Insert media into your document

Working with Microsoft Office on the Mac is an interesting experience, along the lines of standing up and feeling a wee bit dizzy: everything’s fine, but it just feels odd.

For instance, in Excel you can insert media into your spreadsheet - such as a photo, audio, or a movie. That’s all and fine, but when I’m setting out to insert audio into my spreadsheet, it’s probably going to be a voice recording of a meeting or an analyst call.

But Excel helpfully tells you how to find and insert songs from iTunes. iTunes? What, am I going to enhance my budget report with Volcano Girls from Veruca Salt? Rock out a market analysis with some Liz Phair?

It’s almost as if the product brief was to “make it as Mac-like as possible”, but without taking the context into consideration.

Why is it that PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac is still (poorly) riffing off of the visual style of the original iMacs? I mean, that was in style back in 1998, and we’re 12 years hence.

Whiny grumble about Keynote stickies

You know, I really do like using Apple Keynote. We’ve been using it for serious, hardcore production for a number of years now, and it just takes anything I push at it: embedded 1GB video files, massive amounts of formatting, anything.

But that said, I do have one gripe. These nifty stickies that you can use to leave comments for other people working on the deck? Great idea. But when you get down to the last line on a default-sized sticky note with default-sized text and font, it automatically indents the beginning of the line, and then wraps after about 6-7 characters, and looks like ass. If you resize it two pixels taller (count ‘em, two), then it looks fine. Grumble, grumble.

Granted, this is iWork 08 we’re talking about, but something tells me it hasn’t changed in 09.

dwineman:

Designing a good user interface is by no means a simple task, and usability testing can be hard to get right: some users are bolder than others, so what’s intuitive and discoverable to one person can be impenetrable and punishing to another. There’s no simple test that can tell you whether you fucked up.

But if you find yourself having to email your entire user base to explain how your site’s navigation works? Then you fucked up.

Worse yet, now you have to click on the chiclet in the top left of the screen, and then mouse all the way down into the middle of the screen just to choose your next function.  Boo.

Un-tasty font rendering in Microsoft Office for the Mac

Man, this just kills me.  The exact same text, exact same font size, renders a pixel or two taller when bolded.  Unpicky people must have a much easier life.

I was hoping that an upgrade to the latest version of Office for the Mac would fix some of the bugs I’d been butting up against recently, and lo-and-behold, it did.

But to keep us all entertained, it also introduced a host of new oddities, like this wonderful empty script menu in a clean install of PowerPoint:Mac 2008.

What Apple Products Have Cost Over Time (Inflation Adjusted!)

Amazon Reveals Kindle iPad App, Dooms Its Own E-Reader? | Technomix | Fast Company

Now that is impressive - Amazon puts out a Kindle app for the iPad.

Sweet Mac Setups – Shawn Blanc