Articles posted in April, 2010

File sharing and accented characters in file/folder names

Friday, April 30th, 2010 • 4:27 pm

About six months ago, our local newspaper decided to replace its entire fleet of aging Macintosh computers with brand new machines and the director asked me to advise them and help them out with the installation process. We chose a Mac Pro with a 30″ screen, a few 27″ iMacs, and a Mac mini to […]

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‘Save’ dialog in Mac OS X: Needs resizable ‘Save As:’ field

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 • 4:27 pm

What is wrong with this picture? To me, it’s quite obvious. It’s the fact that, after all these years, the “Save As:” field where the user is supposed to enter the file name is still limited to a width of something like 250 pixels, and that there is no obvious way to handle file names […]

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Customizing iWork ’09: Inserting current date

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 • 3:36 pm

Long-time Betalogue readers know that I am an enthusiastic user of Spell Catcher X. Its multilingual spell checking and automatic text entry features are invaluable in my daily work and I totally depend on them for sustaining my high level of productivity. However, while it already does a lot, and does more with each new […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Scripts unusable for text inside table cells

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 • 2:52 pm

My recent surge of enthusiasm for Pages ’09 customizations using a combination of the application’s AppleScript support and Keyboard Maestro has, unfortunately, also led me to discover the limitations of said AppleScript support. I already noted that the “Title Case” capitalization option in Pages ’09’s “Format” menu does not seem to have an AppleScript equivalent, which is […]

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Apple Headphones with Remote Replacement Program

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 • 6:21 pm

When I bought myself an iPod touch back in November 2008, I quickly decided that I wanted better headphones than the cheap ear buds that came with it. But I also absolutely wanted a solution that included a basic remote so that I would be able to play/pause/skip and adjust the volume level without having […]

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Pages ’09: Presence of automatic table of contents breaks ‘get selection’ in AppleScript

Monday, April 19th, 2010 • 11:15 am

This is a bug that looks very weird… until you figure out what appears to be causing it. Readers of my recent Betalogue posts know that I am in the process of using a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro to customize my work environment in Pages ’09, which is my main word processor. In particular, I […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Switching character styles with AppleScript

Thursday, April 15th, 2010 • 9:52 am

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote my first post about using a combination of AppleScript and a third-party utility such as Keyboard Maestro or FastScript to customize Pages ’09 and more specifically to assign shortcuts other than F1–F8 to paragraph and character styles. In that post, I indicated that my script for applying the paragraph […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Changing the behaviour of command-Up and command-Down with Keyboard Maestro

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 • 4:02 pm

There is one particular pair of keyboard shortcuts that has a special meaning in Apple’s applications that I simply cannot get used to, and that is the pair command-Up / command-Down. In Apple’s applications, including not just Pages ’09, but also TextEdit, Mail, and Safari, command-Up moves the insertion point all the way back to the […]

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Mac OS X 10.6.3 and Finder/Preview/Quick Look crashes

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 • 2:59 pm

The problem started with a specific build of the Mac OS X 10.6.3. I am part of the AppleSeed testing program for Mac OS X updates and so I got early builds of the 10.6.3 update to test before the final version was released. I definitely didn’t have any such problems with previous versions of […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Using Keyboard Maestro to bypass Apple’s idiotic table shortcuts

Monday, April 12th, 2010 • 11:32 am

One of the few things that truly drive me insane in Apple’s iWork applications is the keyboard shortcuts that they have chosen for the commands to insert additional rows or columns in a table. When you are in a table in Pages ’09, for example, you can use option-Right to insert insert a new column after […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Writing centuries in French

Thursday, April 8th, 2010 • 10:22 am

The proper way to write something like “20th Century” in French is the following: xxe siècle where “xx” is the number in roman numerals in small caps and “e” is a small superscript “e.” As you can imagine, if you have write this type of thing repeatedly in a text, it can quickly become pretty […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Shortcuts to toggle All Caps and Small Caps

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 • 4:59 pm

Like Microsoft Word, Pages ’09 comes with a built-in character formatting option called “All Caps” (in the “Format” menu, under “Font › Capitalization”). The main benefit of having a formatting option for this as opposed to a command that just changes the case (as if you’d typed with CapsLock on) is that it is easily reversible (and […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: System Events and modifier keys

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 • 11:15 am

After my post last week on using scripts and keyboard shortcuts to customize Pages ’09, I was in a “customizing” mood and decided to revisit an old issue for which I used to have a scripted solution back in the days when Microsoft Word was my main word processing tool. The issue has to do with […]

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