The most obvious one was a problem where the Myriad font that I was using in my invoices in Pages seemed to have become completely corrupted. Instead of displaying the text as expected, Pages was displaying all kinds of garbage characters.

At the time I investigated a bit, couldn’t find anything wrong with the font files, and eventually decided that it was not worth the trouble and changed the font to Myriad Pro, which seemed to be working just fine and was almost identical to Myriad anyway.

Now when I try to reproduce the problem in Pages, I no longer seem to be able to. So it’s possible that it’s a bug that was fixed at some point since the initial release of Mac OS X 10.6.

Similarly, the problem that I was experiencing last fall with some PDF files where accented characters were not displayed properly in Preview and Quick View, but looked just fine in Adobe Reader or Acrobat Pro, seems to have been fixed, as I can longer reproduce it with the same problem file today.

(I don’t know if my own bug reports had something to do with it. But I did submit bug reports to Apple at the time in both cases.)

But now I have yet another seemingly font-related problem in Preview/Quick View that I cannot reproduce in Adobe Reader or Acrobat Pro. Here is a sample PDF file exhibiting the problem:

preview-arial.pdf

Here’s what the heading in this page looks like in Acrobat Pro:

And here’s what the same section of the page looks like in Preview and in Quick View:

The “Document Properties” dialog in Acrobat Pro tells me that the font used for the heading is ArialMT (TrueType). I have various Arial fonts installed on my system, but none of them is called “ArialMT,” so I am assuming that the font is rendered using the embedded font in the PDF.

Here again, I have submitted a bug report to Apple, so we can always hope that it’ll be fixed in a future system update. Until then, I am afraid I’ll have to work with this particular PDF file in Acrobat instead of Preview, even though, as can be seen in the screen shots above, the font rendering in Adobe’s software is far poorer than the native font rendering in Mac OS X’s Preview.

Answer: The process of open a relatively complex Microsoft Word document in the Pages application itself.

Here’s the user interface for this:

And here’s what you can do while the process is in progress: Absolutely nothing.

Once you have selected a Word document in order to open it in Pages ’09 and Pages has started “opening” it—which actually means importing it by converting it into a document in Pages format—there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it, short of force-quitting the entire application.

And since there is absolutely no way to predict how long the process will take, and since it can sometimes take up to several minutes, even on a nearly brand new Mac Pro with a dozen GB of RAM, this is, in my view, a highly inappropriate situation that the user can find himself in.

The same document opens in Word 2008—not a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination—in seconds. So how is one supposed to be able to predict that it will take several minutes for Pages to convert it?

And why is there no “Cancel” button in the modal dialog above? And why is the dialog modal to begin with?

Thank God for force-quitting. But I don’t consider that the “Force Quit” command is part of the Pages ’09 user interface! And force-quitting is not an option when you accidentally start the process of converting a Word document while you have other Pages documents still open and unsaved in Pages.

It really is quite shocking that we still have to deal with such a user-hostile modal dialog box in a modern Mac OS X application, especially one that comes from Apple itself. If the conversion process did indeed require all of the machine’s resources and if it only took a few seconds at worst to complete, I would be willing to live with this. But not when the process can take several minutes, and only uses a small fraction of my machine’s power.

The process of converting Word documents should be a background process. And if indeed for whatever reason it is a process that might take a while, then Pages ’09 can have an optional “Activity” window like Mail, Safari, and other applications so that the user can monitor what is going on. I would even be willing to put up with an “Activity” window that is not optional and pops up automatically whenever there is a Word document conversion process in progress, as long as it automatically disappeared once the process is complete and it was not modal.

But not this. Not in a modern computer with plenty of processing power. And not in a modern word processor that is meant to be an iApp “for the rest of us” who are fed up and sickened by the very sight of Microsoft software running on our Macs.

Then shortly after the first freeze, he got another freeze, this time working with files in the Finder. And after that he noticed that his machine was becoming abnormally sluggish. So he decided to reboot.

He did, and was faced with a solid grey screen that did not seem to want to go away. After a few minutes, he decided to call me. Then, while we were talking on the phone the folder icon with the question mark appeared.

I told him that it was obviously a problem with the startup volume, i.e. his internal hard drive, and that it could be more or less serious, depending on the actual cause of the failure to boot from the drive. I instructed him over the phone to insert his original system CD, which thankfully he was carrying with him.

The laptop appeared to be able to boot from the system CD. I meant to attempt to guide him through the use of Disk Utility on the system CD, but by that stage he was a bit wary of doing something wrong, so I invited him to come over so that we could look at things together.

He asked me how he should turn off the laptop, and I told him to leave it the way it was and bring it without attempting anything else.

When he arrived here, I saw that he was still at the first screen on the system CD, where the installer asks for the user’s language preference. I then proceeded to go through the usual screens and select Disk Utility in the “Utilities” menu. The utility launched just fine, but then when it came time to displaying available volumes on the left-hand side, Disk Utility got stuck. After a few minutes, it was still not showing either the startup CD or the internal hard drive.

I listened to the machine closely and it was not really making any noise beyond the expected fan noise and very small clicking sound from time to time. It was not a very good sign.

Since Disk Utility was obviously not going anywhere, I decided to try and boot the machine using my trusty DiskWarrior CD. To do that, I went to press the power button for five seconds to shut down the machine. However, I noticed that the machine went down as soon as I had started pressing on the power button, and not after the five second delay.

I then pressed it again to start the machine up and held the trackpad button down to force the MacBook to eject the CD. I got the expected startup chime and then a grey screen, and the MacBook did eject the system CD as expected. But nothing happened while I was taking the CD out and inserting the DiskWarrior CD instead. The folder with question mark did not reappear.

And once I had inserted the DiskWarrior CD, the MacBook failed to boot from it. It just stayed at the grey screen stage. After a few minutes, I went to shut down the machine by pressing the power button. Once again, I didn’t have to hold the button for five seconds. The laptop went off right away.

It was not looking good. I tried to reboot with the “C” key down. Again, I got the startup chime, and then the grey screen, and then nothing. And again when I went to shut down, I only had to press the power button for a fraction of a second.

I tried various power-related things in case it was just a case of PRAM corruption due to the multiple aborted booting cycles. I took the battery out and tried to boot using the power adapter exclusively. I tried zapping the PRAM. It was all to no avail.

Since the hard drive contained a few important files that my friend had not had time to back up, I tried the last option I could think of, which was to start the laptop in target disk mode (with the “T” key down) so that I could attempt to mount it as an external hard drive on my own computer.

Unfortunately, even that did not work. I never got to the black screen with the FireWire logo. I just got the grey screen again.

We tried once again to boot from the original system CD, and again got nowhere.

I told my friend that, provided that the procedure was not overly complicated, we could try and physically take the hard drive out and connect it to my computer using the universal ATA/IDE/SATA-to-USB adapter that I have for such purposes. After all, when my sister-in-law encountered a similar situation a few years ago, I was actually able to extend the life of the failing device by a few hours by simply taking it out and then rocking it gently from side to side while it was powered up and trying to read data.

Fortunately, a quick Google search revealed that DYI hard drive replacement instructions were readily available in PDF format on Apple’s own web site.

I downloaded the instructions and followed them and got the hard drive out in a few minutes.

Unfortunately, despite multiple attempts at gentle rocking, I failed to elicit any response from the dead drive. It just wouldn’t mount on my computer, and the sparse noises coming from it were definitely a sign of complete and irreversible failure.

The price of a replacement hard drive is fairly reasonable (approx. $50CDN plus taxes and shipping). And as indicated in the DYI instructions, the procedure is extremely simple. But of course this will not help my friend recover his lost files.

Once my friend had gone, however, I was left with one important question: Why was the laptop unable to boot from the system CD or from my DiskWarrior CD?

Before my friend left, we were able to confirm that the laptop was able to boot from the original system CD now that the hard drive had been physically removed from the machine.

In other words, it was the very presence of the defective hard drive inside the machine that was preventing the MacBook from booting from any CD. And this, to me, does not make any sense.

I can understand not being able to start with the Option key down and select the startup volume among the row of icons for available volumes. After all, in order to display the row of icons, the MacBook does need to at least attempt to read from the internal hard drive, and it is conceivable that it can get stuck at that stage because of a hard drive failure and never get to the point where it can display the startup volume icons. It is conceivable, even though it seems to me that the machine should be able to display those startup volumes that are available and apparently working even if the other volumes are failing.

But that’s not even what we were attempting to do. We were attempting to boot directly from the CD by pressing the “C” key down during startup. My understanding was that this shortcut would by-pass the hard drive altogether and not even attempt to read from it.

But obviously that is not the case on that particular type of MacBook. Even if you press the “C” key down as soon as you have pressed the power button to start the machine, apparently this MacBook model still attempts to do something with the internal hard drive, and, when the hard drive fails, that seems to be enough to completely block the machine and prevent it from booting from the CD until you physically remove the hard drive altogether.

This is definitely not the case with older Mac laptops that I have had the opportunity to troubleshoot. But it is also definitely something that I have already noticed in the the recent past on another fairly recent MacBook that I was asked to help troubleshoot. (I don’t remember the details, but I remember noticing the same inability to boot from CD.)

Obviously, my experience with this is limited to the number of defective machines that I have had the opportunity to troubleshoot over the years. I don’t have the opportunity to force the failure of internal hard drives on various machines just to see how they behave when it comes to booting from CD.

But if it is indeed impossible to boot a MacBook from CD once the internal hard drive has failed—at least until you physically remove the hard drive from the machine—then I consider this a significant design flaw, and one that partially defeats the very purpose of the boot-from-CD feature. It just makes end users and troubleshooters like myself even more powerless when it comes to trying to fix problems. In my view, as long as all other parts of the machine are functional, a laptop should always be able to boot from CD, regardless of how defective the internal hard drive is.

That does not appear to be the case with this three-year-old MacBook, and I wonder it is a limitation that is in any way linked to the switch to Intel hardware.

Here’s an excerpt from the type of document that I encounter every day in my line of work:

As you can see, it’s taken from some kind of form, and includes spaces to fill in, which were created using rows of the underline character (_). It’s not necessarily the way that I would go about designing a form, but there is no denying that it is the way many word processor users go about doing it.

What interests me here is what happens in Pages ’09 when I try to use word-by-word selection in such a document. There are two ways to do word-by-word selection: with the mouse and with the keyboard.

With the mouse, you start by double-clicking on the first word you want to select:

Then, without releasing the mouse button after the second click in the double-click, you start dragging the mouse pointer to the right, to extend the selection word by word. Pages ’09 first adds the second word to the selection:

And then, if you keep dragging your mouse pointer to the right, Pages ’09 adds to the selection the form space intended to be filled in:

It clearly treats this space just as any other word, which makes sense, because it’s surrounded by separating space characters, just like any other word.

And then if you drag a little farther to the right, Pages ’09 adds yet another word to the selection:

And so on.

Now let’s go back to the beginning and try the same thing with the keyboard. First, let’s place the insertion point at the beginning of the first word:

Then, let’s press option-shift-Right once. This will select the first word after the insertion point:

Now let’s press option-shift-Right once more to extend the selection to the right:

No problems here. The behaviour is as expected, and is consistent with what happens when selecting word by word with the mouse.

But now let’s press option-shift-Right a third time. If Pages ’09 were consistent and logical, it would treat the form space as a word and add it to the selection, just like it did with the mouse.

Alas, here’s what Pages ’09 does instead:

Pages ’09 extended the selection all the way to the end of the fourth word, i.e. the next word after the empty form space.

This is obviously very problematic, for a variety of reasons:

• It is not consistent with what happens when doing word-by-word selection with the mouse.
• It fails to recognize the spaces before and after the empty form space as word separators.
• It makes it very difficult to use keyboard selection shortcuts to edit text that contains such form spaces, because one has to constantly correct Pages ’09’s behaviour by adjusting the text selection manually.

Fortunately, in this particular case, the manual adjustment required is relatively minor, since you can just press option-shift-Left once to remove the last word from the selection:

And then you can press shift-Left once if you also want to remove the trailing space from the selection.

On the other hand, if you press option-shift-Left a second time, once again Pages ’09 fails to treat the form space with underline characters as a word and jumps all the way to the beginning of the word before that form space:

And unfortunately there are many other situations where this behaviour with word-by-word selection with keyboard shortcuts requires way too much manual adjustment.

The fundamental problem here is that Pages ’09 uses its very own, very idiosyncratic way of handling word-by-word selection with keyboard shortcuts. It is an approach where all punctuation—including not just the underline character, but also things like empty paragraphs, multiple tabs, etc.—is treated as white space and therefore only counts as a single space for the purposes of identifying separators between words.

I have talked about this before, but I believe the examples above are the best illustration of what is wrong with Pages’s very unique way of handling text selection (and navigation) shortcuts.

Maybe the Apple engineers behind iWork are truly convinced that their approach is better than the standard approach, which does not lump all punctuation marks into the white space category, and actually treats them as separate words when appropriate.

But do they really think that the rest of the world, including Microsoft, Adobe and all other developers of word processors and text editors are just going to follow suit and see the righteousness of their cause?

Indeed, this idiosyncratic way of doing things does not even extend to Apple’s other applications. If you copy the very same excerpt above from your Pages document and paste it into a blank TextEdit document and attempt to reproduce the same behaviour, you won’t be able to, because TextEdit follows the standard behaviour here, which is the one found is every other text editor and word processor application on the planet (except from the other applications in iWork, of course).

And if Apple’s iWork engineers are still convinced that it is the right way of doing things, why haven’t they extended the same behaviour to word-by-word selection with the mouse in Pages ’09 itself?

I am afraid it simply is not reasonable to impose this behaviour on users without giving them any choice in the matter. The worst part of it is that text selection shortcuts are not something that is widely used. I personally don’t know any people other than myself who use them in their daily work like I do, and certainly no one I know uses them as extensively as I do. So it looks more or less like text selection shortcuts are a feature for “power users,” i.e. precisely the type of users who are quite particular about those things and expect things to work in a consistent, predictable fashion throughout their user interface.

Thanks to the stubbornness of a specific team of Apple engineers who, after multiple upgrades and revamps, still haven’t even given us the option to turn this idiosyncratic behaviour off, we are forced to live with it in our daily work and constantly make manual adjustments to work around it. And of course, since we power users are a minority, no one is really paying any attention to this except for us.

(This one and the other one with table editing shortcuts interfering with text selection shortcuts in tables are the two things that really drive me mad at times.)

What exactly will it take to force Apple’s iWork engineers to be reasonable about this?

Apple even has a web page devoted to such improvements in Snow Leopard:

Apple – Mac OS X Snow Leopard – Enhancements and Refinements

Sadly, Apple’s engineers have failed to take things one step further and make text selection tools in Preview really smart, especially when it comes to word-by-word selection.

Not every Mac user knows this, but when you are working with any kind of text that is selectable in Mac OS X, double-clicking anywhere within a word should automatically select the entire word:

And if, after the double click, without releasing the mouse button, you drag your mouse pointer to the left or to the right, instead of extending the selection character by character (which it would do if you single-clicked somewhere and then dragged your mouse pointer to the left or to the right), Mac OS X will extend the selection word by word :

This word-by-word selection is obviously very handy, because one often needs to select entire words/phrases/sentences, and having to create such a selection character by character is much more error prone and requires much finer mousing skills than word-by-word selection. If you don’t click exactly at the very beginning of the first word you want to select or you don’t release your mouse exactly at the very end of the last word you want to select, you’ll have an incorrect selection that will need to be adjusted or redone entirely.

But the thing is that word-by-word selection needs to be smart around punctuation marks. It needs to know whether punctuation marks that are not separated from the word that comes before or after them by white space are part of the word and should be included in the selection of the word itself or not.

And that’s where Preview fails. Quotation marks, for example, should not be selected along with the words that they are attached to in English (without any white space). And indeed, every text editor and word processor in Mac OS X—including Apple’s own applications—is smart enough to know this and avoids selecting the quotation marks, treating each of them as a separate “word” for the purposes of extending or shortening the word-by-word selection.

Preview, on the other hand, is dumb and believes that, since there is no space between the quotation mark and the word, the whole sequence of characters forms a single word. And so, when you double-click on a word preceded by a quotation mark in a PDF document in Preview, you get this:

I always find it very frustrating when Apple’s engineers obviously spend some thought on improving a specific aspect or feature of their applications, but then do not push their thinking far enough and consider all the potential improvements in that specific area. After all, the whole purpose of improving text selection in multi-column PDF documents in Preview was to make text selection more accurate, wasn’t it? So it would have made sense to also examine the issue of word-by-word selection more carefully and make sure that it behaves properly and in a manner consistent with what happens in other Mac OS X applications.

Unfortunately, like keyboard shortcuts and other less “obvious” features in Mac OS X, word-by-word selection tends to be dealt with as an afterthought by Apple’s engineers, who seem to deem it a feature only used by “power users” and not ordinary Mac users.

That may be true to a certain extent, but that does not meant that there aren’t hundreds of thousands, if not millions of such “power users” out there who rely on such features in their daily work and experience on-going frustration because their needs are consistently ignored and they are treated as second-class Mac users.

I am afraid I am one of those users and, as such, I keep experiencing, on a daily basis, the frustration of having to deal with inappropriate word-by-word selection in Mac OS X’s Preview.

(Before you ask, yes, Adobe’s own PDF applications Reader and Acrobat do exclude the quotation marks from the selection when you double-click on a word, but, believe it or not, you cannot double-click-and-drag to extend a word-by-word selection. So these applications are much worse than Preview for text selection.)

It’s a nifty feature, and one that’s sorely missing in Apple’s iWork suite of applications.

Unfortunately, as per usual with Microsoft, the feature is plagued by bugs, and things aren’t getting better with time, on the contrary.

As far as I can tell, in PowerPoint 2008, the feature is broken to the point of being unusable.

If I open a blank new presentation in PowerPoint 2008, type a few words in the title and subtitle fields, and then go to the “Window” menu and choose “New Window” to open a second window showing the same presentation, PowerPoint correctly does just that.

But then if I try to continue editing the text boxes in the original (first) document window, PowerPoint 2008 seems completely unable to refresh the text display properly. Typing seemingly produces nothing—but I can see that the text gets inserted properly, because it is displayed properly in the other (second) window in the background. But in the first window, the only way that I can force PowerPoint 2008 to display what I have just typed is to resize the document window. This somehow forces PowerPoint to “refresh” the contents of the text boxes and render them properly. But it does not fix the problem.

In that first window, it is pretty much impossible to edit text boxes, unless you enjoy doing things like typing in the dark.

So that makes the two-windows feature in PowerPoint 2008 pretty much unusuable for anything other than viewing slides.

I cannot reproduce the problem in PowerPoint 2004, so it looks like a “new” bug in PowerPoint 2008. (If it is indeed new to PowerPoint 2008, it has been there for the past year and a half, so it’s not “new” in that sense any longer!) I obviously cannot entirely rule out something specific to my configuration that might be causing the problem (dual monitor setup, maybe?). But still… It’s a pretty bad and obvious one. (I didn’t notice it earlier because really, in all honesty, I tend to avoid PowerPoint like the plague and only use it when I am really forced to do so. And when I do have to use it I don’t always have to use the “New Window” feature.)

To be fixed in Office 2011 or whatever it’s called? Don’t count on it. With Microsoft’s lackadaisical attitude towards bugs, it’s more likely to be ignored for another few years.

I first wrote about this problem a month ago, but this is a problem that has been plaguing 2009 Mac Pro computers (a.k.a. “Nehalem” models) for many months.

There have been more reports about this issue on the Mac web since my last post, including this post at Ars Technica and this one at Apple Insider. There is also a Facebook page about it.

I can confirm that the update appears to fix the problem on my machine. I can no longer reproduce the big temperature increase when playing tracks in iTunes, leaving Elgato Video Capture open and idle, or leaving Logic Pro 9 open and idle. According to Temperature Monitor, there are still temperature fluctuations during these activities, but they seem to be much more modest and within the range of what can be normally expected when using one’s computer for various activities.

It’s only through regular monitoring over a certain period of time that we’ll be able to confirm that the problem is gone for good, but I am sure that this software update brings substantial relief to all those Mac Pro owners who were rightfully concerned about the durability, reliability and energy consumption of their computer. It is also a relief to see confirmation that this was indeed a software issue that could be fixed through a software update and not a more serious hardware issue related to the Nehalem CPU itself.

It’s good to see Apple take the problem seriously, although of course most Mac Pro owners would probably have appreciated more open and consistent communication from Apple about the issue, and a quicker schedule for the release of a fix. But all things considered, I am sure that most affected people will be glad to be able to bring this unfortunate chapter to a close and move on to other things.

This can be handy when you need to add cross-references inside your document.

The problem is that, even though the creation of a bookmark is an invisible process (you can view bookmarks but using “Show Invisibles” in the “View” menu; they appear as blue boxes around the bookmark text), it has a very real and very visible impact on text selection.

Consider this situation in a Pages document:

With the insertion point at the end of paragraph 1, if I press option-shift-Down, Pages extends the selection all the way from the insertion point to the end of paragraph 2:

If I then press option-shift-Left a couple of times to remove some words from the selection, it works just fine:

But now let’s try the same thing after placing the insertion point at the end of paragraph 2:

With the insertion point at the end of paragraph 2, if I press option-shift-Down, Pages extends the selection all the way from the insertion point to the end of paragraph 3:

So far so good. But now look at what happens as soon as I press option-shift-Left just once, in order to remove the last word from the selection, like I did in the previous situation:

A single option-shift-Left keystroke deselects the entire paragraph 3!

As far as I can tell, the only reason why Pages does this is because paragraph 3 is also a bookmark. For some reason, Apple seems to think that the default behaviour for text selection should be to treat the whole bookmark as a single word.

Indeed, if I place my insertion point at the end of paragraph 3:

and press option-shift-Left once, it also selects the entire bookmark text:

If I want to be able to use option-shift-Left and option-shift-Right to select individual words inside the bookmark text, my only option is to first place the cursor somewhere inside the bookmark text. Then and only then will Pages let me use option-shift-Left and option-shift-Right the way that they are supposed to work:

My problem with this approach is that it makes assumptions about the way bookmarks ought to be used, i.e. that they should be treated as single words for text editing purposes unless the user first signals his intention to edit the bookmark text itself by “entering” the bookmark first.

And my impression is that things work like this for bookmarks in Pages because they are treated the same way that hyperlinks are treated. (Indeed, the “Bookmark” tab is in the “Link” inspector, right next to ”Hyperlink.”) But a bookmark is not a link! On the contrary, it is what a link will eventually refer to. It is not something that will be clicked on, and it can span an entire paragraph or more.

Indeed, in the case of documents imported from Word, tables of contents are sometimes built using such bookmarks and cross-references in the table of contents itself. I am working on one such document right now, and it’s full of bookmarks. I have no need to modify the bookmarks themselves, but I need to be able to edit the text inside the bookmarks just like I would any normal text elsewhere in the document.

And again and again, when I try to use my usual text selection shortcuts, I get the unwanted behaviour described above. It is rather frustrating. It is all the more senseless in the case of bookmarks that span entire paragraphs that there are already readily available text selection shortcuts for selecting entire paragraphs, namely option-shift-Up and option-shift-Down. So I have absolutely no need for option-shift-Left and option-shift-Right behaving the same way as their vertical counterparts!

I guess that the reasoning here is that, since bookmarks are invisible by default, writers editing documents containing bookmarks need to be warned somehow when they are in the process of editing text that happens to feature bookmarks.

Unfortunately, this selection behaviour is a poor choice of warning:

• It does not really tell the writer anything about bookmarks. It just makes the text selection behaviour inconsistent.
• It only applies to selections done with keyboard shortcuts. If you try to create a text selection that overlaps an existing bookmark with the mouse, whether your mouse is selecting character by character (after a single click) or word by word (after a double click), there is absolutely no warning about the fact that your selection will affect an existing bookmark.
• It only works one way. If you start your selection outside the bookmark and then attempt to extend it to words within the bookmark with a keyboard shortcut, then Pages automatically selects the entire bookmark. But if you start your selection inside the bookmark and then attempt to extend it to words beyond the bookmark with a keyboard shortcut, there is no warning.

I am not saying that writers editing documents containing bookmarks do not need to be warned about the presence of bookmarks in the text that they are editing. But I don’t think that an inconsistent text selection behaviour is the appropriate kind of warning. Ultimately, it smacks of laziness on the part of the developer, who cannot be bothered to try and come up with something more bookmark-specific.

Bookmarks are for links, but it does not mean that they should behave just like links. It’s obviously easier than to try and create a separate behaviour for something that is not a link, but text that will in turn be used to create links. To me, that’s the reasoning of an engineer, not of someone who actually uses bookmarks.

While I keep a current copy of Firefox on my hard drive, I hardly ever use it.

Why? Because, even after all these years and after numerous improvements, it still suffers from a pretty basic lack of Mac OS X-level polish in places.

Take this very simple example:

This is what you get when you right-click (control-click) on a button image in a web page that acts as a link.

Apparently, this is a proper-looking Mac OS X contextual menu.

But try selecting one of its commands, for example “Copy Link Location.”

Notice anything?

I do.

When you select it and release the mouse button to activate it, the menu item does not blink.

It might sound like a very minor, mostly aesthetic problem. But it’s not. The blinking of a menu item when you select it is an important visual clue that confirms that your selection worked and that the menu command was executed.

This confirmation is missing in this contextual menu in Firefox. And since the menu command in question (“Copy Link Location”) is one that gives no other visual clue of its execution (it simply copies the link URL to the Clipboard), I find this rather problematic.

Because of the absence of the blinking, I cannot help but wonder whether Firefox did actually execute the command and copy the URL to the Clipboard or whether my fingers slipped and I actually did not select the command properly. I can only check this by pasting the Clipboard and seeing what comes out.

Yes, it’s a pretty minor thing, and not a deal breaker. And yes, Firefox is open source, it’s free, so you cannot ask for the moon. We should be glad that there is such an alternative to Apple’s browser “monopoly,” especially since there is a number of sites out there that only work properly in Firefox (or Camino) and in which Safari is stubbornly not supported (though one of the side benefits of the iPhone’s popularity might be that this situation will continue to improve over time).

But because of this lack of support for such a basic feature/convention in Mac OS X, I cannot help but wonder whether there are other areas where the Firefox developers have failed to follow Apple’s guidelines, in purely visual areas or beyond.

All told, of course, Firefox is a decent, usable browser for Mac OS X. And its support for add-ons can be a bonus. But it still lacks the level of polish required to really make it feel like a native, authentic Mac OS X application. (While not perfect, Camino tends to be better in that respect, which is why I tend to gravitate towards it rather than Firefox when I need an alternative to Safari.)

Note where the insertion point is located (at the beginning of the second paragraph).

Now what do you think will happen when I start typing from that insertion point?

More specifically, do you expect the inserted text to be in bold or not?

Well, here is what happens:

The text is in bold. Why? The reason is simple. The previous paragraph ended with text in bold, and I only changed back to regular (not bold) at the beginning of the next paragraph before typing “Not bold.”

In such a situation, Pages, like other common word processors, “remembers” the exact location where the change from bold to regular took place, even though that location is now invisible to the user. And when the user places the insertion point in that same location (even though the user cannot tell that this is the location where the change from bold to regular was made) and starts typing, the resulting inserted text is… in bold.

On the other hand, if, when typing the first paragraph, I had changed back from bold to regular before inserting the paragraph mark (i.e. before typing Return), this problem would not be occurring now.

Yet, from a purely visual standpoint, the two different behaviours produce the exact same result. the first paragraph ends with something in bold (including the closing period) and the second paragraph begins with something not in bold.

Now my question is simple: Why can’t we get a word processor that is smart enough to understand that, in 99% of all cases, when the user goes to insert something at the beginning of the second paragraph, he expects that something to be in the character formatting of that paragraph (i.e. here the regular font) and not in the character formatting of the end of the previous paragraph (i.e. here the bold font)?

Is that really too much to ask?

Yes, I know that, from the perspective of the word processor program itself, the behaviour above makes sense. The change from bold to regular was made after inserting the paragraph mark, so to the word processor it makes sense to begin the second paragraph in bold. But it does not make sense from a purely visual point of view, which is all that the user can refer to once the typing has been done.

Now, of course, since I am more than familiar with this problem myself, I am usually careful to change my character formatting back before inserting a return character at the end of my paragraph. So for documents that I create myself, I don’t usually encounter the issue described above (except when unwanted text selection problems make it inevitable that I end up applying my formatting to unwanted trailing characters such as spaces and invisible return characters).

My real problem is that, in my job, I spend a lot of time editing other people’s documents. And the number of documents exhibiting the issue described above that I have to deal with is frustratingly high. There are probably various reasons for this, but the main one is of course the lack of intuitiveness of word processor interfaces in general and the lack of proper training of most word processor users.

It is for that same reason that there are no simple solutions to the problem. In the example above, it is merely a matter of switching back from bold to regular, which is not too painful. But far too often the character formatting changes are numerous: different font, different weight, different size, different colour, etc. It is simply too frustrating to have to change all these manually.

And reverting back to the paragraph’s underlying default character formatting by stripping all the inappropriate manual formatting with a “Remove Formatting” type of command usually is not an option either. More often than not, those word processor users who only change formatting options after inserting the paragraph mark are the same users who do not know how to use paragraph styles, and so apply document-wide formatting options manually as well. This means that the underlying default character formatting of the paragraph (i.e. the character formatting defined in the default paragraph style) does not match the actual default character formatting used in the document. Stripping the unwanted manual formatting also strips the manual formatting that needs to be preserved.

There is no easy solution here. The only tolerable approach that I have found when this happens to me is the following. Instead of putting my insertion point at the beginning of the paragraph, where I get the wrong character formatting when I start typing, I put it one or two characters to the right, inside the first word of the paragraph. I start typing what I want, then I go back to the beginning of the paragraph and remove the extra letters that I no longer want, and then I jump back after the first few letters that I have typed and resume typing.

It is utterly inelegant, but it is the only realistic solution that I have found.

Of course, as an experienced and demanding Mac user, I am profoundly bothered by inelegant solutions, even when I have no choice but to use them. Each time I have to use them, it adds a little bit to the low-level frustration that I experience on a continuous basis in my daily work due to the limitations and lack of intelligence of the tools that I am forced to use. I simply cannot resign myself and get used to this situation. I dream of smarter tools. I strongly believe that they are more than possible with today’s hardware and software. It is just a matter of “political” will. But the priorities of the market and of our current crop of “innovators” are obviously elsewhere.

In an ideal world, innovation would take place on a continuous basis on multiple fronts, including less “flashy” and less glamorous areas such as word processing and text editing. But that ideal world is far from today’s reality, where word processors are more or less just as dumb as they were 20 years ago (and not even faster!).

UPDATE: Sven-S. Porst writes to report that Apple’s own TextEdit behaves properly, and so do AppleWorks and InDesign. Even the basic (WebKit) text editor used when composing messages in Mail or filling out forms in Safari actually behaves properly too. I was able to verify this myself in TextEdit, Mail, and InDesign.

Considering the lack of polish otherwise afflicting all these other tools, this is rather shocking news. It appears to confirm that both Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages, the two flagship word processors for Mac OS X, have their own way of doing things and can’t get the simple things right, even after years and years (decades in the case of Word) of supposed polishing, fine-tuning and improvements.

Create a test folder called “Test.”

Inside that folder, create another folder called “Enclosed.”

Inside the “Test” folder (next to the “Enclosed” folder), put two files of any kind. Let’s say the files are called “text1.txt” and “text2.txt”:

Select “text1.txt” and bring up the information for the file. Check the “Locked” option under “General”:

Now the file icon will have a small padlock icon in the bottom-left corner:

Now select both “text1.txt” and “text2.txt” in the window and try to drag them onto the “Enclosed” folder icon, in order to move them inside that folder.

Does the resulting behaviour strike you as normal?

Of course the “text1.txt” file is locked, so the Finder can’t move it.

But is that a good reason to:

1. put copies of both “text1.txt” and “text2.txt” inside the “Enclosed” folder
2. not remove either “text1.txt” or “text2.txt” from inside the parent folder
3. not give the user any feedback about what has just happened?

In my view, this is totally unacceptable. Compare that to what happens when you select both “text1.txt” and “text2.txt” and try to put them in the trash.

The Finder correctly detects that one of the files you are trying to trash is locked and asks you what you want to do:

Compared to this, the behaviour when attempting to move the two files to another folder is totally inconsistent and totally unacceptable. At the very least, there should be some sound feedback indicating that the files have been copied.

But what should really happen is that the Finder automatically moves the unlocked file and asks you what you want to do with the locked file.

Instead, we get… audiovisual silence, and a non-sensical behaviour.

I don’t care if my Finder is Carbon or Cocoa. This is unacceptable in any architecture.

UPDATE: A couple of readers have already written to point out that there is some visual feedback, in the form of a change of the cursor icon from the regular black arrow to the black arrow with the green blob containing the “+” sign that signals an impending copy.

While this is true, I had not noticed it when I wrote the article. The possible explanation is that the cursor changes only when your mouse pointer is over the destination folder. Before that, it remains the regular arrow. Since moving a couple of files to a folder is such a common task, I tend to do it very quickly, which explains that I didn’t notice the green blob, probably because I released the mouse button as soon as I was over the folder icon. So to me that’s not enough feedback.

In addition, in other circumstances where the green blob appears and the Finder performs a copy operation, it plays the “copy completed” sound once the copying is done. No such sound here, so if you don’t catch the green blob during the tiny fraction of a second that it appears, you have no other audiovisual feedback about what has just happened.

Finally, the fact remains that this behaviour is inconsistent with what happens when you try to move the files to the trash, and inconsistent with other comparable operations where some files in a selection of files have specific requirements. (See what happens when you try to copy a bunch of files to a destination that already contains a file with the same name as one in the selection.)

I still think it needs to be fixed.

Or, as often happens to me, you might need to refer to your own mailing address as it appears on your credit card statement, because such and such a web site requires it, and your mailing address as it appears on your statements is slightly different from the way you would normally write it, and you can never remember the exact differences, so you have it as a separate mailing address entry in your own card, and it’s handy to be able to double-check without having to dig out a recent credit card statement.

Unfortunately, Address Book suffers from one annoying flaw when it comes to using this “Go to My Card” command: It does not work what you have something in the search field.

When you type a text string in the search field, Address Book narrows down the list of addresses currently displayed in the “Name” column to those that contain the text string somewhere in their fields.

The problem is that selecting the “Go to My Card” command does not cause Address Book to automatically exit the search mode and jump to your own card. Instead, it just does… nothing. You are expected to understand that this means that you have to clear the search field and exit the search mode first, and then select the “Go to My Card” command again.

I don’t know about other Mac OS X users, but I often use the search field to search for something and then promptly forget to clear the search field before I move on to something else.

And so when I come back to Address Book and select “Go to My Card” command, I get frustrated because it does not automatically exit the search mode for me.

Granted, it’s a minor annoyance, but it’s representative of the lack of polish that the Address Book application still suffers from after all these years, even for those features that it does include. (It is also in dire need of some new features.)

In addition, there are other situations where Address Book does automatically exit the search mode, without requiring the user to manually empty the search field. For example, if you do a search and then, while viewing the search results, you click on a group in the left-most column, Address Book automatically empties the search field, exists the search mode, and displays the contents of the selected group.

To me, if it’s capable of automatically exiting the search mode in such a situation, then it should also be able to do so when the user selects the “Go to My Card” command.

Several years ago, I wrote about the numerous problems with the Edit mode in Address Book. To Apple’s credit, many of the problems described in that post have since been fixed. (I cannot reproduce them in Address Book in Snow Leopard.) But as the example above demonstrates, there are still other areas where Address Book’s user interface can turn out to be rather frustratingly rigid and user-hostile.

I should also point out that, sadly, one of the “hidden features” in Address Book’s search feature that I described in another post and made the rigidity of the search interface a bit more tolerable has since been removed from the application. Today, in Snow Leopard, if you start a search while a specific group is selected and there are no matches in that group, if you want to extend the search to all groups you have to click on “All contacts,” which exits the search mode and forces you to retype your search request.

Previously, Address Book was smart enough to exit the search mode, but not before it had put a list of search matches from all contacts in the “Name” column in answer to your search request. As one of the commenters on my blog post at the time noted, the disappearance of this feature appears to indicate that this was probably an “accidental side effect” and not an intentional thing on Apple’s part.

The bottom line here is that Address Book’s user interface is too rigid to be user-friendly. If you want to start a search in all your contacts, you need to first make sure that “All contacts” is selected. And if you want to use the “Go to My Card” command, you need to first make sure that there is nothing in the search field.

User interfaces that force you to do things in a specific order and do not offer an alternative when you forget to do things in the right order are simply not good enough in this day and age. I am all for iPods, iPads, iPuds, and what not, but come on, Apple, some improvements in the “smartness” of our systems—whether they are of the flat and portable variety or of the more traditional desktop variety—would be appreciated too. We are in 2010, after all. It is about time our computers started demonstrating a semblance of intelligence.

[UPDATE: Reader 'The Skeptic' notes that the same thing happens when you do a search for a contact using the global Spotlight menu and then select a result in the menu that is a contact card, to view the details. If a search is in progress in Address Book, Mac OS X brings Address Book to the front, but fails to cancel the search and display the desired card.]

And here is what I have observed just in the past few weeks.

A local newspaper decided to replace their entire fleet of aging Mac computers with brand new machines. It is a small business, so we are talking about one Mac Pro with a 30″ screen, one Mac mini to act as a server, and five iMacs.

For the last category, they decided to go with the 27″ iMac model, which is, on paper, a pretty convincing and fetching offering. And then they ordered all the machines from a national reseller, and the machines started trickling in after the holidays.

Of the five iMacs, two arrived with a cracked screen. Now, this might not be a flaw in the hardware itself, but at the very least it looks like a flaw in the packaging, which does not look to be sturdy enough.

Of course, these machines are going to be replaced at no cost, but it’s an additional hassle, and it’s definitely troubling to have the incident happen to more than one machine in such a small order.

Only Apple knows how many machines end up with a cracked screen when they are delivered, but maybe the fact that there apparently is a new delay in the delivery of 27″ iMacs confirms that there is indeed a problem and that Apple is trying to address it.

The Mac Pro seems to be OK, but the graphic designer is already having problems with the Magic Mouse, some of which might be tracked down to a problem with Bluetooth reception, which would seem to be a hardware flaw in the Mac Pro itself. (I am still investigating.)

(I am somewhat interested in the Magic Mouse myself, after having tried it during the installation of these new machines, but I won’t buy one for my new Mac Pro until I have good indication that there won’t be Bluetooth reception problems. Generally speaking, I distrust wireless peripherals, simply because I have heard of and seen myself so many glitches, if not actual problems and bugs, with the Bluetooth connections. Plus there is the issue of having to use batteries…)

Then I have another friend-cum-client who’s just bought herself a new 27″ iMac to replace her aging (and kernel-panicking) PowerMac G5. When she got it, the screen was not cracked, but she noticed right away that the machine was making way too much fan noise while running. She called me in, and sure enough, I was able to confirm that the noise was far from normal. I tried the usual troubleshooting steps (zapping the PRAM, etc.) to no avail.

The fan noise would start as soon as the machine was on (even before booting) and gradually ramp up, regardless of what the machine was being used for. I decided to do the hardware test by booting with the D key down (and was shocked to see that, even in these brand new Intel-based machines, Apple still uses a classic Mac OS 8/9-era user interface for the hardware test application).

Much to my surprise (I was already fearing a protracted battle with AppleCare…), the basic hardware test did produce an error called “4SNS/1/40000000:TH00-9.000.” The error code is not much help, but to me a brand new machine on which the hardware test gives an error is a dead-on-arrival machine and I advised my friend to get it replaced. She didn’t buy it directly from Apple, but we did call AppleCare and the representative immediately said that she should and would get it replaced by the retailer. He still gave us a case number just in case, and she’s currently in discussions with the retailer about getting a replacement.

Out of curiosity, I also did a Google search for the error code and found only one result, but a very interesting one. It’s a blog post at OWC (a US retailer from which I have bought stuff in the past, especially when US prices, even with the exchange rate and importing fees, were much lower than Canadian prices):

“Proprietary cable can put the brakes on upgrading Late ‘09 iMacs”

The error code does not appear in the body of the blog post itself, but in the comments, and the gist of the problem appears to be that 27″ iMacs customized with a 2 TB hard drive (the default configuration is with a 1 TB hard drive) that happens to be a Seagate Barracuda drive seem to have problems with thermal sensors and therefore exhibit abnormal fan activity. I quote:

BEWARE SEAGATE replacement drives don’t work.

I have a new 27″ iMac and the 2.0TB Seagate Barracuda LP. Once booted the fan will begin running at ~ 2500 RPM. It will continue to increase in speed until it reached very near max speed….. not quiet.

Running hardware diagnostics generates error 4SNS/1/40000000:TH00-9.000

Putting the 1TB Seagate back in restored the fans to normal operation.

Sure enough, my friend did get a customized iMac with a 2 TB hard drive. So I told her that, if she’s going to get it replaced with another iMac with a 2 TB hard drive, she’d better check and make sure the replacement machine does not have the same problem.

We will have to see how it goes, but again, it’s a rather annoying hassle, especially for people like us, who live in a community that is a three-hour drive from major authorized retailers.

Finally, there is, of course, the CPU heating issue with my own 2009 Mac Pro, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The problem has yet to be solved. While it’s not a deal-breaker and my machine’s temperatures still stay easily within range (at least as far as I can tell, and unlike what’s happening to other victims), I am still rather annoyed by this.

I did submit a bug report to Apple a couple of weeks ago, and they responded to indicate that the bug was a “known issue” (original Bug ID# 7375647). But of course there is no indication of if or when the issue will be fixed. It is hopefully a software issue that can be addressed in a system or firmware update, but given that it seems to affect all 2009 Mac Pros, it has already been a full year with no noticeable action on Apple’s part.

All this adds up to a rather unnerving picture. Are Apple’s quality standards slipping? It is of course impossible to tell if you are not Apple and do not have access to hard data on machine returns, failures, complaints, etc. And I have not forgotten the not-so-distant years when Apple was shipping machines nicknamed “wind-tunnel” because of horrible noise issues. Or mooing MacBooks.

I suppose that, whenever a company ships millions of units, there are always going to be sporadic problems. Overall, Apple still seems to have good customer satisfaction ratings. But do we put up with more because of our minority situation or are things really as rosy as the customer surveys seem to indicate? And how much does the success of the iPod and the iPhone skew the ratings in Apple’s favour?

My own experience in the past few weeks certainly seems to indicate that Apple is far from immune from substantial quality control issues. One key aspect of such a situation is how promptly the company moves to acknowledge and then address these issues.

The culture of secrecy and (occasional) denial at Apple does not help in that respect. If Apple is aware of an issue such as the CPU overheating in Mac Pros and working on a fix, then it would be nice to be told more than just that it is a “known issue,” with no indication of when or how it will be fixed. (I have a number of bug reports that have remained in “known issue” status for years. Is that what is going to happen with this one? Or is Apple really taking it seriously and working on a fix that will be delivered soon?)

All this makes me a big uncomfortable both as a Mac user and as a Mac “expert” asked to give advice about hardware and software purchases. I am not about to switch to the “dark side” and recommend that people get crappy PCs instead of their Macs, of course, but at the same time I wish I could be more enthusiastic and wholehearted about my endorsement of Apple’s products. It certainly is not the case at this point in time.

Every once in a while, however, I have no choice but to work on the Word document with Word itself. Most of such cases are when documents contain a large number of tables (Pages’s table editing tools can be very frustrating) or Microsoft Office-specific graphics typically generated by Excel and inserted in the Word document or generated within Word itself.

These days, I am working on one such document. It contains a large number of tables, as well as numerous graphics such as this one:

My task, as a professional translator, is to translate the entire document, including such graphics. If the graphics are not editable, I have to advise my client that I will provide the translation in plain text underneath the graphic, and his graphic designer or whoever designed the document will have to update the graphic himself.

But if the graphic is editable, I have no excuse but to do the editing myself:

(Things might look a bit different for you depending on which version of Word you are using. I am using Word 2008 for Mac OS X. Microsoft’s developers keep changing the look of the frames and handles and other controls for editing graphics, without ever doing anything about the flaws in the actual behaviours of the controls.)

As you can see in this picture, the “labels” for the pie chart are editable text boxes that can be clicked on and “entered” in order to edit the text inside.

And that’s where the frustration starts.

See, in most computer systems, a double-click on a word is a shortcut for selecting the entire word. When you want to edit text, it is a pretty convenient shortcut. In the example above, my task is to replace “Strongly Agree” with “Tout à fait d’accord” on the first line and to add a non-breaking space between the number and the “%” symbol on the second line (which is required in French typography). My first instinct is to double-click on either “Strongly” or “Agree” and then expand the selection to the left or to the right (depending on where I have started) in order to select the entire line and type the French over the selection.

The problem is that some software developers have other ideas and think that double-click is a convenient shortcut for all kinds of other things. In Word 2008, for example, double-click on the text inside such a text box, instead of selecting the text, will bring up… a dialog box for changing the format of the text box:

Argh. This might make sense as a shortcut for accessing the “Format” dialog box for a graphic object that does not contain any text, and is therefore not editable to begin with. But unfortunately, Microsoft’s engineers have decided that it should apply to all objects, including text boxes.

So now, each time I want to edit the text inside a text box (and I have dozens of text boxes to go through), I have to click just once on the text inside the box to select the box first, and then pause for a short while, and then click on the text again to “enter” the field.

But even then, look at what happens:

Depending on the actual position of the mouse pointer, Word throws a tool tip in my face to tell me what the label is for, which I don’t give a flying hoot about, and that tool tip hides part of the text that I want to edit! And even if I start typing in the text box, the tool tip does not go away. The only solution is to move my hand back to the mouse and move the mouse pointer elsewhere, so that Word will show a tool tip for something else and remove this one from my sight.

Double argh.

At this point, you might think: “Why doesn’t Pierre just do a document-wide Find/Replace operation to replace all occurrences of ‘Strongly Agree’ with ‘Tout à fait d’accord,’ especially if he has dozens of those to do?”

Well, I would—except that Word’s Find/Replace command does not work with the text inside text boxes! It’s as if this text didn’t exist. Word can’t find it, and Word does not include it in its word count. (Another bonus for translators who rely on an accurate word count for billing purposes.)

So I actually have to do each and every graphic manually, one at a time.

Now that I have finally entered the text box and am able to edit the text (as long as the tool tip lets me see what I am doing and does not force me to type in the dark), I have to deal with Word’s esthetic brilliance.

See, while you are editing text inside a text box, Word is apparently unable to recalculate the size of the text box on the fly, and so it continues to display the current borders of the text box, even though they are not longer correct:

This image is supposed to represent text that is centered inside the box. And when I am finished typing I get more prettiness:

Now, somehow, Word has realized that it needs to widen the text box, but the centered text spills over the other edge of the box!

It’s only when I exit the text box altogether that Word finally adjusts its borders to accommodate the new content properly:

Except that—Darn! I’ve forgotten to add the non-breaking space before the “%” on the second line!

And so we start all over again… Double-click on the text box’s second line—oh no, here comes that “Format” dialog box again. Escape that. And try again, this time with a pause between the clicks. And so on. And so on. And so on.

Repeat the same scenario over dozens of similar text boxes, and you get an idea of how maddening this can get.

Oh, and by the way, even if you uncheck the “Show Paste Options buttons” option in Word’s preferences (under the “Edit” pane), Word 2008 still shows the “Paste Options” button each time you paste something inside a text box, thereby adding to the screen clutter and hiding even more of the text you are trying to edit.

And I am not even mentioning Word’s performance issues, which mean that, even on a 2009 Mac Pro with 12 GB of RAM, half of the time, when you try to expand the selection inside a text box, there is a slight but very noticeable delay before Word actually draws the proper selection highlighting. Or responds to your mouse click. Or to your keystroke. Which causes you to make more errors, and to have to repeat all these stupid actions even more.

And I am not mentioning document scrolling issues either. I have dozens of such graphics one after the other, so when I scroll down to edit the next one, it’s not always fully displayed in the visible area of the document window. Or sometimes, even when the graphic that I am editing is fully visible, editing it still causes Word to jump up or down while I am trying to edit a perfectly visible text box, and so I have to readjust my own positioning due to Word’s uncontrollable scrolling, and scroll back up or back down, which causes yet more headache-inducing jumping, because Word is not designed for the scroll ball on my Apple mouse and thinks it’s a scroll wheel and Word’s scrolling is way too sensitive, and there’s nothing that can be done to adjust that either!

Oh, and did I mention that the blinking I-beam cursor keeps disappearing while you are typing, making it even harder to keep track of what you are doing and avoid more unwanted errors and more repetition?

I could go on and on. Working with Word is just horrible, and it’s probably even worse in Mac OS X with Word 2008, although other versions of the software are probably affected by most of the flaws illustrated above as well.

It’s hard to believe that we are in 2010 and we still have to use such crappy, badly designed, horrendously flawed software. But we are, and we do. And we have Bill Gates and his clique to thank for it (although Adobe’s own software wizards are not far behind, and are getting closer and closer all the time).

It’s maddening, and it’s profoundly discouraging.

One is about the third-party MsgFiler plug-in for Mail. In my previous post on this topic, I wrote:

Unlike LaunchBar, as far as I can tell, MsgFiler does not have a smart abbreviation engine that “learns” your preferred destinations based on abbreviated versions of their names. It just matches what you type to the actual names of the mailbox folders.

If, like me, you have lots of subfolders that start with the same word, then you need to type not just that whole word but the beginning of the next one (or hit the cursor keys multiple times to select the right item in the list of matches). For example, I have mailbox folders called “Betalogue – Admin,” “Betalogue – Mail,” “Betalogue – Feedback,” etc. In order to select one specific mailbox in that group, I have to type “Betalogue -” and then the first few letters of the next word. That’s a lot of typing.

The same issue applies to family members. I have a mailbox for each family member and, of course, many of them have the same last name, which I usually type first so that mailboxes are sorted alphabetically. Here again, in order to narrow things down to a specific mailbox, I have to type the whole last name and then the first few letters of the first name. Again, that’s a lot of typing.

A couple of readers wrote to indicate that you don’t necessarily have to type out the first word in the name of a mailbox. For example, to get to “Betalogue – Admin,” if I have multiple mailboxes starting with “Betalogue,” I could type “Admin” instead.

The problem with this, of course, is that I also have multiple mailboxes with the word “Admin” in their name. Similarly, when it comes to people’s names, if the last name is common to multiple mailboxes, I could type the first name. But here again, I have multiple acquaintances with the same last name, and I also often have multiple acquaintances with the same first name.

A more useful note with a view to reducing typing is that you don’t have to type out words in full. For example, to select “Betalogue – Admin” in MsgFiler, I just need to type out “bet ad.”

This is good to know, except, of course, that, in this particular case, in my mailbox drawer, “Betalogue – Admin” is not just a mailbox itself, but also a folder containing multiple subfolders. So I still get multiple results when typing “bet ad,” although the “Betalogue – Admin” mailbox itself is the first result (i.e. the one selected by default) and the other mailbox subfolders enclosed within the “Betalogue – Admin” mailbox folder are listed afterwards and can be selected directly by typing portions of the words in their own name.

It all depends on the names used for one’s various mailboxes and mailbox folders, of course. I have a long-established system that I use and I have no desire to change it after all these years. It means that, in my case, MsgFiler might require more typing than it would for other people with other naming systems.

It can still be argued, however, that, even in my situation, MsgFiler is still more convenient and efficient than the default message filing options available in Mail. I will have to give it another try over a number of days and see if I can really get used to it and find it more efficient than Mail’s options and consider it worth the expense and the additional burden of having to manage yet another third-party plug-in. (I am not giving up Mail Act-On for the single keystroke shortcuts that I have defined for my most common mailbox destinations.)

Speaking of Mail Act-On, another reader wrote to point out that Mail Act-On has its own feature for filing messages in any mailbox, aside from its rule-based keyboard shortcuts that can be defined by the user and used for specific mailboxes.

Under “Menus” in the Mail Act-On preference pane, there is a shortcut for a command named “Move Messages.” The default shortcut is F3.

However, as I wrote in my reply to this reader, I have to report that, on my system, that command is unusable. On my system, the window that pops up for message filing is totally unresponsive, or responds to key strokes (or mouse actions) after a delay of many seconds. It is unacceptable.

It was already like this a couple of years back when I first tried the feature, and it is still like this on my 2009 Mac Pro.

The reason might be that I have a large number of mailboxes (nearly 2,000). The reader who wrote to me and who uses this feature all the time only has 40 mailboxes. He has tens of thousands of messages, but only a limited number of mailboxes, and mostly relies on Mail’s search feature to locate individual messages.

I obviously have a different approach. And it looks like Mail Act-On’s “Move Messages” command is useless when the number of mailboxes is large. (Other Mail Act-On features still work fine.)

In closing, I think it’s fair to say that, for people frustrated with Mail’s built-in options for moving messages around, there are third-party alternatives, but that these third-party alternatives are an extra expense and might not work for everyone. My wish is still for Apple to include more efficient built-in solutions, but until that happens, I will definitely give MsgFiler another try.