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 […]
Pages ’12 obviously does not exist at this point in time. There have been no news about a new version of the iWork suite for OS X in years, and for all we know we might not get a significant update for another two or three years. Yes, the situation is that depressing. This cannot stop […]
Either there is something seriously wrong with my machine, or there is something seriously broken in the preview column in column view in Lion’s Finder. More often than not, when I select a picture file in a Finder window in column view mode, I get something like this: And that’s if I am lucky. If […]
Mac OS X’s Spotlight has a fairly handy feature when your list of search results includes PDF files. If you double-click on a PDF file in the list of search results in the Finder, Mac OS X opens it in Preview as it would open any PDF file, but in addition, Mac OS X automatically includes the search […]
I am a long-time NetNewsWire user. I don’t feel the need to explore other news readers at the moment, but lately I have had thoughts that have led me to discover additional features that make my news-reading experience more pleasant and efficient. It probably has to do with the fact that I now have a […]
On Friday, I wrote about problems I was having with the performance of text-based searches on my system and in particular with searching for long exact phrases in PDF documents in Mac OS X’s Preview. In my view, searching for an exact phrase should be a pretty fast process, especially when the phrase is fairly […]
As the holiday season approaches, I’d like to indulge in a bit of wishful thinking… This is not just something that I’d like to get for Christmas. It’s something that I wish someone (preferably Apple itself) would actually make, sell, and support. Because right now, if you are not happy with iPhoto, you can get Aperture […]
I took some time off last week and during that time off, a reader named Herman wrote to comment on my recent posts on the Finder’s column view and list view modes and the persistence of numerous bugs and inconsistencies, even in Snow Leopard, which was supposed to be a bug-fixing release. Herman mentioned something […]
Yesterday’s post about the restrictions imposed by Apple in the view options for Finder windows displaying Spotlight search results generated a fair amount of e-mail feedback. Most of it was to express agreement with the absurdity of the remaining limitations. But some readers provided additional information. Alan C. pointed out this text on Apple’s own […]
One of my pet peeves withy Spotlight in Mac OS X has always been the limitations imposed by Apple on the ways search results can be viewed. First we had the lousy one-of-a-kind search results window in Tiger obtained when Spotlight searches were initiated via the global Spotlight search menu. Then in Leopard Apple attempted […]
This is something that has been bothering me for years, and apparently I must be the only one on the planet, or at least no one at Apple seems to care, because there has never been even an attempt to address the issue. Take a typical Finder window in column view used to browse the […]
It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder, “What were they thinking?” Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I have noticed, on more than one occasion, that when I attempted to drag a selected message in Mail’s message list in order to file it in a specific mailbox, instead of responding to my mouse […]
There is simplifying and streamlining, and then there is dumbing down. I am afraid that, with this latest “improvement” in iTunes 9, Apple’s engineers have crossed the line: This is what you get on your screen each and every time you create a new empty playlist. As if all iTunes users with a moderate level […]
For a company that prides itself on attention to detail, Apple occasionally suffers from disappointing and rather frustrating lapses. A long standing bug affecting the process of making an alias in list view has finally been fixed in Snow Leopard, but the fix itself introduces yet more unjustified inconsistency. Prior to Mac OS X 10.6, […]
There are some usability tips in Mac OS X that are so simple that one sometimes forgets that they are not necessarily obvious to everyone. For example, it took me several years (after the very first release of Mac OS X) to realize that clicking and holding the mouse button on a Dock icon was […]