This is particularly appropriate for OS X and the major bundled apps such as Safari, and takes me back to Google and searching online collections of plugins. If there is no sign of the feature in the app’s preferences, or I cannot get a feature included there to work in the way that it should, my next quest may be to see whether there is another component which will add or fix it. See if it can be customised using a plugin etc. The hidden benefit from checking these out is that it ensures that the preference settings are updated on disk, which is helpful for step 5 below.Ĥ. Sometimes they reveal that the app in question will work the way that the user wants, if they are prepared to switch it to a different display or other mode. Many applications now have quite labyrinthine panes of preference settings, so they are my next port of call. Sometimes I will have gained some insightful clues which allow me to take shortcuts to the answer, but more often than not it is going to be a sequence of steps like 3-8 below. Sometimes a simple search brings me an instant solution in the first few hits, or it may convince me that a lot of users are complaining of the same problem, which has no known solution.īy this stage, I know whether I am on my own in trying to solve the problem, and have to work through the next steps. This is particularly useful when I am answering a question for publication, because a lot of my questioners have already asked in an Apple Support forum, sometimes elsewhere, so I can see what others have suggested. Here the trick lies in selecting the best search terms: if you are looking for information about the VoiceOver feature in the Accessibility pane in El Capitan, you need to combine those key terms, searching for something like “VoiceOver bug El Capitan”, for example. I then phrase searches using Google to locate recent support queries, reports, and any other material germane to the problem.
Macpilot 8 change font upgrade#
A recent question about failing to get App Store updates, for example, revealed that the user had not had any updates at all since their original upgrade to El Capitan: that upgrade was obviously broken from the start, and was repaired when they re-installed OS X.Ģ. So any user expecting to find it in the font menu in Pages or Word is out of luck.Īt this stage I usually check that the user and I are both referring to the latest version of the product. However, this time Apple has deliberately hidden San Francisco from font selection dialogs, as it does not want it used except for display purposes. Previously, users have expected to be able to use all their installed fonts, including the System Font, in their own documents. So the first step is always to establish that what the user thinks should happen is actually correct.Įl Capitan brought with it a new System Font, San Francisco.
So how would I tackle this, and how do I advise a user?įeatures change, user expectations do not always match features in reality, and there is plenty of scope for misunderstanding. It is not unusual to be asked to solve this sort of issue in an app which I neither have installed, nor could ever obtain: specialist high-end packages for maths, science, and architecture, for example. This is common in the tools and features which Apple bundles with OS X, in any additions to it, and applications.
One goes along the lines of: X used to work (or should work), but does not any more. Over the 25 years or so that I have been answering user questions in various magazines and other publications, there have been some common themes, almost template problems.
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