It Just Works

The phrase "it just works" is most closely associated with Apple since Steve Jobs repeatedly used it in his WWDC 2011 keynote. He was talking specifically about iCloud but the slogan has been used to describe just about everything Apple, both in positive and negative ways.

In my experience, 99% of the time it is quite an accurate description. Right now, I'm at the alternative Apple Harvest HQ, with about 75% of my full HQ infrastructure set up. Mavericks 10.9.2 is now out of beta, and all my apps, plugins and drivers all seem to be "just working" fine.

Even some of my long term bugbears about iTunes seem to have disappeared since my last post. My "Discrepancies" playlist which is set up to catch the iTunes Match error whereby a song has a last played date but 0 play counts, and "Discrepancies 2" which catches songs with a play count but no Last Played date have been empty for a few weeks, and even the old bug where play counts didn't get updated if the Crossfade Songs preference was turned on has been fixed.

Mail 7.2 is fully operational with my favourite add-ons (with the sad exception of DockStar) and the UI modification apps, Flavours and DockMod (both previously mentioned in this blog), have both been updated to work properly with 10.9.2.

Now that all is rosy in the Apple Harvest garden I've decided that the MacBook Air will no longer be used for beta versions of OS X - a very timely decision since 10.9.3 has just been seeded to developers this very morning!

(Rant Alert) It's easy to knock Apple when bugs appear in the OS regardless of which version it is. But I do get angry when people use inappropriate language to slag off developers. OS X is an incredibly large and complex system, which ultimately has to run on an infinite set of configurations. There will be problems with some set-ups, just as there are with Windows and other operating systems. And it's not unreasonable for frustration to take over from time to time. What is unreasonable is for people who have no idea of the effort that developers put in to creating their work to make unpleasant accusations. Sadly some people are never going to be mature enough to realise that trolling on the internet serves only to highlight their own ignorance and insecurities. (End Rant)

Two great new games made it onto the iOS devices this weeks - Lyne and Threes. Both are cerebral, pattern matching games (for want of a better description), and both are highly addictive. I've had to put a limit on the number of games in succession I have on Threes because it's making me light headed! It's also a serious battery gobbler.

You've been warned!

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!!!!!

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!






 

Testing Times With Mavericks (OS X 10.9)

This is the first year that I've been officially part of the Apple Development Community, and as such the first time I've ever used a pre-release version of an Apple OS.

I loaded Mavericks onto my old MacBook Pro (mid 2007) when it was released as version 6, a couple of months ago. I was genuinely pleased that it loaded and ran on a relatively old machine. To be honest, I really don't use the MBP much these days, so it was a fairly safe bet, but because I don't use it that much, I wasn't really getting a good handle on of the Mavericks experience. But two things were for certain - the machine wasn't crashing and performance wasn't being stifled.

So I decided to repeat the exercise with my 2011 MacBook Air. By this time we were on version 8. Once again I had no problems with the installation or general performance. In fact, in many ways I couldn't really distinguish much difference over 10.8 Mountain Lion. With one major exception. Safari turned into a disaster zone and became virtually unusable. I'm not sure what caused the problems, and I wasn't going to hang around to find out. I restored Mountain Lion (luckily without any incident) and reconsidered the warnings about not using beta versions of an OS on a workhorse machine.

With the release of the GM version of Mavericks, I decided it was worth another go. The experience has been much less painful - but I do still have some quibbles with Safari, almost all of which are around the problem of not being able to click on links. Some of this is down to badly designed websites which are clearly only designed for IE, and maybe Firefox, but it still causes me some pain.

Some of my newly discovered toys don't work anymore but I'm not too surprised at that, as they almost all do some shenanigans with the core UI code. But some of them, such as Flavours, already have beta versions that will, and do, work under Mavericks. 1Password 4 is causing me some teething troubles - it installed OK but is prone to tantrums (it's having different tantrums under 10.8.5 so maybe Mavericks isn't the problem here). I find that occasionally some applications don't seem to want to load, no matter how many times I try. Terminal and Contacts are specific examples. But a reboot does seem to fix that - I'm thinking this issue maybe due to other beta software

I'm guessing that between now and some time in the next few weeks, before the offical public release, we'll be seeing a flurry of activity from developers and new releases of software will be a regular occurrence. And then the auto update feature in the Mac App Store will be a real blessing as it already has proved to be under iOS7.

Batttery life does seem to have improved considerably, so there is clearly a lot of stuff going on under the hood. My third party battery status software is showing that I've got 85% left on this charge and it's estimating that it's good for 5 more hours. Admittedly that's with most background apps switched off, but it's still much more than I'm used to.

For now, I'm happy to keep the GM release running on the MBA (although I think I'll keep the iMac on Moutain Lion). Which means I can start using some of the other features I've been reluctant to try, especially File Tagging. And if 1Password continues to misbehave I may even resort to KeyChain in the Cloud. We'll see. For me at least, there is every reason to take advantage of the full update when it is made available, especially at the price point widely expected to be around £20. Even if it is a whopping 5+ Gb of download!

Once A Developer…Always A Developer

In the middle of July I finally made the decision to join the Apple Developer Programme. The following day it came to light that the system had been hacked and all access to the programme via the web was removed, and the enrolment page stayed out of commission until the second week in August.

Having once been a successful commercial developer, albeit on non-Apple platforms, I've always had a slight hankering to write my own Mac software and maybe even an iOS app. XCode sits on my iMac, idly standing by, I've enrolled in a couple of on-line courses and I have a couple of books on Objective-C and Cocoa development and iOS development. Whether or not I'll get any further is an unknown, but at least I'm prepared.

No, the main reason for joining the developer programme was to get my grubby little mitts on the beta versions of iOS7 and Mavericks (a.k.a OS X 10.9).

Post hack, the enrollment process was not plain sailing. I only signed up for the individual plan, but when I finally received my activation codes (long after the 24 hours indicated by the initial enrollment menu) and tried to use them, I got an error message saying that Apple were trying to contact my references to ensure that I had authority to join the programme on behalf of my company. This could have taken a long time since I hadn't provided any references, having never been asked for them, but a mail back to the support guys soon got the problem resolved and I finally got access to the treasure chests.

iOS7

Installing iOS7 on my old iPhone 4 proved a challenge - I needed a SIM card in the phone, but all my SIM cards were the wrong size. I managed to get an adaptor and installed beta 5. Even as the installation was taking place beta 6 was released, so the first task was to do the update.

I really like the initial look of iOS7. The black text on a white background looks clean and fresh, and while I share many folks dislike of some of the new icons, they aren't as bad as I first imagined - the wallpaper used in many of the earliest screen shots really didn't help.

The new control panel, allowing quick and easy access to bluetooth, wireless, airplane mode, camera, brightness, etc. is just what the doctor ordered. I like the approach of a pull up panel, in the same way that I like the pull down notification centre panel. Better than having widgets taking up screen real estate when you don't really need them very often.

The new task switching mechanism is a definite improvement. It's great being able to see a proper screen dump of the apps currently running. I think this will be a major feature when apps are updated to take full advantage of the new APIs.

I've had a few problems getting iMatch to load, but this doesn't appear to be an issue with iOS7 specifically; I've had similar problems with the iPad and iPad mini in the past with iOS6.

Until I put in a proper working SIM I'm not going to be able to properly evaluate the beta. For now I'm satisfied that iOS7 is going to be a worthwhile update - even though it appears a little sluggish at the moment. However I'll put that down to being beta and running on a slower iPhone than I'm now used to. Watch this space for more information.

OS X 10.9 - Mavericks

I installed Mavericks on my old 2007 MacBook Pro. So the good news is that many of these older machines are certainly supported. I've not yet had a chance to do much with Mavericks. Off the shelf there doesn't appear to be too much to write about in terms of visible change. It looks like OS X 10.8 - but then many of the features previewed at WWDC were under the hood. Maps and iBook are now apps in their own right. Two of my favourite tools under OS X 10.8, Total Spaces and TotalFinder were flagged as being incompatible but I had already predicted this as Finder now has many of the TotalFinder features built in, e.g. Tabbed windows. File tagging looks useful too. I'll play around more over the next few days and have more to say next time.

September 10th is the generally accepted next big thing in the Apple calendar so it'll be interesting to see what happens between now and then.

In the meantime, enjoy the last throes of summer!