Author Archive

Numbers 3.5 (iWork): Hijacks cursor keys when editing cells

Friday, February 27th, 2015 • 10:41 am

On February 25, 2015, I used Bug Reporter to submit the following bug report (#19951698) to Apple: Summary: When I select a cell and start typing, the cursor blinks inside the cell. Yet if I use the Left or Right cursor key, Numbers jumps to the previous/next cell, instead of navigating inside the current table […]

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Responsiveness problems in Yosemite: Menu-delay bug caused by ‘Reduce transparency’ option?

Friday, December 19th, 2014 • 7:09 pm

When I was young and careless, I used to love being an early adopter of new technology, including computer technology. This meant that I often installed new system releases as soon as they became available, come what may. I was even quite excited when I was invited to join the AppleSeed program back in the […]

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OS X 10.10 (Yosemite): Responsiveness problems not solved by clean install

Monday, December 8th, 2014 • 10:29 am

I just don’t understand. Last week I reported about noticeable responsiveness issues that I was experiencing with OS X 10.10.1 (Yosemite) on my 2014 Mac Pro: visibly slow drawing of the blue highlighting behind the “Help” menu heading in the menu bar; interruptions when scrolling down a Finder window with a long list of files (namely, […]

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Numbers 3.5: Keeps displaying time in date cells with no time

Thursday, November 27th, 2014 • 4:56 pm

At the same time I upgraded my Mac Pro to Yosemite last week, I decided to upgrade to the latest versions of Pages and Numbers. Because of the disastrous changes made by Apple in Pages 5 compared to Pages ’09, I have permanently switched to Nisus Writer Pro as my default word processor, and I have […]

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Mail 8 (Yosemite): Now includes attribution at same quote level as quotation itself

Thursday, November 27th, 2014 • 3:37 pm

Every so often (albeit with worryingly increasing frequency these days), Apple’s software engineers make changes that make you shake your head in disbelief. Now that I have upgraded to Yosemite (a not-too-pleasant experience), I have a fresh new batch of such changes to describe. Here’s one that has to do with the new version of […]

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OS X 10.10 (Yosemite): Unacceptable levels of responsiveness

Thursday, November 27th, 2014 • 10:32 am

In the summer, I bought a new Mac Pro. My previous machine (a 2009 Mac Pro) was getting long in the tooth. It would have lasted a while longer, but then one of my screens broke and I had to replace that, so I figured that, the 2013 Mac Pro having been out for a […]

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OS X Tip: Better than ‘Paste and Match Style’

Saturday, November 15th, 2014 • 11:48 am

Yesterday, Jason Snell’s Six Colors web site posted a tip about using OS X’s built-in keyboard customization features to create a universal shortcut for a command for pasting as plain text. While the tip is not useless, it neglected to mention the fact that the menu command labelled “Paste and Match Style” is not nearly as […]

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OS X 10.9 (Mavericks): Bug with ‘Secure Keyboard Mode’

Wednesday, November 12th, 2014 • 10:26 am

OS X has a special keyboard mode that it switches to whenever the cursor is in a password field (in an OS X dialog, in a web page in Safari, Firefox, in apps that require password input, etc.). This mode, called ‘Secure Keyboard Mode’, is intended to protect your password input from any kind of snooping by […]

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Fixing ‘Find Previous’ in Adobe InDesign CC 2014

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014 • 8:51 am

Following my blog post from last week (‘Find Previous’ in Adobe InDesign), I actually got some feedback from Vipul-Bansal, an InDesign engineer, on the Adobe Forums: We had tried really hard to just provide two buttons “Find Previous” and “Find Next” but there were quiet [sic] a few design limitations because of which we can […]

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‘Find Previous’ in Adobe InDesign

Wednesday, July 16th, 2014 • 8:56 am

Here’s a real-world scenario. (It’s very real in my world anyway.) I have a 200-page document in InDesign with lots of text in various frames. I need to review all occurrences of the word “department” in this document and change some of them — but only some — to “Department”. I cannot use a batch […]

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Disappearing cursor in Microsoft Word 2011: Affects .doc documents only?

Wednesday, April 16th, 2014 • 10:31 am

For years, I have been complaining about the I-beam cursor disappearing in Microsoft Word during text navigation: “Word 2004: New bug with blinking I-beam cursor” (June 19, 2004) “Word 2004: More on disappearing I-beam cursor” (June 28, 2004) “Word 2008: The case of the disappearing cursor” (July 13, 2009) “Word 2011: Disappearing cursor” (March 7, […]

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OS X 10.9 (Mavericks): Video corruption in Safari

Friday, February 28th, 2014 • 5:47 pm

For me, the problem started as soon as I upgraded to OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). I started seeing all kinds of unsightly video corruption artefacts on web pages in Safari, like this one (click to enlarge): The video corruption artefacts are static or sometimes “dynamic”, with actual flickering taking place in real time. (Needless to […]

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OS X 10.9’s Finder: Wrong text colour in selection highlighting in list view

Saturday, February 15th, 2014 • 3:02 pm

Ever since I installed Mavericks last fall, I’ve been trying to find a way to reproduce a problem that I was seeing with the Finder using the wrong text colour for the highlighted item in a Finder window in list view: The dark green is my custom selection colour (instead of the lighter sky blue […]

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Mail: Unable to update thread heading automatically

Saturday, January 25th, 2014 • 4:45 pm

Generally speaking, I don’t loathe OS X’s Mail as an email client like other people do. Yes, it does have a number of issues, including several that I have talked about myself on this blog. And I sure do wish that Apple would do something about them. But on the whole I find that Mail […]

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Finder: Inconsistent and nonsensical selection behaviour when deleting file

Saturday, January 25th, 2014 • 4:09 pm

In OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), take a Finder window in list view and select a file in the list: Now press command-Delete to delete the selected file. Here’s what happens: The Finder automatically selects the next file in the list. This is important. Now undo what you just did and, instead of pressing command-Delete to […]

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