they are treating this as a bug and that, indeed, it is now considered a “known issue.”

This seems to indicate that a bug fix should be available soon in an incremental iOS update. The fix will probably consist of restoring the previous behaviour, which was that, when the iPod touch was asleep, its Wi-Fi features would be automatically turned off. After all, the iPod touch is not a phone and usage patterns surely are significantly different.

Sure, there might be some iPod touch users for whom the always-on Wi-Fi might be a desirable feature, in spite of the battery-draining effect, but they are probably a small minority, and it would make sense to restore the previous behaviour for everyone and simply give these users who want it the option to keep their Wi-Fi connection live even when their iPod touch is otherwise asleep. (It also seems to me that, if the “Push” setting is off, even if the “Fetch New Data” option is set to fetching automatically at regular intervals, iOS 4 should be able to turn the Wi-Fi connection off and only back on when it actually needs it, i.e. for each automatic check. Surely that would alleviate the battery-draining significantly.)

Truth be told, I mostly use my iPod touch as a music player. I work at home and do not travel much, so I have no big need for portable computing applications. I occasionally use the iPod as a PDA, to look up contacts, appointments, passwords, etc. while I am on the road, but the iPod’s primary use is as a music player.

And it is honestly the best music player I have used. I still have a classic hard-drive-based iPod with the click wheel, but I don’t really use it as a music player anymore, because it’s heavier, the screen is smaller, and the click wheel comes nowhere near the touch screen in usability.

Since the iPod touch uses flash memory instead of a hard drive, there is no concern about moving too much and causing problems with the hard drive, which is not insignificant for me since I mostly use the iPod touch as a music player while I am exercising, i.e. usually going for a walk outside (or occasionally using an elliptical trainer in the winter time, when the weather is really too nasty). My main form of physical activity is swimming, but I do enjoy walking along the shore near the house, which I tend to do at least 4 or 5 times a week, and I like to listen to music while walking.

As well, the battery life of the iPod touch when used as a music player is excellent. With my limited usage patterns, I am used to not having to charge my iPod touch for a couple of weeks or even more.

It is all rather liberating.

So when Apple released the iOS 4 a few weeks ago, I did not rush to upgrade my iPod touch, even though it was compatible, simply because most of the features of the new OS are of little importance to me. But when my battery was finally drained the other day, I figured that it would be interesting to see what Apple was up to with the newer OS and test some of the features, just out of curiosity.

I connected my iPod touch to my computer, ran the upgrade through iTunes and thought nothing of it. The next day, I disconnected the fully charged iPod, went for a walk, and barely noticed the slightly improved user interface for the music playing feature. After my walk, I simply stopped the music playback with the remote, and left the iPod on a shelf in the corridor, as I usually do.

Then two days later when I grabbed the iPod again, I noticed that the battery was pretty low. I thought that it was a bit strange, since I hadn’t used it much, but didn’t worry too much about it and simply charged it again, and put it back on the shelf.

Then some days later after I had used it only once, I went to use it again and noticed that the battery was completely drained. In fact, even after I plugged it into the computer, I couldn’t do anything with it. All I had was the empty battery icon with ominous red flashing. I started to fear that the OS upgrade had somehow killed the iPod altogether, but left it plugged in for a while, just in case the battery was so drained that the OS couldn’t run even with the USB cord plugged in, because it couldn’t get enough juice through the USB connection to both run and charge the completely drained battery at the same time.

And sure enough when I returned to the plugged-in iPod a couple of hours later, it was back to normal, charging properly and letting me use it at the same time.

But I then started thinking that there was indeed some problem with the OS upgrade that had somehow screwed up the battery. I decided to keep a close eye on the battery level in the next few days and see what would happen.

So I used it once for half an hour after unplugging it from the computer, and the battery level was normal.

But when I used it again two days later (this afternoon), the battery level was down to about 50%, even though I had done nothing with it for two days and had just left it asleep on the shelf. I went for my walk with it, but while walking I thought that I should check the Apple discussion forums when I was back. I also thought that there were a couple of troubleshooting steps that I could try, including powering off the iPod touch altogether between each use. The iPod takes about 30–40 seconds to power up after it’s been shut off, but at least the music player feature does remember where you were and allows you to resume playing, so it would not be too much of a hassle. I even thought that, if worst came to worst, I could try and revert the iPod to iOS 3, since I didn’t really need the new features anyway.

I also couldn’t help but fear that Apple’s engineers had once again adopted a fairly careless attitude in their support for older hardware, and were just assuming that people would want to replace their iPod with a new model after a couple of years anyway, and should expect a loss of battery life over time. But this was not a gradual loss over time! Rather, it was a very sharp decrease in battery life, and I couldn’t help but feel somewhat offended by the apparent implications of Apple’s design decisions here.

When I came back from my walk, I went online and sure enough, I quickly found a big discussion thread on Apple’s iPod touch forum titled “Low battery life on iPod touch after installing iOS 4.”

This discussion thread makes it clear that I am far from alone in experiencing this. It is somewhat reassuring, in that it means that the problem might be addressed in a future OS update. But it is also quite disappointing that Apple’s engineers failed to predict this battery-draining behaviour with the default settings of the new iOS 4 and failed to include steps to warn users and advise them about what they could do to avoid the behaviour.

Based on the advice provided in this discussion thread, it looks like the problem is due to the wifi feature (which I rarely use) being left on all the time, even when the iPod touch is apparently asleep. So I should be able to avoid the battery draining by turning the wifi feature off or switching the iPod to “Airplane Mode” (in the “Settings” app)—which I am going to try right away. I certainly hope that it will eliminate the battery draining and bring back the extended battery life that I am used to with my typical usage pattern.

Since I mostly use the iPod touch as a music player, Airplane Mode is not a big problem for me. I can remain in this mode most of the time, and only switch it off, which switches the wifi feature back on, when I really need that feature.

But I can easily understand why other users are rather frustrated by this sudden change in the power consumption of their device, and not too pleased to have to manually turn wifi off and back on all the time in order to avoid the very negative impact on battery life.

I am sure that it is difficult for Apple’s engineers to take into account the hundreds, if not thousands of different usage patterns that actual consumers exhibit when using their devices. But I still feel that they could have made more of an effort in this particular case to at least warn users about the significant change and the significant impact that it has on battery life with the default settings of the new OS. And I hope that they will provide an update that lets people change the iPod’s behaviour back to the way it worked in iOS 3, where wifi is turned off automatically each time the iPod goes to sleep.

I will continue to monitor the battery life of my iPod touch now that I have switched to Airplane Mode. If things do not improve, you can be sure that I will write more about this.

And sure enough, there seems to be an odd limitation, at least in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), with Finder windows in list view.

In Mac OS X, the Finder is no longer based on a purely spatial metaphor (one folder = one window). This means that you can display the contents of the same folder in two different windows at the same time.

These two different windows showing the contents of the same folder can be in two different view modes (column and list view, for example), or they can be in the same view mode.

However, when these two different windows showing the contents of the same folder are both in list view mode, in Snow Leopard, if you change the sorting criterion for one of the windows (by clicking on a column header), from “Name” to “Size,” for example, Mac OS X… automatically changes the sorting criterion for the other window as well!

This means that you cannot have two different windows showing the contents of the same folder in list view mode that are sorted using two different criteria at the same time.

It is rather odd. Why such a limitation? If you are going to break the spatial metaphor, you might as well completely break it and fully embrace the ability to display the contents of the same folder in two different windows at the same time with two different sorting criteria.

But Snow Leopard does not let you do that.

I cannot help but connect this to the other odd limitations that affect the list view mode in a Finder window in Snow Leopard when the window displays the results of a Spotlight search. In that case, the limitations affect the very criteria that you can use for sorting the search results.

As with those other limitations, I would tend to suspect that there are underlying issues in Snow Leopard’s Finder that Apple was not able to address in time for the release of the final software. And since Apple tends to limit itself to bug fixes in subsequent incremental system updates, this means that we won’t see any improvements in this area until at least Mac OS X 10.7. In addition, since the list view mode is usually treated by Apple’s engineers as a second-class citizen, there is a good chance that we might have to live with unwarranted limitations in list view for many more years.

Thanks to Herman for pointing this out to me. (Since I am an old school Mac user, I don’t often attempt to have two different windows showing the contents of the same folder in list view mode at the same time. When I break the spatial metaphor, it is usually with windows in column view mode, where the sorting issue does not exist. So I hadn’t noticed this particular limitation until now.)

UPDATE: A reader writes to confirm that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) does the same thing, and he also says:

And the explanation is quite simple: the sort order is a property of the folder, not of the window. Consequently, when the sorting is changed in one window it also changes in the other. One could consider the fact that the ordering changes in both windows to be a feature rather than a bug. Certainly, changing the sort order to track with the window rather than the folder would add complexity, which is generally a bad idea.

I am afraid I cannot agree with this. In a non-spatial Finder where the same folder can be viewed simultaneously in several different windows, it makes no sense to attach a single sort order property to the folder. It’s a totally undesirable constraint, and it looks much more like an unwarranted limitation than a feature to me. If Apple decided that each folder had to have a single sort order property, they made a mistake.

The complexity that this reader refers to was added by Apple back in the early 2000s when it decided to break the spatial metaphor in the Finder. Since that metaphor was broken, the complexity of the non-spatial approach is now a fact of a life in Mac OS X’s Finder, and any “feature” that arbitrarily limits the options offered by this increased complexity is likely to frustrate users without really helping keep things more simple.

In my experience, these two progress bars were, generally speaking, rather useless, because InDesign would typically jump from one end to the other with little indication of progress in between.

But at least there was some indication of overall progress, and you could tell when the exporting process was complete.

Now, in InDesign CS5, when it comes to importing a publication as a PDF file, you have two options, labelled “PDF (Interactive)” and “PDF (Print)”:

I won’t go into the rationale for creating two separate options here. My concern is primarily with the user interface.

If you select the “PDF (Interactive)” exporting option, then eventually, after selecting the desired settings for your PDF file, you will get the same dialog with two progress bars that you used to get in InDesign CS4, illustrated above.

If you select the “PDF (Print)” option, on the other hand, after selecting the desired settings for your PDF file and instructing InDesign to proceed with the exporting process, you get… absolutely nothing.

The dialog with the PDF export settings disappears, and you are back in your InDesign publication.

If you happen to have the target folder for your PDF file visible in a Finder window in the background, you will see that a PDF file with your selected file name appears right away.

Does this mean that, in InDesign CS5, Adobe has managed the astonishing feat of introducing instantaneous PDF export?

Of course not. Just like the other PDF exporting option, this one requires a process that takes time, sometimes a lot of time.

The difference is that, with the “PDF (Print)” option, Adobe InDesign CS5 no longer displays a dialog box with progress bars. And this PDF file that immediately appears in the Finder window in the background is only an empty file weighing 0 KB that you cannot do anything with. (Don’t try to view it in Preview or with Quick Look.)

Apparently, according to Adobe, you are just supposed to know, as the user, that the exporting process will take time and that the PDF file in the Finder window will only be usable after that time. And how long will it take? Well, there is no indication of this. You are just supposed to wait an indeterminate amount of time (which of course, varies depending on the size of your InDesign publication and multiple other factors) before you can try to double-click on that PDF file in the Finder to open it, or you can try copy it to another location.

Obviously, the drawback of the approach with the dialog box with progress bars is that this dialog is modal, which means that you can’t do anything else in InDesign while the PDF exporting process is in progress.

Now that there is no dialog box, you can do other things in InDesign CS5 while the exporting is taking place. And of course you could always switch to another application and do something else while the exporting is in progress. But whatever you do, don’t try to do anything in that Finder window with the PDF file already visible in it until it’s actually ready!

There is absolutely no point in trying to use Adobe’s atrocious on-screen help feature to find out more about this change in InDesign CS5. As far as I can tell, the section about exporting as PDF makes no mention of the removal of the dialog box with progress bars for the “PDF (Print)” option.

If you scour the Adobe Forums, you will find other users who wonder where the dialog box with progress bar has gone. And you will find other users trying to do Adobe’s job here and explain the reasons for the change.

And most important, you will find out that there is actually a way to see the progress of the PDF exporting process in InDesign CS5. For this, you will need to bring up a palette called “Background Tasks” that is accessible via the “Window” menu, under “Utilities.”

And sure enough, when this palette is visible, there is a progress bar for the exporting process that you can keep an eye on, and therefore you have a way to determine when the process is complete and you can actually start using the new PDF file in the Finder.

Several questions remain, however:

• Why the inconsistency between the “PDF (Interactive)” and the “PDF (Print)” options? Why does one still use the old modal dialog box with progress bars whereas the other one does not?
• What will happen if you continue editing that same InDesign publication while the exporting process is in progress in the background? Will the changes be taken into account when creating the PDF? At what stage does InDesign “freeze” the state of the publication for the purposes of determining what to put in the PDF?
• Why does this “Background Tasks” palette not appear automatically when the exporting process starts? How is the user supposed to guess that this palette even exists? How is he supposed to guess that this palette is now the only way to follow the progress of the PDF exporting process?

Not that I am in favour of palettes or toolbars popping up all over the place like this, mind you. But if the user interface is badly designed to begin with, then you have to make do with whatever options are available via that user interface.

The whole situation just stinks. The change might have been well-intentioned, since making the PDF exporting process a background task does let you use InDesign for other things while the exporting is in progress, but it boggles the mind that Adobe’s engineers did not realize that InDesign users, especially those used to previous versions of the software, would need some kind of visual feedback regarding the PDF exporting process by default.

After all, when you are exporting a publication as a PDF file, what’s the next task that you are most likely to want to do? Is it really to try and immediately work on another InDesign publication, especially given that InDesign CS5, like previous versions of the software, has significant responsiveness issues, and is not likely to be as responsive as it normally is while the PDF exporting is taking place in the background? (You also are not allowed to close the publication window while the exporting is in progress, even though the background task is not visually attached to it in any way.)

Isn’t your very next task much more likely to be to want to upload the resulting PDF file to your printer’s server or send it to someone by e-mail?

I don’t know. Maybe I work in a non-standard way as a graphic designer. But usually exporting as PDF is the last thing I want to do when working on a specific project in InDesign. After that, I want to send the PDF file and move on to something else altogether.

And until I found out about this “Background Tasks” palette, with InDesign CS5 I found myself having to leave that Finder window open in the background with the embryonic PDF file and trying to monitor it to determine when it would turn in an actual, usable PDF file.

It is all rather absurd. I am all for moving away from modal user interfaces and taking advantage of multi-threading to turn processes into background tasks, but:

1. It needs to be done in a way that ensures that the user still has an easy (and easily discoverable) way to monitor the progress of the task, especially if it is one that might take quite a while.
2. It needs to be done in a way that ensures that the rest of the application remains fully responsive, which is not quite the case with InDesign CS5, even on a 2009 Mac Pro.
3. If the task involves the creation of items that are accessible from within other applications, especially the Finder, then it needs to be done in a way that does not reveal the newly created items before they are actually usable!
4. If the task involves the processing of the current document in a given state, then there needs to be clear indication of what this state will be and what impact further work on that same document while it is being processed in the background will have on the background process.

And it really would help if similar features all worked the same way. How is the average user supposed to understand why the PDF exporting is a background task for the “PDF (Print)” option, but not for the “PDF (Interactive)” option?

I am afraid that Adobe’s InDesign engineers simply are not good enough to provide this level of quality and polish in their software for Mac OS X.

As far as I am concerned, it would have been much more elegant to make the PDF exporting task a background task, but to “attach” it to the document window with a modal dialog sheet that includes a progress bar. This way, the user can still continue to work on other documents in InDesign if he wishes to do so, but there is no ambiguity about the state of the document that is being exported to PDF, and there is a clear indication of how long the process will take and when it will be complete.

The only problem I see with this approach is that InDesign lets you open multiple windows showing different pages of the same publication document (using the “New Window” command in the “Window › Arrange” submenu). So that raises of the question of which window the dialog sheet should be attached to, and what to do with the other windows. It might be appropriate to automatically close all windows of the same document but one, and then attach the dialog sheet to that one. (Other document windows showing other publications would be unaffected.)

I often copy a web address (URL) to the clipboard and then want to open a new window in my browser, paste the URL, and instruct the browser to go to the page.

Because I am a fast typist and like to avoid unnecessary strain on my wrist with mouse movements, I tend to do all this with the keyboard, using keyboard shortcuts.

This means in particular that, once I am in the web browser, I do the following three things in quick succession:

1. press command-N to open a new browser window
2. press command-V to paste the URL from the clipboard
3. press Return to start loading the web page

When I do this in Safari, no matter how fast I go, the browser has no problem responding to my actions and doing what I expect it to do.

When I do this in Firefox, on the other hand, if I do not pause between step 1 and step 2, Firefox simply ignores the second shortcut (command-V) and does not paste the URL.

In other words, it looks like Firefox does not have some kind of “keyboard buffer” that would keep track of my keystrokes even when I type too fast for it to be able to follow me in real time.

It might be a small thing, but when you encounter the problem several times a day, every day, it quickly becomes very annoying.

I have already written about other shortcomings of the Firefox application for Mac OS X. It does not make it a bad browser. But it makes for a less then satisfactory user experience and is one of the reasons why I tend to stick with Safari as my browser of choice.

I’ve talked about this problem before and unfortunately, I still haven’t found a solution. I still get multiple crashes every day while using Snow Leopard’s Finder and its Quick Look function to explore PDF files, or when opening and browsing these PDF files in Preview. It is really quite irritating, and I’ve decided that it’s really time to do something about it.

The first problem I had to deal with was that, for some reason, my Snow Leopard system was not sending any crash reports to Apple’s servers. I would get the usual crash report dialog, but the only options I was given was to relaunch the offending application. The dialog seemed to imply that the crash report would be sent to Apple, but I have Little Snitch’s Network Monitor window open at all times, and I would never see any network activity with my system trying to connect to Apple’s servers after I dismissed the dialog.

I had no idea why my system was not sending the reports to Apple, but I figured that there had to be a way to make it work again. (This was not a new problem, but until I got a decent high-speed Internet connection last week, I just couldn’t be bothered to try and solve this problem knowing that my connection was so slow and unreliable anyway.)

So I explored my home library folders to try and find a preference file or cache that I could trash to force Snow Leopard’s crash reporting process to offer me to send the crash reports to Apple again, but I couldn’t find anything that had any impact on anything. I trash a few files and tried to relaunch the appropriate processes, but Snow Leopard continued to refuse to send its reports to Apple’s servers. (It was easy for me to trigger crashes, because I would get them all the time when attempting to explore a specific folder with PDF files with Quick Look.)

Finally, I did a Spotlight search for “crashreport” in file names on my hard drive, and Spotlight told me that I had an application called CrashReporterPrefs.app somewhere inside my “Developer” folder:

I launched that application and, sure enough, it offered the following options:

I changed my option from the first one (which was selected) to the second one and quit the application. I triggered another crash and finally I got a different dialog box with the option to specifically trigger the sending of the crash reports to Apple. I kept an eye on my Network Monitor window, and it did indicate that my system was communicating with Apple’s servers.

So I managed to get that working again. But of course it did nothing to fix the crashes. It’s just that now I am sure that, each time I get a crash, Mac OS X will send a report to Apple. Since I get so many crashes, maybe, just maybe there is a tiny hope that the presence of all these crashes will add to other people’s crash reports and cause Apple to notice that there is something wrong and try to fix it.

Because I am fairly certain that it is some kind of bug in Mac OS X. As I wrote in my earlier post, the whole thing started with a specific build of the Mac OS X 10.6.3 update, and has been going on ever since.

Now, it is of course possible that it is just a coincidence and that the problem has nothing to do with this particular update. But then, what could it be? I have tried trashing preference files. I have tried deactivating various third-party plug-ins that might interfere with Quick Look (but they don’t have anything to do with Preview, and Preview crashes on a regular basis too). I have tried clearing caches, repairing permissions, rebuilding my LaunchServices database. Nothing helps.

I should also note that I am not the only one with this problem. There are all kinds of complaints about Finder crashes on Apple’s forum, but this thread in particular describes a situation that is exactly the same as mine. Unfortunately, so far no one has posted any kind of suggestion of a solution.

So, what to do? I am afraid the next option for me will probably be to try and rebuild a separate user environment from scratch. Because if I try to reproduce the crashes in a blank user environment with zero customizations and no third-party application running, of course I am unable to do so. I can only reproduce the problem in my own user environment, so it must have something to do with some specific settings, caches, or third-party tools in my environment.

But rebuilding a new user environment from scratch will be very time-consuming, all the more so if I want to try and identify the specific setting/incompatibility that causes the problem with the crashes. Because if I rebuild everything at once, and the problem reappears, then I will not have a better idea of what is required to reproduce it and I will be unable to do anything further about the problem. The only way to identify the source of the problem will be to rebuild things slowly, piece by piece, and try to reproduce the crashes after each step. It’s going to be mightily painful.

I have put it off for many months, but since Apple does not seem to be able to reproduce the problem (I have submitted several bug reports about this), what other option do I have?

After surviving for ten years (until 2006!) on dial-up and then having to bite the bullet and acquire an expensive satellite-based service, we had to deal for three years with a change of ownership (from Aliant to Xplornet), unreliable service (bad weather, defective parts, and so on), and unacceptable restrictions (bandwidth throttling, limited access to certain specific sites, etc.) that we had to put up with simply because we didn’t have any choice.

The reason we didn’t have a choice was that our specific neighbourhood, while not far away from the area along the main highway that is served by both the phone company and the cable company, was geographically too far for the phone company to provide DSL service and had never been equipped with the cabling required for cable service either.

Over the years, we (as in me and a number of other people in the area) unsuccessfully tried to lobby the cable company to expand their service to our neighbourhood. But the response was always that it required too much of an investment on their part for a limited customer base, and that therefore there was “no business case” for it.

Then in 2007 the provincial premier at the time announced a “high-speed Internet for everyone” broadband program for rural Nova Scotia and we were told that everyone in Nova Scotia would have access to broadband by the end of 2009.

Later it was announced that the company hired by the government to provide Internet service in our area was Eastlink and that it would be provided in the form of a local wireless service via strategically placed towers.

And so we waited. As the deadline approached, the status of our particular area stayed desperately stuck at the planning stage and so we started to worry again, and with good reason. Before the end of the year, it was confirmed that the project had been delayed and that we would now have to wait until April or May 2010.

I kept monitoring the status of our area regularly and, in early April 2010, saw a change to a status that indicated that the project was near completion and that the last phase would last no more than a week.

And then… nothing. For several weeks, the status stayed stuck at that same near-completion stage. And then the end of May 2010 deadline was reached and we still had nothing.

Thankfully, a friend of mine who was monitoring the situation sent me a link to a media report in early June indicating that there were “fewer than 200” people province-wide who were still waiting for Eastlink to hook them up, which was patently untrue. But I went back to the status page and then I discovered that it had miraculously changed altogether and that the service was now listed as being available in all areas.

So I picked up the phone and, to my surprise, without even being put on hold, I was put through to a representative who confirmed that the service was now available in my area and offered to set up an appointment for me. She called me back an hour later with a date of June 16, and just warned me that it was an appointment for an “installation test” and that normally they should be able to set me up, but if there were any problems with the signal reception, they would have to come back later with more powerful equipment, “at no extra cost” to me, but of course with more delays.

While waiting for the appointment, I checked the location of the towers in my county on Eastlink’s map and saw that I was located about mid-way between two towers, which was not too reassuring. On the other had, one of the towers was across the bay from us, meaning that there would be a clear line of sight with no obstacles whatsoever.

And so we waited for June 16. Two days ago, I got an automated call reminding me of the appointment. When I had talked to the representative, she has said that they would call me in the morning to give me the approximate time of their arrival. But this morning I didn’t get a call, so I started to worry again.

But finally around noon I got three phone call attempts from a cell phone (cell service is pretty bad in our neck of the woods) and on the last one I was able to determine that the technicians had the wrong civic number and couldn’t find me. I corrected the number and five minutes later they showed up at the door.

Colin and Jason were nice young fellows and they immediately reassured me that they didn’t anticipate any problems with signal strength from my location. And sure enough, their first tests with the tower across the bay confirmed that the signal was excellent, and so they proceeded with the installation, which requires a small antenna on the roof and a ground connection in addition to the service connection, for safety reasons.

They did an excellent job of hiding the cables (including the hideous lime green one for the ground) and a couple of hours later we were able to test things on my computer and confirm that my connection had a download speed of over 3 Mbps and an upload speed of nearly 1 Mbps. Yey!

(The officially advertised download speed is 1.25 Mbps, but the technician said some people got a better speed, for a variety of reasons. He did warn me that they might eventually throttle it back down somewhere closer to the advertised speed. I guess we’ll see.)

Beyond the speed/throughput numbers per se, the big changes are of course that there is no more latency (something that is unavoidable with a satellite-based service) and no more throttling back or blocking of specific sites (“no usage restrictions,” says the web site).

I will have to give it a bit of time before drawing any conclusions about the overall reliability and consistency of the service, but while these speeds are of course at the very low end of the spectrum in today’s world, and even in what Eastlink has to offer, they are also obviously much better than what I used to have with the satellite-based service, which would so often throttle things back down to near-dial-up speeds.

So this is it. Finally, we have broadband, and finally I can say goodbye to lengthy downloads and choppy streaming. What a relief. I think we deserve a nice bottle tonight with our supper to celebrate the end of 15 years of waiting!

Sadly, I am afraid I have to report that the experience was almost uniformly worse. I do not have time to go into all the things that are wrong with this new version of InDesign in full detail, but here are a few notes gathered while I was in the process of trying to work on my academic review.

Crashes when importing Word files

Since I had to work on an academic review, that meant that I had to deal with multiple articles provided by authors in MS Word format. And since we are talking about university research here, most of these articles came with plenty of footnotes.

I have already had the opportunity to discuss a long-standing bug with footnotes in InDesign, which causes the application, during the process of importing a Word document with footnotes, to skip some of the footnotes altogether, to replace the missing footnote references with an unidentified character, and to renumber the remaining footnotes.

Needless to say, this is a bad, destructive bug that has caused me a lot of grief over the past couple of years.

Last week, I wrote to report that I had found a workaround of sorts in InDesign CS5. By saving the Word files in the new .docx format from within Word 2008, I was able to avoid the disappearance of footnotes in the articles I had to deal with for this year’s issue of the review.

Unfortunately, I have since received e-mail from other people that suggests that this workaround might not work for everyone. Apparently InDesign CS3 and CS4 do also support importing Word files in the .docx format, but the use of that format does not seem to eliminate the problem with missing footnotes. It is also possible that I was just lucky with the batch of articles that I had to deal with this time, but I was able to reproduce the problem in InDesign CS5 with some of the articles when using the regular .doc format. It’s only when I used the .docx format exclusively that I was able to avoid losing any footnotes while importing the files into my InDesign publication.

On the other hand, I soon discovered that my switch to the .docx format introduced a new problem, and an even more serious one than the disappearance of foonotes. For several of my articles, a mere attempt to place the Word file in .docx format would cause InDesign CS5 to crash altogether.

In some cases, I was able to narrow down the problem and determine that the mere presence of any kind of proprietary Word code in any of the footnotes of the offending the .docx file would cause InDesign CS5′s Word importer to crash the entire application. For example, I had a file which contained a couple of unwanted OLE_LINK bookmarks in the footnotes that I had accidentally introduced during the process of editing the file in Word 2008.

Fortunately, for this file, simply deleting the bookmarks in Word before attempting to import the .docx file in InDesign CS5 was enough to eliminate the crash in InDesign.

But for several other files, I couldn’t find any kind of proprietary Word code in the footnotes, and still they would cause InDesign CS5 to crash each time I tried to place them as .docx files.

I was able to determine that placing these same files into a brand new, blank InDesign publication would not cause a crash. After further investigation, I managed to determine that it seemed to have something to do with the existing paragraph and character styles in my master InDesign publication. But I simply didn’t have time to further explore things and I ended up using a workaround consisting of placing the remainder of my Word articles into a separate InDesign CS5 file that contained only a partial style sheet instead of the full style sheet that I was using in my main InDesign file.

This meant that some of the formatting was lost, but at least the application was not crashing. Strangely, some of the formatting that was lost included the paragraph style I used for the footnotes. For some reason, even though the InDesign file I was placing the articles into did contain the same paragraph style with the exact same name, when InDesign was placing the articles with their footnotes, all the footnotes were changed back from my footnote paragraph style to the default “[Basic Paragraph]” style, as if they had no paragraph style at all.

In addition, InDesign would insert an extra tabulation character after each footnote number in the footnote. Fortunately, these two defects were fairly easy to repair after the fact using batch replace operations. (On the other hand, it was impossible to simply place the insertion point in one of the footnotes and use the “Select All” command to select all footnotes before applying the paragraph style to them. It is now impossible to select the text of more than one footnote at the same time in InDesign.)

But still… It was all mightily frustrating. Based on this evidence, it does appear that InDesign (including version CS5) suffers from a major bug in its Word file importer that is somehow connected to style formatting for footnotes. If you have InDesign CS5 and have a bit of time, I invite you to go to my iDisk and download the Zip archive called “InDesign CS5.zip.”

It contains three files, a Word article in .docx format and two different InDesign files, one with a limited style sheet and one with a more complete style sheet. On my machine, I can cause InDesign CS5 to crash simply by attempting to place the .docx file into the InDesign file with the complete style sheet. And when I place the same .docx file into the other InDesign file, I don’t get a crash, but I get the loss in paragraph style formatting in the footnotes and the extra tabulation characters.

I’d be interested to know if other InDesign CS5 can reproduce the problem as well. (You might have to fiddle with the import options.) If you can reproduce it, I invite you to submit a bug report to Adobe through their web site. You don’t have to have a support account to do so. Feel free to provide a link to the archive on my iDisk if you do. I am leaving it there for now, as I myself submitted a bug report to Adobe referring to it. (As far as I can tell, you cannot attach files to your bug reports to Adobe. So I don’t know how seriously they actually take such bug reports.)

Freezes when using contextual menus

Another major frustration with this new InDesign CS5, at least on my machine, is that it is unfortunately very easy to cause the application to freeze altogether. There are periods when, each time I try to right-click on an object to change some of its formatting options via the contextual menu, InDesign completely freezes. Yet I can use the exact same formatting options via the application menu bar at the top with no problems.

The first such freeze I experienced was when I right-clicked on a placed graphic and accidentally selected the “Open With” menu item in the contextual menu. I didn’t mean to select it, but of course I was going through the menu and accidentally selected it in passing. InDesign then attempted to display the “Open With” submenu, and I just got the Spinning Beach Ball of Death and that was it. I waited long enough before I decided that InDesign was not coming back from its frozen death and had to force-quit it.

I relaunched InDesign and then got a freeze again as soon as I tried to pull up the contextual menu by right-clicking on an object, even before InDesign was able to display the menu.

Since then, it has been hit or miss. I tried to trash a few preference files and relaunch InDesign, and that seemed to eliminate the freeze for a bit, but then it was back. After that, I decided I was not going to bother with the contextual menu at all, and just used the application menu bar instead. (Fortunately, none of the options I need is available exclusively through the contextual menu.)

I don’t know if this chronic freezing problem has anything to do with Launch Services, since it first appeared when I accidentally selected that “Open With” menu item (which can cause a temporary freeze in the best of cases, simply because the application or Mac OS X has to look up a list of available applications). But I don’t really have the will to rebuild my entire Launch Services database from scratch at this point, especially since I have no guarantee that this will prevent the problem from recurring eventually. (I rebuilt my database not too long ago, so it’s fairly “new,” and I don’t want to have to change all these “Open With” settings all over again if I can avoid it.)

Significant performance issues

Just these two things (the crashes and the freezes) would be enough to turn Mac users off. Is it really too hard for Adobe to produce an application that does not freeze or crash?

But then, even when it does not freeze or crash, InDesign CS5 has other pretty significant issues when it comes to performance. I am using it on a 2009 Mac Pro with 12 GB of RAM, which is arguably as good a machine as you can get with your money today for running InDesign CS5.

And yet, even with that fairly new and fast machine, I had to turn off several settings that were on by default when I first launched InDesign CS5, because they were making everything unbearably slow and unresponsive. Most of the problems had to do with live resizing. In InDesign CS5, by default you now get not only live redrawing of your window’s contents when you resize the window, but also live redrawing of the contents of text frames when you resize the frames.

I don’t know if it was due to the presence of footnotes in my articles, but I don’t think so, because I noticed the performance problems in every text frame that I was attempting to resize, not just the ones containing footnotes: The live resizing was just not responsive enough and caused me to constantly overshoot. It was painful.

I ended up scouring InDesign CS5′s preferences in frustration and turning off a number of things, but I believe the one that did it was the “Live Screen Drawing” option under “Interface,” which I changed from “Immediate” to “Delayed.” (Don’t ask me what the difference between “Delayed” and “Never” is. With the former, I’ve tried to wait ten seconds after dragging a text frame corner, and InDesign still won’t redraw its contents.)

Unfortunately, there is no way to turn off live resizing for the entire document window, and the unresponsiveness issues remain there. Fortunately, resizing the entire document window is not something that I have to do too often. Still, I do have to do it each time I reopen a document, because InDesign CS5 is still unable to remember the size and position of a document window when you close it, and reopens it by default as a window that fills the entire screen, even if there are palettes open on the side, which end up hiding the vertical scroll bar. Will we have to wait until InDesign CS99 before we finally have an application that remembers the size and position of its document windows? It’s pathetic.

(It’s another thing that Adobe has in common with Microsoft: Word 2008 too is unable to remember document window positions, even though Word 2004 was perfectly capable of doing so. Apparently, these software giants believe both in feature creep and in feature crippling.)

In the same vein, there is another new problem in InDesign CS5, which is that, occasionally, after the text of an story spread across multiple frames has been reflowed (because it was edited), the application simply skips one specific frame altogether, which remains blank, and the flow of the story jumps directly from the previous frame to the next frame, for no apparent reason. I was able to determine that simply resizing the frame slightly would force InDesign to come to its senses and “remember” to include that particular frame in the sequence.

But really, how bad can you get? Crashes, freezes, unresponsiveness even on the fastest machines, and obvious screen redraw and text reflow glitches. That’s what you get for purchasing an Adobe InDesign CS5 upgrade. Terrific stuff!

Other

I have also encountered other, “smaller” issues. For example, as far as I can tell, the “Export to Interactive PDF” option for saving your document as a PDF file fails to take into account the option you select in the “Layout:” section of the dialog box. When I take a 4-page InDesign document with facing pages (so that pages 2 and 3 are facing pages and pages 1 and 4 are by themselves), if I try to export it as an “Interactive PDF,” regardless of whether I choose “Single Page,” “Single Page Continuous,” or “Two-Up (Facing)” in the menu of options, I get the exact same result in the PDF file, with pages 2 and 3 combined as a single 2-page spread.

Maybe I don’t understand the option at all. Or maybe it just does not work. Fortunately, the “Adobe PDF (Print)” export option, which is what the old PDF option is now called, works properly and lets me choose if I want to display facing pages as spreads or as single pages.

I could go on. But I think the above provides ample illustration of the fact that the whole experience of using InDesign CS5 really makes you feel that there is a serious lack of quality control happening at Adobe at the moment, and that the Microsoftization of Adobe is well underway.

That does not mean that Preview is perfect, far from it. It suffers from a number of frustrating limitations and inconsistencies. For example, the selection tool still includes punctuation marks (commas, colons, etc.) when selecting entire words. And, on my machine at least, Preview 5.0.x has a tendency to crash on a regular basis.

One of the more long-standing issues I have with Preview, however, is with the way it handles focus and keyboard shortcuts. When you view a PDF document, you usually have a sidebar that contains either a table of contents or thumbnails of the document’s pages, for quick navigation.

The problem is that the behaviour of Preview’s keyboard shortcuts, including common ones such as Home and End and Page Up and Page Down, varies depending on whether the focus is currently on the document itself in the main area of the window or on the sidebar.

And that’s particularly problematic in light of the fact that the visual clues for the current focus are very minimal. There’s no blue halo around the sidebar or the main area. The only way you can tell that the focus is on the sidebar and not on the main area is the fact that the caption of the currently selected thumbnail is highlighted in the foreground selection colour and not in the background grey used when a selection is in the background.

Here’s a selected thumbnail when the sidebar is in the foreground:

And here’s the same selected thumbnail when the sidebar is in the background:

(Don’t ask me why the highlighting for the frame around the thumbnail is still in the foreground selection colour.)

The situation is similar when the sidebar contains a TOC.

In the foreground, you get this:

And in the background, you get this:

If you haven’t selected anything in the sidebar, or if the visible portion of what’s in the sidebar does not include your current selection (because you’ve scrolled beyond it), you are out of luck, because there are really no visual clues indicating whether the focus is on the sidebar or the main window area.

And unfortunately, this is important, because the meaning of the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down shortcuts changes depending on what the focus is on.

If the focus is on the sidebar, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down apply to the sidebar and not to the pages of the PDF document itself.

And if you do a search with the toolbar search field, for some reason the Page Up and Page Down shortcuts work as expected (i.e. they scroll through the found pages of the document in the main window area), but not the Home and End shortcuts, which do… nothing.

It’s all very frustrating, so today I decided to make myself a couple of Keyboard Maestro macros that would work all the time, regardless of what the current focus is (on the sidebar, on the main area, or on the search field).

More specifically, I created a “Home” macro which:

1. simulates a mouse click at (200,100) from the front window’s top left corner
2. simulates the Home keystroke

The first step ensures that the focus is on the main area of the window. And then the second step just does what the Home key is supposed to do.

I assigned the command-Home shortcut to it, et voilà. Now I have an easy-to-remember shortcut for going all the way back to the beginning of a PDF that works all the time, regardless of whether the focus is on the sidebar, the search field or the main area.

I did the same with a command-End shortcut for the corresponding macro to go to the end of the PDF. And while I was at it, I also created “proper” macros for going up and down one page and assigned the command-Page Up and command-Page Down shortcuts to them.

To me, these shortcuts are appropriate because they don’t have any special function in Preview (as opposed to a word processor, where they would be expected to move the insertion point as well). Either they don’t do anything at all, or they do the same thing as the key without the Command modifier. And they are easy to remember. And, most important, unlike the regular shortcuts, they work all the time.