I have lost count of the number of years that we have had to endure Microsoft Word’s lack of support for background window scrolling — i.e. the ability to scroll through a background document window by simply hovering over it with the mouse pointer and using the mouse’s scrolling control, whether it’s a wheel, a ball, […]
After I posted about customizing the Pages ’09 user interface with a DragThing dock that performs AppleScript scripts earlier today, I decided to further investigate the reason why I was unable to directly control the value of the “After Paragraph” text field in the “Text” tab of the Text inspector. I had the following script: tell […]
A while ago, I wrote about my use of Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript to create a keyboard shortcut for formatting options like “Keep with following paragraph” and “Keep lines together.” With the default user interface in Pages ’09, the only way to access these commands is through the “More” tab of the Text inspector: When you […]
In order to complete the picture of the custom-designed workflow that I described in my two previous posts: From Pages ’09 to the Web: An XML-based workflow From Pages ’09 to the Web: An XML-based workflow (continued) I think it would be a good idea to provide a few screen captures that illustrate the process in a […]
It’s the frustrated developer in me. Once I start fiddling with code, I cannot stop. (When I was a teenager, I spent hours and hours writing programs, first in Basic, then in compiled Basic, then in assembly code, first on a Sharp MZ80K and then on a Commodore 64. I could have become a software […]
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a new French-language web site at www.fauxamis.fr on which I discuss various issues relating to what linguists call “false friends” or “deceptive cognates” between English and French. The site is WordPress-based, but is not exactly a blog. It’s more like a repository where I will gradually add […]
À la suite de la présentation que j’ai faite au début du mois, j’ai décidé de mettre sur pied un site Web sur lequel je recenserai les nombreux faux amis que j’ai évoqués lors de cette présentation et que je n’ai pas eu le temps d’aborder dans le détail. Ce site est désormais disponible à […]
As a French-speaking user of Adobe’s InDesign page layout application, there is little that irritates me more than Adobe’s on-going refusal to support the standard keyboard shortcut for inserting a non-breaking space, a character which is an essential part of French typography (and should be used more often even in English typography). In InDesign, for […]
A while back, I wrote about message filing in Mac OS X’s Mail and, in particular, I mentioned the third-party tool MsgFiler and its apparent pros and cons. In spite of my initial reluctance (due in part that I had already shelled out some cash for Mail Act-On and didn’t want to add too much […]
When Word 2011 came out, I wrote about this new bug that caused the application to fail to open any file whose path contained certain “non-standard” characters, including accented letters, forward and backward slashes (/\), more-than and less-than symbols (<>), and so on. Today, I installed the latest Office 2011 update, whose description fails to […]
It’s that time of the year again. I am putting together a publication for our local university in InDesign CS5, and I have to work with existing Word files that were submitted by the various contributors and then edited by the publication’s editor-in-chief. And when you combine two lousy pieces of software such as Office 2011 […]
Here’s a bug in Pages ’09 that has been… bugging me for years and I have finally (I think) figured out exactly how to reproduce it: Open a document in Pages ’09. Hide the Pages ’09 application itself. Bring Pages ’09 back to the foreground. Bring up an inspector window if you haven’t got one open already. Go to the […]
For the past year or so, I’ve been able to use our new local wireless service to connect to the Internet, with average throughput ranging from 1.5 to 3 mbps. It’s not great by any standards, but it’s far better than what use to be the only alternative, i.e. a satellite-based service with major latency […]
Two days ago, I wrote about the fact that the “Purchased” section of the App Store application window enables you to keep an eye on downloads currently in progress. There is another aspect of this list of purchases, however, that I find slightly bothersome and unintuitive. For example, look at this: (Click on the image […]
The default user interface in the App Store for really large downloads, like Xcode or the latest Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview (both larger than 4 GB) is rather frustrating. All you get after completing your purchase is a Dock icon with a small progress bar on top of it. If your default view […]