Perhaps its because I generally don't use my Mac to send faxes with, but this one's becoming irritating, because its an example of bad programming.
The standard way to send a fax on a mac is to pull up the print dialog (curley-P), then select the "Fax PDF" option (an option under the PDF button in the lower left).
In the dialog box that then appears, the first line is where you enter the destination fax number.
Go ahead and try it. Did it "helpfully" go to your address book and force an entry in there that changed what you were typing?
This is no accident, or one-off wierdness: the behavior is documented in Apple Article ID: 302229 ("Mac OS X 10.4: Letters may be unexpectedly added to fax numbers")
And when you read that, you'll quickly realize that the "Solution" on Apple's support pages isn't really a solution - - its a work-around to a programming design flaw in the UI.
The programming flaw is that at no time should the "intelligence" of a field-completion routine EVER change the information that the user entered.
Blackberry gets this right; why can't Apple. Argh.
YMMV, but I would think that any reasonably intelligent auto-complete routine would recognize that in a fax field, if the first character entered is a number, the User's trying to enter a new number - - and is not looking for a name in their address book. As such, the auto-complete should stay the Bleep! out of the way.
If you agree, then feel free to add your squeak to the Apple Wheel to get this flaw fixed on 10.4.5. You can put in feedback on the Support article by going here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302229
...and then clicking the appropriate "not helpful" link, and enumerating the above in your own words.
-hh
The standard way to send a fax on a mac is to pull up the print dialog (curley-P), then select the "Fax PDF" option (an option under the PDF button in the lower left).
In the dialog box that then appears, the first line is where you enter the destination fax number.
Go ahead and try it. Did it "helpfully" go to your address book and force an entry in there that changed what you were typing?
This is no accident, or one-off wierdness: the behavior is documented in Apple Article ID: 302229 ("Mac OS X 10.4: Letters may be unexpectedly added to fax numbers")
And when you read that, you'll quickly realize that the "Solution" on Apple's support pages isn't really a solution - - its a work-around to a programming design flaw in the UI.
The programming flaw is that at no time should the "intelligence" of a field-completion routine EVER change the information that the user entered.
Blackberry gets this right; why can't Apple. Argh.
YMMV, but I would think that any reasonably intelligent auto-complete routine would recognize that in a fax field, if the first character entered is a number, the User's trying to enter a new number - - and is not looking for a name in their address book. As such, the auto-complete should stay the Bleep! out of the way.
If you agree, then feel free to add your squeak to the Apple Wheel to get this flaw fixed on 10.4.5. You can put in feedback on the Support article by going here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302229
...and then clicking the appropriate "not helpful" link, and enumerating the above in your own words.
-hh