Living Critic

Every once in a while, inexplicably, I loose the ability to type or click in OSX. I have yet to figure this one out.

If you’ve heard of this or if you are having the same problem I’d like to know.

For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, OSX grab is an awesome screen capture utility. In windows I used to create a screen capture and paste into paint, and then cut out the part I wanted.

With grab you have the ability to make a timed photo, or to select a specific area of the screen. The program will copy just that section for you.

What I cannot figure out however is why on earth apple would leave out your ability to save the image as a jpg, or png. These options are littered throughout the system, however in this one instance it is left out.

All I can see doing is frustrate users of OSX. Can anyone explain this? I thought apple was supposed to be the thoughtful software company.

And my other question…where is paint for OSX? Is this supplied with OSX?

As a part of my photo sorting routine I’ve had to make a number of folders in which to put my files. The drive I was working on was a Fat 32 drive, I need it to be a fat drive so that I can access it from the MS Windows Machines on my network.

The resulting complication you’ll see the image on the right. The last folder I made was labeled “Pets.” There were two others with distinct names. However upon creating “Pets.” Somehow OSX got confused and was only able to display the one folder three times. I no longer had access to the other two.

That is, not until I dragged them onto an HFS drive. Then they reappeared.

I’m not sure why this error occurred but it is repeatable. Why on earth this is occurring? I don’t know. It seems to me that there shouldn’t be any trouble reading and writing to a Fat drive. I hope that there is a fix for this somewhere because it sure makes that whole idea of “switch” to be so much less appealing.

I’m encountering significant frustration while I try to reorganize some 18gb of photos.

While I move between drives or between folders on a particular drive and I am selecting photos from a list and moving the window down to a particular file, I have no way to cut the photos I’ve selected, move to the folder in question and paste the files.

I hope I’m missing something because this is ridiculous. I’ve heard others indicate it’s a “safety feature” because that way you can’t loose a file. This is false however because you can’t loose a file cutting and pasting, the file doesn’t move unless it’s pasted somewhere.

Some have said you can drag the file using the command key while you’re dragging, but you can’t always drag when you’ve got a screen full of files and the files you’re dragging aren’t located anywhere in the vicinity of the folder you’re dragging them to. That’s why cut and paste is so important.

I know there are hacks and third party solutions for this but this ultra-basic piece of an operating system should never have to be installed by the user separately from the OS.

The fact that this isn’t here is a major disservice to the user. Someone please show me I’m wrong.

I’m now a Mac user so I’m not longer using it except occasionally when I’m in windows mode. This is one of the better products I’ve seen Microsoft come out with. One lame thing about the product is it requires you to set up at least one blog for automatic posting in order to set it up. Beta 2 was recently launched with some significant enhancements. While I won’t go into it here it’s definitely and improvement over the previous version.

Tables
Support for tables has been added which is one of the biggest reasons to us WLW. I had a good sized table set up in which I had to move some of the data around. It was very simply simply to click on the table and tell it to move the existing data up or down a cell, and the cells swapped places. This obvious tool is surprisingly missing from a lot of other HTML editors and blog clients.

Preview
The preview mode is impressive. Without saving a post you can select to preview it, and you’ll be taken to a screen with essentially a mock-up of your blog, theme and all, and you’ll get a good image of what your post is going to look like prior to your posting it.

It’s really not that difficult to post directly to your blog in most cases, but a blog client can make some tasks easier, especially when composing off-line. If you’re looking for a blog client and you’re in the MS Windows Environment then Windows Live Writer is definitely something to check out.