Ever meet two kids who were great by themselves, but became absolute terrors when you put them together?

That’s how I feel about Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Spaces feature. Spaces are awesome, and Office 2008 is far better than the 2004 version, but they both have a lot of growing up to do.

Other apps (such as Firefox) have had trouble adapting to Spaces, but they’re slowly coming around as updates are released. Microsoft had better get us an update, and quick. Here’s why.

I haven’t used PowerPoint enough to know if it’s a problem, and Entourage seems very well-behaved, but Word and Excel documents never seem to stay in the same window.

I have Word set to open in Space 1, and Excel in Space 4 (in a 3×3 grid of 9 Spaces, like this):

I switch between apps using CMD+TAB, which changes spaces if needed to show me the app I select. Without warning, Word or Excel documents will randomly move to another Space, usually #2 or #5. #5 is the center of the Spaces layout, where I keep Firefox and spend most of my time. Oddly, though, only one window will move. Worse, it will hide behind other open windows, even those I haven’t switched to in a long time. Often, just one Word document will find a new place to hide, or my Excel spreadsheet will move to another space, yet all the toolbars will remain in Space 4 (or vice-versa - the toolbars move and the document stays put).

So far, the best way I’ve found to deal with this is to activate hot corners for both Exposé and Spaces. To find my missing window, I activate the Spaces view (shown in the screenshot above), then go to the hot corner for Exposé. This Exposés the windows from within the Spaces view, so you can see every window open in every space (though they’re very small thumbnails if you have a lot open).

(image via Wikimedia Commons)

Click and drag an app into the correct Space, then exit Spaces view, and you’re done. Until it happens again.

Microsoft, it’d be awesome if you fixed this problem so we don’t have to resort to search-and-rescue like this.

I’m still in the stone age of Aperture 1.5, and I have about 60 gigs of photos on my MacBook Pro. Clearly, this is a problem since the hard drive is only 120 gigs.

A few weeks ago, I purchased a WD Passport 250 GB (actually more like 230 GB) USB hard drive from Amazon, and today I moved my photos from 1998 to 2003 - totaling about 10 gigs - onto this hard drive.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to do this, but this blog post on moving Aperture projects informed me that I could simply drag the project file into a new location - in this case, a Finder window for my external hard drive.

I did notice a rather annoying bug when exporting from Aperture: hitting the space bar in any other program (e.g. Firefox) popped up the information window in Finder for the file I was currently exporting. So much for multi-tasking.

Also of interest is the relative size of each year’s photo collection:

And this is before I got my 6MP Nikon D70s DSLR.

Let’s hope we continue to get better and better ways to store and manage photos. Aperture is a decent system, but I wonder if it’ll continue to scale at the necessary rate.

I’m using Office 2004 on my MacBook Pro and am finding it a decent, though far from excellent, product. Entourage in particular seems to need work, so I’m considering upgrading to 2008. PowerPoint 2008 is significantly better on the MacBook Pro, as it’s the first version (to my knowledge) in which you can view different things on your laptop screen and the projector (for example, so you can see your notes on your screen, but only the slides show up on the projector).

Today in the Apple Store for Education, I found this product listing for Office 2008:

Huh?

I guess all you need for Office 2008 is Office 2008. Nice.

Incidentally, the “home and student edition” does not support Exchange Server, which is something I need, so I’ll be paying the full price despite being an education user.

When waking my MBP from sleep mode, I noticed that the cursor would often be extremely slow and jumpy, to the point that it was nearly unusable. A reboot was the only way to fix it. This thread on the Apple forums hinted that iStat Pro, the popular performance statistics widget for OS X, may have been causing the problem.

I disabled iStat Pro and had no problems for weeks. Problem solved.

On a lark, I re-enabled iStat Pro yesterday, and sure enough, the problem returned. While this isn’t a scientific test, it’s as close as I’m going to get to solid evidence that iStat Pro is causing the slow cursor problem on Leopard.

Update 5/10/08: After a giving the iStat Pro gurus a few months to fix this, I decided to try again. I’ve been running the latest version of iStat Pro for a few weeks, and this problem appears to be gone.

The duo that announced the AirMail sleeve for the new MacBook Air were certainly quick out the gate, announcing their product within days of the Stevenote at which the MBA was announced.

Being a fully converted fanboy, I ordered both the MBA (first looks) and the AirMail sleeve right away. The MBA arrived quickly, but the AirMail took a bit longer. It’s here now, so I thought I’d share some thoughts.

First, like the MBA, the AirMail sleeve is very, very thin. It’s made of supple vinyl, lined with a thin fleece. The FAQ on Manila Mac’s website claims that the fleece is “thick… [and] will protect your laptop from any cosmetic damage and smudges, and keep it safe from bumps in daily use.”

I think this is a bit of a stretch; any situation that would’ve caused real damage to the MBA’s guts would still cause said damage if it were in this case. However, as claimed, it is nice for keeping scratches and incidental damage from affecting the geek-chic appeal of the MBA.

As you can see from the first picture, the MBA in the AirMail sleeve is still thinner than a MacBook Pro.

The buttons are plastic, which was a bit of a surprise, but it comes with a spare as well as some extra string, should there be a problem with the closure hardware. Plus, the sticker (easily removed) is pretty nifty, and they even wrote WebbleYou on it to prove that these pics are original (I’m sure that’s what they had in mind).

The sleeve came with a letter apologizing for the delay and moaning about how difficult it was to get into light manufacturing on the spur of the moment. Yeah, that’s why most of us don’t do that (they’re backordered again, by the way).

At any rate, it’s a decent sleeve, and would be a good choice if you either weren’t planning to travel much with your MBA or if you have a secondary case (e.g. built into your bag) that provides all the protection you need.

I often find that my MacBook Pro sleeps and wakes for dozens of cycles without needing a full reboot. Sometimes, though, it gets sluggish and needs a reboot.

If you’d like to know how long it’s been since your last reboot, simply open Terminal and type the command

and hit enter. This will display the amount of time since your last reboot.

Note: this includes time your computer has been asleep, so it’s not a measure of how long the computer has been on and active, just a measure of how long it’s been, in real hours, since you last turned on or rebooted the computer.

As a heavy user of Excel, I was dismayed when I found no obvious replacement for my beloved F2 key, which in the Windows version of Excel allows you to edit the contents of the currently selected cell without using the mouse.

It appeared that my only option was double-clicking the cell or clicking in the formula editing toolbar, but some deeper digging revealed that the shortcut for edit cell in Excel (2004) for Mac is ctrl+u.

Since just about every website has some type of login system now, it’s helpful that Firefox remembers recently-typed usernames and other information you type in text boxes. However, if you want to get rid of something (for example, your friend’s username from last time he used your computer) so you have fewer items to choose from in the dropdown list, it’s nice to be able to delete them, too.

For example, I often use [my.name]+test@gmail.com for secondary logins to sites with which I already have an account using my email address. Over time, these build up, and pretty soon it’s hard to find my actual email address in the dropdown list.

To delete items from a text box’s autocomplete suggestions, scroll down to it and hit shift+delete.