Betalogue

Finally, maybe a solution to alleviate some of Word’s performance problems in Mac OS X.

A new web form for sending “You guys rock!” messages anonymously. Yey.

Microsoft’s Jensen Harris writes about an incredible breakthrough in user interface design in Office 12.

John Welch and Rick Schaut square off.

For some reason, when I export a Pages document as a Microsoft Word document and then open the exported document in Word, I see all kinds of manual tab stops in the ruler. More specifically, there is one manual tab stop at each centimeter.: My settings in Pages are to have default tab stops every […]

For a giggle, head over to Microsoft developer Rick Schaut’s blog to read his post about Word and tabs (as in “tabulations”). The post itself is not particularly interesting… It attempts to explain how Word’s AutoFormatting feature works. (Rick Schaut calls it the “Auto Formatter” but I’ve never seen this phrase anywhere in the Word […]

This little piece of news at C|Net might not sound like much, but I find it significant, because it echoes stuff I have heard from other sources about Microsoft moving more and more towards automated testing instead of using actual human beings to test their software. Why is it significant? Because Microsoft’s software is already […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the idiotic behaviour of Microsoft’s Office 2004 Service Pack 1 updater, which leaves a log file at the root level of your hard drive. I am sorry to report that FileMaker’s recently released updater (which updates FileMaker to 7.0v3) is just as bad. It too leaves a […]

In order to be able to download the recently released Office 2004 Service Pack 1 — which fixes almost none of the many bugs identified so far in the product — you first need to update… Office 2004’s Microsoft AutoUpdate program. Which means that you have to activate the bloody thing in the first place, […]

Apple’s financial figures for the last quarter are quite impressive. With the delay in the launch of the new iMac G5, there were concerns that Apple might have suffered. But iPod sales more than made up for it. 2 million iPods sold? Wow. 5 times as many as a year earlier during the same period? […]

What happens when you use an ever-changing naming/numbering scheme for your software is that you end up using an ever-changing naming/numbering scheme for your software updates as well. So now Office updates are “service packs”. Why not, I guess? More importantly, if you’ve read the MacCentral article about this update and are wondering where on […]

I won’t go into the reasons why, in Office 2004, Microsoft decided to move the user’s “Normal” template from the Microsoft Office application folder to the “Microsoft User Data” folder inside the user’s home “Documents” folder — while other templates remain in the Microsoft Office application folder. There’s just no point in trying to explain […]

While reviewing Rick Schaut’s blog entry on the “Disk is full” bug in Word yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice that one of the people who had commented on his entry was another Microsoft developer named Larry Osterman. His comment was in response to a comment by Rick Schaut himself about the number of open […]

The inconsistency in the behaviour of controls (buttons, etc.) in background windows in Mac OS X when clicked upon — also known as click-through — has been discussed several times in this blog. Leave it to Microsoft, however, to screw up things even more than any other Mac OS X application. Take a look at […]

In his fourth post on Word’s development process, MS program manager Chris Pratley says the following: A couple of people have asked about the permanence of electronic information and access to it in the future if it is in Word format. Microsoft takes this very seriously. That’s one of the reasons we make the format […]