Betalogue

Here’s another example of how, in spite of its maturity and polished appearance, Adobe’s InDesign CS fails to meet some pretty basic user interface requirements. The other day, I was editing a document and needed to flip a placed object horizontally. (Flipping produces the mirror image of an object, while rotating by 180 degrees preserves […]

I always beat on Microsoft and Apple for not complying with basic UI guidelines (Apple’s own guidelines, as it happens). It doesn’t mean that software products by Adobe, that other software juggernaut, are exempt. It just means that I use Adobe’s software less frequently. Still, it’s rather frustrating to encounter interface components that break fundamental […]

I didn’t see the whole game last night, only the first half. But what I saw was enough to convince me that Manchester United’s exit from the Champions’ League is far from being a total shock. The match report in The Guardian is a good description of what happened. What it fails to mention, however, […]

I’ve always wondered why the “iTunes” folder inside my home “Music” folder contained two files, one called “iTunes 4 Music Library” and one called “iTunes Music Library.xml.” Well, now Apple’s Knowledge Base has an article that explains the function of the two files. Basically, the first one is the main one that iTunes uses to […]

This is another example of inconsistency in Mac OS X. Over the years, I have developed the habit of using a double-click on a word to select it. This works in pretty much an context where there is text: word processor documents, database entry fields, dialog boxes with input fields, etc. But there is one […]

Last week, I had a long discussion with Microsoft’s Rick Schaut. This discussion covered a great number of issues. In particular, Rick said that the “Disk Is Full” bug that has been affecting every version of Word since Word 98 had “been fixed for quite some time“, but that he didn’t know whether the fix […]

This happens to me on a regular basis. I have a fairly large Address Book database with hundreds of records and over 40 groups. I think it’s rather normal that, sometimes, I don’t remember what group(s) a given record belongs to. So I select “All” in the Groups column, and type the first few letters […]

Not much to report on this one… Portsmouth were lively and seemed motivated in the beginning, but they were cut apart a bit too easily by Arsenal’s strikers. Once Thierry Henry scored the opening goal with a fine finish, there was really no sign of a possible upset. Arsenal entirely dominated the rest of the […]

Macworld’s preview of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is beyond predictable. It deals exclusively with Microsoft’s new flashy, marketing-friendly features, such as the “Project Centre” and the “Notebook” layout view. The only interesting part is the one about the page layout view in Excel, which is of course long overdue. What about […]

This is another one of these dumb things that Word X does for no apparent reason other than the fact that the code hasn’t been updated in 10 years. If you have more than 9 document windows open at the same time in Word, Instead of listing them all in the “Window” menu, Word only […]

Yesterday I saw a news item on MacMinute about AirPort Software 3.3.1, a recent software update released by Apple. The MacMinute article linked to this page on Apple’s web site, which states quite clearly in the system requirements: “AirPort Extreme-ready computer with internal AirPort Extreme card“. I have a dual G4 with a regular AirPort […]

Two slightly weird things in my mailboxes this morning. First of all, all of a sudden, for some strange reason, I have been receiving copies of really old e-mail messages. These are legitimate messages that were indeed sent to me by people I know a long time ago (and I already have copies of the […]

Here’s another example of Apple’s current carelessness and inconsistency when designing pieces of UI for Mac OS X. Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) has a new feature which causes a dialog box to automatically appear whenever an application crashes, regardless of whether it’s a piece of Apple software or a third-party application. This dialog box […]

Here’s a perfect example of the kind of infuriating day-to-day idiocy that users of Microsoft Word X are confronted with. I have a document with several user-defined styles. One of them is called “Outline” and I want to make a change to it. So I go to a paragraph in the document that is formatted […]

This is for Betalogue readers who have submitted or are interested in submitting comments on any of my Betalogue pages. The pMachine blogging system that I use guarantees the privacy of your contact information. When you submit registration information along with your comment, you have several options: provide a name and email address, but no […]