MEC, Author at Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal

Pages 5 and Importing Styles

I’ve been experimenting with styles in Pages 5.1, and have finally figured out how to copy styles from one document to another. Figuring this out is important, because Pages 5.1 has no style import function, and to properly export an EPUB, for example, you really do want to have certain styles in your document from Apple’s EPUB Best Practices document (which, by the way, is still in Pages 4 format; it should be a template in Pages 5, but noooo…).

It seems there are a lot of little bugs in Pages 5.1’s styles, as the procedure I figured out demonstrates. First of all, the only way to get styles from one document to another is either to copy and paste the styled text from one document to another or to use the Format > Copy Style and Format > Paste Style commands, as I describe below. Note the same problems arise whether you merely copy the style and paste it or copy text containing the style and pasting that:

Select text containing the style you want in the source document.
Choose Format > Copy Style.
Switch to the document to which you want to add the style and select the text you want changed to the style you copied.
Choose Format > Paste Style. At this point, the style is pasted into the document, but may not show up in the Text Format inspector, so you may have to perform the following step.
Click elsewhere in the text then back in the styled text you pasted. The Text Format inspector should now show the pasted style’s name, but that style is still not in the list of styles, so you can’t use it elsewhere in the document.
Click the down triangle in the Styles popover. Notice that no style is checked in the list of styles, and the pasted style’s name does not appear.
In the popover, at the top, click the + to add a style. Now the new style name appears in the popover and can be used.

Pages 5.1 should really be categorized as a beta…

Very light…

And tasty, too.

The bait-and-switch battle for eyeballs

Forbes goes the extra mile in shoving an Apple reference into an article that is actually about something else completely:

The headline: “No iPhone Bump For September Retail Sales”

The first paragraph: “Even though U.S. shoppers raced out to buy the latest model of the iPhone, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates consumers kept an otherwise-tight grip on their wallets in anticipation of the dampening effect of the government shutdown.”

So it’s really an article about the U.S. retail sales report for September. But without an Apple mention, it’s just news, not linkbait.

If journalism is dying, Forbes is sticking the knife in, twisting it, and licking the blood off of it…

Syncing Vinny with TBS

Vin Scully is doing the play-by-play announcing for the National League Championship Series on the radio. The series is being telecast by TBS, which has its own announcers. They aren’t national treasures like Vin Scully is.

A billion years ago, in the Analog Age, I would have listened to Vinny on the radio while watching the TV with the sound off. But I live in a place with very bad over-the-air radio reception, so that’s not possible. However, I do have the MLB app on my iPhone, and that does provide my local radio feed (KLAC). Problem solved?

Not quite. The MLB audio feed can be delayed anywhere from 6 to 20 seconds behind the TV broadcast. Luckily, my cable box is a DVR: if I pause the live feed for just as long as the MLB app lag, I can sync the video and the audio.

Dodgers playing for the pennant and Vinny on the radio. Some things are timeless.

Reading the Writing on the Wall(paper)

With the release of iOS 7, I’ve been hearing lots of muttering about how hard the home screens are to read with new system font (a variant of Helvetica Neue). While I do agree that the new font is slender and not particularly friendly to older eyes, I suspect much of the problem has to do with the wallpapers that people are putting on their home screens.

Here’s the thing: If you choose a bright, highly textured wallpaper image, like the image shown here, you’ll have a real problem.

But, if you choose or create a wallpaper image that is relatively dark with few or no highlights, like this one here, the icon labels are much easier to read, and the color bleed-through in Notification Center and Control Center is much reduced.

What I learned in the TWC-CBS war

Time Warner Cable and CBS are having a spat over pricing, and, as a result, no CBS channels are currently available on Time Warner Cable in my community. CBS, to retaliate, has decided to block access to CBS Web sites from anyone who uses Time Warner as an ISP—a bizarre attempt to win hearts and minds by attacking non-combatants in the struggle.

This war of media predators should not affect me very much, however, but it does mean that I was unable to watch the premiere of the retooled CBS TV series “Unforgettable” last night. This show, in its original incarnation, was not a particular favorite of mine—I think I’ve seen about four episodes—but I was curious about the changes the producers were going to make to it in an attempt to resurrect the previously cancelled series. (It is not unheard of for a failing or flailing TV series to be, as the Firesign Theatre put it, returned for regrooving, and I always find it instructive to see what choices TV producers make in their attempts to revivify shows that have failed.)

As luck would have it, though, the show was available for purchase from iTunes, and, on a lark, I decided to buy the premiere and watch it on my Apple TV 2, something I have never done before (I use my Apple TV quite a bit, but not for purchasing TV episodes). I was impressed: not with the show itself (which was, as I more or less expected, not particularly superior to previous episodes), but with the technology. Although my Apple TV is of the previous generation, capable of only providing 720p resolution instead of the 1080p resolution that current models provide, the video was distinctly sharper than the 1080i feed that I get from Time Warner Cable. What’s more, the purchase process was painless, the download was playable within moments, and was accessible well before the west coast air-time of the show. Even better, the show is available for me to redownload from Apple’s cloud service any time I like on any of my Apple devices, so I don’t have to worry about backing it up, either, or taking up storage space on my Mac.

My takeaway lesson? Time Warner’s cable service technically sucks, and I need to reconsider whether or not I wish to continue as a TWC subscriber. If those two media giants had not gone to war, I may not have discovered that.

Things to avoid when planning a dinner party

Honestly, I’m not THAT depressed…

Nonetheless, I did spend part of my weekend composing suicide notes for the time-challenged self-annihilator.

* Sorry to leave you such a mess. But you have my word that I won’t do it again!
* Don’t be so surprised — You know how impatient I was!
* Turn out the light, and then, turn out the light.
* Yes, it _was_ all your fault!
* Hey, look! I finally found the _Undo_ command!
* If you _must_ throw dead stuff on my grave, don’t throw flowers. Throw bacon!
* At least Death is willing to accept me for who I am.
* Hah! Didn’t think you’d have to write that eulogy so soon, did you?
* Yes, I did this just so you’d have to take that black suit to the dry cleaners.
* Can you hear me now?

What Siri Won’t Do But Should

Siri continues to be a work-in-progress, and though it is useful, it still has surprising gaps. For example, Siri should know basic information about what you have on your iOS device, if not in 3rd party apps, surely in Apple-supplied ones—especially those apps that function as media libraries.

But ask Siri how many books you have in your iBooks library, and Siri instead offers a suggestion that definitely won’t work.

Siri can’t count books in iBooks, even when iBooks is open.

Or ask Siri to open a folder on one of your home pages, and, although it can open apps just fine, folders are beyond it.

And don’t ask the poor thing to count your songs in the Music app.

I’d love it if Siri could answer questions about the device on which it runs. That can’t be too hard, can it?

The Social Curmudgeon

Posted on Twitter today: When Twitter emails me with suggestions for whom to follow, I want to write back, “I’ll do my OWN stalking, thank you!!”

Posted on Facebook today: Facebook keeps encouraging me for my contacts in order to add more friends. It’s like a tar pit with a megaphone asking for more victims: “Toss me another mastodon: I’m STILL HUNGRY!!”

Posted on Google+ today: When Google+ encourages me to add more people to my circles, I want to shout back, “Who the hell do you think I am? Dante!?!?”