I just wrote about the lack of responsiveness of the text alignment buttons in the Formatting Palette in Excel 2004. Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, the behaviour of the corresponding buttons in Word 2004 is different — but equally flawed. As far as I can tell, here’s what happens when you double-click on Word 2004’s text alignment […]
A while ago, I wrote about the fact that the text alignment buttons in Excel’s Formatting Palette are still very confusing indeed. But that’s not the only problem. Let’s say, for example, that you have a column in an Excel spreadsheet in which some of the cells have left-aligned text and some have centered text. […]
Brent Simmons (developer of NetNewsWire) has a problem with the click-through behaviour of the toolbar buttons in Mail 2.0. I am not sure what his problem is. Either an application supports click-through — i.e. the ability to click on a toolbar button directly from another application — or it doesn’t. NetNewsWire doesn’t. Mail does. Given […]
If there is a computer god, he/she really does have a great sense of irony. Having been part of the Apple Seed program for Mac OS X 10.4, I have had to deal with my share of shaky builds and ugly bugs. But I’ve been through it all. Then I joined the Apple Seed program […]
I am afraid Mac OS X 10.4 suffers from a major bug that affects users with calibrated display profiles (created using Mac OS X’s Display Calibrator assistant). The symptoms of the bug are the following. Say you have created a customized calibrated profile for your display using Mac OS X’s Display Calibrator assistant and called […]
I don’t know why, but whenever I select an MP3 file in a Finder window in Columns view and the Finder displays the preview of the file, with the “Name,” “Kind,” “Size,” etc., it gets the “Duration” wrong each and every time. As far as I can tell, the duration it displays in the Preview […]
It certainly was quite a night, and quite a comeback. Whether it was actually a great game of football is another matter. Several of the goals were scored because of poor defensive mistakes (bad marking on the first Milan goal and the first Liverpool goal, lack of concentration on the second Milan goal, bad goal-keeping […]
Configure Mail so that it automatically adds one of your signatures when you create a reply to a message, and also so that it quotes the entire message in the body of the reply. Now select a plain-text message (I haven’t tested this with HTML e-mail) in your Inbox and hit “Reply” to compose such […]
It’s funny that I should discuss two very similar, yet totally unrelated bugs/flaws in Tiger on the same day. Try the following. Switch from your current application to System Preferences, goes to the “Print & Fax” preference pane, then select one of the printers in the list on the left-hand side of the “Printing” pane […]
I am afraid that the interface for the results of a Spotlight search is extremely poor. There are numerous issues, some of which are blatantly bad UI choices. For starters, Mac OS X 10.4 uses two totally different ways of presenting Spotlight search results depending on whether you are conducting a search in the Finder […]
I tried, and I really can’t… “Can’t Choose” (MP3 file – 160 kbps – size: 6.7 MB – duration: 05:51) More LATEXT music here.
An undeserved win if I ever saw one… The Gunners were dominated and outplayed throughout the game. There were some feeble attempts to string together a few passes that might lead to a goal, but most of it was stifled without too much trouble by the Manchester United defence. Manchester United, on the other hand, […]
This happens to me quite regularly. I have a project open in GarageBand and have been working on it for quite a while. It has a number of tracks (possibly 10 or more), many of them software instruments. The last time I worked on it before switching to another application and doing something else, it […]
Safari 2.0 suffers from new flaws (not there in version 1.x) that probably affect primarily people with slow Internet connections, such as myself. (I had a dream last night that high-speed Internet had finally become available in our neighbourhood. Unfortunately, it was just a dream. That’s how desperate I am.) In order to experience these […]
Mail 2.0 is better than Mail 1.x in that it is finally possible to bring the UI focus onto the mailbox drawer itself (or whatever it’s called now) using the Tab key, and then use certain keys on the keyboard to do certain things — like going up and down the list of mailboxes with […]