Betalogue

Something to walk on… “Solid Ground” (MP3 file – 160 kbps – size: 5.5 MB – duration: 04:45) More LATEXT music here.

Nothing like a sympathetic message from a software company to alleviate one’s no-broadband blues… Today, when I launched InDesign, Adobe’s updater automatically launched, and found a couple of available updates for me. When I checked them to see how big they would be and how long it would take to download them, I saw the […]

This is yet another example of the lack of polish that still plagues Mac OS X’s Mail application. It affects people who, like me, use Mail without the message preview area in the bottom half of the main viewer window. When I want to read a message, I select it in my Inbox and then […]

A few weeks ago, I noted a problem with the visual interface in Tiger’s Mail, where the vertical scroll bar in the main viewer window would be active with a blue scroller indicating the presence of stuff below the visible area, even though there was nothing beyond the visible area, with the message list stopping […]

In my personal experience, there is a major problem with using e-mail as a communication tool in a professional environment. The problem is simple: people don’t acknowledge receipt. E-mail communication is not 100% reliable and there are many situations where one really needs to know very quickly whether someone has received one’s e-mail message or […]

I know it’s a minor cosmetic detail, but… This kind of visual glitch simply shouldn’t happen. We are talking about a fairly mature operating system and application here. I was simply browsing the web and scrolling down a page (a frame in a page, to be precise). Of course, I cannot reproduce it, so there’s […]

Mac OS X’s Preview application, which is the default reader for PDF and picture files, has consistently improved over the years. Yet even version 3.0 (included in Tiger) still suffers from annoying quirks and flaws that limit its appeal as the default PDF reader application. For example, say you are in any Mac OS X […]

It happens to me from time to time, so I am going to assume that it also happens to other people… The situation is that you are working on a GarageBand project with multiple tracks, and two of the tracks are using the same software instrument (a generic piano sound or drum kit, for example). […]

As noted in another post a while back, when no project window is open in GarageBand 2, you get this proprietary window with two buttons (“Create a New Project” and “Open an Existing Project“). It’s bad enough that we get this non-standard behaviour. What makes it worse is that it’s so poorly implemented. First, there […]