There is one particular pair of keyboard shortcuts that has a special meaning in Apple’s applications that I simply cannot get used to, and that is the pair command-Up / command-Down. In Apple’s applications, including not just Pages ’09, but also TextEdit, Mail, and Safari, command-Up moves the insertion point all the way back to the […]
One of the few things that truly drive me insane in Apple’s iWork applications is the keyboard shortcuts that they have chosen for the commands to insert additional rows or columns in a table. When you are in a table in Pages ’09, for example, you can use option-Right to insert insert a new column after […]
OS X has a special keyboard mode that it switches to whenever the cursor is in a password field (in an OS X dialog, in a web page in Safari, Firefox, in apps that require password input, etc.). This mode, called ‘Secure Keyboard Mode’, is intended to protect your password input from any kind of snooping by […]
It’s happened again… There is a long history of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts failing to work properly for users of non-U.S. keyboard layouts because the keys involved in the shortcuts are located in a different place on their keyboards. There was a problem with the shortcut for the “Cycle Through Windows” command in Snow […]
Like many other professional Mac users, I suspect, I was quite relieved when Apple finally shared, in early April, with a select panel of writers who cover Apple news, their plans for the Mac Pro and, more generally speaking, for pro and “prosumer” users of Macintosh computers. When the new Mac Pro was announced in 2013, […]
As you know if you’ve read my recent blog posts, I’ve had a bit of a torrid time with my 2014 Mac Pro in the past few months, because of a recurring problem with random video freezes. It turns out that, contrary to what I had believed earlier on, the problem was not hardware-related, but software-related […]
I don’t know it is bad luck or something else, but I have certainly experienced my share of hardware flaws and failures with Apple products over the years. I am not talking about more or less predictable failures here, like conventional hard drives failing after a few years, or power adapter cords becoming frayed (although […]
Last week, I wrote about how pleased I was with my upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan. I am still pleased, but daily use of El Capitan is starting to reveal things that I hadn’t noticed in my first few days of playing with the new OS. As I noted in my post, I am […]
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, […]
This has been a very traumatic few months for me as a Mac user. As indicated in several previous blog posts, I purchased a new Mac Pro along with a new 4K display back in July 2014. The machine shipped with Mavericks and worked pretty well until I upgraded to Yosemite. I waited until OS X 10.10.1 […]
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 […]
Since my original post about a bug with window resizing in Preview in Yosemite, I have received feedback indicating that not everyone is able to reproduce this bug on their system. This leads me to suspect that the problem might be limited to specific hardware configurations, like the other responsiveness issues that I have be […]
Here’s a typical example of the many things that are wrong in Yosemite in terms of performance and responsiveness. When you first upgrade to Yosemite, you might notice all kinds of different responsiveness issues and it can be all quite confusing, giving you a general impression of unresponsiveness even though you cannot quite clearly pinpoint […]
When I was young and careless, I used to love being an early adopter of new technology, including computer technology. This meant that I often installed new system releases as soon as they became available, come what may. I was even quite excited when I was invited to join the AppleSeed program back in the […]
I just don’t understand. Last week I reported about noticeable responsiveness issues that I was experiencing with OS X 10.10.1 (Yosemite) on my 2014 Mac Pro: visibly slow drawing of the blue highlighting behind the “Help” menu heading in the menu bar; interruptions when scrolling down a Finder window with a long list of files (namely, […]