More fun with the Adobe CS5.5 installer… It of course still forces you, like its predecessors, to quit all your web browsers during the installation process: Nothing new here. There is still no option not to install the Adobe Internet plug-in for viewing PDF documents, if you prefer your browser’s built-in viewer or, like me, […]
It really does boggle the mind. How can it be that, when you install the Creative Suite 5.5 upgrade on top of your existing CS5 setup, the individual applications are totally unable to preserve the user preferences from their predecessors? I don’t want my Adobe applications to open their documents in tabs instead of windows. […]
I’ve been very busy with work lately, hence the relative lack of new posts on this blog. Among the extra work that I have taken on, there is a series of jobs involving both English-to-French translation and page layout work with InDesign. I don’t mind doing page layout work myself, because I am fairly comfortable […]
I have already had the opportunity to report on various new problems in Word 2011 linked to the introduction of the new default user interface for finding and replacing text. Today, I’d like to try and describe the new feature as a whole and its impact on my workflow in real-world situations involving real-world Word […]
In Snow Leopard, the default behaviour for application icons in the Dock is the following: If you click and hold on an application’s Dock icon, Exposé displays all windows currently open in the application, and you get what the Apple Human Interface Guidelines call a “minimal Dock menu” that allows you to quit the application, […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about a shockingly bad UI choice made by the Adobe engineers who developed the new Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) series of applications. As I wrote in my post, when you do certain actions that require the user to wait until they are completed before he can resume […]
As a long-time Mac user, there is little that I find more infuriating than software applications made by major developers that are not even able to get the most basic Mac behaviours or UI conventions right. Yesterday, I wrote about Google Chrome’s failure to support Mac OS X’s “smooth scrolling” feature. Today, I wanted to […]
About six months ago, our local newspaper decided to replace its entire fleet of aging Macintosh computers with brand new machines and the director asked me to advise them and help them out with the installation process. We chose a Mac Pro with a 30″ screen, a few 27″ iMacs, and a Mac mini to […]
Try the following experiment. Put a sample PDF file (any PDF file) on your desktop. Let’s say it’s called “test.pdf.” Now open the file in Preview. It does not matter how you open it (double-click, “Open” command in “File” menu, etc.). As soon as you’ve opened it, it will be listed at the top of […]
I am just not having much luck with Mac OS X’s Preview application these days. After the problem with weird blocks of text rendered as black and grey boxes discussed last week, here’s another one I encountered this week-end while working with a French-language PDF document. As with the last problem, I am able to […]
Take the following excerpt from a simple word processor document: Note where the insertion point is located (at the beginning of the second paragraph). Now what do you think will happen when I start typing from that insertion point? More specifically, do you expect the inserted text to be in bold or not? Well, here […]
Like I wrote in a blog post about InDesign earlier this year, pictures and Microsoft Word go together like oil and water, especially on the Mac. More often than not, when you get a Word document with an embedded picture on the Mac, it’s pretty much impossible to edit the picture, even though the same […]
Since my original post on this topic has been Daring-Fireballed, has generated a fair amount of feedback, and has been followed by another post on Daring Fireball, I thought I should clarify a few things. First of all, I want to stress that my initial post raised two clearly separate issues. One is the logic […]
Adobe recently released a slew of updates for the latest version of its Creative Suite, i.e. the CS4 applications. Given Adobe’s recent history with software installers and software updaters, I bet you will not be surprised to hear that the user experience with the CS4 updates is as atrocious as it has ever been with […]
Since my post yesterday on the lousy Adobe CS4 installer generated a fairly substantial amount of feedback (thanks in no small part to a link on Daring Fireball), including a post on Adobe product manager John Nack’s own blog, but also a fair amount of private e-mails, I would like to clarify a few things. […]