Mac rumour site AppleInsider has an article on Mail 2.0, the upcoming version of Mac OS X’s e-mail application that’s expected to be included in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) next year. Of course, Mail will include “smart mailboxes” whose behaviour will take advantage of Tiger’s advanced search functions. This, in itself, is rather promising, […]
This one is not a bug. It’s just a perfect example of Microsoft’s sloppy software design work. If you have a Word document open in Normal view mode and that document includes footnotes or endnotes, and if you then open the Footnotes/Endnotes (still in Normal view mode), here’s what it looks like: See the problem? […]
A while back, I complained about the fact that, in Normal view mode, when viewing a Word document’s footnotes or endnotes in the special pane at the bottom of the document’s window, it was impossible to make the ruler appear in order to change the text’s paragraph formatting, not matter how many times you selected […]
As Sydney Pollack’s character would say, I am probably way out of my league here, but still… How plausible is this whole thing? There’s probably some universal truth in the contrast between the woman’s ability to stick to fantasizing only and the man’s irrepressible need to act on his own fantasies, but is it enough […]
In most Mac OS X applications I use, when I want to save a file, there is a check box called “Hide Extension” somewhere in the “Save As” dialog box. This check box is the visible manifestation of a “smart” behaviour used by such applications when it comes to file naming conventions. Since Mac OS […]
For most automatic text entry purposes, I use Spell Catcher X rather that Word’s own AutoText and AutoCorrect features. But I still have to use Word’s features for AutoText entries that contain text with formatting (such as superscript, small caps, etc.). I sometimes find myself having to delete a bunch of AutoText entries. Like most […]
I have already reported on a new bug in word-based selection in Word 2004. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Not only does Word 2004 introduce new bugs at such a fundamental level, but it also introduces new unfathomable changes that quickly become a constant source of irritation, again because they have been made at such a […]
One day, BBEdit will support Spell Catcher X‘s interactive completion feature and let me automatically insert home page URLs from my Address Book entries by typing the first few letters of the person’s or company’s name and hitting F5… Until then, however, I am still forced to do a lot of cutting and pasting when […]
A while ago, I wrote about my confusion regarding the “proper” (i.e. standards-compliant) way to quote excerpts from books, titles, etc. Well, things are not getting any better. Just yesterday, I read this post on the markdown-discuss mailing list, in which John Gruber says: I also disagree with MPT about the `cite` tag. He gives […]
Comme toujours avec Francis Veber, il y a une garantie minimum de qualité, ne serait-ce qu’en raison de la pléiade d’acteurs de premier ordre (Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu, Thierry Lhermitte, Michel Aumont, Jean Rochefort, etc.) et du soin avec lequel le film a été conçu et réalisé. Cet épisode particulier de la vie du générique […]
This new tech note posted by Apple answers one of the questions I had about the new AirPort Express product, which I might have been interested in: Wireless Distribution System is another way for AirPort Express to join an existing Wi-Fi network. AirPort Express uses its Ethernet port and can offer its wireless access point […]
Here’s yet another episode in the on-going “unwanted toolbar behaviour” series… Like the “Reviewing” toolbar mentioned yesterday and the “Web” toolbar mentioned a while back, the “Header and Footer” toolbar in Word 2004 (as in previous versions) is a source of more pain and frustration for the user. First of all, it should be noted […]
Last week I mentioned the irritation associated with the way Word keeps sticking the “Web” toolbar in the user’s face. The problem with unwanted toolbar behaviour extends, naturally, to many other built-in Word toolbars. There are just far too many Word commands that cause additional toolbars to pop up on your screen, take up valuable […]
Rachel Neumann of AlterNet has a sweet personal story titled The Best Prince of My Life which retraces her love of Prince’s music back in her teenage years and then jumps to the present and her first-ever Prince concert: I can now say I have evidence that it is better to love Prince as a […]
There are basically two ways to review what’s just happened in the 2004 edition of the European Championships competition. On the one hand, it could probably be argued that the Greeks have devalued the competition, that they have ruined the entertainment by sticking to an ultra-defensive approach that goes against the very spirit of the […]