Articles posted in September, 2004

Champions’ League: Rosenborg 1 – Arsenal 1

Thursday, September 30th, 2004 • 3:10 am

When it comes to the Gunners, there are bad news and there are good news. The bad news is that the team is obviously going through a somewhat rocky patch. After a thunderous first month of domestic football, there was a contentious 0-3 victory at Fulham, an unimpressive 1-0 victory against PSV in the first […]

More »

Excel 2004: Fails to remember document window position on secondary monitor

Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 • 5:59 am

This one is another one of Office’s numerous small but annoying bugs… I often move my spreadsheet document windows to my secondary monitor so that I can view them while editing a document in another application. Unfortunately, whenever I do that, after I close the document, Excel fails to remember that the document window was […]

More »

Word 2004: Split bar outline not visible on secondary monitor

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 • 4:35 am

Every Word document window has this small control in the top-left corner (above the vertical scroll bar) that you can drag down to create a division of the single document window into two separate panes. You can then use these two panes to view two different sections of the document at the same time. While […]

More »

Safari: Doesn’t support <label> elements for radio buttons and checkboxes

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 • 3:33 am

Today’s edition of MyAppleMenu has a link to a new article by Jakob Nielsen on checkboxes and radio buttons in user interfaces and, in particular, in forms on web pages. As Heng-Cheong Leong (the MyAppleMenu webmaster) notes, the UI guidelines about checkboxes and radio buttons are as old as the Mac itself (i.e. 20 years […]

More »

Prince’s ‘Kiss’

Monday, September 27th, 2004 • 11:34 pm

MP3 blogger Tofu Hut has tons of interesting music — and also interesting comments and links to other stuff. The other day he had a link to an old article (from June 2001) about Prince’s song “Kiss” which I hadn’t seen before. It’s an article by Dan Daley that appeared in Mix magazine on June […]

More »

Unicode, WordPress, Panther Server and BBEdit: UTF-8 with or without BOM

Monday, September 27th, 2004 • 12:00 am

I am having fun these days developing and designing a web site powered by the WordPress blogging system. It’s working well for the most part. Yesterday, however, I encounted a problem that might have left me stuck for a long time if I hadn’t developed a general awareness of potential Unicode-related issues over the years. […]

More »

.Mac: HomePage could use some work

Friday, September 24th, 2004 • 12:19 am

If you are a .Mac subscriber and try to use Apple’s HomePage service, which automates the process of creating and maintaining publicly accessible web sites on your iDisk, you will encounter problems that are quite shameful for a company that prides itself on the user-friendliness of its products. For example, yesterday I went to create […]

More »

Google removal page in Safari

Friday, September 24th, 2004 • 12:05 am

This is a strange one. Yesterday, while doing a search in Google, I found a reference to a web page that I had helped design that was on my HomePage web site at www.mac.com. I didn’t want this page to be indexed or archived by Google, but of course, the automatic web page design tools […]

More »

Safari: Text fields scroll back to top as soon as tab is in the background

Thursday, September 23rd, 2004 • 2:39 am

I am a multitasking kind of guy, which means that I often do several things at the same time with my computer — and sometimes I do several different things at the same time within a single application, such as Safari. For example, I might be filling out a form on one web page and […]

More »

Mac OS X’s Finder: Sort order when copying a list of files in View As List view mode

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004 • 5:09 am

I have a folder containing the following 8 files: bully lesson plan.wpd bullying lesson plan.wpd Child Traffic grade 1.wpd DEFY 1 (medicine cabinet)outline.wpd defy level 1(medicinecabinet)lesson plan.wpd Elementary Drugs.wpd Halloween Safety lesson plan.wpd internet safety.wpd If I open the folder in a Finder window in View As Columns view mode, select the 8 files, and […]

More »

Excel 2004: Not ‘Select All’ command when you need it

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004 • 5:05 am

Sometimes using Microsoft products really feels like you are on another computing planet… OK, that’s the way it feels almost all the time. But there are some issues that are really just beyond human comprehension. Why is it, for example, that, when editing the contents of a cell in Excel, you cannot use command-A to […]

More »

Pasting accented text from Preview to Word: How to get the accented characters right

Tuesday, September 21st, 2004 • 10:55 pm

Copying and pasting text from a PDF file into a Word document has never been a very reliable proposition. The text selection tool in PDF viewers tends to be pretty poor, and then there can be all kinds of formatting issues. With Mac OS X’s Preview, there can be an additional difficulty when attempting to […]

More »

Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server: Several useful hints at macosxhints.com

Tuesday, September 21st, 2004 • 10:48 am

The web site Mac OS X Hints is always a good read, but Rob has a particularly good crop of hints these days, at least as far as I am concerned: “Some info on Unicode and multilingual Macs” explains the difference between “composed Unicode” and “decomposed Unicode”. I wondered why I was getting these weird […]

More »

Mourinho on Tottenham’s defensive approach

Monday, September 20th, 2004 • 3:45 am

I am not sure what the Chelsea board of directors had in mind when they brought in FC Porto manager Jose Mourinho to replace Claudio Ranieri this summer, but they probably didn’t hire him to provide comic relief in the media coverage of the English Premier League. (Ranieri used to provide his own brand of […]

More »

Word 2004: More on losing selection when clicking on a document to bring it to the fore

Monday, September 20th, 2004 • 12:25 am

Last week I wrote about this serious problem in Word where clicking on a background document with a selection to bring it to the foreground causes Word to lose the selection. As I indicated in my post, this “click-through” behaviour doesn’t make sense in the context of editing multiple documents, and the fact that the […]

More »