To say that I am thoroughly disappointed with Apple would be a massive understatement. I am actually angry and disgusted. After months of testing and fine-tuning (?), the Mac OS X 10.8.3 update is out, and… it fails to fix the kernel panics that have been afflicting Mac Pro users with multiple GeForce video cards […]
Macworld has a new column by Dan Moren and Lex Friedman about Apple’s use of “silent email filtering” for iCloud accounts. As John Siracusa notes, this is nothing new. Apple’s silent mail filtering “has been going on since the .Mac days”. But I suppose people need to be reminded from time to time. As a […]
Long-time Betalogue readers know that I could write about how crappy Microsoft Word is all day long. However, there is only so much you can say before the sheer inanity of the thing makes you want to do unspeakable things to a Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer voodoo doll. At that stage, I guess you […]
Last week, I wrote about the problem with shortened URLs in Safari’s History feature. A reader wrote to express his agreement and also mention similar issues he was experiencing with unresolved URLs from Google searches crowding his Safari history instead of the actual resolved URLs. I did notice, a couple of years ago, that, all […]
Alright, if you are in Safari, go to this item posted by someone on Twitter (chosen randomly), and then click on the link provided in the tweet (pic.twitter.com/ozBCyAmJ). This should normally take you to a new window with the picture in question and the Safari window’s title bar and address bar should look like this: […]
Many readers probably remember the harrowing tale of the hacking of the Apple ID account of Wired’s Mat Honan from August 2012. While my own experience qualifies as a tiny blip compared to his situation, I would still like to share it, because I cannot help but worry about it, especially since I myself was […]
Sometimes I really do wonder how much Apple’s engineers still care about small details. OS X still has a decent level of polish, but there are also obvious, blatant flaws that should never have slipped through in the first place and that Apple seems to have no interest in fixing. Here’s a perfect little example: As […]
There are two things in Word 2011 (admittedly, among numerous other ones) that are a constant source of irritation for me and that are so basic that it’s quite clear that Microsoft’s engineers have absolutely no clue about how people use their software in the real world, so much so that there is no hope of […]
Sometimes I really feel as if I am somehow cursed. The reality is that I am just too reliant on modern technology, of course, but so is almost everyone else. And the thought that most people have to go through situations like the one I went through yesterday morning is, strangely enough, not particularly comforting. […]
The one thing I hate the most about cloud-based computing is the sense that I have lost control, that the computer does things on my behalf with very little input or feedback, and that things can fairly easily go wrong. And so I tend to avoid it like the plague. That said, as a tech […]
Here is a telling example of everything that is wrong, in my opinion, with the current state of the music industry. Yesterday, I was listening to an Etta James mixtape from 2009. The mixtape included one song that I particularly liked, titled “Quick Reaction & Satisfaction”. So I decided to try and find more about […]
Apple has just released an update for iTunes 11 (iTunes 11.0.1) and I am glad to report that it appears to include improvements for two of the issues I mentioned last week. First of all, the View › Column Browser submenu is no longer disabled when the sidebar is visible. And then the egregiously bad […]
I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s definitely something that is not right with Safari’s Resume feature in Mountain Lion on my machine. Well-behaved OS X applications follow the “Close windows when quitting an application” setting in System Preferences › General: If the option is not checked, when I re-open those well-behaved applications, […]
In recent years, using iTunes to manage my music library has always been, for me, a major exercise in frustration. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death has always been part of my experience using iTunes. While some aspects of iTunes’s performance levels have actually improved in iTunes 11 (notably the execution of AppleScript scripts, generally […]
Last week, I wrote that iTunes 11 can no longer open playlists in separate windows. This creates annoying limitations for those who, like me, are used to editing playlists in separate windows while looking at their music library in their main iTunes window. In particular, I wrote: So now if you want to, say, copy […]