As regular Betalogue readers know, I am a very reluctant PowerPoint user. I generally think that Microsoft’s products for Mac OS X are complete and utter crap, but PowerPoint really takes the cake, so to speak. If other Microsoft software titles for the Mac are bad, PowerPoint is positively atrocious. (I would extend my comments […]
No review of real-world usage of the iPad as a multi-purpose device (i.e. as a laptop replacement) would be complete without a close examination of how the device handles e-mail communication. One key issue with mobile devices in general, including laptops, is configurability and adaptability. One of the main reasons why so many people use […]
In Snow Leopard, the default behaviour for application icons in the Dock is the following: If you click and hold on an application’s Dock icon, Exposé displays all windows currently open in the application, and you get what the Apple Human Interface Guidelines call a “minimal Dock menu” that allows you to quit the application, […]
As regular Betalogue readers know, I have been a member of the AppleSeed program for several years now. This means that I get to test early builds of new versions of Mac OS X (and occasionally other Apple applications), including incremental software updates that consist primarily of bug fixes, but also major system revisions. (I […]
When we decided to forego the laptop and only take an iPad with us on vacation last month, one of our immediate concerns was what would happen for text entry. We’re both fast typists who make full use of our hardware keyboards on our respective computers. We are also both bilingual and need to be […]
Here’s what the Apple Store web page has in its top-right corner when you have something in your cart, inviting to click on the green button to check out: Here’s what the same page looks like in the French-language Apple Store for France: And here’s what the same page looks like in the French-language Apple […]
Soul legend Mavis Staples’s new album titled You Are Not Alone is coming out on ANTI- Records on September 14. It’s produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame. Here’s a great recording of Mavis and Jeff playing an acoustic version of the title song, on ANTI-‘s YouTube channel: “You Are Not Alone” (acoustic) As a […]
I have been a regular user of NetNewsWire since the early 2000s. For many years, I used the free version. Then when the product was bought by NewsGator and they started charging for an ad-free version, I decided that it was worth the expense and purchased it. But in my line of work I don’t […]
By now, most iTunes users probably have downloaded and installed iTunes 10 and have been introduced to what Ars Technica calls “the cringe-inducing vertically aligned window controls”: As Ars Technica writer Chris Foresman notes, these vertically-aligned controls are used in conjunction with the removal of the actual title bar of iTunes’s main window to “save […]
The launch of Apple’s new Ping network via the iTunes Store poses some interesting questions. If you’ve ever shopped at the iTunes Store, you might have noticed that there isn’t just a single iTunes Store for everyone in the world, but an iTunes Store for the US, another one for Canada, one for France, one […]
When we go on vacation, we both bring our own digital camera with us. Mine is an old Nikon Coolpix 5000, while my wife’s unit is a brand-new Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS. We also want to bring along some albums of our photos from the past couple of years to show to our family and […]
When I got home from my vacation with my iPad and connected it back to my computer, iTunes told me that a system update with security fixes was available. Since the update had come out while I was away and was not brand new, I assumed that it had already been installed by a large […]