Babble On

Mac OS X 10.5.3 is now available on auto update. I am about to reboot and install, but before I do will cross my fingers and hope that between this and the recent Office 2008 service pack, the annoying issue with Spaces and Office is now resolved.  Let’s find out…

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…that’ll be a resounding NO then. It just doesn’t work - especially if you have multiple Office windows open (for example, Word in addition to its Formatting Pane). As you move from Space to Space, windows jump around all over the place, either apparently following you or running away from you, resulting in a pretty dismal experience.

Also, Spaces in general doesn’t seem particularly polished to me. When I leave one Space for another, do a bit of work and then head back to my original Space, I want it laid out exactly as it was when I left it. This is quite often not the case, however: if, say, I have Finder windows open on multiple Spaces, clicking any of them will bring them all to the foreground - even those on the other Spaces. I also encountered other minor niggles whereby certain dialog boxes (if that’s what they’re called in the Mac world) would vanish behind other windows after a simple flick between Spaces with no other interaction with the OS.

So it seems that Spaces still cause more problems than they solve for Office 2008 users, and perhaps have a few issues that need ironing out in any case, which is why I am leaving them disabled until a glorious future date.

To find the mac address of your MacBook’s wireless interface:

1. Open up Network Preferences
2. Select AirPort and click the Advanced… button
3. The mac address will then be listed as AirPort ID

Having recently moved from the world of Windows, and even more recently picked up a 2nd Mac, and then even more recently again donated the original Mac to a relative, I hit upon the problem of both Macs having the same name. Of course the network address of each computer was different - one had a “-2″ appended to it, which I wasn’t particularly fond of.

Anyway, as usual, this turns out to be very easy to remedy:

1. Open up System Preferences
2. Under Internet & Network, click the Sharing icon
3. At this point you can simply edit the computer name
4. Use the Edit button to make changes to the network address (if still necessary)

Et voila!