Articles posted in May, 2003

More reasons to avoid AOL and Microsoft products

Friday, May 30th, 2003 • 10:22 pm

Here’s a new column about the slow death of Netscape as a viable force in the online world: “Is this the end of Netscape? ” by David Becker, C|Net Now that AOL Time Warner has locked into IE for the foreseeable future, the usefulness of Netscape to the company seems tentative at best, It’s bad […]

More »

New York Times on the iTunes Music Store

Friday, May 30th, 2003 • 5:53 pm

The New York Times has a good recap (dated May 29) of the current situation regarding Apple’s iTunes Music Store in a column by Neil Strauss entitled “Apple Finds the Future for Online Music Sales“. It’s cautiously optimistic in tone and provides various interesting viewpoints. The impression that one gets out of the current situation […]

More »

iCal UI: Pretty bad, and pretty buggy

Friday, May 30th, 2003 • 12:53 am

I really don’t like the iCal UI much. It uses non-standard behaviors and controls that I just can’t get used to and requires much more trial-and-error clicking and dragging than it should. Then on top of this, it suffers from obvious bugs that should have been fixed long ago. For example, you click and drag […]

More »

… And no click-through when you need it!

Thursday, May 29th, 2003 • 11:18 pm

There has been much debate about the implementation of click-through in Mac OS X and Mac OS X applications lately. The general consensus among Mac pundits is that Mac OS X’s implementation of click-through is flawed because it is often active by default, and often causes the user to trigger actions that he/she didn’t want […]

More »

Empty Room

Thursday, May 29th, 2003 • 8:45 pm

It’s hard to describe the greatness of a seemingly “simple” song such as “Empty Room” by Prince. First of all, the song is not readily available. The first studio version, recorded for the failed I’ll Do Anything movie project, is only available on bootleg releases. The second studio version (and accompanying video) was only played […]

More »

However…

Thursday, May 29th, 2003 • 8:27 pm

I don’t usually read James Adams’ weekly column “Weekend Diary” in Saturday’s Globe and Mail. As the column title indicates, there is very little of substance in it. But today I came across this: However, because Heidi [Fleiss] has a criminal record — she spent 1997-2000 in a California prison for money laundering and tax […]

More »

Champions League: AC Milan 0 – Juventus 0

Thursday, May 29th, 2003 • 5:57 am

Good grief. There should be a law against this type of playing. How many dives can 20 men perform in an hour and a half? Too many to count… and of course at that stage there have been so many fake fouls that the real ones don’t get noticed by the referees anymore. Which makes […]

More »

“Review” of iTunes Music Store at Ars Technica

Wednesday, May 28th, 2003 • 1:34 am

Ars Technica has a “review” of the iTunes Music Store by Jade, and it’s pretty funny, if not really useful or enlightening.

More »

Multitasking in Mac OS X and UI intrusiveness

Wednesday, May 28th, 2003 • 1:13 am

I was downloading a big file (Acrobat Reader 6) over my pokey modem connection, and reading an already-loaded Washington Post column in a Safari window tab. Then I decided to load a football news site while I was reading the column. I knew that it would at least take time because of the big Acrobat […]

More »

Dave Winer: Who will fix your lousy software?

Tuesday, May 27th, 2003 • 9:26 pm

As a very, very, very frustrated user of Radio UserLand, it’s becoming harder and harder for me to read Dave Winer’s pseudo-essays about where the software industry is today and where it is going. Here’s the latest one: “Who will pay for software?” by Dave Winer, DaveNet First of all, anyone who expresses sympathy for […]

More »

No Exit from the Matrix

Tuesday, May 27th, 2003 • 8:49 pm

I have not seen the Reloaded movie, and I don’t intend to do so until it comes out on DVD — but this article is about much more than just one movie: “There’s No Exit from the Matrix” by Frank Rich, The New York Times [free registration required] We expect our journalistic media to fictionalize […]

More »

Word X: Click-through that doesn’t work

Monday, May 26th, 2003 • 11:04 pm

Go to Word X, open the Find/Replace dialog, and then switch to another application, in ORDER to put Word X’s windows in the background: Now hover with your mouse pointer over the Find/Replace dialog’s Close button. It turns red, as it should, because the Close button supports click-through for all windows in Mac OS X. […]

More »

Word X: Font size in Find & Replace dialog

Monday, May 26th, 2003 • 11:02 pm

Can you tell the difference between the apostrophe in the “Find” field and the apostrophe in the “Replace” field in the picture below? (One of them is curly. The other one is straight.) On a normal day, I can’t. It would take superpowers to tell the difference with such a small font size and Mac […]

More »

Word X: Unpredictable word counter

Monday, May 26th, 2003 • 1:27 am

When working on big Word documents, I like to monitor my progress, and Word’s live word counter fits that purpose (more or less) by constantly updating the total number of words and my current position in the document. Today, I’m working on a big document, and Word’s word counter simply doesn’t work. It gets updated […]

More »

And now Mail…

Sunday, May 25th, 2003 • 9:13 pm

Today appears to be a day of major irritants. After Radio basically doing whatever it pleases, now Mail decides that it doesn’t want to send my messages out anymore… I get the typical “Sending failed. Do you want to try with a different SMTP server?” alert. I don’t want to try with a different SMTP […]

More »