A Piecemeal Network
My home network, like many, started simply with a wired router. It then progressed to wireless with my first Airport Express, which, at the time was plenty for me, living alone in my small studio apartment. My next apartment, however, was a duplex, so I extended my network with an additional Airport Express, one capable of 802.11n. Then, as wireless networks in the city exploded and frequencies grew more congested, causing problems with the wireless Netflix streaming I started doing a good deal of, I added yet another Airport Express and built out my network, creating one 5GHz network for my heaviest use-cases, and a 2.4GHz network for my phones and gadgets.

When all was said and done I had a wired router feeding three Airport Expresses, two of which were supplying wireless on 5GHz and one of which provided separate wireless access on the 2.4GHz frequency. It was a total mess: it took forever to set up (like when we recently moved to a new house); it broke often and was horrible to troubleshoot.

Cut To The Present Day
So this year one of my presents was an Airport Extreme. I just wanted to simplify everything. I suppose I could’ve gotten some LinkSys dealio that would’ve been faster, but frankly, this is about laziness, and the Airport Extreme is, for me, the easiest option available, if for no other reason than the fact that I already use and am quite familiar with the Airport ecosystem.

And easy it was! In fact, I was able to set it up and completely replace my existing network — a router and three Airport Expresses — in about ten minutes. That’s right, what used to take me hours to set up and get working just so took ten minutes with an Airport Extreme. And now, all those boxes are gone, replaced with a single — and quite attractive, I might add — wireless router. It’s fantastic!

I have to say, setting up my Airport Extreme was one of the best user experiences I’ve had in a very, very long time. I’m not used to calling network setup easy, but that’s exactly what it was. I entered my settings and it simply Just Worked.

Clearly a lot has changed since I first began building my home network. It’s nice to finally be using some current gear, and the Airport Extreme is a great box. Super simple to set up and use. Oh, and it’s fast too!

If you’re looking to upgrade an aging wireless network, want simplicity and ease-of-use, and don’t need a ton of tweakable settings, I highly recommend the Airport Extreme.

For years now I’ve kept my Desktop organized by file type. I like this because it groups all my files in a way that I find logical and easy to visually parse. One glance at the Desktop and I can find all the PDFs, for instance, and these will be ordered alphabetically. It’s a personal preference, and it’s worked well for me for years. But it’s broken in Lion.

In Lion, sometimes items of the same type group together, but sometimes they don’t. The other day, for instance, I downloaded four PNGs to my Desktop. Three of them were grouped together, but one was just put somewhere random. Restarting the Finder caused all the items to group properly. This little trick was repeatable on both my system and on other Lion systems in my facility.

Moreover, eventually the items will group properly, and I’ll see, out of the corner of my eye, my Desktop suddenly rearrange itself for no apparent reason.

But here’s the thing: without consistency, the feature that allows you to arrange your Desktop by file type is essentially useless. If I can’t rely on it to present me with accurate information all the time, then there’s no real point in using it anymore.

So I’ve switched to manually arranging items on my Desktop. That’s right, I’ve now abandoned the method of Desktop organization I’ve used for years because Lion has broken it. But here’s the kicker: manual organization doesn’t always work either. Even manually arranged items get disordered from time to time after, say, a logout.

Another thing that happens — less annoying, for sure, but indicative of the sad state of the Lion Finder — is that when I log in there is often one item on the Desktop that’s missing an icon. Again, restarting the Finder fixes the issue. But still…

And then there’s this:

From an item on my Desktop. Jesus.

At this point, for me, the Desktop is essentially completely broken; it’s nearly unusable. I’m not sure how the folks in Cupertino even use this OS without driving themselves up a wall. And I don’t know how they can allow these basic and obvious bugs to persist.

The sad state of Lion’s Finder really shows Apple’s level of commitment to the desktop version of their once great OS. It’s just tiresome to have to be wrestling, after ten years, with the most basic piece of Mac OS software: The Finder. But that’s where we are today.

Siri’s great when it works, it just so seldom does. The most common thing I want to do with Siri is make calls to restaurants to order food. But restaurants, particularly ones in this town, tend to have odd names. Siri doesn’t work well with odd names and it usually fails when I try to use it to call, say, Kouzan. It also fails if I try to call Café Viva by reversing the words of the name and saying, “Call Viva Café.” But this sort of intelligence — the ability to parse natural language, even mistakes to some extent — is just what Siri’s billed as being great at.

I’ve pretty much given up calling restaurants with Siri. And since I don’t really make many other calls, Siri phone functionality is mostly useless to me. So what else can Siri do?

Well, Siri’s great at dictation. I mean really great. So this morning I attempted to jot down an idea for a blog post using the dictation feature. After finishing the input the note was empty. Completely blank. Siri just completely gave up the ghost. Turns out there was a network related problem, and Siri famously fails when it has any problem connecting to Apple’s network. Let’s be clear: I had connectivity three ways to Sunday; the problem was Apple-side. I think it might be good for Siri to do some network checking before taking requests, because, though it can save you quite a bit of time when it works, when it doesn’t, it’s a huge time waster. And that just adds to my steadily increasing level of gunshy-ness.

So far Siri’s pretty good about setting reminders. Hasn’t failed me there yet; I’ll keep trying to use it. But I’m pretty close to giving up. I don’t know. Maybe the giving-up threshold is simply determined by a loose calculation of how much time you’ve wasted on a new technology. Maybe once your brain realizes that this thing that’s supposed to be saving you time is instead stealing it away, maybe that’s when you stop playing guinea pig and get back to work.

Whatever the case, Siri has proven, over the longer haul, to be not particularly useful in real world use cases, at least not yet.

Don’t believe the hype. Or at least not all of it.

1. Siri is a believable and convincing enough piece of software to make people react to it as though it is a real person, with real thoughts and opinions.
2. Most people either just have no clue how technology works, or no interest in understanding it. Or both.

Sometimes, ya just gotta laugh.

1. Open Camera app.
2. Take photos.
3. Look at Camera Roll from Camera app and verify that photos are there.
4. Quit Camera app.
5. Open Photos app.
6. Navigate to Camera Roll.
7. Photos app crashes.
8. Open it again, and navigate to Camera Roll again.
9. Camera Roll appears empty.
10. Look again from Camera app, and the Camera Roll shows the recent photos.

Clearly, the photos are in my Camera Roll, but they’re just not appearing when viewed from the Photos app. So WTF?

After a good deal of research I was able to track the problem down to what would seem to be a corrupt database. The solution is kind of a pain, but it works and seem to keep the problem from happening ever again. So here it is, the fix:

1. Plug in and back up your iPhone, for good measure.
2. Download and install either iExplorer (formerly iPhone Explorer) or any app that lets you view the file system of your iPhone.
3. With iPhone still connected, launch iExplorer.
4. In iExplorer navigate to the Your_iPhone->Media->PhotoData folder.
5. If you’re at all concerned or paranoid (like I am) back this entire folder up to your computer by simply dragging it from iExplorer to your Desktop.
6. Delete the following three files:
• com.apple.photos.caches_metadata.plist
• PhotosAux.sqlite
• Photos.sqlite
7. Reboot your iPhone.

When the iPhone returns to service the Photos app should show your Camera Roll repopulated with your recent photos. If you don’t have any other albums, you’re done. Otherwise, any other albums you had — particularly ones that you’d been syncing from iPhoto — will need to be resynced. Simply open up iTunes and perform a sync operation.

That’s it! You’re done. From here on out your iPhone should behave properly when taking new photos; the Camera Roll should always display recent photos from inside the Photos app.

The Phone
In many regards, this is the same phone I had a few weeks ago. The software is the same, the data is the same, most things are the same. And this is a good thing. Moving to the new phone was almost completely painless and straightforward.

Performance
Overall, though, there are some differences, of course. In general, I really like the phone itself. It’s a huge speed boost from the iPhone 3GS, and that helps make everything work better, more smoothly and quicker. The interface is just faster, and that’s really nice.

I was more surprised at how much faster the network is. I assume that this has something to do with my new provider, Verizon (more on that in a minute), but I also think that speed gain is a function of the phone hardware itself. Whatever the reason, I’m extremely pleased by this.

The Body
Coming from the iPhone 3GS‘s rounded edges and arched back, I was a bit skeptical that I’d like the body of the iPhone4S, with it’s all-flat surfaces and hard edges. The 3GS felt perfect in my hand. It was a most ergonomic body shape.

But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I actually do like the 4S’s feel. It’s not as soft to the touch, but it feels a bit thinner, and the hard edges add a certain grippiness that makes it feel very firm in hand and easy to pick up. They also afford the possibility of placing the phone on its edge for video shoots.

The glass surfaces, too, are very elegant — far more so than the 3GS’s plastic back — yet have enough friction to them that the phone never feels in danger of slipping out of my hand. They also don’t appear to scuff as easily or as much as the 3GS’s plastic back.

And the iPhone 4S’s body is just beautiful, maybe the prettiest phone I’ve ever seen. There are tradeoffs to the new body style, but they’re very minor and pretty much even out. I’m quite pleased with the body style of this phone.

The Screen
I’m pretty blown away by the Retina Display. This is one of my favorite things about my new phone. Sure, I’d seen friends’ iPhone 4s, so it wasn’t completely new to me. But seeing the screen and using one on a regular basis are two very different things. Using the Retina Display is amazing, especially as my vision gets crappier with age. Reading text on this screen is noticeably better, an improvement that extends to every area of the iPhone experience. Also, I can finally notice tiny details, like the paper texture in Notes, that I’d never seen before. It’s really terrific.

The Camera
The camera is much faster than the one on my old phone. It’s also better, but I wouldn’t say the improvement is huge. Side by side you can certainly tell a difference, but these still look like iPhone photos.

The HDR functionality is good only for certain types of lighting situations. For anything else it usually does a worse job. Moreover, it slows the camera down considerably. I recommend keeping it off unless you need it. For this reason I wish it had a dedicated button instead of being buried within a submenu.

Video is still clearly phone video, though as such it’s quite serviceable. But what impressed me was the stabilization. It’s very good, and on such a small device, it’s really essential. These little video phones tend to exacerbate camera shake, but the iPhone 4S does a pretty darned good job of smoothing out the worst of it by using the phone’s physical sensors, in part, to do the job. This, perhaps even more than the optics, makes a huge improvement to the video the iPhone 4S produces.

Siri
The big surprise for me, with Siri, is how much I actually do use it. For Reminders and phone calls it really is much quicker and easier than using the touch screen. And, yes, it’s really as accurate as everyone says. It’s not for everything, but there are certain situations that Siri is perfect for, and when you’re in those situations, Siri is a joy.

Perhaps my favorite use of Siri is dictation. It’s great! It’s very accurate, and far more convenient than typing everything out on the touchscreen keyboard. Accurate dictation is far less useful on a computer with a physical keyboard, because you can usually type faster than you can speak. But with virtual keyboards, the equation is the reverse, and this is one place where Siri really shines.

Siri’s limitations can be frustrating, though. I wish (as I think everyone does) that it was more hooked into the OS. I’d love to use Siri as an application launcher, for instance. Or maybe even for navigation. Siri’s technically only in beta at this point, though, so I’m sure we’ll start to see these sorts of things as the service evolves. I think it’s going to be great.

Verizon
One of the biggest changes for me with this upgrade has nothing to do with the actual phone hardware itself. For this phone purchase I switched to Verizon as my mobile provider. I was actually a little worried about the switch as I’d been fairly happy with AT&T’s customer service and web apps. But I live in New York City, and AT&T’s reception is pretty lousy here. Moreover, at work, often when I really need a connection, AT&T is spotty or just plain out of range, and that’s not cool.

So I switched to Verizon on a trial basis.

Thus far I’ve been very happy. The cell service is truly amazing, a huge step up. Calls are not only more reliable, they are also clearer and louder. Some of this may be due to the new phone hardware, but credit where due, Verizon’s cell service works everywhere I go, and works very, very well. I’ve not had a dropped or garbled call, nor been in an area with no signal yet. I actually needed to make a call on the first day I had the phone from a previously impossible location at work and it worked flawlessly. With voice commands, no less!

The improved reception has also brought another advantage: my data connection is more pervasive and reliable. Suddenly, I’m able to get a data connection in all sorts of places where it had been terrible on AT&T. At times, I believe this more reliable data connection even makes it appear that the network is much faster than on my old phone, which would choke when trying to connect using a spotty connection. So, overall, the increased reliability has ultimately resulted in increased network speeds.

Verizon’s customer service has been very good as well. I’ve had two occasions to deal with their phone support, and both times they’ve gotten the job done quickly and politely. And that’s pretty much all I ask.

Their account management site is also very good and easy to use.

Verizon is definitely more expensive, however. About $30 more per month for the plan I got, which is a slight step up from my old AT&T plan. I am now getting an employee discount that brings this back down to only about $10 a month more than my AT&T account, but without that, the price hike is significant. If phone reception is key, though, it might just be worth it; the improvement is huge. In my case, I’m more than happy to pay $10 more per month for much, much improved service.

Bugs and Updates
It hasn’t been all wine and roses, however. There have been some bugs and issues.

The most annoying problem I’ve had is that, when shooting pictures or video with the Camera app — and this seems particularly bad when shooting from the lock screen rather than launching directly from the Springboard — sometimes they don’t show up in the Camera Roll gallery. If I sort by Places, the pictures appear and can be moved to other galleries, but for some reason they don’t appear in the Camera Roll. For that reason, importing via iPhoto can be hit-or-miss. Sometimes the photos appear for import, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they get deleted from the phone, sometimes they don’t. It’s more of an annoyance than anything, and I haven’t permanently lost any data yet. But I really wish they’d fix it. And fast.

I was hoping the iOS 5.0.1 update would bring some relief, but it does not seem to have addressed the issue. Moreover, after applying the update, I
experienced the bug wherein contact names don’t appear for incoming calls, despite the fact that they’re still in your Contacts. This I was able to fix, however. It seems the Contacts database gets corrupted with the iOS 5.0.1 update, and the punctuation (parentheses and dashes and what not) gets removed from the phone numbers of all your Contacts. The incoming phone number, however, does retain all the necessary punctuation, and this inconsistency causes the Phone app to be unable to recognize said incoming number.

The fix that worked for me is easy enough: Just restore your contacts from a recent backup. Of course, this assumes you made a backup before updating. If you didn’t, this is perfect example of why you should. Shit happens.

Conclusion
I’m very happy with my Verizon iPhone 4S. The hardware is a vast improvement over the 3GS, and I notice the speed boost and spectacular display all the time, in every area of operation, from note-taking to search, even after weeks of use. Siri is fun and useful, and the technology to watch; it’s going to be great someday and a real boon to iPhone users. Finally, Verizon has really rounded out my user experience by at last allowing my phone to perform well in its primary function, as a phone.

Like a lot of people, I’d imagine, I seem to be on a leapfrog iPhone upgrade cycle, upgrading every other version, and so far that seems to be working out well. Each time I upgrade I receive a subsidy on the price of the phone and a significant hardware boost. The iPhone 4S is no exception. It’s a solid upgrade, and I’m very happy with it.

Now comes this latest salvo in the barrage of evidence that points to major focus shifts at Apple: It appears they are considering ending the Mac Pro line of desktop machines.

Now I quite realize that this is just at the rumor stage. But I actually think it’s very likely that this will come to pass, that Apple will end the Mac Pro line, or at least radically transform it to such a degree as to be unrecognizable to its former user base. Apple is aggressively cutting out parts of the business that aren’t big money makers. Everything they’ve done with their pro-oriented products speaks to a company that’s pretty much only interested in mass markets, huge ones like cell phones, not niche ones like pro workstations and software.

I may be proven wrong, but I do think this is the beginning of the end, not just of the Mac Pro line, but of Macs as powerful tools for creative professionals.

I hope I’m wrong, but that seems to be the way the wind is blowing.

1. I open a document.
2. I make some temporary or test changes — changes I don’t intend do actually keep.
3. Once I’ve seen what I need to see, I quit the application.

In the past I’d have been asked if I wanted to save the changes to the document. I would say no, because these were only temporary changes. But now these changes are saved to the document, and I’ve likely forgotten that I’ve made those changes. The next time I open the document I’m shocked to see that it looks completely wrong.

Yes, it’s true, the upside is that I need merely look through the previous versions of the document in order to find and revert to the correct one. But I still find this problematic, and there are two reasons why.

First of all, under Versions there is no good way to make temporary changes to a document. This is something I do way more than I ever realized. It’s not so much a feature of the old document saving paradigm as a side-effect of it, nevertheless it’s extremely useful. And it breaks in potentially jarring and disconcerting ways under Versions. If you’re used to making temporary changes to documents, then simply reverting by not saving the document, you may be in for a surprise one day. Let’s just hope you remember to check your versions.

Secondly, the way this all works is simply too quiet. I’ve just opened a document, made changes to that document, and closed the document. There’s nothing now to confirm that these changes have been made, and so they are committed to this new version quietly and without warning. Attempting to edit a locked document, on the other hand, is completely the opposite experience, with warnings and multiple dialogs replete with confusing text. It’s a strange juxtaposition. But frankly, if I just made a bunch of unsaved changes to a document, a little confirmation dialog at quit time might be nice.

Look, I get that this is a new paradigm, and behaviors need to be adjusted to some extent. But the way Versions works isn’t perfect, nor is it set in stone. It can and should be better.

A Lion Correction
I had originally reported that one of my favorite new Lion features was that Quicklook stayed active even when switching away from the Finder to another app. This apparently only happens on my 30″ monitor at work, and I don’t believe it is the intended behavior. Kinda sad when a bug is preferred over proper operation. Go Lion!

Lion 10.7.2 Update
10.7.2 fixes a few things that were bothering me.

For one, the bug where Desktop icons disappear when you partially swipe to another Space, stop swiping, and stay in your current Space, has been fixed. Do this now and you’ll even see the Finder redraw the Desktop icons.

Also, when navigating sorted columns using arrow keys, the headers now don’t get selected.

Finally, performance and memory use seem to be a bit better in 10.7.2. Specifically, the green slice of the memory pie in Activity Monitor is consistently larger than in previous iterations of the OS.

iOS 5 On iPhone 3GS
If you’re wondering why Apple’s new Reminders app doesn’t give you the option to geofence your reminder — i.e., you can’t set a location — it’s because that particular feature is for users of iPhone 4 and up. Now you can stop twiddling your GPS settings and get some sleep.

iOS 5 Little Thangs
A few other things I stumbled upon while playing with iOS 5.

In the Camera app, swiping right now takes you to your camera roll. Also, you can now set macros, so typing “omg” will actually write out “Oh my gawd!”

Also, custom ringtones! Huzzah!

UPDATE:
Reader Matt points out that Quicklook does, in fact, stay active when viewing apps other than the Finder on his system. So I started investigating, and it seems that the feature works for other users on my computer; there is a problem specific to my account which is breaking it for me for some reason. I’m presently looking into a fix. For now, suffice to say, this is a real feature in Lion and, for most folks anyway, should work just fine.

Thanks, Matt!

UPDATE:
Got it! Trashed my Finder prefs. Now I got the Quicklook all the time!

This Lion-specific problem has a Lion-specific solution: boot from the Recovery Partition. Despite the fact that Lion’s ASR has been inexplicably hobbled, the Recovery Partition is quite full featured and provides many SysAdmin-friendly tools, including a full featured Terminal and ASR command.

Running ASR from the Recovery Partition allows you to unmount and, thus, block copy your boot partition without reaching for an external boot drive or DVD.