Articles posted in October, 2004

Rumour: Canadian iTunes Music Store

Friday, October 15th, 2004 • 6:38 am

According to a rumour mentioned at MyAppleMenu, Apple is readying the Canadian version of the iTunes Music Store. It’s about time. I know that Canadian people can already purchase stuff from the US iTunes Music Store as long as they have a credit card with an American mailing address, which is apparently fairly common — […]

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Michael Moore, Farhenheit 9/11 (2004)

Friday, October 15th, 2004 • 1:07 am

I had the opportunity to watch this movie on DVD this week. Even for someone who’s stayed reasonably well informed over the past few years, there were enough surprises and unseen footage in it to keep it fresh and powerful. It really is amazing. I keep reading in the media about how George W. Bush […]

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Microsoft update: leaves log at root level of startup volume

Thursday, October 14th, 2004 • 2:03 am

In order to be able to download the recently released Office 2004 Service Pack 1 — which fixes almost none of the many bugs identified so far in the product — you first need to update… Office 2004’s Microsoft AutoUpdate program. Which means that you have to activate the bloody thing in the first place, […]

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Apple’s profit, the hardware plateau and Microsoft’s sluggish products

Thursday, October 14th, 2004 • 12:58 am

Apple’s financial figures for the last quarter are quite impressive. With the delay in the launch of the new iMac G5, there were concerns that Apple might have suffered. But iPod sales more than made up for it. 2 million iPods sold? Wow. 5 times as many as a year earlier during the same period? […]

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Microsoft Office 2004 Service Pack 1

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 • 7:09 am

What happens when you use an ever-changing naming/numbering scheme for your software is that you end up using an ever-changing naming/numbering scheme for your software updates as well. So now Office updates are “service packs”. Why not, I guess? More importantly, if you’ve read the MacCentral article about this update and are wondering where on […]

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International week-end in football

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 • 5:59 am

No English Premier League last week-end as players were off on international duty in various locations around Europe. In Canada, we were “fortunate” enough to get to watch the England – Wales game on Sportsnet and the France – Ireland game on TV5. I put “fortunate” between quotation marks because the two games were rather […]

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Word 2004 Tip: How to prevent ‘Tables and Borders’ toolbar from appearing

Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 • 1:28 am

For years now, Word has had this extremely annoying behaviour where doing certains things causes toolbars to appear out of the blue even if you don’t want them to appear. For example, I have my own customized toolbar for creating and editing tables in Word. It has a whole range of buttons for adding or […]

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Word 2004: The problem with Superscript

Friday, October 8th, 2004 • 7:01 am

Problems with superscript characters have been plaguing us in word processing and graphic design for many years. And there are no signs that things will improve any time soon. Far too often, when I provide a graphic designer with a word processing file containing text that uses superscript, the superscript formatting gets lost and requires […]

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PowerPoint 2004: Centered text that doesn’t look centered

Thursday, October 7th, 2004 • 5:59 am

Here’s the footer part of a master slide design in PowerPoint 2004: As you can see, the text is perfectly centered inside the footer text frame. After all, all I did was type some text and click on the “Align Center” button in the Formatting Palette. Here is, however, what the exact same footer looks […]

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PowerPoint 2004: Keyboard shortcuts for navigating/selecting text

Thursday, October 7th, 2004 • 4:41 am

It’s maddening. As I reported recently, in Office 2004, Microsoft changed the default keyboard shortcuts for navigating/selecting text in Word 2004. For example, in order to select text word by word, instead of using command-shift-Left/Right, you must now use option-shift-Left/Right, which is consistent with text selection in other Mac OS X applications. Why is it, […]

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PowerPoint 2004: Replace command doesn’t treat character case the same way as in Word 2004

Thursday, October 7th, 2004 • 4:37 am

In Word 2004, when you use the “Replace” command to replace, say, “section” with “part“, if you do not check the “Match case” option, Word will replace things as followed: section will be replaced with part Section will be replaced with Part SECTION will be replaced with PART etc. It’s handy, because it effectively replaces […]

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PowerPoint 2004: Problems with notes in ‘Normal’ view

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 • 11:23 pm

PowerPoint suffers from so many fundamental issues that it’s simply scandalous that this software is allowed to exist. It’s doubly scandalous that Microsoft apparently makes no effort to fix such issues from one version to the next. Some of the most obvious problems, are with the various view modes offered by PowerPoint. When you first […]

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Mac OS X: The problem with having ‘Network’ under ‘Computer’

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 • 5:19 am

This is something that has bothered me for a long time. In Mac OS X’s Finder, there are several ways to access networked volumes. One of them is to go back to the root of your file structure, a.k.a. “Computer“, and look under “Network“, which appears as a volume alongside your hard drive partitions and […]

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Word 2004: Problem with the ‘Normal’ template in Microsoft User Data folder

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 • 5:05 am

I won’t go into the reasons why, in Office 2004, Microsoft decided to move the user’s “Normal” template from the Microsoft Office application folder to the “Microsoft User Data” folder inside the user’s home “Documents” folder — while other templates remain in the Microsoft Office application folder. There’s just no point in trying to explain […]

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NetNewsWire Lite 2: Important information for users with low bandwidth connections

Monday, October 4th, 2004 • 4:12 am

Version 2 of the freeware news aggregator NetNewsWire Lite is already available in beta form (but very reliable and usable as far as I can tell), and there are some important improvements for users who, like me, have little bandwidth available at the best of times. Here are the new options in the “Downloading” preference […]

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