Articles posted in March, 2009

Excel 2008: Multiple flaws in text engine

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 • 12:01 pm

Some day, developers at Apple and Microsoft (and probably in a few other places) are going to have to wake up to the fact that, in the real world, table cells are not used just for numbers or other types of numerical data, but also as containers for blocks of text of varying length. And […]

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iWork ’09 Update 1: Page count bug in Pages fixed, but not much else

Friday, March 27th, 2009 • 3:50 pm

Apple has adopted a strange new approach for iWork ’09 updates. It is distributing a package called iWork ’09 Update 1, which updates Pages ’09 from 4.0 to 4.0.1, Numbers ’09 from 2.0 to 2.0.1 and Keynote ’09 from 5.0 to 5.0.1. I guess users who only need Pages and Numbers and don’t care about Keynote have no choice but […]

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Mac OS X’s Finder: Selection highlighting and dragging in list view

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 • 11:09 am

It’s sad but true. Ever since Apple switched us from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, the list view mode in the Finder has been treated as a second-class citizen. It has been buggy, neglected, abused, and more. Unfortunately, nearly ten years later, there are still daily reminders of this class struggle in […]

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Performance tips for Pages ’09 with large documents

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 • 3:04 pm

Microsoft Word for Mac OS X (especially Word 2008) is such an atrocious pile of crap that using it for professional work on large documents requires a leap of faith that I am simply no longer willing to take. One can only endure so many application crashes and corrupted documents (with the associated data loss […]

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Pages ’09: Things that are too easy to click on

Friday, March 6th, 2009 • 3:57 pm

In Apple’s Pages ’09 application, there are page elements that are simply too easy to click on and select accidentally when you actually mean to do something else entirely. The two most obvious targets here are page headers/footers and table cell borders. Let’s take a typical table in a Pages document: Right now the entire […]

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Adobe CS4 Updates: As atrocious as ever

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 • 11:33 am

Adobe recently released a slew of updates for the latest version of its Creative Suite, i.e. the CS4 applications. Given Adobe’s recent history with software installers and software updaters, I bet you will not be surprised to hear that the user experience with the CS4 updates is as atrocious as it has ever been with […]

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Time Capsule: Backing up slowly, but surely

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 • 4:40 pm

Using Apple’s Time Capsule for Time Machine-controlled backups for my wife has been a rather frustrating experience. (I don’t use Time Machine or the Time Capsule for my own backups, because I have long used my own SuperDuper!-based automatic backup scheme. But I do use the Time Capsule as a remote disk for manual backups […]

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