I also follow a number of other artists fairly closely, and also have a wide range of other musical interests.

This means, among other things, that I have amassed a rather vast collection of recordings, which needs to be maintained and managed. Most of it is now in digital form. (I still buy lots of music on CD, but I convert everything into digital files on my hard drive as well. The CDs are effectively my hard drive backup, and the medium for listening to the music on my main sound system, whereas I listen to the digital files with the sound system in my office.)

What are the options for managing these digital files? Well, on the Mac side, there seems to be pretty much only one option, which is iTunes. For years now, I have been praying for the introduction of some kind of version of iTunes optimized for music collectors — a kind of iTunes Pro, if you will. But of course, hoping that Apple itself would release such a product is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Instead, as time goes by, iTunes is becoming more and more bloated with things that are at best marginally useful to the music collector, and it’s becoming slower and slower, and buggier and buggier. Meanwhile, of course, my music collection is not getting any smaller.

A couple of months ago, I decided that I had finally had enough. While the iTunes 11.0.1 update released in late 2012 did address some of the worst issues introduced with iTunes 11, I still found myself constantly looking at the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, even for the most mundane of tasks (like starting or stopping playback!). In addition, knowing that this was at least partly due to iTunes constantly writing and rewriting the bloated files called “iTunes Library.itl” and “iTunes Library.xml” in the ~/Music/iTunes/ folder was not reassuring at all.

I had also started experiencing new bugs that were beyond irritating. For example, each time I imported music from an audio CD into my iTunes library, when I tried to eject the CD from within iTunes, the application would simply freeze altogether. (The only workaround was to quit iTunes after each import, eject the CD in the Finder, and then relaunch iTunes. Given that the very process of quitting and launching the iTunes application itself is slow as molasses, that was not really acceptable either.)

I was unable to reproduce the issue in a different user environment on my machine, so clearly it was a problem linked to my existing user environment and my existing iTunes music library. But I was not interested in exploring any of the more drastic troubleshooting options (like rebuilding my library from scratch, etc.) that would be required to try and identify the cause of the bug.

I then started exploring alternatives. First, I tried a couple of applications that were essentially alternate music players, like Ecoute or Fidelia, which would let me play the music from my iTunes library without having to launch iTunes itself. But I was not really satisfied and, besides, these solutions did not address my main concern, which was that even managing my music collection had become way too painful with iTunes. I needed a new music collection manager.

Then I stumbled upon Swinsian. I tried the demo and really liked what I saw. Unlike the other alternatives, it was an actual replacement for iTunes, not just as a music player, but as a music library manager. It could handle all the music file formats that iTunes supported (and then some). It offered tag editing, playlists, various view modes, etc.

But could it really replace iTunes? The first test was to see how it would handle my large collection of nearly 100,000 tracks. It passed that test with flying colours. Even the importing process was far shorter and smoother than I expected it to be. I made sure to configure it to only import the track info and not actually create duplicates of all my existing music files, and it was just fine with that.

Then I started playing around with the software, and began to feel increasingly confident about its ability to actually replace iTunes as my music library manager. It had some shortcomings, but it was very promising. I started sending reports about apparent bugs and issues to the developer, and was delighted to find that he was very responsive, even though I had not even purchased the software yet!

So I took the plunge, and decided to give it a real try. It wasn’t like I was taking a huge risk: If it didn’t work out, I could always go back to iTunes after a few weeks and simply update my library in iTunes to match the changes made in Swinsian. I would inevitably lose or have to redo some of my work in the process, but it would not be anything too catastrophic.

I purchased the software and set about using Swinsian in earnest for the various music library management tasks that my music collection usually requires. I started encountering other issues, of course, but was, once again, delighted to find that the developer would not only respond to my questions in a very positive and constructive manner, but would also actually implement bug fixes and enhancements in direct response to my comments, sometimes within a manner of days or even less! (I quickly opted to become a beta tester for new builds of the application, of course.)

This pattern continued for several weeks and it didn’t take me very long to decide that I had definitely made the right choice in switching from iTunes to Swinsian to manage my digital music collection. And now, as a long-time Mac user and iTunes user, I feel that it is almost my duty to report on what I have been able to experience and accomplish in Swinsian, with the help of its developer.

There is lots of material to cover and I won’t have time to mention everything that needs to be mentioned, but I’ll do my best to try and describe some of Swinsian’s key benefits and how it can be used as a replacement for iTunes for the purpose of managing and using one’s collection of digital music files. Everyone has different needs, of course, but I hope that sharing my experience will help others see that a switch from iTunes to Swinsian might be the best thing that they could do to regain control of their music library management experience.

Speed

This is definitely the main thing for me, and Swinsian really delivers. It is specifically designed for handling large libraries, and succeeds where iTunes fails miserably. It launches fast, it has a very responsive user interface, it lets you browse your large library quickly and smoothly, it lets you import tracks and edit tags efficiently, and it even has a Find/Replace feature that supports regular expressions, which is a crucial time-saver when you need to edit large numbers of tags in specific ways.

In fact, I am shocked to see how fast Swinsian is. Because of iTunes’s long-standing shortcomings and sluggishness, I had somehow managed to convince myself that the slowness was due to the large size of my library and to the intrinsic performance limitations associated with accessing and writing large numbers of files on a conventional hard drive. (My music collection is far too large to fit on an SSD drive.)

What Swinsian proves to me is that this was a false impression and that iTunes’s performance problems are not due to intrinsic limitations, but instead to the bad quality of iTunes itself as a piece of software. (Given Swinsian’s speed, the bottleneck is obviously not OS X itself or the file system.) I am more than surprised to see how fast Swinsian can, for example, modify the “Album” tag for dozens of tracks in a fraction of a second. I select the tracks, I edit the “Album” tag, I press Return to validate the changes — and my hard drive churns for about half a second, and that’s it! The same task in iTunes, at least for me with my large library, would be interrupted by multiple occurrences of the Spinning Beach Ball of Death and would easily, depending on the circumstances, take 10 or even 20 seconds sometimes.

It is really ridiculous how much faster Swinsian is, and it’s an eye-opener regarding the poor quality of iTunes itself as a piece of software, especially with large libraries.

Tags

With Swinsian, you can finally say goodbye to the semi-modal dialog box for editing track information. The information is displayed in a pane on the right-hand side that can stay visible at all times and is immediately updated based on the current selection in the main pane of the window. It takes a bit of time to adjust to this change (and the absence of visible field edges when the focus is not on the tag field is a bit disconcerting at first), but you quickly realize how pleasant it can be to have a non-modal interface for editing tags:

Of course, the tags are not in the same order as in iTunes, so there is a period of adjustment there too. And Swinsian does not support as many tags as iTunes does. Notable absentees include iTunes’s sort fields. Swinsian only supports the standard “Artist” and “Album Artist” tags, so if you are used to sorting your artists by last name in iTunes, you will not have that option here. At first, I was a bit disappointed by this, especially given all the effort that I had put into tagging my tracks properly in iTunes in order to get, for example, all my Miles Davis music to show up under “D” rather than “M”.

But the truth is that, even after all these years, I was still very far from having properly tagged everything in my music library anyway, and of course, because of the limitations of the sort field feature in iTunes itself, it was a never-ending task, because there was nothing smart about this feature, and every time I imported a new Miles Davis album in iTunes, for instance, I still had to manually tag it properly in order to avoid having it show up under “M” rather than “D”. (A really smart sort field feature would have rules that would automatically add the right tags, at least for known artists with known sort fields, but also for obvious names. I mean, how hard can it be for a computer program to figure out automatically that, in “Neil Young”, “Young” is the last name and “Neil” is the first name?)

So basically I had to abandon the idea of having a music library with alphabetically-correct sorting. It’s not the end of the world for me, because I do a large part of my library browsing either via playlists or with the search feature anyway. When you access your Miles Davis tracks mostly by selecting a playlist or by typing “Miles Davis” in the search field (with instantaneous results in Swinsian, thank you very much), it does not much matter whether Miles Davis shows up under “D” or under “M” in alphabetical lists of artists.

One thing that the Swinsian developer has implemented is ignoring “The” when sorting things alphabetically. Initially, this only worked for artists, but he has recently added support for this same feature in track titles, so that “The End” shows up under “E” and not under “T” in alphabetical order. (And you can also browse lists by typing, which also correctly ignore the “The”. Ignoring “A/An” is not supported at this time.)

When editing tags, it is also now possible to use the familiar command-P and command-N shortcuts (as in “Previous” and “Next”) to jump from track to track in the Track Info pane without having to change the selection in the main pane. Even though the Track Info pane is not modal, it would still be a pain to constantly have to grab the mouse to select the track(s) whose info you want to modify.

In addition, Swinsian is a well-behaved OS X application, with support for the built-in spell checker, substitutions, etc. And it also provides text transformation commands for changing text to lowercase, title case or all caps.

Last but not least, Swinsian has a very powerful Find/Replace feature (separate from the regular search field) that supports regular expressions. This to me is pretty close to the Holy Grail of tag editing. Regular expressions have a bit of a learning curve, but they are such a powerful tool for editing large numbers of tags that I don’t think any owner of a large music collection can really do without them. (I know I did until now, but really I was just waiting for such a feature to finally become available.)

You can use the Find/Replace dialog without learning about regular expressions, of course, and it already enables you to execute batch operations that are impossible in iTunes, but regular expressions are where this feature truly shines.

In the process of collecting bootleg Prince recordings, for example, I often get, among other problems, tracks where the “Title” (song title) field contains the song title prefixed by a track number (as in “04 – Purple Rain”). Since there is already a separate track number tag, this is highly undesirable and the track number prefix needs to be removed. But how do you remove it? Well, without regular expressions, you have no choice but to do it manually, one track at a time. (Experienced iTunes users know that there are AppleScript scripts for iTunes for this type of thing, but they too are affected by the major performance issues in iTunes.) In Swinsian, you can just use a regular expression like:

[0-9]+ - 

(which means “any sequence of one or more digits followed by a space, a dash, and another space”) in the “Find:” field and replace all occurrences with nothing. While you cannot restrict the Find/Replace operation to the current selection of tracks, you can restrict the operation to tracks added recently only (in the last X days). And you can also preview the changes to make sure that the operation won’t affect any tracks that you don’t want it to affect.

With regular expressions, the possibilities are endless. You can clean up hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of tracks with lightning-fast batch operations. It is an essential tool for managing a large collection of digital music files.

Controls

If you are used to using your keyboard’s media keys to control playback in iTunes, the same media keys will work Swinsian. On my aluminium Apple keyboard, for example, I can use fn-F8 from anywhere in OS X to play/pause playback in Swinsian, and fn-F7 and fn-F9 to jump to the previous and next tracks. (You don’t need the fn modifier key if you use OS X’s default keyboard settings for the aluminium keyboard.)

Controlling Swinsian playback volume specifically (without changing the overall volume level for the system) from anywhere in OS X is a bit more complicated, but one other key aspect of Swinsian is that it’s scriptable.

For increasing the playback volume, I ended up using Keyboard Maestro to define a macro that runs this AppleScript script:

tell application "Swinsian"
	set myVolume to volume
	set the volume to (myVolume + 0.05)
end tell

and displays a quick notification in Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, and I assigned the global cmd-shift-F12 shortcut to it. I have a similar macro for decreasing the playback volume in Swinsian.

I am still in the process of experimenting with other AppleScript scripts. For example, for my Prince bootleg recordings, I also need a script to “albumize” a selection of tracks, i.e. to automatically number these tracks in the right order in the “Track Number” field. (Typically, tracks that come with a track number prefix in the “Title” field also fail to include a track number in the “Track Number” field.) Even though my scripting skills are quite limited, I already have a script that appears to be working fine:

tell application "Swinsian"
	set p to selection of window 1
	if p is not {} then
		set c to count of p's items
		repeat with i from 1 to c
			set t to item i of p
			set the track number of t to i
		end repeat
	end if
end tell

I initially had some performance issues with this script. But again, the developer has been very prompt to resolve them.

Interface

If you are one of the many iTunes users who were dismayed by the fact that Apple removed the small pane displaying the album art in the main window in iTunes 11 in list view, I am pleased to report that the track information pane in Swinsian includes such a section.

Sometimes, Apple’s design decisions are maddeningly stupid, and at some point you find yourself wanting to throw your arms in the air and give up on the whole thing. Well, with Swinsian, you can give up on iTunes and get a proper list view mode with album art again:

Swinsian also brings back the option to have a browser view with columns on the left — another key feature that was removed by Apple in iTunes 11. And it’s quite flexible:

In many respects, Swinsian offers a user interface that is what the iTunes interface for music collectors should be, and no longer is.

The playlist management features are similar to the ones in iTunes. Due to restrictions imposed by Apple itself, Swinsian is unable to import smart playlists from iTunes, and imports them as regular (static) playlists instead. But you can easily recreate your favourite smart playlists in Swinsian itself.

The one big thing that is still missing in Swinsian, in my view, is the ability to open playlists in separate windows. It’s another thing that Apple removed in iTunes 11, and I was hoping to get it back with Swinsian. But the developer tells me that he’s thinking about it, so I am quite optimistic.

iTunes and Swinsian Cohabitation

Even if, like me, you decide to embrace Swinsian as your primary music library manager, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get rid of iTunes altogether. For one thing, you might be a regular iTunes Store customer and want to continue to be able to purchase music from the store.

The good news is that you can have both. All you need to do, after importing your existing iTunes music library into Swinsian, is to use Swinsian’s “Watched Folders” feature to keep an eye on your iTunes Music folder automatically:

On my machine, iTunes is configured to save new music files to a folder called “Music 2009” (where I consolidated my entire music library back in 2009, hence the name). Now that I’ve moved to Swinsian as my main music library manager, I have changed the iTunes setting so that music files are no longer copied to this folder when I add them to the iTunes library (so that I don’t end up with all kinds of duplicates when I add stuff from my Swinsian library to my iTunes library). But when I buy some music from the iTunes Store in iTunes, it still gets added to my “Music 2009” folder. And now, with Swinsian’s “Watched Folders” feature, these newly-purchased tracks are also automatically added to my Swinsian library as well. (Again, to avoid multiple copies, I have configured the “Watched Folders” settings for my “Music 2009” folder in Swinsian to “Just Add Tracks”, as opposed to copying them.

This way, when I import new music (from a ripped CD, for example), it gets copied to my Swinsian library folder. But when I purchase something from the iTunes Store in iTunes (which gets copied to my iTunes music folder), it simply gets added to my Swinsian library, without getting copied to my Swinsian library folder. This means that I have music files in two different places, yes, but both those locations are on the same hard drive, and I back up everything on that hard drive nightly.

The other important issue regarding iTunes and Swinsian cohabitation is managing the music that’s stored on iOS devices. Initially, I thought I’d have to try and keep my Swinsian library and my iTunes library in complete sync. But I’ve since discovered how, once you’ve plugged in your iOS device and it shows up in iTunes, you can switch to the device’s “Music” pane and then drag and drop music files from Swinsian directly onto that pane in iTunes so that it gets added to the device, bypassing the iTunes library itself altogether.

(You can also easily select a bunch of tracks in Swinsian and simply drag-and-drop them into iTunes to add them to the iTunes library. As long as you have the right settings in iTunes, iTunes will simply add references to the tracks to its library and not copy the tracks. And it’s actually reasonably fast — as fast as iTunes can be these days, anyway.)

Of course, this will never be as good as complete iOS device integration or direct access to the iTunes Store, which only iTunes can offer. But it’s good enough for me and I suspect it might be good enough for many other music collectors.

I should also note that Swinsian includes support for AirTunes, which means that you don’t necessarily have to rely on iTunes to play the contents of your music library on your living room’s sound system, for example.

Importing CDs

Swinsian does not include its own feature for importing CDs. Instead, you can use a third-party application, such as XLD. In order to make the process smoother, you can use Swinsian’s “Watched Folders” feature to keep an eye on the folder where XLD saves the imported tracks, so that they will be automatically moved from that folder to Swinsian’s library folder and added to the library. (See the “Watched Folders” screen shot above.)

XLD is donationware and is a pretty powerful tool, which lets you use alternate sources for track information and album artwork. And it does not freeze when you try to eject a CD after importing it!

Conclusion

There are several other aspects that I have not mentioned about Swinsian (podcasts, shuffle, last.fm support, etc.), simply because I don’t really use them myself, or because I am running out of time and space. But I hope I have given you a good idea of what Swinsian can do as a replacement for iTunes.

Of course, by switching to such a tool for managing my music collection, I am also taking a bit of a long-term risk in that I am now dependent on a single developer continuing to develop, update, upgrade, and otherwise improve his software. With the passing of Evan Gross, developer of Spell Catcher, less than a year ago, I am more than sufficiently aware of the risks associated with excessive reliance on independent developers.

But at this point in time, there is simply no reason to believe that Apple will ever make iTunes a user-friendly tool for music collectors again, especially those with large music collections. So it is, once again, a risk that I am willing to take. One thing to keep in mind is that the work you might do on tagging your music collection properly, for example, is not application-dependent, since the tags are stored with the music files themselves, which remain fully accessible and transferable.

I certainly hope that Swinsian’s developer will continue to develop his application for many years to come, while preserving its essential qualities of speed, responsiveness, and power — qualities that are sorely lacking in iTunes today and show no sign of being part of Apple’s priorities these days. Also, if I can convince other people to switch to Swinsian, this will of course also increase the likelihood that it will continue to be developed and improved, so I am not being completely selfless here!

If you are the owner of a large music collection and are endlessly frustrated by iTunes’s numerous flaws and major performance issues, I strongly urge you to give Swinsian a try. It’s not a flashy piece of software that tries to reinvent the wheel with custom UI controls or crumbles under its own feature bloat. It’s an extremely solid, super-fast, standards-compliant application that really gets the job done.

Yesterday, I indicated that the problem had to do with the fact that the text in the header, even though it didn’t look any different from regular text, was actually a reference to metadata associated with the Word document.

Since then, a couple of readers have written to confirm that, in Word 2010 under Windows, there is a visual difference in the header: “The title is shown within a light blue rectangle with the tag ‘title’.” I obviously cannot reproduce this on the Mac and I don’t have a copy of Word 2010 for Windows to confirm this myself. All I can say is that, in Word 2011, there is no visual difference whatsoever between this header text and regular header text.

Apparently, this all has to do with a feature called “content controls” that was introduced in Word 2007 for Windows. Evidently, this feature was never introduced in the Mac version of Word, but Word for OS X has to be able to open and display Word documents created in Windows. Since these Word documents can contain such “content controls” but Word for OS X does not have a “content controls” feature, what does the MacBU do? It just pretends that the feature does not exist and displays content controls as regular text.

But of course if you start interacting with such text, you end up encountering issues such as the one I experienced the other day. What I had in my document was apparently what is called, on the Windows side, a “plain text content control”:

… if you italicize one word of a sentence that is in a plain text control, all the text inside the control is italicized.

There is such a thing as a “rich text content control”, which can contain formatted text, but of course even if I had wanted to replace the plain text control with a rich text content control in my header, I wouldn’t have been able to do so, since Word for OS X does not have a “content controls” feature.

I still have no idea whether the author of the Word document that I was working on had even intended to use this “content controls” feature himself or it was used accidentally or unintentionally in the process of creating the document (maybe through the use of an existing document template or because Word has some other automatic behaviour that inserts such things without the user really understanding what’s going on).

What seems pretty clear to me is that these “content controls” are primarily intended as some kind of replacement for form fields (which are supported in Word for OS X). But it’s far from obvious to me that there is any benefit to insert a reference to the “title” field in the Word document metadata as opposed to simply typing out the title, whereas there are obvious drawbacks, such as the fact that the “title” field in the metadata only contains plain text.

You also won’t be surprised to hear that, based on the article about content controls mentioned above, the feature is at best half-baked even on the Windows side:

… despite their enormous potential, Microsoft has failed miserably in resolving long standing bugs and in providing enhancements to functionality to fully realize this potential.

What else is new?

What isn’t new either is the fact that Mac Word users are treated as second-class citizens and left to deal with mysterious, unexplainable behaviours all on their own.

Thanks to L. H. and Dan for their additional feedback.

Sure enough, when I look at the properties for this particular document, I see this:

The text in the “Title” field in the properties matches the contents of the existing header. And most important, if I edit the contents of the “Title” field in the properties, the text in the header changes accordingly.

Conversely, if I edit the text in the header by typing over it, the changes also affect the contents of the “Title” field in the properties.

As the reader who provided this information points out, “Since ‘Title’ can be edited in plain text outside the document canvas — even from outside Word, in fact — Word formats all the text within ‘Title’ as one item, presumably to avoid formatting merge issues when the text is modified externally.” This would tend to explain why attempts to change the formatting of some of the text trigger a change of the formatting for the entire text.

That said, there are lots of unexplained aspects remaining here.

First of all, I cannot find any kind of indication in the Word UI that this header text is anything other than ordinary text. It’s not a text field, because even if I use the Word preference setting to add grey shading to text fields, no shading appears behind the text, and if I use the Word preference setting to display field codes, nothing happens either.

What is it, then? How does one even insert such metadata into a Word document? Word’s Help feature is of course completely useless, and my on-line searches fail to return much of interest either. It is probably quite telling that the most common result for my on-line searches on Microsoft Word metadata is a Microsoft Support article about how to remove metadata from your Word documents for privacy reasons. Metadata is quite obviously one of these “features” that Microsoft added to Word at some point and that most people hate because it automatically adds personal information to their documents that they do not want to share with other people. And of course it’s on by default, so Microsoft finds itself having to post knowledge base articles about how to undo the damage.

Beyond this, however, the key question is this: If the text in the header of this document is some kind of reference to the “Title” field in the metadata, why is there no visual indication of this? And why am I even allowed to select part of it and try to apply character-level formatting to it, thereby triggering the weird, unexplainable behaviour described yesterday?

If there was a strict equivalence between editing the contents of the “Title” field and editing the contents of the header, I would simply put the lack of visual indication down to Microsoft’s usual sloppiness. But in fact, I can quite easily break this equivalence by using the workaround I described yesterday, which consists of switching from regular script to superscript and then back while typing something in the header. For example, if I replace the “Mathematics 1” text in the header by typing over it and entering the sequence 4-superscriptON-t-h-superscriptOFF-Space-o-f-Space-J-u-l-y, when I go back to look at the “Properties” dialog, I see this:

Word is now clearly very confused.

The conclusion here is that the situation is typical Microsoft. Instead of being an actual bug in the software, this strange behaviour that I encountered yesterday is actually some kind of “feature” that is very poorly implemented and that nobody really uses intentionally, but which ends up being used accidentally just the same and affecting the usability of Word documents in a way that makes look as if we are dealing with some kind of software monster with an impenetrable mind of its own.

I still have no idea how to insert metadata in a Word document. I still have no idea how one is can tell whether something in a Word document is a reference to its metadata (apart from the fact that trying to apply character-level formatting to it triggers non-standard behaviours). But at least I have some kind of “explanation” and a workaround that I can rely on the next time I encounter such weirdness.

The sad part, of course, is that there are literally hundreds of such opaque and poorly implemented “features” in Microsoft Word that Word users end up using unwittingly, to the endless frustration of their own selves and of those who have to work with the documents that they created.

Thanks to K. B. for the information about Word document metadata.

I want to edit that header and replace the existing text with some text that contains a portion in superscript, like “July 4th” with the “th” in superscript. So I type the text and select the “th” portion:

Then I apply the superscript to the selection and I get this:

The entire header is now in superscript! And it’s not a visual glitch. No matter where I put my cursor in the header, Word tells me that the current selection is now in superscript.

And it’s not just superscript. If I try to put a portion of the text in bold, the entire header turns to bold. Same thing with any other kind of character-level formatting.

I open the exact same document in Pages ’09, and of course I am able to edit the header and apply character-level formatting to individual characters or strings of characters without any difficulty.

Out of curiosity, I switch to a different OS X environment with no customizations (in Microsoft Word itself or anywhere else in the OS) and I open the same document in Word. Same problem.

What exactly am I supposed to do? I check the current style for the header in Word’s lousy interface for viewing and editing styles, and it tells me that the text is in a paragraph style called “Header”. This style does not have its “Automatically update” option checked. (I checked, just in case.) I have no idea how to turn this behaviour off. I have no idea whether it’s some kind of hidden “feature” or an actual bug.

Then finally I get inspired and, instead of selecting the “th” to apply superscript to it, I delete the “th” so that the insertion point is after the the “4”, I switch to superscript without a selection, I re-type “th” and then I switch superscript back off. And now I have a header with only “th” in superscript.

What the hell was this?

I have no idea. And the problem is not gone. I’ve just managed to work around it, and fortunately, it only appears to affect the header, which I don’t really have to edit beyond this.

But still… Only in Microsoftland does such weirdness actually exist, and only in Microsoftland is even an experienced troubleshooter and computer user such as myself left stumped by such a repulsivelessly useless piece of junk software.

Just in case you are interested, here is a copy of the Word document with which you might be able to reproduce the problem:

word2011-headerformatting.docx

If you can reproduce it, give me a shout. Not that it will make any difference, unless you are a Microsoft developer who actually cares about improving the product. But I honestly have never heard of such an individual.

UPDATE: A Mac-using reader has confirmed that he can reproduce it in his work environment. And another reader has informed me that the problem can also be reproduced in Word 2010 under Windows 7. So I guess it’s not unique to the Mac version, and is tied to some more general problem with the underlying technology. Nothing too surprising, of course, but it means that Microsoft does not even have the excuse of the bug “only” affecting Mac users.

Back in December 2012, I took advantage of a special offer at Amazon.ca to order a copy of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo on Blu-Ray that was available at a special price of $9.99. The discounted item happened to be a combo pack that included both the Blu-Ray and the DVD version of the movie. The availability line said “Usually ships in 1 to 2 months”, but I was not worried about that, as I was in no hurry to get the movie. I ordered another item with this one and was able to take advantage of the free shipping for orders above $25.

The other item was in stock, and so Amazon.ca sent it to me within a few days, even though it meant that they would have to ship the two items separately, at additional cost to them. (They often do this even for orders with free shipping.)

After a couple of months, however, Amazon.ca started sending me automatic messages saying, “We’re still trying to obtain the following item[s] you ordered…” and so on. Based on my past experience with such situations, sometimes it does indeed mean that they are still trying to get it and eventually they do, but sometimes it’s the first sign that there might be some problem with the availability of this particular item. In the past, I have had items like this on back order for a few months, with regular updates saying “We’re still trying…”, and then finally after six months or so I would receive a message saying, “Sorry, it looks like we won’t be able to get this…” and cancelling the remainder of the order. (Even if, without this missing item, the initial order didn’t qualify for free shipping, they don’t charge you anything else and just cancel the remainder of the order.)

In this case, I decided to wait another month or two. And then finally last week, after receiving yet another “We’re still trying…” message, I decided that it definitely didn’t look good for this particular item, especially since the page for the combo pack at Amazon.ca now clearly indicated that this item was only available from third-party sellers.

I did find, however, that the Blu-Ray only version of the same movie was still readily available at Amazon.ca, albeit at a slightly higher price of $14.99.

So I decided to try and contact Amazon’s customer service via the web site:

This is about the “Hugo (2011) Combo Pack (Blu Ray/ DVD /Digital Copy) [Blu-ray] [Blu-ray]” item that you’ve been trying to obtain and deliver for the past four months (order no ******). Your supply of this particular item has obviously run out and I suspect you will never get access to it again.

Since there is a “Hugo (Bilingual) [Blu-ray]” currently available and in stock at Amazon.ca:

http://www.amazon.ca/Hugo-Bilingual-Blu-ray-Ben-Kingsley/dp/B00ANB327Y/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1366057104&sr=1-2&keywords=hugo

couldn’t you just replace the item ordered by this replacement item and send me this one instead for the price specified on the original order ($9.99)? I don’t need the DVD version of the movie, only the Blu-ray. I only ordered this particular Blu-ray/DVD combo item at the time because it was the cheapest option available.

Please advise.

Thanks!

Within six hours, I had received a reply by e-mail saying:

Thanks for writing to us at Amazon.ca.

Per your request, I have swapped the ASIN of your item to (ASIN: B00ANB327Y) in your order and honoured the same price of $9.99.

And sure enough, within a couple of days, the item was shipped and I got an e-mail confirming the charge of $9.99 + tax for it. I received the package in the mail today and everything is in perfect order.

I honestly wouldn’t have been shocked if they had rejected my request and simply instructed me to order the Blu-Ray only version at $14.99 if I really wanted it. But they didn’t, and I for one really appreciate their flexibility and responsiveness. Of course, I have spent lots of money at Amazon over the years and it is possible that their customer service representative was able to see this history and decide that it was definitely worth accommodating my request in this particular case.

Nonetheless, I can also report that there have been several other situations in the past with the various Amazon stores that I shop at where they were just as accommodating. And this is something that, to me, is a strong incentive to continue shopping for books, movies and music at Amazon, even though I am perfectly aware that the picture is not entirely rosy, especially for warehouse employees working for such big on-line retailers.

I have never understood, and I still don’t understand, how Macworld can be so chronically blind to the atrocious quality of Microsoft’s software products in general and of its software products for the Mac in particular. Every time a new version of Office for OS X comes out, their reviews are systematically very positive, as if they themselves didn’t make any effort to actually use the software and notice the myriad of bugs and flaws that afflict it.

Back in the day, I used to think that it was because they were under pressure from Microsoft as a major source of advertising money. But surely this can no longer be true. Surely most of Macworld’s revenue comes from other sources these days. How, then, can they justify this continuing blindness regarding Microsoft’s products?

I don’t really care about Brent’s experience during his visit on the Microsoft campus. I am sure the people that work at Microsoft are like other people, and that some of them are even competent developers. And I am sure that Microsoft is still able to put together demos that look half-decent and can fool their audience.

But until some member of Macworld’s regular staff or a high-profile contributor dares to write in plain words in the publication about how awful Microsoft’s products for OS X really are in the real world, I am afraid that I will continue to completely distrust anything that Macworld ever publishes about Microsoft. And I will continue to rejoice at the thought that, with every passing day, Microsoft is sliding further and further into technological irrelevance. No matter how competent some of its developers might be, their products have been consistently awful — and have been and still are a constant source of frustration, annoyance, and rage in my daily working life.

If Macworld actually dared to write about how awful these products are and how shameful the lack of quality and polish coming from Redmond truly is, maybe things would change for the better (although I suspect it is far too late for this). But since they obviously can’t or won’t, the only hope that I have is that, sooner rather than later, I can work in a completely Microsoft-free environment. (Unfortunately, that day hasn’t arrived yet.)

Well, I think it’s rather obvious: the document window’s status bar (or whatever it’s called in Microsoft parlance) is a big blob of solid black instead of displaying the various bits of information (page number, word count, etc.) and controls that it is supposed to display.

Fortunately, resizing the window clears the problem:

And so does minimizing and maximizing the window again.

But it’s a recurring problem that happens to every single one of my Word document windows if I leave them open long enough (usually overnight) in Word 2011. (I tend to work on several things simultaneously, so I often leave windows open in various applications, in the background, usually hidden.)

I find it hard to believe that no one else has noticed the problem or that it’s occurring on my machine exclusively, but who knows? A quick search online fails to return any substantial results. Then again, most Word 2011 users have probably given up on complaining about bugs in the software, since Microsoft itself obviously does not care enough to fix them. So the lack of results does not necessarily mean much.

Still, I find it more than annoying to have to manually resize multiple Word document windows every day just so that they display properly. (It also does not help that Word’s window management is broken in many other ways, including the fact that sometimes, currently open windows fail to show up in the Dock icon’s menu altogether, and then Word also refuses to respond to “Hide All” commands coming from other applications, and so on. And let’s not even mention what happens when you close a document window and reopen it.)

It is just one of the myriad of ways that Microsoft manages to make our everyday working life more irritating than it should be.

In fact, I can confirm that I myself have been experiencing at least one kernel panic with each build of Mac OS X 10.8.3 that I was provided with as an AppleSeed participant. The latest build, 12D78, which is the official release, is no different, and I had a kernel panic with it yesterday morning.

I have been reporting on these kernel panics since last September. In fact, I starting sending bug reports to Apple as part of my AppleSeed involvement as soon as the kernel panics first started occurring, with early builds of the Mac OS X 10.8.2 update last summer. In late September, Apple even sent me a reply acknowledging that this was a “known issue” and closing my bug report as a “duplicate”. And there are multiple reports online of other Mac Pro users with multiple GeForce video cards who have been affected by the exact same issue ever since they updated their machine to Mac OS X 10.8.2.

What has happened since? In October, Apple released a “Mac OS X 10.8.2 Supplemental Update” that updated one of the kernel extensions involved in the crash. Unfortunately, it did not eliminate the kernel panics.

In December, I decided I had had enough of the random kernel panics and bought and installed Apple’s Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter (not cheap!) so that I could connect both my 30” cinema displays to the same video card, and I didn’t get a single kernel panic after that, although I definitely noticed a significant degradation in video performance due to the fact that I now had only half as much video RAM available for my two monitors.

Then Apple started issuing early builds of Mac OS X 10.8.3 via AppleSeed and I saw that the three kernel extensions involved (IOGraphicsFamily.kext, IONDRVSupport.kext, and IOPCIFamily.kext) were all updated, so I thought, “Finally! Apple is doing something about this…” I switched back to driving my two displays with the two separate video cards, without using the Mini DisplayPort, and have been using this setup ever since.

Overall, the frequency of the kernel panics has decreased somewhat in Mac OS X 10.8.3, at least on my machine. But they are still occurring on a regular basis. In the past few weeks, I have had several kernel panics while playing Flash video in Firefox. It is not the only type of activity that triggers a kernel panic, but it certainly seems to be a contributing factor.

Given that, as far as I can tell, Mac OS X 10.8.3 also fails to fix several other long-standing bugs in Mountain Lion, such as the fact that some applications (like Preview, or Numbers ’09) completely fail to resume after a restart, and that some others, like Safari, resume from a state that is not the very last state before the restart, these on-going kernel panics are a royal pain in the neck. There is the risk of data loss if you don’t save your work regularly, and then there is the time wasted waiting for OS X to restart and to reopen (or not, as the case may be) all that was open and running before the crash. I am fortunate enough to have an SSD drive as my startup volume, so at least the rebooting process does not take too long on my machine, but it is still a royal pain.

At the same time that Apple has been working (or not working, depending on your point of view) on the Mac OS X 10.8.3, it has been working, apparently, on an SMC update for MacBook Pro Retina users that “resolves a rare issue where users may experience slow frame rates when playing graphics-intensive games on the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display”.

I am very glad for MacBook Pro Retina owners, but to me, this seems to indicate that Apple finds it more important to improve the frame rate in video games for gamers that to fix kernel panics for users of expensive towers with expensive multiple monitors who are trying to get work done with their machine.

It is a nice feeling indeed to know that one’s needs are being addressed so vigilantly by a company that has tens of billions of cash in the bank and is said to be the largest tech company in the world, if not the largest company in any category.

Sure, there might be far fewer Mac Pro users with multiple video cards than there are MacBook Pro Retina video gamers… But still, what exactly does such an attitude say about Apple’s priorities? Video game frame rates are now more important than overall OS stability and reliability?

I am royally pissed off. Exactly how long is it going to take for Apple to finally take this kernel panic issue seriously and fix it once and for all? They don’t have the excuse of not being able to reproduce the kernel panics. They themselves said that the kernel panics were a “known issue” six months ago. I find it hard, if not impossible, to believe that the issue is so complex that a team of video card driver engineers at Apple is not able to address it after six months.

I don’t even know for sure that they have been working on it! For all I know, the fact that the kernel extensions involved were being worked on was simply a coincidence and was due to a totally unrelated issue that they were working on and fixed in the update. For all I know, the fact that the kernel panics are no longer as frequent as they were (even though they are still far too common) on my machine is just a unintentional side-effect of a fix for another bug.

I don’t know, because, since acknowledging that the problem was a known issue, Apple has not said a word about the topic. I have been sending bug reports with panic logs on a weekly basis, if not more frequently, and all they do is acknowledge receipt of them with generic form e-mails. What else can I do?

I can write about it here, at the risk of incurring the wrath of AppleSeed employees, who might feel that I am revealing too much about the testing process. But frankly, I don’t care. It’s not like my involvement in the AppleSeed program is producing any tangible results. Most of the bugs I report on remain unaddressed. And Apple’s engineers manifestly have so little interest in my “enhancement requests” that I stopped sending those long ago. All they want from AppleSeed testers is to report on bugs, and even then, it’s hard to fathom exactly what they do with those bug reports, since so many bugs remain unaddressed, months and even years after they were first reported.

At this stage, it is becoming harder and harder to believe that Apple will really come up with a true Mac Pro successor this year. And even if they do, I frankly find myself feeling far from enthusiastic about spending thousands of dollars on a new machine with powerful video cards driving multiple monitors when I have no guarantee that this will finally give me back a work environment where I don’t have to endure a 1990s-like level of instability and unreliability. Does Apple really deserve more of my hard-earned cash at this point in time? It’s more than debatable, and from the feedback I have received since I first started reporting on this issue, I am not the only one feeling this way.

The really depressing part, of course, is that the alternative (Windows? Linux?) is probably even worse. And that might be part of the problem. Apple knows that it has a “captive audience” of professionals who would find it very hard indeed to abandon the platform completely. But still. This is no way of treating some of your most loyal customers, who have spent very large amounts of money on your products over the years.

As a long-time .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud user, I distinctly remember the time the controversy first erupted. I had switched from my local provider’s e-mail account to my @mac.com as my main e-mail account, and had to switch again when I realized that I couldn’t count on Apple to be transparent about the whole process and let me control whether the e-mail I was receiving was undesirable or not. (Apple’s attitude then is not much different from its attitude today, and not much different from its attitude in other areas as well. It can be summed up as “we know what’s best for you, and we don’t feel you should have any say in it”.)

My solution at the time (back in the 1990s) was to do what I had been thinking about for a while, i.e. to purchase my own domain name and my own web and e-mail hosting with a provider that would not have any non-optional, opaque server-side filtering. That’s what I did, and I have been using my own domain with my own e-mail account(s) ever since.

Unfortunately, it’s not a panacea.

Unless you are willing to spend quite a bit of money on your hosting services, you normally get shared hosting, which means that your domain, with its web site and e-mail accounts, is hosted on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other domains. It’s all transparent for you, but it means that your domain’s IP address is the same as these other domains’ IP address.

And, as far as I can tell, there are a number of spam-fighting systems on the Internet that rely on continually-updated blacklists that block domains based not on their domain name, but on their domain’s IP address. This means that, if your domain happens to be hosted on a server that also hosts a domain that is guilty of spamming, this might cause the entire server and all the domains it hosts — including yours — to be flagged as suspicious by some systems.

Even though my current provider is, as far as I can tell, a reputable one, and I have been quite satisfied with the reliability and affordability of the service, this particular problem has happened to me on more than one occasion over the years. Typically, it does not cause my domain and its e-mail accounts to be flagged as spam and blocked by all e-mail servers worldwide, but it just takes one slightly overzealous server somewhere, relying on a blacklist that might not be updated as regularly or as reliably as other blacklists, to cause my e-mail to become undeliverable for those of my recipients that rely on that particular server.

When this happens, the e-mails don’t necessarily bounce back to you. Sometimes they simply disappear in the ether, with no indication that they were not delivered. And even if they bounce back to you, it might take several days for this to happen, which can be quite problematic for time-sensitive correspondence.

It’s actually happening to me right now. None of the e-mails that I have been sending from my @latext.com domain to a friend in France using the 9online.fr Internet access provider for the past several weeks have reached him, and they have not bounced back to me either. They are simply gone without a trace.

As far as I can tell, he’s the only recipient who’s been having this problem lately, so I can only assume it’s because 9online.fr has an overzealous spam filter that has someone flagged my domain as a source of spam. But what can either of us do about it? Not much. I suggested that he try and call them to discuss the issue, but with today’s tech support services being the way they are, we all know how time-consuming such a process can be, with no guarantee of any results. It’s just easier, for now, for me to use a different e-mail account to correspond with him, and hope that the problem will somehow disappear by itself over time.

Last month, I had a similar problem with my employer (I work from home), however, and that was much more problematic. In that case, the e-mails were bouncing back, but it still took us a few days to notice that there was a problem, and still a few more days to get my employer’s tech people to acknowledge the problem and eventually fix it.

During that time, no other correspondents had any problem receiving my e-mails. It only affected that one particular server, but it was the main server for my employer. (In fact, my employer also uses another server with a different domain, and this one was not affected at all, so I had no problems corresponding with some of my colleagues.)

When, like me, you work from home, with sometimes tight deadlines, it can be quite problematic to have such a issue happen to you all of a sudden, out of the blue, without warning, and with symptoms that only become visible after a few days.

But I am not sure that there is much that I can do about it. I could explore “industrial-strength e-mail” options with a dedicated server, but such options are probably priced way out of my range.

I guess the bottom line here is that, even if you switch away from a service such as Apple’s iCloud and its silent mail filtering and purchase your own domain with your own e-mail hosting, that does not mean that your e-mail life will be trouble-free. If my own experience is any indication, you will still have to deal with overzealous spam filters and occasional collateral blacklisting. This makes it hard to rely entirely on e-mail as your primary form of communication, no matter how convenient and useful it is in other respects.

That is why I was advocating for some kind of universal automatic mechanism for acknowledging receipt of e-mails several years ago, and my views haven’t really changed. Unlike direct, live communication over the phone, e-mail might never be 100% reliable (at least in terms of knowing for sure that your recipient has received your message), and so we need some kind of backup system to bring it closer to that elusive goal.

Still, from time to time, because the reality of your work still forces you to use Word 2011, you encounter a behaviour that is so absurd and so stupid that you cannot help but write a short thing about it:

Note the position of the insertion point. Note the formatting of the two paragraphs. Note the fact that hidden characters are visible and therefore what you see here is supposedly all there is to see. And then press Delete:

Where the hell does this change in formatting come from?

Oh, I am sure that, if pressed (which they never seem to be), Microsoft’s engineers could come up with an explanation for this. But it would and could never be a justification for such a stupid, infuriating behaviour.

For the record, I tried every possible combinations of cursor position + flavour of delete that I could think of (insertion point at end of first paragraph, forward delete instead of regular delete). Nothing helped. I ended up having to change the font back to Times New Roman 11 pt manually.

One way that people deal with this kind of stupidity in computers is that they describe the computer or the software as having “a mind of its own”. As if. The only “mind” that is behind such crap is the mind of marketing executives who are constantly trying to find new ways to milk a captive clientele of its hard-earned cash.

I for one cannot wait until the day Microsoft in its entirety becomes entirely irrelevant. We’re not quite there yet, but surely it will happen in my lifetime, in my working life. Surely?

I did notice, a couple of years ago, that, all of a sudden, Google switched to a system where every “live” link in its search results was actually a link to an internal Google URL that would eventually get resolved into the actual URL of the destination. I noticed this, because I had developed a habit of right-clicking on Google search results to copy of the URL of the destination, so that I could then paste it in the document that I was working on.

Of course, Google’s new mechanism meant that I could no longer do that and so I had to develop a new skill and learn to select and copy the green URL underneath the search result, which has always been the URL of the actual destination, but has never been a live link. It was a bit of a pain, of course, because it’s not as easy to select this green URL as it is to right-click on the link and then choose “Copy Link”, but I didn’t have much choice…

That said, I had never noticed that this “improvement” implemented by Google (probably for internal clickage counting or something like that) was interfering with Safari’s History feature.

So after I got the e-mail from this Betalogue reader, I went back to check. Much to my surprise, I noticed that not only Google was not cluttering my Safari history with unreadable URLs, but even the afore-mentioned “improvement” appeared to be gone. Indeed, right now, when I do a search in Google and then right-click on a search result and use “Copy Link”, the link that gets copied is the actual URL of the destination.

So we seem to be back to the situation of a few years back, which, to me, is very much a good thing.

I tried to do some research on the issue, but it’s pretty hard to identify the right combination of keywords to find information about this practice introduced by Google a few years back and now seemingly eliminated again. People who follow the technical aspects of Google’s activities probably know where to look, but I am afraid I am just a regular Google user myself and I don’t quite have the time to delve into developers.google.com.

I am also not entirely certain that the experience that I see on my machine with my current system is exactly the same as the one that other Google users get. There’s quite a bit that goes on behind the scenes when one uses Google (which is what makes some people perceive it as a rather more creepy company than its “Don’t be evil” motto would suggest), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the experience of other people, even other Mac OS X / Safari users, does not match mine exactly. Indeed, I also wouldn’t be surprised if Google changes these behaviours again in the future.

But for now at least, it looks to me like we can once again copy links directly on Google search results pages without having to select the green URLs.

This should normally take you to a new window with the picture in question and the Safari window’s title bar and address bar should look like this:

Now, go to Safari’s history and look at how the last visited page (i.e. the page with the picture) there:

Incredibly useful, isn’t it? And it’s the same for each and every URL-shortened link that you open from within Twitter in Safari. Imagine opening ten such links in a row, and then looking at the corresponding history. How on earth are you supposed to figure out what URL corresponds to what web page?

This is not a new problem. Ted Landau wrote about it more than a year ago for Macworld. It’s still there, and there is no sign of Apple caring enough about the problem to actually fix it. It’s not a minor bug that only affects a small fraction of Mac users. It affects everyone with a Mac who clicks on Twitter links and then might want to use Safari’s history to go back to a page visited this way.

In my case, with kernel panics still unfortunately a regular occurrence for us with Mac Pros running multiple video cards and Safari’s failure to resume properly after quitting, I find myself having to use Safari’s history fairly regularly to bring back pages that I had loaded by clicking on links in Twitter but hadn’t yet had time to read properly.

The history feature is completely useless for those links. I have to reload all “(no title)” links manually one by one just to see which ones might be to pages that I hadn’t yet finished reading. It’s quite frustrating. And it’s an unforgivable flaw in Mountain Lion’s Safari.

UPDATE: Several readers have written to alert me of the existence of the Detox Safari extension. I didn’t mention it myself, because it was mentioned in the Ted Landau article referenced above. I agree with Ted’s take on it. It helps, but it’s not a panacea. It’s still unforgivable that, after all this time, Apple has done nothing to improve the situation.

While my own experience qualifies as a tiny blip compared to his situation, I would still like to share it, because I cannot help but worry about it, especially since I myself was a victim of a hacker back in 2008. (The hacking was thankfully limited to this blog.)

Like many Mac users, I have an Apple ID account, which is a direct descendant of my MobileMe account, itself a descendant of my .Mac account. It is an @mac.com address, and it is also my account for iTunes purchases, and my account for Apple Store purchases, and my account for Mac App Store purchases, and my account for various other Apple-related memberships.

I am also a 1Password user and I treat my passwords seriously. I find it quite difficult to use a very complex password for my Apple ID/iCloud account, because Apple keeps asking for my password again and again, not just on my Mac, where I can easily copy it from within 1Password if needed, but also on my iOS devices, where things are far less straightforward.

But I try to keep my password reasonably complex, and I have changed it a few times over the years — probably not as often as I should have, but…

My current situation is the following. Six days ago, out of the blue, I received an automated e-mail from appleid@id.apple.com, with the subject line “Redefenir sua senha ou desbloquear seu Apple ID.” According to Google Translate, this is Portuguese for “Reset your password or unlock your Apple ID.” And the contents of the e-mail was of the usual variety, starting with “Prezado(a) Pierre Igot” (“Dear Pierre Igot” in Portuguese) and inviting me (still in Portuguese) to “click the link below if you want to reset your password or unlock your Apple ID. This link will expire in three hours after sending this message.”

The e-mail itself was clearly legitimate, with headers indicating its provenance and links to the Apple web site. And it’s not exactly the very first time I have received an e-mail from Apple asking me to confirm that I wanted to reset my password. But why was it in Portuguese? I have only ever used my Apple ID account in English, so it makes no sense for Apple to send me a communication about it in Portuguese.

Still, I didn’t worry too much. I assumed that maybe there was a flaw in Apple’s servers that caused them to send such correspondence in the language used at the time of browsing by the person (or robot) requesting a password reset. I just ignored the message (but kept it on file).

Then four days later I received another automated e-mail from the same legitimate Apple account, this time with a subject line in English saying “Please verify the contact email address for your Apple ID.” The really worrying part this time, however, was that the body of the message itself started with “Dear Carlos. De. Pedro” and not “Dear Pierre Igot” as expected. The rest of the e-mail looked normal and asked me to confirm my @icloud.com address as “the contact email address for [my] Apple ID”.

I can imagine a flaw in Apple’s servers causing them to accidentally use the wrong language when sending out the automated e-mail for a password request. But a flaw causing them to use the wrong first name and last name for the account holder? That’s something else…

My first reflex was to:

1. go to appleid.apple.com, log in, check all my account settings (including the security questions) and change my password to something entirely new
2. check my current credit card statement (there was nothing suspicious there, but things can take a few days to show up) and remove my credit card information from the Apple ID account (I was not planning on making any purchases in the following days)

I managed to do both, although now I cannot remember how I found the credit card information, since it’s far from obvious on the Apple ID web site in what section the credit card information is actually stored. (At the iTunes Store in iTunes, for my payment information, it says “No card on file”, so it seems that my credit card information is indeed gone.)

Then I decided to try and contact Apple about this. I didn’t really want to spend tons of time on the phone, so I tried the on-line facility to “contact Apple Support”, at www.apple.com/ca/support/contact/. It took me to the “Express Lane” web site and I found a section for “Apple ID” under “More Products & Services”. Under “Other Apple ID Topics”, I found an option labeled “Apple ID account security”, so I selected that option, and it took me to a page with a Knowledge Base note about “Security and your Apple ID”, which was of course useless to me, and then, under “More Options”, “Talk to Apple Support Now”, “Schedule a Call” and “Call Apple Support Later”. (I cannot give you direct links here, because it’s all part of a web app.)

But when I clicked on “Talk to Apple Support Now”, the first thing that the system said was: “Your serial number is required for this solution.” And it asked for a serial number!

How on earth can I give a serial number for an Apple ID-related issue? It makes no sense. I only have serial numbers for my devices, none of which is under warranty any longer.

If Apple really takes Apple ID security issues seriously, as it claims, why does it ask for a serial number for a hardware product at this stage? I could “cheat” and enter the serial number for my out-of-warranty Mac Pro, but what good would that do me? It would take me to a page asking me either to choose a $59 + tax per-incident support option or to “request an exception”, even though neither of the two reasons given as options for requesting an exception is applicable.

At this stage, I gave up. But as a last-ditch attempt, I went to the “Product Security” section of Apple Support at www.apple.com/ca/support/security/ and used the e-mail address that appears on the very first line:

To report security issues that affect Apple products, please contact: product-security@apple.com

I composed and sent an e-mail describing what had happened and telling them what I had done, and asking for further advice.

I did not have much hope for this. I did get an automated reply right away with a follow-up number, but within 24 hours, I also got this reply:

Hello Pierre,

Thank you for contacting us. Apple takes all reports of potential security issues very seriously.

You took a reasonable step by resetting your Apple ID password. You may also wish to confirm your account details are correct by logging into https://appleid.apple.com. If your account details are correct, we recommend deleting the message you referenced.

Best regards,
Jeffrey
Apple Product Security

I appreciate the fact that they actually replied to my request, but basically, if I understand correctly, they are telling me to ignore the message(s). Their answer addresses neither the fact that the first automated e-mail was sent in Portuguese nor the fact that the second automated e-mail had a different name associated with my Apple ID.

What am I supposed to think here? I don’t find the situation particularly reassuring. (I’ve replied and told them as much.) It really does not help one feel that Apple is taking security issues seriously when (1) the procedure to submit queries/concerns about Apple ID security issues is far from obvious and (2) the reply you get does not address the main concerns you have about a particular issue.

If nothing else happens in the next little while, I will eventually buy something else and enter my credit card information again, but I simply do not like this way of not addressing perfectly valid concerns about identity theft and Apple ID security.

As the window on the right shows quite clearly, the Contacts application window is currently in the background. (The foreground window is a Finder window.)

It’s already bad enough that the one-of-a-kind window “chrome” used in Contacts looks exactly the same in the background as it does in the foreground (except for the shallower drop shadow). But what about the selection highlighting colour in the email field that I was in the process of editing when I switched Contacts to the background?

The universally standard behaviour for the selection highlighting colour in OS X is that, when the window that contains it switches from the foreground to the background, it should change from the default selection highlighting colour (defined in System Preferences, under “General”; in this case sky blue) to gray.

And yet, as this screenshot demonstrates quite clearly, even with Contacts is in the background, the selection highlighting remains in the foreground selection colour, which is a very misleading behaviour because, if you are not paying attention to other clues in the visual environment, you might think that you are still in Contacts, editing this field, and start typing, and then nothing will happen in Contacts and instead your typing will be registered and processed in your current foreground application.

Is this really so unimportant that Apple’s engineers can get away with ignoring the convention? I don’t think so. I find it highlight misleading myself. It might be because I have two large 30” monitors and often do a lot of things in different applications at the same time, but I can also easily imagine an inexperienced user trying to type something here and hearing system beeps and not understanding what’s going on at all.

This is just an example. There are other similar issues, in Contacts and in other OS X applications made by Apple, that suggest that attention to detail in OS X software development is becoming something of a dying art. And it’s rather sad.

Consider the following situation:

All I’ve done is that I’ve double-clicked on the first word in this paragraph to select it. And already the first problem appears: Word has included in the word selection the trailing space after the word. This is simply wrong. A double-click on a word means that you want to select that word, and that word only. There is no reason for the user to want to select the trailing space as well. Maybe once upon a time, this was useful because word processors were not smart enough to automatically delete the extra space if the user opted to delete the selected word. But today’s word processors, like Pages ’09 and indeed Word 2011 itself (!), are smart enough to delete superfluous spaces automatically, and so the automatic selection of the trailing space makes no sense whatsoever.

This trailing space is problematic because I often have to copy words (or phrases) and paste them into a search engine or another similar tool, and that tool is not necessarily “smart” enough to know that it is supposed to ignore the trailing space.

Yes, with smart clipboard features, most of the time Word automatically removes the extra space when the word copied to the clipboard with the trailing space gets pasted elsewhere (most of the time, but not always, depending on the presence of things like non-breaking spaces, which are not standard spaces, and are used quite often in French typography, for example). But what if you switch to another application with the copied word (and trailing space) in the clipboard? That other application won’t necessarily be smart enough to know that this trailing space is supposed to be ignored. And since Word is the only OS X application with this non-standard behaviour, inevitably there are problems with this extra space in other applications. But clearly Microsoft has no intention of ever fixing this issue.

The other problem only transpires once I copy the selection in the picture above, and then switch to another application and paste it. In other applications, the result is this:

As you can see from the position of the insertion point, and as predicted above, OS X has pasted the copied word with the trailing space, even though it’s completely undesirable in this context (the Spotlight search tool in LaunchBar, but it’s just one example among many).

But even worse, OS X has also pasted a bullet and a tab character before the copied word! This is completely idiotic. It makes absolutely no sense to treat the automatic bullet formatting, which applies to the entire paragraph, as if it applied to the first word of the paragraph that was selected and copied by itself. And Word’s engineers clearly know this, because if you copy the selected word above and paste it in another Word document, Word does not include the bullet formatting with it. It’s only when you paste the contents of the clipboard in another application that, for some reason, Word includes the bullet formatting along with the word, in the form of this bullet + tab combination.

This is quite clearly because, when you copy something in Word, even a single word by itself, Word 2011’s handling of the clipboard mechanism is such that multiple versions of the selection are included in the clipboard, included a “plain text” version that includes the bullet and the tab, which never gets used by Word itself, but which somehow someone at Microsoft believes is useful to have when pasting the contents of the clipboard in another application that will only accept the plain-text alternative.

It drives me nuts, because, again, I encounter the problem (along with the trailing space) whenever I copy a word that’s at the beginning of a formatted paragraph and paste it in another application, like a search tool or a database tool. And the problem does not just affect the automatic bullet formatting. It also affects the first word of paragraphs of text formatted with automatic numbering. When copying such a word in Word, the plain-text alternative includes the plain-text version of the automatic number (i.e. the actual alphanumeric characters, along with the punctuation) as well as the tab character — and again, the extra characters are pasted along with the word in other applications. And it also affects any selection that includes the first word, so I also get the extra stuff if I select and copy, say, the first five words of the paragraph.

I constantly find myself having to delete this extra cruft that Word automatically adds to the plain-text alternative in the clipboard before I can submit my search request in the other applications that I use. Or I submit the search request before I notice the problem and of course, the search results are completely irrelevant, because my search tool or database does not know how to handle a search string that includes a bullet or a number before the key word(s)!

Today, I decided I was really tired of this, and so I came up with this simple Keyboard Maestro macro:

It highjacks Word 2011’s own “Copy” command and instead, does the following:

1. It tests the clipboard’s contents to see if it contains the bullet + character sequence. (Fortunately, KM applies this test to the plain-text alternative, so it finds it there.)
2. If so, it runs a small BBEdit text factory that remove it.
3. And then it applies the “Trim Whitespace” clipboard filter that’s included in Keyboard Maestro, which removes the trailing space at the end.

It is, at this point, a far-from-ideal solution. First of all, the best test I can come up with in KM is a test to find the bullet + tab sequence anywhere in the clipboard. As far as I can tell, there is no way in KM to test to see if this sequence appears at the beginning of the clipboard only, and also to test whether the clipboard contains entire paragraphs of text, where removing the bullets might not be the preferred scenario.

Then, it fails to test for the presence of an automatic number converted into plain text, followed by a tab. This, again, would require a much more refined test than what KM’s own control flow features allow. Fortunately, the bullet is the most common manifestation of this problem that I encounter, so the macro still helps in the majority of cases. But ideally I’d like to have a macro that tests for the presence of any automatic list formatting converted into plain text by Word behind the scenes in the plain-text alternative of the clipboard’s contents.

As well, the BBEdit text factory I designed is a simple search/replace function that replaces all occurrrences of the bullet + tab combination anywhere in the clipboard with nothing. Ideally, I’d just want to replace the first occurrence with nothing, or trim the first two characters of the clipboard, but BBEdit’s options are too limited to enable me to do this. (It should also be noted that I could ditch the test altogether and apply the replace-all operation in all cases, but I am still hoping to have a more effective detection test some day and be able to apply the transformation only if the bullet + tab appears at the very beginning of the string of copied text.)

Finally, the “Trim Whitespace” clipboard filter is probably too agressive and removes whitespace that I might not want to remove in some situations.

I suspect that, if I took the time, I might be able to come up with AppleScript-based solutions for some or all of these issues with my macro. But I am afraid I just don’t have the time to explore things further at this point. So this macro will have to do, with its own flaws and limitations. I’d much rather have a macro that works properly for the most common scenario and only requires further adjustements in less common ones, than have to continue to live with a situation where Word forces me to make manual adjustments each and every time I encounter the most common scenario.

If you too are constantly frustrated by Microsoft Word’s multiple annoyances and flaws, I urge you to explore the use of a third-party tool such as Keyboard Maestro to remedy or at least alleviate the most common issues you have with the software. (Don’t waste your time trying to fix Word using its own customization features. You’ll ultimately be punished for it, because the carelessness of Microsoft’s developers extends to these customization features as well, and there is also absolutely no guarantee that your fixes will remain supported. Remember what happened with VBA in Word 2008.)