A while ago, I ranted about Pages ’09’s on-going apparent inability to do what I ask it to do when it comes to replacing straight apostrophes with curly ones or vice-versa. This week-end, I was able to better pinpoint the exact source of the problem. In a nutshell, the problem is that the “Use smart quotes” […]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about my theory regarding the internal scheme used by iTunes to determine which artist name is used in the “Artists” column (when using iTunes in column view) in cases where several tracks with the same underlying sort artist name have different artist names, which often occurs […]
Pages ’09 has two ways to insert a page number in the footer or header of a document. You can open the header or footer, format things the way you want and then just use the “Page Number” command in the “Insert” menu, which inserts a simple text field. Or you can use the weirdly named […]
Last week, I wrote about using USB Overdrive to customize the behaviour of the Apple Mouse in the Preview application in Mac OS X. Unfortunately, there was one thing that I failed to note at the time and that makes USB Overdrive a less than ideal solution. That thing is that there is a particular […]
A while ago, I created a password-protected disk image with a 20 GB size using Disk Utility. Since I knew that I might have to increase the size of the disk image eventually, I elected to use the “sparse image” disk image format, which is supposed to allow you to do just that. Then today […]
Everybody might be writing about Apple’s new Magic Mouse with touchpad, and I might try it out eventually, but for now I’ll stick to my regular wired Apple Mouse (formerly known as “Mighty Mouse”) and its one-of-a-kind scroll ball, which, unlike some people, I actually like a lot. I like the scroll ball a lot, […]
As the holiday season approaches, I’d like to indulge in a bit of wishful thinking… This is not just something that I’d like to get for Christmas. It’s something that I wish someone (preferably Apple itself) would actually make, sell, and support. Because right now, if you are not happy with iPhoto, you can get Aperture […]
Ever since Apple introduced the “Album Artist” and “Sort Artist”/“Sort Album Artist” tags/fields in the track information in iTunes, I have been experiencing problems with the way artists are displayed in the “Artists” column when browsing my iTunes library in column view. The “Album Artist” and the “Sort Artist”/“Sort Album Artist” tags serve two different […]
Earlier today, I wrote a post about a new performance problem that I was having in Snow Leopard with the preview column in Finder windows. After reading the post, a reader wrote to me to say that he couldn’t reproduce the problem and that I should take a look at my “QuickLook previewers.” QuickLook is […]
There are several areas where, unfortunately, Snow Leopard is slower than its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). I have already mentioned the global Spotlight menu in a previous post. But there is another area where I have noticed a definite performance drop, and this one is a bit of a mystery. It has to […]
If you are highly sensitive to responsiveness issues like me, you probably do not much like the new “feature” in Snow Leopard where clicking and holding on an application icon in the Dock, instead of giving you the expected pop-up menu, gives you some kind of weird UI hybrid that shows Exposé thumbnails of the […]
Unlike Microsoft Word, which is still (after all these years) totally confused about the whole thing, Apple’s Pages at least has a user interface that makes clear distinctions between paragraph styles and character styles, both in the styles drawer and in the formatting toolbar: (In Word 2008, there is a single field in the toolbar […]
I took some time off last week and during that time off, a reader named Herman wrote to comment on my recent posts on the Finder’s column view and list view modes and the persistence of numerous bugs and inconsistencies, even in Snow Leopard, which was supposed to be a bug-fixing release. Herman mentioned something […]