About the recent trend in ambiguous Macintosh application names
By Jaems • Jun 4th, 2008 • Category: TutorialsPages, Numbers, Mail, Preview. I am waiting for the Safari update called “Browser”; I know it will happen. The problem is that finding help online is next to impossible. Check out the following hypothetical search:
As you can see, not a single of the top 5 results had anything to do with the application called “Pages”. At least not directly. The following is a search that I actually did. In other words: not hypothetical.
This was to change the American standard thousand separator (100,000) to a period (used in many other countries: 100.000) in the Macintosh spreadsheet program, ambiguously known as “Numbers”. On top of the fact that a Google search with the word “Numbers” is basically useless, it turns out that it might not even be possible to change that parameter. There is a new bug (?) in OS 10.4 and 10.5 that has eliminated this preference in the International pane (see below):
Where is the button to customize the currency and number format? It was there in OS 10.3!
Where can I change that preference? The customize button is missing. Even if this bug is corrected, I am still unsure if I can change it on on application to application basis (which is what I would like to do, as an American citizen living in Europe)
Let’s try a similar search with the competitor:
Now I am not saying that Windows is perfect (their flagship program is, after all, called “Word”) but at least I could easily find an answer. And by George, it is actually possible to easily change the thousands separator in Microsoft Excel! The recent trend in stripped-down commercial Macintosh applications worries me. The iLife and iWork suites are particularly troublesome in this regard. Perhaps it is due to the fact that they are entry level applications, but I would not consider things like thousands separators and reversing a video (impossible in iMovie ‘08) to be advanced techniques that demand a paid upgrade to pro level applications.
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You can try appending “.app” to the application name, which sometimes helps. (“.app” is the hidden bundle suffix for applications)
I agree with the sentiment, though. It’s also a problem with the “MacBook” and “MacBook Pro” names. You can’t search for “MacBook” (meaning the plastic machines) without also getting “MacBook Pro” hits.
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