Author Archive

Finder: Dragging proxy icon to the trash creates a copy in the trash

Sunday, June 19th, 2005 • 6:03 am

Another example of sloppy, inconsistent programming by Apple in Mac OS X’s Finder… Create a folder called “Test” in your home folder. Open the folder “Test” in a new Finder window, and switch the Finder to View as List mode (if it’s not in this view mode already), so that the Finder window displays the […]

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Finder: Wrong focus after drag-and-drop action

Sunday, June 19th, 2005 • 5:55 am

This is a typical example of what’s wrong with Mac OS X’s Finder. Let’s say you have a file called “MyFile.txt” on your desktop. Open a new Finder window and browse to your “Documents” folder (or any other folder) in that window. After that, click anywhere on your desktop’s background picture, in order to make […]

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Spotlight: Cannot create a smart folder combining the contents of several folders

Thursday, June 16th, 2005 • 6:32 am

I find it hard to believe that such a simple application of the “smart folder” concept has not been included in the Finder in Mac OS X. What I am trying to do is very simple. I want a smart folder that displays the combined contents of several existing folders. In other words, I want […]

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Finder: command-option-drag in View as List

Monday, June 13th, 2005 • 12:38 am

Normally, in Mac OS X’s Finder, when you hold the command and option keys down while dragging an item, this creates an alias of the item where you drop the item. The problem is that, while this works in Finder windows that as in “View as Icons” or in “View as Columns” view mode, it […]

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Power Mac G4 (MDD): How to bring the internal temperature down

Friday, June 10th, 2005 • 6:07 am

Regular Betalogue readers know that I use a Power Macintosh G4 (MDD) as my main desktop computer and that it has had cooling issues from the very beginning, which played an important role in the G4 noise debacle. Even with the replacement Power Supply Unit in it, the G4 (MDD) is still a noisy machine […]

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Spell Catcher X 10.2.1: Not so minor update

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 • 5:08 am

Version 10.2.1 of Spell Catcher X was released earlier this week. It might sound like a minor, insignificant update, but there are more new features in this update than Microsoft have ever bothered to include in their humongous and useless “Service Packs”. First, you can now include cursor key movements in glossary expansions. This means […]

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Hard drive back from the (almost) dead

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 5:48 am

The hard drive that I was talking about earlier today has decided to come back from its state of near-death… While I was in the process of painstakingly recovering the files at a very slow speed with RBrowser Lite, all of a sudden the transfer speed picked up considerably. I finished recovering all the files […]

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Safari 2.0: Misleading error message

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 5:00 am

I am still on dial-up. This makes me particularly aware of the shortcomings of Mac OS X in a situation with insufficient bandwidth. Here is an error message that I get regularly in Safari 2.0 when it’s trying to load a web page and can’t get a response from the server because my dial-up connection […]

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Hard drive failure

Monday, June 6th, 2005 • 12:05 am

Last week I wrote about problems I was experiencing with Tiger, which led me to do a complete reinstall of the system. This appeared to fix the problem at the time. Unfortunately, over the course of the following seven days, things gradually deteriorated again. The symptoms were quite simply that more and more things in […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Finder quits without saving unsaved smart folders

Friday, June 3rd, 2005 • 1:20 am

Try the following experiment. In the Finder, open a smart folder that you have created. Click on “Edit” and make some changes to the search criteria. Do not save the changes. Now launch Activity Viewer and, in the list of processes, select “Finder” and click on the “Quit” button. In the dialog sheet that pops […]

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Spotlight: Needs ability to open a smart folder directly in editable state

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 • 6:36 am

Right now, when you have an existing smart folder and you open it in a Finder window, in that window, by default, the Finder only displays a heading row with the title “Smart Folder” on the left-hand side and the “Edit” button on the right-end side, and then a refreshed list of the search results […]

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Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 10:50 pm

One of the good things about Amazon’s Customer Service is that they really do respond pretty swiftly. Yesterday evening, I experienced a weird problem, which led me to submit an inquiry via their Customer Service on-line form. This morning, I already have an answer, and it clarifies the issue. Here’s what happened. Yesterday, I had […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): More on bug with display profiles and fast user switching

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 8:38 am

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a serious bug affecting Mac OS X 10.4 users who have calibrated their displays using Mac OS X’s built-in Display Calibrator Assistant and who switch users in Mac OS X using the fast user switching feature. Today, there is a new report at MacInTouch.com about this problem. […]

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Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Packages and disk images listed as ‘documents’ in Spotlight results

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 4:33 am

This, to me, is something that doesn’t make much sense from a user’s point of view. When you search for a word or a phrase with Spotlight and the Spotlight results for this search include disk images or software packages (i.e. files ending with “.dmg” or “.pkg“), such files are listed in the Spotlight results […]

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BBEdit: Where are the dialog sheets?

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 • 4:25 am

I am a long-time user of BBEdit and am generally pleased with the way the application has evolved over the years. I have bought all the updates. What I cannot understand, however, is why Bare Bones Software is so reluctant to embrace some of Mac OS X’s core features, even when they have clear advantages. […]

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