My Top 6 OS X Pre Mavericks Bug Fixes

I can't wait until the autumn when OS X Mavericks arrives (hopefully!). From what I've seen and read so far, the highlights for me are :

• Proper multi-display handling (why so long?)
• Searchable tags in Finder (again why so long?)
• Improved notification support (especially across devices)
• iCloud Keychain (with reservations)

But before we get too excited about these 'innovations' (let's face it these aren't genuine innovations, they are integrated improvements which in many cases are already available through 3rd party software (e.g. Tags, 1Password), I hope Apple have gone through the support logs, bug reports and forums, although the latter may be a misguided hope) to find out what still needs fixing after multiple incarnations of OS X.

I have six areas I've singled out for attention. They aren't real show stoppers but they are annoying because of their longevity, and the fact that they do appear to affect thousands of users. So here are my top six bugbears (in no significant order)

iTunes / iMatch

I love iMatch. My music library alone has over 27,000 songs in it, which is clearly impossible to keep on anything other than a Mac with a 250Gb drive, and certainly not on any iOS devices. Even my 160Gb iPod classic has already gone overdrawn (unless you listen to nothing but 3 minute pop songs the estimate of 40,000 songs in your pocket is a clear overestimate). But my  number one bug with iMatch is the way that play counts get screwed up everytime iMatch weaves its magic. Last played dates remain intact but play counts are re-zeroed. This seems to happen pretty much at random - I can't see any patterns. Sometimes 100 songs are affected, sometimes it's as many as 17,000. But many of my smartlists use play counts and I have to rely on Doug's Apple Scripts for iTunes to fix the problem to make these smart lists work properly. OK, it's not mission critical, but as a former programmer I can't believe this is anything more than a five minute fix.

Another issue I have with iTunes is that I'd like to see the same viewing options in the Home Sharing that I have in the dedicated library support, specifically regarding playlists. I think this is an omission rather than a bug, but I'd like to see my home share playlists as something more than a plain list.

Final iTunes gripe is the amount of time it takes to check the integrity of the iTunes library after a crash or improper exit. Please find a way to speed this up - it can take 10 minutes or so on a really large library, and I want to listen to my music now!

Mac App Store

I've documented the problem with the Mac App Store in a previous post, but this bug is still lurking and it would appear to be due to Apple linking the internal store data to the user's spotlight index. So, when the spotlight index gets corrupted, for whatever reason, the Mac App Store can't work out which apps are installed, which need updating or which new apps should be installed. If Apple used a separate index for the Mac App Store app rather than relying on spotlight I would expect this bug to disappear. Again, this situation can usually be resolved by rebuilding the spotlight index, but this can take hours, and the user shouldn't have to understand how this works in order to be able to update their apps.

Time Machine

There are a few issues that regularly occur with Time Machine backups but I'm guessing this is not an easy problem to fix. Nevertheless, I would argue that anything to do with backing up your system can be classed as mission critical and as such I would urge Apple to look closely at some of the more common problems. My two favourites ("?"!!) are "Time Machine Disk cannot be found" and "Sparse.bundle already in use".

In both cases, for me at least, rebooting the Time Capsule (or sometimes the modem/router) will almost always fix the problem, but takes down the system at the same time since the TC device is my wireless router.

Integrity of Time Machine backups is paramount and while the backup and restore system usually works perfectly, there are enough glitches for me not to have complete confidence that my systems are 100% safe without taking additional steps like regularly cloning disks.

Networking

There's a well reported issue with network access being lost when a Mac goes to sleep. Apparently Apple are aware of some significant problems in this space and the last couple of 10.8.x betas have asked developers to look out for changes in this area. It seems a shame that Apple have included the 'power nap' feature in Mountain Lion but many people can't take advantage of it since they have no network once the machine is asleep. Maybe this will be fixed in the forthcoming 10.8.5 release - fingers and ethernet cables crossed! At present I'm getting round the problem by using a 3rd party app called Sleepless but this comes with a potential overheating health warning (especially in this hot weather!).

AirPlay

I've also documented AirPlay problems on this blog in the past. AirPlay is one of those funny things - it either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, it just seems a matter of starting everything again. Some improved diagnostics would be really helpful (unlike Error -1500 …) if nothing else.

Safari

This is a relatively new issue that I've noticed where sometimes Safari just partially freezes. The menu works, scrolling works, selecting tabs works but noe of the controls on a page work. Buttons can't be pressed, input fields can't be filled. This only appears to be on certain sites - I have most problems with the Amazon login page. The only fix I have to date is to restart Safari.


As I've indicated, none of these problems is without a work around, and none are that critical (exception possibly being Time Machine). But they do cause interruptions, they force me to spend time fixing them when I could be doing something more productive - and overall they detract from the whole Apple OS X experience, where stuff just works!

Any specific bugs you'd like to see fixed before Mavericks? Drop me a note via the comments or @allygill on Twitter so we can compare notes.

Enjoy the summer!

Silence Is Golden - Update

Almost immediately after posting my last article, iTunes stopped sending AirPlay signals to my Airport Express device. I felt a bit like the Apple ecosystem had become a petty minded sentient being who was taking the mickey. Once again I went through each and every one of the possible fixes I have accumulated over the past few weeks but to no avail. Nothing I tried seemed to work.

But then a bit of serendipity took place. I recently downloaded a small menu bar utility called Output (available from the Mac App Store - 69p) which simply allows you to easily select input/output devices from a drop down list of available devices. I regularly swap output devices so this is a godsend saving the hassle of having to either go into the System Preferences or remember to hit the Alt button when selecting the volume icon.

Output showed the Airport Express as one of the available output devices and when I selected it, lo and behold, iTunes played out through the stereo system downstairs. It's not true Airplay since you can only select a single output device at a time, but it demonstrated that my system was actually OK and that it was most likely an iTunes issue.

Once I'd established that the problem appeared to be an iTunes bug, it meant I could stop spending (wasting?) hours trying to fix it if it recurred. As if by magic, shortly after that, the problem resolved itself, and then later in May a new minor version of iTunes appeared (11.0.3) and I've not seen the problem since.

Has iTunes been fixed? No clues from Apple in that respect in the release notes. Which is another reason for disliking some of Apple's reluctance to be more open about its software. We never get to see whether bugs have been addressed (and potentially fixed for eternity), or whether they've just disappeared for a while but may reappear in the future. As a former developer, I've always tried to be open about known bugs which have been fixed, whilst trying to be clear that sometimes the little beggars will show up again. This helps prevent people from suing you, and it's a stance I wish more big companies would take - including Apple!

Silence Is Not Golden

Most people who know me understand that I am something of an Apple geek. The Apple Harvest ecosystem is almost entirely Apple based. The bits that aren't are mainly there because Apple doesn't make them, or because of necessities like work (yup I have to use a horrible old Lenovo Thinkpad for my current contract). I do most of my own work on the new 27" 2.9GHz i5 iMac with 24Gb of RAM and the 3Tb Fusion disk. Outside base I use a combination of my 2 year old 13" MacBook Air and a 3rd generation iPad, my iPad Mini and of course an iPhone 5. The network is glued together from a Virgin Superhub in modem mode, with the wireless network driven from a 3Tb Time Capsule, and extended across the house through an Airport Extreme. There are a couple of Apple TVs and a new style Airport Express box completes the multimedia set-up with an AirPlay™ link to my stereo system.

99% of the time I consider myself to be a very happy bunny. My cable based broadband connection is rated at 100Mbps (soon to be upgraded to 120Mbps) and by using the 5GHz wireless channels I can get wireless transfer rates of unto 40Mbps. And for 99% of the time everything works as I expect it to.

The remaining 1% of the time I'm unhappy because of the silly little things that occasionally go wrong and divert me from what I want to be doing to what I have to do to fix them. Because that's one of my problems - I can't live with a system that isn't working the way it's supposed to! I'm a little tinkerer!

My most recent bugbear has been with Apple's AirPlay™ system. Ever since I bought my first Airport Express I've been using AirPlay to hook into my stereo system which lives downstairs from the main Apple Harvest office. Over a multitude of system configurations it has worked faultlessly. Until just recently when the iMac refused to connect to the Airport Express. The MBA could connect, as could all the iOS devices, and everything could connect with the Philips Fidelio AirPlay speaker in my bedroom. And everything connected OK with the Apple TVs in the house. So AirPlay itself didn't seem to be the problem.

There are hundreds of similar problems mentioned in the Apple support forums, but not many are fully resolved. I spent a couple of hours rebooting different parts of the system with no success before trying that catchall of solutions - repair disk permissions - which of course worked…! For a few days…

A week later the same problem manifested itself so naturally my first inclination was to repeat the previously successful process. Nada. Rebooted all the systems. Nada. Scratched head and returned to Apple support forums. A few folk appear to have resolved the problem by turning off IPv6 protocol settings but these were already switched off. So, unaware that I had made any system changes, I gave up trying to fix the problem and went for a beer having wasted most of the morning. Later that afternoon I had to do a reboot on the iMac, and for some reason decided to see if AirPlay would connect this time. Of course it did, and has now continued to work as expected for ten days during which time there have been several more reboots to one or more parts to the system.

And I still have no understanding of the root cause or how to fix the problem again in the future.

My second big problem recently has been with the 3rd generation iPad. I bought this last July and it has been a stellar performer, far exceeding the original iPad which I still consider to have been the greatest disruptive technology to have hit the consumer computing industry in my lifetime. However, after upgrading to iOS 6.1.2 I had nothing but problems. These included:

• iPad went into recovery mode. Then took 5 attempts to recovery from a previous backup - repeatedly returning to recovery mode during restore
• When connected to iMac it often only displayed the "Welcome to Your New iPad" screen 
• Random video glitches usually resulting in reboot
• Video glitches in folders
• Intermittent app updates - sometimes waiting for 24 hours or longer. Almost always required reboot
• Could not install iOS 6..1.3 - error downloading
• Last restore from backup took 3 days to complete
• Generating much more heat than before (on both battery/mains)
• Random reboots when launching apps
• Random reboots using apps
• Sometimes took 4+ attempts to launch apps - usually requires reboot
• 8 apps went into update mode (waiting) - could not remove them, even by removal and reinstall from iTunes 
• Restarts about 10 times each day

In other words the machine became pretty much unusable. The only solution was to make an appointment with the genius bar which I duly did. However, I have quite a trek to get to the nearest Apple Store so I decided to have one last go at fixing the problem myself. I managed to get the iPad connected to my MBA, did a backup to computer and to the cloud and wiped it. I then did a clean restore onto the "new" iPad which now allowed me to install iOS 6.1.3 and within a couple of hours all was well. There are still a few random reboots and app issues, but nothing like the problems before.

But once again, I have no explanation as to what happened or why. Whether it was a corrupt iOS 6.1.2 installation or not, I shall never know. I'm just grateful to have my favourite toy back up and running!

Ultimately, the whole point of this post is that while Apple kit and software generally works brilliantly, it's the occasional time when it doesn't that drives us crazy - because it's gone outside the normal parameters of tolerance that we have become so used to. We don't (well I don't) expect Wintel systems to last a day without some grief so this becomes the norm. We expect Apple systems to last for weeks or months on end, and even if they don't, there are usually relatively trivial fixes that are easy apply.

It's said that Apple don't monitor the support forums, but I would like to think that one day they may at least put triggers in place so that when a discussion hits a certain number of pages that someone in the company would look into the problem and do something about it, or at the very least acknowledge the problem. Even the most loyal Apple supporter wants to know that someone in the corporation has one ear open to the occasional plight of the customer, and in this area of customer service, silence is not golden.