Articles posted in September, 2009

Mail 4.x: ‘Copy Address’ behaviour is now ‘as intended,’ says Apple

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 • 2:26 pm

Three days ago, I wrote about a change in Snow Leopard that I considered a bug, which is that, when you right-click on the “From:” field of an e-mail message you have received and select the “Copy Address” command, Mail now copies the entire contents of the “From:” field and not just the e-mail address […]

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Pages ’09: Character formatting and numbered lists

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 • 3:28 pm

I don’t doubt that this will be filed under “Nit-picking” by some people, but to me it is a usability issue and it’s not inconsequential. In a Pages ’09 document, start a new paragraph and select the automatic list numbering feature (either with the toolbar or with the “Numbered List” list style in the styles drawer). […]

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Mac OS X’s Finder (Snow Leopard): Doesn’t update window title in column view

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 • 3:08 pm

For a bug-squashing release, Snow Leopard turns out to be buggier than anticipated or hoped. Some of the bugs seem so obvious that it’s amazing that they have slipped through the cracks. Open a Finder window in column view. Start at the root level of your system. Click on your startup volume, then on “Applications,” […]

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Mail 4.x: ‘Copy Address’ command copies entire ‘From:’ line

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 • 2:34 pm

This is a new behaviour in Snow Leopard and in my opinion it’s a bug. When you get an e-mail in Mail and you look at its header, you can right-click (or control-click) on the contents of the “From:” line to access a contextual menu with various options, including a command labelled “Copy Address”: This […]

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More on clicking and dragging to select in Apple’s Mac OS X applications

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 • 10:49 am

As with my posts about selection highlighting in column view in the Finder, my posts discussing selection by dragging in Mail and other Apple applications have been generating a fair amount of e-mail correspondence. The fact is that, here again, even experienced users—including myself—have various degrees of awareness of how things actually work in Mac […]

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Finder: More on selection highlighting in column view

Saturday, September 26th, 2009 • 9:45 am

My recent posts about dragging and selection behaviours in Mail, the Finder, etc. have been generating a certain amount of e-mail correspondence. It is obviously an issue that strikes a chord with a number of Mac users. And it is also quite obvious that even experienced users—including myself—have various degrees of awareness of how things […]

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Mac OS X’s Finder: Inconsistent behaviour in column view

Friday, September 25th, 2009 • 3:00 pm

This is something that has been bothering me for years, and apparently I must be the only one on the planet, or at least no one at Apple seems to care, because there has never been even an attempt to address the issue. Take a typical Finder window in column view used to browse the […]

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Mail 4.x: More on dragging in message list

Friday, September 25th, 2009 • 8:37 am

Yesterday, I wrote about what I believed was a new behaviour introduced in Snow Leopard’s Mail application when dragging items in the message list. As a reader pointed out to me, however, it appears that this behaviour already existed in versions of Mail prior to Snow Leopard. (I don’t know how far back it goes.) […]

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Mail 4.x: Dragging in message list depends on direction

Thursday, September 24th, 2009 • 3:57 pm

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder, “What were they thinking?” Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I have noticed, on more than one occasion, that when I attempted to drag a selected message in Mail’s message list in order to file it in a specific mailbox, instead of responding to my mouse […]

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Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): Performance and video issues

Monday, September 21st, 2009 • 4:57 pm

The consensus around Snow Leopard is that it is a system upgrade that actually improves Mac OS X’s performance on your existing hardware. Since I installed Snow Leopard a couple of weeks ago, however, I cannot say that my own experience confirms this widespread view. Performance is not markedly worse overall, but it’s not really […]

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iTunes 9: About that new ‘Playlist’ screen

Friday, September 18th, 2009 • 9:51 am

There is simplifying and streamlining, and then there is dumbing down. I am afraid that, with this latest “improvement” in iTunes 9, Apple’s engineers have crossed the line: This is what you get on your screen each and every time you create a new empty playlist. As if all iTunes users with a moderate level […]

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LATEXT: ‘Salomé’ (MP3, 03:09)

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 • 4:14 pm

“Salomé” (MP3 file – 160 kbps – size: 3.8 MB – duration: 03:09) More LATEXT music here.

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Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): More on option-clicking on file names

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 • 11:44 am

Last week, I wrote about the changes made by Apple to the feature that enables you to copy a file name in “Save As…” dialog boxes by option-clicking on it in the file list below the file name field. It turns out that, somewhat inevitably, the changes have introduced new problems. Take for example what […]

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Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): Fix for making aliases in list view

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 • 10:49 am

For a company that prides itself on attention to detail, Apple occasionally suffers from disappointing and rather frustrating lapses. A long standing bug affecting the process of making an alias in list view has finally been fixed in Snow Leopard, but the fix itself introduces yet more unjustified inconsistency. Prior to Mac OS X 10.6, […]

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Pages ’09: Forgets formatting change after manual line break

Friday, September 11th, 2009 • 9:59 am

Try the following: Open a new document in Pages ’09. Press command-I to switch to italics. Type a line of text in italics. Press command-I to switch back to roman. Type shift-Enter to insert a manual line break. Type some text. The text should be in roman characters. It’s not. It’s back in italics, even though […]

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