Articles posted in June, 2005

Spell Catcher X 10.2.1: Not so minor update

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 • 5:08 am

Version 10.2.1 of Spell Catcher X was released earlier this week. It might sound like a minor, insignificant update, but there are more new features in this update than Microsoft have ever bothered to include in their humongous and useless “Service Packs”. First, you can now include cursor key movements in glossary expansions. This means […]

More »

Word 2004: Automatically updated styles only work with built-in commands

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 • 1:44 am

I don’t normally use automatically updated styles in Word, but sometimes I have to deal with them. And, of course, like any other feature in Microsoft’s products, the implementation of this particular feature is buggy. Say for example that you have a heading style called “Heading 1” that is set to automatically update itself whenever […]

More »

Intel inside the Mac: Questions, questions…

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 10:43 pm

So for once the rumours were true… Apple is actually switching to Intel processors. This is a big decision and a major shock. In theory, it shouldn’t matter to the end user much, because the processor (CPU) is not something that he has to deal with directly in his everyday interaction with his machine. But […]

More »

Hard drive back from the (almost) dead

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 5:48 am

The hard drive that I was talking about earlier today has decided to come back from its state of near-death… While I was in the process of painstakingly recovering the files at a very slow speed with RBrowser Lite, all of a sudden the transfer speed picked up considerably. I finished recovering all the files […]

More »

Safari 2.0: Misleading error message

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 5:00 am

I am still on dial-up. This makes me particularly aware of the shortcomings of Mac OS X in a situation with insufficient bandwidth. Here is an error message that I get regularly in Safari 2.0 when it’s trying to load a web page and can’t get a response from the server because my dial-up connection […]

More »

Hard drive failure

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 12:05 am

Last week I wrote about problems I was experiencing with Tiger, which led me to do a complete reinstall of the system. This appeared to fix the problem at the time. Unfortunately, over the course of the following seven days, things gradually deteriorated again. The symptoms were quite simply that more and more things in […]

More »

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Finder quits without saving unsaved smart folders

Friday, June 3rd, 2005 • 1:20 am

Try the following experiment. In the Finder, open a smart folder that you have created. Click on “Edit” and make some changes to the search criteria. Do not save the changes. Now launch Activity Viewer and, in the list of processes, select “Finder” and click on the “Quit” button. In the dialog sheet that pops […]

More »

Spotlight: Needs ability to open a smart folder directly in editable state

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 • 6:36 am

Right now, when you have an existing smart folder and you open it in a Finder window, in that window, by default, the Finder only displays a heading row with the title “Smart Folder” on the left-hand side and the “Edit” button on the right-end side, and then a refreshed list of the search results […]

More »

LATEXT: ‘Everybody’ (MP3, 05:46)

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 • 12:50 am

All together now… “Everybody” (MP3 file – 160 kbps – size: 6.6 MB – duration: 05:46) More LATEXT music here.

More »

Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 10:50 pm

One of the good things about Amazon’s Customer Service is that they really do respond pretty swiftly. Yesterday evening, I experienced a weird problem, which led me to submit an inquiry via their Customer Service on-line form. This morning, I already have an answer, and it clarifies the issue. Here’s what happened. Yesterday, I had […]

More »

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): More on bug with display profiles and fast user switching

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 8:38 am

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a serious bug affecting Mac OS X 10.4 users who have calibrated their displays using Mac OS X’s built-in Display Calibrator Assistant and who switch users in Mac OS X using the fast user switching feature. Today, there is a new report at MacInTouch.com about this problem. […]

More »

Mail 2.0: Confusing interface for importing mailboxes

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 4:50 am

Let’s say you have an archive of old Eudora e-mail in a folder with the following file/folder structure: Eudora Folder/Mail/Macintosh/Apple/ and the “Apple” folder contains several mailboxes you want to import. That’s all you want to import: not all the mailboxes contained inside “Mail“, but only the ones inside the “Apple” subfolder. In Mail you […]

More »

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Packages and disk images listed as ‘documents’ in Spotlight results

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 4:33 am

This, to me, is something that doesn’t make much sense from a user’s point of view. When you search for a word or a phrase with Spotlight and the Spotlight results for this search include disk images or software packages (i.e. files ending with “.dmg” or “.pkg“), such files are listed in the Spotlight results […]

More »

BBEdit: Where are the dialog sheets?

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 4:25 am

I am a long-time user of BBEdit and am generally pleased with the way the application has evolved over the years. I have bought all the updates. What I cannot understand, however, is why Bare Bones Software is so reluctant to embrace some of Mac OS X’s core features, even when they have clear advantages. […]

More »