In the summer of 2012, Apple started seeding early builds of the OS X 10.8.2 update. As a member of the AppleSeed program, I was able to test these early builds. I quickly noticed (as one would) that they introduced a serious new bug that caused frequent kernel panics on my Mac Pro, up to […]
I used to have a custom-made FileMaker Pro solution for cataloguing my books, my music, and my movies. But when Delicious Library came about, with its built-in access to Amazon’s data, I quickly made the decision to switch to this particular tool. The user interface had a few quirks, but on the whole the experience […]
Ever got this error when you tried to open a Word document in Pages ’09? I just did, and I now know why. See, Microsoft Word users in general and Windows users in particular are so confused about file extensions, and Microsoft’s user interface for dealing with file extensions is so confusing, that sometimes they do […]
This is something that pisses me right off. Apparently, according to Apple, sandboxing is good for us. After all, it “provides a last line of defense against the theft, corruption, or deletion of user data if an attacker successfully exploits security holes in your app or the frameworks it is linked against”. Yay. As far […]
In Microsoft Word, there is a myriad of inconsistencies, behaviours that don’t make sense and are simply the way they are because they have always been that way and nobody at Microsoft bothers to use his or her brains to think about whether these things still make sense today. Take, for example, what happens when […]
I am ambivalent about the upcoming new Mac Pro unveiled by Apple yesterday at the WWDC. Of course, I am relieved that Apple has finally given us something tangible to look forward to. I am also glad that the new model is a radical rethink and that heavy emphasis has apparently been put on keeping […]
If there is one thing about Microsoft Word for OS X that you can say, it is that it is never boring. For sheer entertainment value, no other piece of OS X software will ever give you a scene such as this one: Here’s the context: I am working on a Word document created by someone […]
What’s the point of submitting bug reports? That’s the question I used to ask myself when it came to Microsoft and its crappy software, but I must say I am increasingly asking myself the exact same thing with Apple and its own software offerings. The two pieces of Apple software that I use the most […]
As a music lover, I collect, among other things, lots of bootleg recordings of live Prince concerts. Back in the pre-Internet era, I actually spent some of my hard-earned cash on bootleg LPs, CDs, and VHS tapes. But thankfully, with the advent of the Internet, it has become possible to build a very decent collection […]
I have received more feedback about the issue with character-level formatting in the header of a Word document that I was working on the other day. Yesterday, I indicated that the problem had to do with the fact that the text in the header, even though it didn’t look any different from regular text, was […]
I now have a partial explanation for the mad behaviour of the header text in a Word document that I described in a post yesterday. A reader has written to indicate that he believes the text in the header in that document is not actually regular text typed by the user, but a reference to […]
Here’s the situation. I have an existing Microsoft Word document with a header that contains some text: I want to edit that header and replace the existing text with some text that contains a portion in superscript, like “July 4th” with the “th” in superscript. So I type the text and select the “th” portion: […]
As a long-time customer of the Amazon (France), Amazon (US) and Amazon (Canada) web stores, I must say that I have always enjoyed stellar customer service, and my latest experience is no exception. Back in December 2012, I took advantage of a special offer at Amazon.ca to order a copy of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo on […]
While I have a lot of respect for Brent Simmons as the developer behind NetNewsWire (although he sold it several years ago, and things have ground down to an ominous standstill since), I am afraid his latest column for Macworld is directly in line with everything that has ever been written in Macworld about Microsoft […]
What is wrong with this picture? Well, I think it’s rather obvious: the document window’s status bar (or whatever it’s called in Microsoft parlance) is a big blob of solid black instead of displaying the various bits of information (page number, word count, etc.) and controls that it is supposed to display. Fortunately, resizing the […]