Fussy macs?

Another interesting wee glitch involving Mac apps. My pal Di and I write church reports for the local paper. Because we try to make them different from the average church report, we tend to concoct them on one of our wet walks or while recovering from same over a cuppa. She then mails them as an attachment to my Powerbook for me to forward to the paper. All very straightforward.

Well no, actually. Di uses Mail on her mac powerbook; I gave that up after the demise of my relationship with Demon and now use Googlemail on Firefox. But if I try to open the file - which I know fine well began life as a Word file - it appears as a Quicktime movie which then can't be opened. However, if I open the mail in Safari (and you'll recall I don't do this right now 'cos I can only write lower-case mails on Safari) it opens nae bother.

So, for all my friendly geeks out there: does mac only speak to mac these days?

Gremlins

Very strange happenings chez blethers this evening. It all began normally enough, with one of these wee windows from Firefox advising a new update, which I duly installed and found that the quick contacts box had vanished from my g-mail account page, along with the ability to chat. Had Firefox decided that such activities were a threat to my security? Next I tried downloading the updates to my OS, including the latest version of Safari. Now, Safari hadn't supported the chat facility till now, but, advised by a friendly guru that it now did, I went ahead.

No joy. No chat - just delayed messages received when I had been, apparently, offline. But the latest horror was that when I tried to compose a new mail (using gmail on Safari) I found that every time I pressed a "shift" key, the text migrated into the subject box. Daunted, I sent an entirely lower-case mail to a recipient who will think I've lost my few remaining marbles and relaunched Firefox.

And there it was. Chat and quick contacts miraculously restored. All well. I did nothing new - just relaunched.

Safari on t'other hand is still doing very strange things with the shift keys. Anyone else had this bother - or am I especially favoured?