I must say that I am utterly disgusted by the fact that I now use one of Apple’s most powerful computers (a dual 1.25 GHz G4), and Microsoft Word X is still plagued by highly irritating performance issues. More specifically, the stalls that I used to experience all the time running Word X on my […]
Imagine you have the following situation in a table in Word: The first column is obviously not wide enough to accommodate the word “Rafraîchissements” in the last column. So you select the column and go to the Ruler to adjust the column width. And you get this: How useful is this? Of course you didn’t […]
The interface for footnotes and endnotes in Word X is utterly non-intuitive. (What else is new?) But one could get past the bad interface if things actually worked. However, when in Normal view mode, if you choose to view your document’s footnotes/endnotes, they appear in a separate pane at the bottom of the screen. And, […]
My latest column is out at Applelust.com: “The Intrusiveness of Background Processes in Mac OS X” I examine a recurring User Interface issue in Mac OS X that affects both the system as a whole and individual applications.
I find it rather disappointing that, on my dual 1.25 GHz G4, when a Flash animation such as the one that Salon forces you to go through before you can access its “premium” content is playing in a Safari window that is not currently in the foreground (even if Safari itself is in the foreground), […]
Reading the MacInTouch Reader Report on the recently released Acrobat 6 for Mac OS X, I am afraid the news is very bad. From ultra-slow performance for the simplest tasks to crippled “Professional” software that can’t even create “smart” PDF files (with tables of contents) from Microsoft Word documents — whereas the Windows version of […]
Installing the recent slew of updates (Safari, iMovie, QuickTime) reminded me once again of a regular source of irritation. I am a fairly quick typist/clicker, especially for well-known, repetitive tasks. So when the Mac OS X installer application asks for my password and then asks me to agree with the “Software License Agreement” that I […]
Much has been said about Mac OS X’s Finder and its departure from the purely spatial “metaphor” of 1 folder = 1 window, which was used in the classic Mac OS. (You could only have one Finder window representing the contents of a given folder open at a time. If you double-clicked on the same […]
Paul Krugman has no choice but to reach the inevitable conclusions: “Standard Operating Procedure” by Paul Krugman, The New York Times [free registration required] Suggestions that the public was manipulated INTO supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which — to an […]
Haven’t had one of those in a while (personally)… Right now (3:49 AST), the server is saying my password is wrong. (It isn’t.)
I got a couple of comments on yesterday’s item on missing shortcuts in Safari. They mentioned cmd-backtick and cmd-shift-backtick for cycling through windows. I am afraid I can’t find these shortcuts anywhere in Apple’s Knowledge Base article on Safari shortcuts. Granted, this article is dated (January 15, 2003), and doesn’t mention the shortcuts for cycling […]
Since there are shortcuts for cycling through all existing tabs in a single Safari window (cmd-shift-left and cmd-shift-right), I don’t see why there aren’t shortcuts for cycling through all existing windows. I realize that cmd-left and cmd-right are already used for the Back and Forward commands. Maybe ctrl-left and ctrl-right? We need something.
This is a problem with word selection that I encounter regularly and is best described with this short QuickTime movie [163 KB]: Word selection is what happens when you double-click on a word to select it. After the double-click, as long as you hold your mouse button down, if you move your cursor to extend […]
This one is another one in the list of small things that Apple so far has inexplicably failed to fix in Mac OS X. If you have a Finder window in List view mode in Mac OS X, and you click on the name of a file or folder in the list, the Finder selects […]
You don’t hear much about media consolidation in the mainstream media conglomerates, maybe because it’s not a very sexy subject, but mostly because it is definitely not in their interest to cover an issue where they themselves have so much at stake. This makes Dan Gillmor’s recent column on the subject all the more required […]