Betalogue

This is a typical example of what’s wrong with Mac OS X’s Finder. Let’s say you have a file called “MyFile.txt” on your desktop. Open a new Finder window and browse to your “Documents” folder (or any other folder) in that window. After that, click anywhere on your desktop’s background picture, in order to make […]

I find it hard to believe that such a simple application of the “smart folder” concept has not been included in the Finder in Mac OS X. What I am trying to do is very simple. I want a smart folder that displays the combined contents of several existing folders. In other words, I want […]

In order to avoid getting even more spam, I have to take a few precautions. So if you want to contact me, Pierre Igot, the author of this blog, by e-mail, you can use my Gmail account. My Gmail user name is “latext“. The rest is the same as in any Gmail account (gmail.com). Please […]

Take a Word document whose text is formatted using a paragraph style called “Body.” In that document, create a non-contiguous selection by selecting a word in location A and then holding the command key down and selecting another word in location B in the document. Make sure not to select paragraph marks — only isolated […]

What is wrong with the picture below? Well, you cannot exactly tell because I didn’t want to make the screen shot too big for practical reasons — but the fact is that this is the bottom-right corner of the main Mail Viewer window in Mail 2.0 (with the message area collapsed), and that this mail […]

Well, it’s taken a loooong time, but finally somebody at Apple has done something about it. It used to be that, on a Canadian CSA keyboard such as mine, the keyboard shortcut for making text bigger didn’t work consistently across all Mac OS X applications. Since the “+” key is actually shift-= on my keyboard, […]

In GarageBand 1.x, if you were in the middle of playing a song and wanted to save it, as soon as you hit command-S, GarageBand would stop playing the song. No longer in GarageBand 2. You can now save your song at any time without interfering with song playback. It’s a small thing, but it’s […]

Normally, in Mac OS X’s Finder, when you hold the command and option keys down while dragging an item, this creates an alias of the item where you drop the item. The problem is that, while this works in Finder windows that as in “View as Icons” or in “View as Columns” view mode, it […]

Regular Betalogue readers know that I use a Power Macintosh G4 (MDD) as my main desktop computer and that it has had cooling issues from the very beginning, which played an important role in the G4 noise debacle. Even with the replacement Power Supply Unit in it, the G4 (MDD) is still a noisy machine […]

Recent versions of Word have this weird behaviour where pressing the Delete key at the beginning of an empty paragraph with a negative left indent actually “deletes” the indent instead of deleting the paragraph by removing the preceding paragraph mark and merging the current (empty) paragraph with the previous one. This behaviour is caused by […]

I have a sequence of actions in Mail 2.0 that can pretty reliably make messages disappear for good. It doesn’t move them to the Trash. It makes them disappear completely. This is bad. Try the following… Make sure you have a mailbox called “XXXX” (whatever) in your list of mailboxes. Then send yourself a message […]

In Mail, view the contents of mailbox A (by selecting it in the list of mailboxes). Select a message in mailbox A and move it to mailbox B. Now view the contents of mailbox B (by selecting it in the list of mailboxes). Then view the contents of mailbox A again. Press command-Z to undo […]

Select a message marked as unread in your Inbox and drag it to another mailbox. Hit command-Z to undo the move. The message comes back to the Inbox, but is now marked as read — even though the message was not read at any point! (I am not using the “message area” at the bottom […]

This is a rather annoying bug and, as far as I can recall, it was introduced in GarageBand 2. Version 1.x didn’t suffer from it. It happens when you select a note in a software instrument loop and try to drag it to the very end of the loop. Take the following note for example: […]

GarageBand has two basic playing modes: normal and cycling. In normal mode, when you press the Space bar or click on the “Play” button, GarageBand plays the song starting from where the playhead currently is. In cycling (or looping) mode, a specific section of the song is highlighted in yellow in the beat ruler and, […]