Mavericks Woes - Tracking Down the TrueSuite Culprit

Doggone - it's happened again! I was working on the MacBook Air yesterday morning and I had to restart the computer after installing an update but the machine went straight into its infinite reboot mode. I didn't even bother messing about this time - I just went ahead and restored from the previous Time Machine backup taken about 30 minutes previously.

Actually, that's not quite true. I did unplug everything except the mains cable - a step that I had previously neglected to perform when the problem first occurred. But that didn't make any difference.

However, I do think I may have found the culprit...Only time will prove the hypothesis correct, but it seems that the TrueSuite fingerprint recognition software may be responsible for the bad behaviour. Which is really rather ironic, since Apple bought Authentec - the original developers - about a year ago. [For more info about TrueSuite and fingerprint recognition on the Mac, I wrote about it in this post in July 2013]

I had come across some horror stories on the web about Mavericks not playing well with TrueSuite - that may be a bit of an understatement - users were reporting that they couldn't actually logon after installing Mavericks without uninstalling TrueSuite first - regardless of whether a fingerprint scanner was physically present. The general consensus has been to remove TrueSuite before even attempting to install Mavericks.

Whilst I never suffered the problem of being unable to login following a power-up, I did find that I couldn't log out and log back in without a full restart. So, yesterday morning, as I was doing some general housekeeping, I decided to remove TrueSuite using the appropriate uninstall programme. And the next thing I knew was that the machine would no longer reboot.

While I was restoring the system I started doing some more investigation along these lines and lo and behold, many users were reporting that if you tried to uninstall TrueSuite on a 10.9.x Mac it would not reboot and a restore would be required. In fact the safest thing to do was to restore to a Mountain Lion version, uninstall TrueSuite and THEN upgrade to Mavericks. Now you tell me!! After I've bricked two machines, one of them twice!

In fact, Apple have now published a work around for the problem which doesn't involve removing TrueSuite from a Mavericks machine. All that's required is to disable "Fingerprint Log On" from within TrueSuite. [December 12, 2013]

In summary:

• if you have TrueSuite installed and haven't yet upgraded to Mavericks, uninstall TrueSuite now, as this is the safest thing to do
• if you've already installed Mavericks, do not attempt to uninstall TrueSuite but disable the "Fingerprint Log On" option in the settings
• make sure you have a recent backup of your system whatever else you do

Other functionality within TrueSuite may or may not be working as expected under Mavericks, I've not had time to investigate properly yet. Don't take anything for granted though, and sadly don't expect your existing fingerprint scanner to work on a Mac through newer releases of OS X.

If you've suffered this or similar problems with TrueSuite under Mavericks, please let me know - there seems to be a lot of folk in the same predicament and it would be good to let Apple know that TrueSuite users are suffering and back it up with hard evidence.

Finally, as we head into the last full week before Christmas, my current Number 1 favourite game for the iPad is The Room Two. It's just as beautiful and evocative as its predecessor and great for casual gamers and puzzle solvers like me. And it's a snip at £2.99!

Happy Christmas everyone, and see you in the New Year!

Mavericks Woes - A Real Conundrum

Two weekends ago I had to return back to Apple Harvest HQ from my girlfriend's house to sort a few things out and to pick up some forgotten bits and pieces.

On the Sunday morning I booted up the MacBook Air for the first time since I'd arrived since I'd been using the iMac exclusively over the course of the weekend. Well, I tried to boot it up but it wasn't having any of it. The Apple logo would appear, then the start-up chime would sound and the spinning gear wheel would start, all as normal. Then the screen would flicker and the gear wheel would change appearance slightly before stopping completely. The screen would then flicker again, changing colour slightly, the wheel would spin a bit more and so on. But it wouldn't boot.

I tried rebooting in safe mode and although the safe mode progress bar would appear the result was the same. Boot failure. For the next hour, I tried every trick in the book. I cleared the PRAM, SMC, ran the internal diagnostics (no issues!), reinstalled Mavericks through booting up in recovery mode but nothing worked. The disk utility checks also indicated that the flash drive was OK. I had been thinking the worst - that this was a major hardware failure and was likely to be very expensive (although the MBA is still covered by Apple Care until next July) - but if the logic board had failed, or the video was knackered, then I wouldn't have been able to run any of the utilities or reinstall the OS.

I had a Time Machine backup from the previous Thursday so I decided to restore this as a last resort. It worked, and I've not had any problems since.

This last weekend I went back to HQ again to check on things. I've been remotely connected to the iMac via Slink but noticed that one or two updates had failed, so I decided to reboot the machine and try again. And guess what...Yes, exactly the same scenario as with the MBA. Complete boot failure under every attempt. The only difference on this occasion was that under the dual screen set-up, the extended display flickered rather than the main iMac display.

In this instance I was unable to fix the iMac - for some reason, Time Machine has not been backing up to the 3Tb Time Capsule for the last month so my most recent backup available was pre-Mavericks. However, I did clone the disk as a precaution should I lose the connection to the iMac from Mel's house. Sadly I didn't have it with me this weekend, and I also ran out of time, so I'm hoping that a clean install of Mavericks and a restore of the cloned disk will end up getting me the right result, namely a fully restored iMac.

How extraordinary that two different machines, with completely different configurations should fail in exactly the same way within a fortnight of each other. Coincidence? I doubt it, but I'm stumped as to the root cause. I can only guess that some installation or update of something has caused it - but it's now impossible to narrow it down. I've not seen the message boards or forums awash with this specific problem, although I have seen some similar instances, but no pain free solutions or root causes.

So, until I get home next week, there's nothing I can do except sit and wait, and hope that my proposed fix will work - note to self...remember to take the clone disk home and not write over it in the meantime!!!!!

Dear Apple Santa...

It's only three and a bit weeks until Christmas, and I have been very good this year. I've written lots of Apple Harvest posts and increased the number of people viewing the blog. I've supported lots of independent developers by buying their software, and lots of hardware manufacturers by buying their shiny kit.

So here's what I'd like you to do for Christmas:

• Fix the Displaylink problems that have caused so many people with USB monitors so much trouble when they upgraded to Mavericks. This won't help me, because I've given up and bought a new 24" monitor and donated the USB monitor to my girlfriend to use at home with her Wintel work laptop
• Fix iTunes match so that play counts work. I know this is an old one, but for goodness sake, it's been going on for far too long
• Find a way to turn off the worthless warnings on iOS devices when using non-Apple Lightning connectors. So far, all the non-Apple cables and adaptors I've bought work just fine - as do all the non-supported devices
• Stop fiddling about with Mail, especially when you make Mail add-ins stop working
• Update the Apple Thunderbolt display and bring it into the 21st century with some USB 3.0 ports (oh, and drop the price to something resembling a monitor rather than an iMac!)
• Let me change the volume of the start-up tone on my MacBook Air or even mute it completely

You see, I'm not greedy. Most of these things won't take much effort but they'd bring pleasure to thousands of Mac users, including me.

So thank you and Merry Christmas in advance, Apple Santa! Ho, ho, ho!

My Top 6 OS X Pre Mavericks Bug Fixes - Revisited

Back in July this year I published a set of bugs/features that I wanted to have sorted out before or with the release of OS X 10.9 a.k.a Mavericks. For your delectation and delight I thought I'd revisit that list and give an update on how I perceive things to have improved. Of course, what works or doesn't work for me may be different to other people's environments, but most of the issues I wrote about in July were common to a lot of folk - if the discussion forums are anything to go by! Keeping with the same random order as before, I started with three gripes about iTunes.

iTunes and iMatch

At the time of writing we're now onto iTunes 11.1.3. So we've been through a major version increase and several minor revisions since July. And nothing much has changed regarding my specific issues.

• Playcounts are still a mess and iMatch still screws things up by returning corrupted meta data whereby play counts or the last played date are wiped out
• In Home Sharing mode playlists can only be viewed as lists of songs and not shown in artist or album view
• It still takes a long time for the Check Library function to complete if iTunes has been forced to quit, especially on very big (approaching 1Tb or bigger) libraries

MacAppStore

The specific problem I referred to in July of installed apps not appearing in the update or purchased lists hasn't manifested itself for some time, so, touch wood, it may have been resolved in the Mavericks update.

Time Machine

Similarly the Time Machine "sparse.bundle already in use", or "Time Machine Disk cannot be found" messages have not reared their ugly heads for a long while. This could be down to improved firmware in the Time Capsule or a bug fix in Time Machine, but for now at least this is no longer a problem for me.

Networking

My jury of one is still out on this network issue of wireless networks being dropped on sleep. I'm not running Sleepless any more, but since moving to my girlfriend's house the network environment is so different from Apple Harvest HQ I'm not sure quite what is going on. Certainly, after a quick sleep, the wireless network is still there, but I haven't really logged the behaviour over a longer period. Certainly things are moving in the right direction.

Air Play

I no longer have access to an Air Play speaker like I do at Apple Harvest HQ, so again haven't really been able to monitor the state of play with Mavericks, but on the occasions when I have been at home I've not noticed Air Play problems to the extent I was getting them.

Safari

Aside from some of the teething problems I had with early installs of Mavericks, I happy to report that Safari, by and large is now behaving itself again. There are occasional glitches, but having finally ditched Glims once and for all, I'm not sure whether the quirks may have been Glims induced.

Not a bad result really. Everyone at Apple with the exception of the iTunes team clearly reads the Apple Harvest and prioritises their bug fixing accordingly. OK, so that's a bit of wishful thinking, but in five categories a whole bunch of niggles have disappeared completely or to an extent that they are no longer causing me grief.

All I need now is an update to fix the DisplayLink issues on USB monitors and a rewrite of iTunes - preferably one that splits out Music and Video like they've done with iBooks.  Anyone got any 'genuine' insights into OS X 10.10?

Let me know if you've had the same or similar experiences, or tell me about your own pet bugs that are driving you mad!






 

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!