Various new iTunes 9 features will be discussed at length by other outlets. But, as someone with a very large music collection (over 300 GB of files), I thought I should mention something that is not mentioned in the release notes and yet has a very significant impact on my daily use of the application: […]
I did not notice this bug fix right away, because, while I do download and apply incremental updates as diligently as possible, I don’t have time to check each and every known bug (there are thousands of them) to see if it has been fixed or not in the update. I also don’t use Word […]
iCal is one of those “small” Mac OS X applications that Apple’s engineers seemingly just cannot be bothered to fix properly once and for all by giving them the proper UI polish that they deserve, just like any other Mac OS X application. Long-time Betalogue readers might remember that I have moaned about the pain […]
As a French translator, I make heavy use of my Grand Robert dictionary application for Mac OS X. It’s not a very good Mac OS X application (see this blog post—in French, sorry—for more information), but I am afraid it’s the only version there is. Sadly, Snow Leopard introduces a new cosmetic problem that was […]
I am afraid Snow Leopard reintroduces some old bugs that I thought we finally had managed to get Apple to rid us of for good. As per usual, these include bugs that primarily affect non-English-speaking users. Take, for example, this sample PDF file with a page containing French text: accents-sample-page.pdf If you open this PDF […]
It is one of those small yet far from insignificant improvements that Apple’s engineers have made in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). For several years now, Mac OS X has had this built-in feature that used to be available only through third-party system utilities, where, when you are in a “Save As…” dialog box, […]
There are new developments in the on-going saga of the channel exception errors. Now that I have installed Snow Leopard, I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem on my Mac Pro, i.e. I haven’t experienced the permanent system-wide UI freeze that requires a hard reset or a remote shutdown. But it could just be […]
Apparently, a bit of work has been going on under the hood at Apple’s Mail application department, especially when it comes to editing plain text messages. (Mail uses rich text, i.e. HTML, by default, but I still prefer plain text for most e-mail messages, and a lot of other e-mail users agree with me that […]
There has been a bit of a breakthrough with the “channel exception” error encountered by Mac Pro users with NVIDIA GeForce 7300 cards which causes a system-wide UI freeze requiring a hard reset. I have now received an e-mail from Apple Developer Bug Reporting confirming that the bug is a a “known issue, which is […]
I have just made the transition to Snow Leopard on my main “production” Mac Pro. It’s been a fairly smooth process so far, and I now have one more thing to add about the issue with the “Cycle Through Windows” keyboard shortcut discussed earlier. It turns out that, on my main machine, where I installed […]
I have already written about Safari 4 and the new “Loading…” animation that it uses in the address bar instead of the blue progress bar from the previous version. My opinion of this replacement scheme has not changed. I still feel that it ignores the need of users in low-bandwidth situations, and I still rely […]
Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that Snow Leopard introduces a new bug for users of French Canadian keyboards with the “Canadian French – CSA” keyboard layout, which is that the system-wide keyboard shortcut for the “Cycle Through Windows” command is no longer the expected command-Ù, but the decidedly less convenient command-shift-option-À. Well, I am […]