Yesterday, Jason Snell’s Six Colors web site posted a tip about using OS X’s built-in keyboard customization features to create a universal shortcut for a command for pasting as plain text. While the tip is not useless, it neglected to mention the fact that the menu command labelled “Paste and Match Style” is not nearly as […]
Following my blog post from last week (‘Find Previous’ in Adobe InDesign), I actually got some feedback from Vipul-Bansal, an InDesign engineer, on the Adobe Forums: We had tried really hard to just provide two buttons “Find Previous” and “Find Next” but there were quiet [sic] a few design limitations because of which we can […]
Since my previous post on Pages 5 was mentioned on Daring Fireball, I have received quite a bit of feedback, both directly and indirectly. I’d like to address some of the issues about my post and this situation that were raised in that feedback, in order to clarify, as they say, “where I am coming from” […]
Dear oh dear. They really have done it, haven’t they? They have taken what had evolved into a rather decent word processor / page layout application and have eliminated so many useful features that it effectively is now a piece of useless junk, and I honestly have no idea for whom this latest version of Pages […]
As a music lover, I collect, among other things, lots of bootleg recordings of live Prince concerts. Back in the pre-Internet era, I actually spent some of my hard-earned cash on bootleg LPs, CDs, and VHS tapes. But thankfully, with the advent of the Internet, it has become possible to build a very decent collection […]
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 […]
This is (I hope) the final instalment in my series of posts on customizing the BBEdit user interface in order to allow paragraph selection using the standard OS X shortcuts, i.e. shift-option-Up and shift-option-Down. You can read the first two instalments here: AppleScript scripts for paragraph selection in BBEdit AppleScript scripts for paragraph selection in BBEdit […]
Last week, I wrote about the use of AppleScript scripts to provide commands for paragraph selection in BBEdit, where the usual shortcuts do not work. As indicated in my post, I was able to adapt scripts provided by Oliver Taylor to create rudimentary commands for paragraph selection. But I had a problem with the command […]
I have been a BBEdit user for years. But I am not primarily a developer. I am a writer. And one thing that has always bugged me in BBEdit is its non-standard use of the text navigation and selection shortcuts involving the Option key and the Up and Down cursor keys. In most other applications […]
As people who (unlike me) have already upgraded to Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) have discovered, while the new system brings back the “Save As…” command that was eliminated in Lion with the introduction of the Auto Save feature, it actually does so in a way that is rather misleading (at least to people used to the traditional […]
One of the long-standing annoyances with computer software in general and Mac OS X software in particular is that, after all these years, there is still a strong American bias in many features. While Mac OS X is of course a multilingual OS and supports a number of “international” features, there are still system-wide or application-specific behaviours […]
How fun. All of a sudden, my copy of Safari (5.1.7, under Lion 10.7.4) has started acting up. It works fine for a while, and then all of a sudden, when I click on a link, I get the dreaded “Safari can’t connect to the server” error message: Once this happens, Safari can no longer […]
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the annoying default behaviour of the “Link” inspector in Pages ’09, which is used to turn the selected text into a link: What’s annoying about it isn’t just that the “Link” inspector is the only way to create such a link, but also that, each and every time […]
Mac OS X’s Address Book application has never been a particular good piece of software. In fact, I distinctly remember writing a pretty scathing blog post about the multiple problems with its “Edit” mode six years ago. (To be fair to Apple, most of the problems described in that post were eventually fixed, but it […]
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 […]