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!

Confessions of a Fickle Browser User

When I first started working, the internet, as we know it today, was still in its infancy. So was e-mail; GUIs were only research projects, and browsers were people who walked around shop floors without any money in their pockets or bank accounts.

A few years later when I was properly ensconced in the corporate IT world I remember briefly playing with Netscape, but from then on in it's pretty much been Internet Explorer all the way. And on company owned machines it's usually been at least two versions of IE behind the latest one. IE has moved forwards in leaps and bounds since those early days when Microsoft was still in denial about the future of the net, and the last version that I used in anger on the PC, IE7, did just about everything I needed or expected.

Of course, when I bought my first Mac back in 2007 it didn't take long to realise that IE on the Mac had not exactly progressed with the times. Because my entry into the Mac world coincided with the launch of Leopard and Safari 3 it made sense to use Safari from the outset, and I was quite happy for a few months. But something, and I genuinely forget what it was now, made me try out Firefox. Before long, Firefox became my browser of choice.

I love Firefox's extendibility, and before long I had the browser configured exactly how I wanted it. I had toolbars for LinkedIn and Facebook, Xmarks (previously FoxMarks) for bookmarks, Morning Coffee to load a set of default tabs, and all sorts of other goodies. Almost all was hunky dory in the Apple Harvest world. But I started to get annoyed when some of my extensions failed to load every time there was a point update. And then there was the problem I had when my internet connection intermittently started hanging forcing a reboot.

When Safari 4 was released I decided to have another look at it, but it seemed to take forever to load my home page (mine is set to a customised BT:Yahoo home page), so I decided to stick with Firefox, and put up with it's inconveniences.

However, in the last couple of weeks I found out that some of the features that I really like were available to me in Safari. I began to investigate and to my surprise my home page loaded almost instantly. I installed Glims, Inquisitor and PDF Browser plug-ins. With these three additions I'm able to perform all the main tasks that I used to demand of Firefox, but with fewer configuration issues. And some of the super duper add-ins for Firefox that I used to have installed proved to be padding and superfluous.

I don't really need a Facebook or LinkedIn toolbar, Xmarks works fine with Safari, pages load fast and Safari is now my default browser. Until something better comes along!