I haven’t written on this blog since last year and my very traumatic experience with upgrading my 2014 Mac Pro to OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). It’s not that I don’t have anything more to say about OS X or other topics. It’s just that I find it less time-consuming and more immediate to post things on Twitter, […]
Here’s another example of Apple’s sloppy work in OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) that is very easy to reproduce (at least on my Mac Pro): Open the Activity Monitor application (in the Application/Utilities folder). Option-click on your desktop to hide the foreground application, i.e. Activity Monitor, and switch back to the Finder. Click on the Activity […]
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 […]
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 […]
It used to be that one of Apple’s distinctive features when it comes to computing was its ability (and indeed its willingness) to sweat the details. Nowadays, more often than not, its distinctive features include a newly found ability to mess up the details. In Mavericks’s Mail 7, as in previous versions of Mail, you […]
Most of the time, when Apple comes up with system updates that modify the Mail application, the changes cause Mail to reject installed third-party plug-ins (known as “bungles”) by moving them from the “~/Library/Mail/Bundles/” folder to the “~/Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled)/” folder at launch time. This happens even if there is no known compatibility issue between the […]
Apple’s engineers have a strong tendency of being unable to leave good enough alone. In the previous version of Mail, if you received an email message containing multiple attachments, there was a way to save all these attachments with a single click. You could just use a single click on the “Save” button in the […]
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 […]
In Lion (OS X 10.7) and Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), Mail has a bug that, for certain types of e-mail accounts at least, causes the application to fail to identify sent messages containing attachments as such. The paperclip icon never appears in the message list, and the “Remove Attachments” command is greyed out, even […]
There are on-going issues with Mac OS X’s Mail application when it comes to selection highlighting. Some of them date back to the first release of Lion. Others are new to recent builds of Mountain Lion. But they all are issues that Apple does not seem to care much about or be in any hurry […]
Sometimes the sheer stupidity of how Mail handles (or rather cannot handle) network failures just boggles my mind. A couple of days ago I heard that people using one particular ISP in our area (the cable company Eastlink) were experiencing a general system failure and did not have any Internet access for several hours. Then […]
I am not sure why, but I am going through a phase where any encounter with a software bug on my computer leaves me with a feeling of intense frustration. I just cannot believe that I have to live with so many bugs that affect my work on a daily basis in my computing life, […]
What is it exactly that Apple’s engineers have against people wanting to remove attachments from their e-mails? Ever since Apple added the “Remove Attachments” command to Mail’s interface, back in 2003, it has been plagued with problems. It has always been, and still is, impossible to undo the command. Given that it is quite a […]
Sometimes, as a Mac user, I can be my own worst enemy. As reported earlier, I installed Lion on my main machine last month, and since then I have of course encountered a number of bugs that I have been reporting to Apple through the appropriate channels. But any major system upgrade can also cause […]
As Matt Gemmell notes, in Lion the Mail application now has a “Favorites” bar at the top, underneath the toolbar. This bar can be customized like the one in Safari, except that you can only add single mailboxes as buttons, so you are limited by the space available. One of the side benefits of this […]