Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update brings RAW support for more cameras [UPDATED]

May 28th, 2008, by moose

As Apple states in the update’s KBase page:

About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update:

Includes additional RAW image support for several cameras.

Well, it would be nice to know which ones.

[UPDATE]
Well, hot on the heels of the 10.5.3 update, here’s the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 2.1 that brings RAW support for the following cameras:

  • Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/Kiss Digital x2/450D
  • Epson R-D1
  • Leaf AFi 7
  • Leaf AFi 6
  • Leaf AFi 5
  • Pentax K200D
  • Pentax K20D

Note that this update is available for MacOSX up from 10.4.11, which is nice seing Apple continue to bring out updates for the previous version of OSX.

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Spot The Idiot: deface your iPhone with this Vista Skin

May 26th, 2008, by moose

VistaPerfection 2.0:

iphone_vista_skin.jpg

So, like, urgh, they even have the boot screen with ugly progress bar and all.
Hmm, maybe if they have been really good, they have managed to reproduce the slowness, the bugs and even the annoying UAC behavior (maybe the iPhone will ask you for your PIN code every time you want to make a call, read an SMS or - GASP - browse the ‘net).

I can’t think of why anyone would install this on their iPhone…

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How to assign command-G to ‘Find Next’

May 21st, 2008, by moose

Betalogue » Blog Archive » Word 2008: How to assign command-G to ‘Find Next’:

Microsoft has decided that command-G shortcut should be assigned to “Go To…,” and they won’t ever change their minds. So you have to customize Word just to make it behave the normal way, i.e. use command-G as a shortcut for “Find Next.”

“Easy,” you say. “Just go to the ‘Customize Keyboard‘ dialog box, find the ‘Find Next‘ command and assign command-G to it.” Right.

I’ve been raving for YEARS about not being able to hit command-G to go to “Find next…”… And you know what? Word’s UI is so well done I actually NEVER even managed to reassign the keyboard shortcut because… well, read the post and you’ll find out why.

p.s.: oh, by the way, I totally agree, Word 2008 is so bad.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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A Cure for the Excel 2008 EURO symbol bug

May 16th, 2008, by moose

So, I posted a couple days ago about a really annoying bug where Excel 2008 documents with celles formatted using the € currency get “converted” to $ when you close and reopen them.

Well, I sort of found a cure. A workaround really… Well, two actually.

1) Simply save your document using the .xsl format instead of the default new .xlsx format and the problem goes away. Or,

2) instead of using the Format Cell menu option then choosing Currency and €, simply use the € icon in the formatting toolbar, or use the Financial cell format (that’s what the € icon does). It does almost the same as the € “currency” format, simply adding a space between the number and the symbol…

Don’t you love M$ products?

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Spot the Idiot: I know why it took 4 years to complete Office 2008 for Mac

May 15th, 2008, by moose

And so I continue my venture in the shadowy depth of Mac Office 2008, wondering whether I shall finally stay with the 2004 edition… not that it was great (it wasn’t, on an Intel machine), but the 2008 edition fixed almost no bugs from the 2004 version, and added a whole lot of new bugs.So what could they have been doing down in the Mac BU during these long years? I think I might have found part of the answer: they fell in love with Aqua and all the shiny widgets and decided they might as well spend some time on creating their own… and so, I hereby introduce the “Enlarging, Blueishing, Splashing Widget”.Watch this video closely: you’ll recognize the widgets that live at the bottom of your Word document windows, and allow you to swap between display modes (Page, Outline…).
  
yes, you are not dreaming, this is a triple-action widget: when you roll over it, it enlarges, it gets blue, and there’s a splash animation within it. Said animation is probably done using raytracing and specular reflections on terapolygonal vertices, since simply mousing over the widgets taxes my 2.3GHz Core2Duo CPU… well, on some occasions, for on the video it doesn’t register much on the Menu Meter CPU display (it did 5 minutes ago, and Activity Monitor pointed to Word using up to 25% of one CPU, while doing nothing more than mousing over… and I am running a 2.3GHz core2duo MacBook Pro) but a friend of mine running on a core solo Mac mini managed to get the CPU to 75% by mousing over.Well, I hope I’ll have some new nuggets to report to you as I’ll be heavily trying out this 2008 edition to see whether I shall migrate or stay with Office 2004.

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Word ate all my nice CPU…

May 14th, 2008, by moose

OK, so I posted yesterday about a bug in Excel 2008, and now I just hit another one in Word (yes, I’m not counting the one that does the same sort of random document windows rearranging when you use multiple screens, it plagues Word as well as Excel, which, in a way, is sort of reassuring since it seems to imply that there is at least some common code between the various Office apps).As soon as I hit the save button in Word 2008, Word, closely followed by syslogd go crazy and eat 95% of one of my core2duo’s firece CPUs.It seems that the Spotlight plugin installed by Office 2008 and in charge of indexing Word documents is seriously buggy and a real ressource hog.Now I know why sometimes my MacBook Pro’s fans would start whirring like crazy for no apparent reason.

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Oh! Excel wherefore are thou Excel?

May 13th, 2008, by moose

So I’ve been using Office 2008 for a while, and been cursing and screaming at it for taking more time to launch on my MacBook Pro C2D 2.3GH than it took Office 2004 running in Rosetta. As well as for having exactly the same bugs happening in exactly the same situations, mostly in Word (like when dealing with some large Office for Windows documents, or when doing search/replace all and you get some occurrences randomly replaced by random words… yeah, try to undo that after having saved! Oh, and I forgot: when you use two displays one above the other, as soon as you move Excel in the background, all the Excel windows in the secondary display are neatly moved back to the main display… handy… NOT!).
But yesterday, I stumbled on a show-stopping bug in Excel 2008.

You see, I live and work in Europe, so when I need to do a quote for one of my clients, I do it in Euros (€).
So in Excel I set my table cells to a currency format using the € symbol, like so:

eurobug_1.png

Cool, works alright… Not so much actually: when I reopen my document, ALL the cells formatted as EURO currency have turned into US DOLLARS:

eurobug_2.png

Which, when you have a look at today’s EURO/USD exchange rates is probably gonna please my clients, but not myself.

Ah, yes, I forgot: this bug affects the French version of Office (I can’t test any other languages, since M$ insists on NOT shipping multilingual apps) and ONLY the EURO currency (I tried with a number of other currencies and they are retained fine).

Conclusion: I CANNOT work anymore in Excel for my quotes and invoices, so I’m switching over to Numbers.
Way to go M$… I hope the first “Office 2008 Service Pack” will solve this problem, but I highly doubt it…

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iPod to feature in PS3’s Metal Gear Solid 4

May 13th, 2008, by moose

So, after playing a central role in William Gibson’s Spook Country, as a means to smuggle data, the iPod is now going to feature in the latest - and last - installment of the cult video game franchise Metal Gear Solid, coming to PlayStation 3 this June.

metal-gear-solid-4-meets-ipod-20080513010953562-000.jpg

IGN: Metal Gear Solid 4 Meets iPod:

Of particular note is the in-game iPod. Using this, you’ll be able to change the game’s background music to music data that you find in the game world. You’ll also be able to download new tracks via the web.

What better proof that an item is really becoming mainstream than to see it appearing in books, movies and videogames, not as a “cool factor” bullet-list gimmick, but simply as part of the story.

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