Articles posted on July 10th, 2003

Word X: Cursor movement in field area

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 10:49 pm

Put your blinking cursor in a field area in Word — for example, a page number reference such as the one below: (I have field shading always on in Word, hence the gray shading behind the number.) If you use the cursor keys to move to the right or to the left in the number, […]

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Mac OS X’s Font Panel: Where is the focus?

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 9:26 pm

I know that Apple will provide a brand new utility for font management in Panther, but it’s not clear yet how this will integrate with Mac OS X’s existing Font Panel feature. And boy does this Font Panel need some work. The issue is very simple. Just look at the following picture: What’s wrong with […]

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FireWire and USB woes

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 9:26 pm

It’s a bit sad that, after all the excitement caused by the introduction of “plug-and-play” technologies such as USB and FireWire to REPLACE the aging and fussy ADB and SCSI ports on Mac computers, and after half a decade of Macs shipping with these new ports, we are still experiencing far too many fundamental problems […]

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Mac OS X: Slow pop-up folder in Dock

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 9:17 pm

I have several folders in the Dock which contain aliases to files that I need to access often. Usually, the contextual pop-up menu displaying the contents of the folder appears instantly after clicking on the folder. Lately, however, for one particular folder, I’ve noticed that it’s taking Mac OS X several seconds to display the […]

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Panther: Improved iDisk? Improved Mail?

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 8:50 pm

If you’ve followed the news about the upcoming Panther release of Mac OS X (10.3), you know that it’ll feature a revamped iDisk feature, where the “disk” will actually reside on your local hard drive and automatically synchronize with the copy on Apple’s servers in the background. This obviously addresses an issue with iDisk that […]

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Radio comments broken

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 6:42 pm

This is just a note to let people know that UserLand’s comments server appears to be down (has been unaccessible from here since July 9), and it causes my blog page to LOAD much slower on the Web, because your browser desperately attempts to LOAD the comments counts from UserLand’s servers and is not getting […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: URLs followed by period

Thursday, July 10th, 2003 • 6:26 pm

Mac OS X’s Mail frequently has a problem with URLs in plain text messages. It detects them automatically (when they start with the protocol, i.e. “http://”, etc.) and turns them INTO “live” links that can be clicked on. If, however, the URL happens to be the last thing in a sentence and is immediately followed […]

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