Your source for indispensable Apple and Macintosh news, reviews, tips, and commentary since 1990.

 

Track Changes Dates Reset on Save As in Word 2008

If you regularly use the Save As feature to create new drafts while working in Word 2008, you might notice that with Track Changes enabled, previously time-stamped comments and edits have their times reset to the Save As date and time. Work around this by sticking with your original file, but using Save As (or just File > Duplicate in the Finder) to make backup copies.

Written by Jeff Carlson

 
 

MobileMe Mail and Gmail Go Down Simultaneously

For a period of several hours on 11-Aug-08, both MobileMe Mail and Google's Gmail were inaccessible for many users, although Gmail reportedly remained accessible for those retrieving email via IMAP and a standalone email client. MobileMe's outage was not accompanied by any acknowledgment of the problem on the status blog, and after a few hours, access returned. If Apple is going to be serious about providing a status blog, they should at least put the effort into updating it promptly (see "MobileMe Status Page Promises Updates, But Tone Rings Flat," 2008-07-26). We'll see if Google provides any more explanation than Apple when the dust settles.




Other MobileMe and Google services were unaffected, as far as I've seen, but it's distressing that MobileMe continues to suffer outages even after Apple claimed to have fixed the initial problems after the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition. Steve Jobs dissected the MobileMe launch in an internal email message, coming to essentially the same conclusions as Glenn Fleishman did in "Apple Claims MobileMe Mail Fully Restored" (2008-07-30).

I haven't tracked Gmail outages separately, but for the most part, I haven't heard complaints about frequent problems. Although there are no guarantees with any email service (heck, my server has been inaccessible for my few local users every so often too), people relying on email for mission-critical services would do well to maintain alternate accounts in case of trouble.

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