Articles posted in May, 2005

Finder: How to tell what’s in the background and what’s in the foreground

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 • 4:59 am

Apart from the addition of the Spotlight-related features, the Finder has barely changed in Mac OS X 10.4, and that’s a major disappointment, because there are so many things that could be improved, from the performance to the user interface. One thing that hasn’t changed at all, for example, is the way the Desktop works […]

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Mail 2.0: Commands that are not part of the ‘Undo’ loop

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 • 12:35 am

There’s little that’s more annoying than an application that lets you undo certain commands but not others. Unfortunately, Mail has always suffered from this problem, and still does in Tiger. More specifically, while you can undo the deletion of a message or the action of moving it to a different folder, you cannot undo the […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): No more application-specific Scripts menus in Mail and Safari

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 • 5:58 am

In Mac OS X 10.4, for reasons that they have not disclosed, but that might have to do with trying to avoid the confusion generated by multiple Scripts menu, Apple decided to do away with the application-specific Scripts menu in Mail and Safari. This doesn’t mean that you can no longer have application-specific scripts that […]

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Adobe Photoshop: What to do when double-clicking on files in the Finder doesn’t open them in Photoshop

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 • 1:04 am

My colleague had this problem for a very long time… She has tons of Photoshop files, but when she double-clicked on them in the Finder, they would not open in Photoshop CS. The only way that she could open them was to go to Photoshop CS first and then use the “Open…” command in the […]

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Safari: Doesn’t strip extraneous return char before line of text when pasting in single-line text entry field

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 • 12:26 am

On Saturday, I noted that, in its most recent incarnation, Safari was smart enough to strip the extraneous return character at the end of a line when pasting such a line in a single-line text entry field in a Web form. Unfortunately, Safari is not that smart when the Clipboard contains a line of text […]

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Preview 3.0: Remembers which page in PDF file was viewed last

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 • 12:21 am

When you view a multiple-page PDF file in Preview 3.0 (in Tiger), if you are reading, say, page 4 of the PDF file, and then close the PDF file and re-open it, or even quit Preview, relaunch Preview, and re-open the PDF file, it opens on page 4. In other words, Preview 3.0 remember which […]

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Address Book Smart Groups: Not so smart

Monday, May 16th, 2005 • 11:52 pm

One of the major drawbacks of Mac OS X’s Address Book as far as I am concerned is that it’s not really hierarchical. You can create groups of cards, but you cannot create groups of groups of cards. More accurately, you can actually add a group (say, Group A) to an existing group (say, Group […]

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Safari: Strips extraneous return char when pasting text in single-line text entry field

Saturday, May 14th, 2005 • 5:11 am

This is one of these small enhancements that don’t get mentioned often enough. For a long time, when I was filling out Web forms in Safari, I had to deal with the fact that, when I had copied text from another application and tried to paste it into a single-line text entry field in the […]

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Mail 1.3 and Mail 2.0: Sound effects play through sound output device selected for system alert sounds

Saturday, May 14th, 2005 • 5:03 am

I think I’ve finally understood the reasoning behind Apple’s decision to make Mail’s sound effects play through the sound output device selected for system alert sounds in the first tab in the “Sound” preference pane in System Preferences. A year ago, I complained about the fact that Mail 1.3 had introduced a change that made […]

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Mail 2.0: Now preserves message colouring after sending reply

Saturday, May 14th, 2005 • 4:51 am

In previous versions of Mail, there was an on-going problem with message text colouring. I have a number of Mail rules that colour my messages using a number of different colours depending on which Address Book group the sender is part of, etc. This would work fine, except that, as soon as I selected a […]

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Mail 2.0: The drawback of individual message files

Saturday, May 14th, 2005 • 4:03 am

Mac OS X 10.4’s version of Mail introduces a major architectural change when it comes to the way e-mail messages are stored on your hard drive. In Mail 1.x, e-mail messages are not stored as individual files, but as part of the mailbox that they are stored in. The mailbox itself is stored as a […]

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Word 2004: Flaws in Equation Editor

Friday, May 13th, 2005 • 6:04 am

I don’t work on Word documents containing mathematical equations on a regular basis, so I have no desire to purchase a specialized tool such as MathType for the purpose of editing such equations when I encounter them in a Word document. So when I do, I end up using Word’s built-in equation editor. What an […]

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EPL 2005: Day 37 (Arsenal 7 – Everton 0)

Thursday, May 12th, 2005 • 12:27 am

How is that for a season finale? It is true that there was nothing at stake in this game. Everton had already secured fourth spot and Champions’ League qualification. And Manchester United’s home defeat against Chelsea on Tuesday had confirmed beyond any mathematical doubt that Arsenal would finish runners up. But still… There were emotional […]

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Word 2004 Tip: How to turn table lines into table rows

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 • 4:35 am

This is a problem that I encounter far too often, because too many people don’t know how to use Word’s table tools properly. Here’s a typical example of what I get: I’ve set Word 2004 to show invisible characters, so that you can clearly see that this table is, unfortunately, a 2-row table and not […]

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LATEXT: ‘Nobody Knows’ (MP3, 03:46)

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 • 12:39 am

Don’t ask me to define it… “Nobody Knows” (MP3 file – 160 kbps – size: 4.4 MB – duration: 03:46) More LATEXT music here.

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