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. 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.

Case in point: Locked Files.

Lion now locks files that haven’t been edited for a certain period of time. It does this in order to prevent accidental changes to documents opened in applications that support auto-save. But, unfortunately, it can cause its own problems and unforseen changes to documents.

Here’s what happens when I try to simply add an action to a locked Automator Workflow.

1. I open the file (note: it’s locked, but this is only apparent by looking at the grayed-out text in the document titlebar).
   
2. I attempt to edit the document (in this case, I added an action to my workflow).
3. I get a dialog box regarding how I want to handle the locked file. The dialog is wordy, and if I were a new user I would find it confusing and alarming.
   
4. It seems fairly obvious to me that I want to make changes to the document — that’s why I opened it. But the preferred and presumably safest choice, as indicated by the button highlight, is to Duplicate the document, so that’s what I do.
5. This produces a copy of the document — indicated by an informative animation — and yet another dialog that now asks how I want to deal with the edits I just made to what I was just told was a locked document. This dialog is even wordier and less clear. Moreover it’s unnecessary and makes no sense, because it shouldn’t have been possible to edit the locked document in the first place, and presumably you made this decision in the last dialog by choosing to work on a duplicate. Also, the button text is completely unclear: What is the difference between Older Version and Last Opened Version? What happens if I click Cancel? Why do I have the option to unlock the file from this dialog when I just made the decision to not unlock it in the last dialog? Insanely confusing!
   
6. Here, the highlighted safe choice is indicated as “Last Opened Version,” so let’s just go with that. But wait! Doing so gives me an error that says that the document could not be reverted. Now, the document I just took pains to duplicate and, thus, not edit has in fact been unlocked and edited. Moreover, I now also have a duplicate of the document with the same edits. So now I’ve got all sorts of file management to contend with.
   

Mind you, all I wanted to do here was add an action to a preexisting Automator Workflow. In the past I’d have opened that document, made the change, and saved the file. Done. Now a simple document edit has become an exercise in frustration and confusion. Mac OS X Lion has actually attempted to prevent me from editing my own file. And then, when failing to prevent me from editing my file, it has failed to clean up after itself and left everything in a state of disarray. Worse, there is now a good chance for data loss here, for a mistaken edit to occur.

And can someone tell me what the point of all this is? What’s the payoff? Why is the OS locking my files? It presumes I’m making a mistake by editing a document, implying I’m some kind of careless child who can’t be trusted with his own data. And while I get the idea of protecting the user from himself — or just from accidents — this is overkill. There is certainly a better way.

Locked Files in Lion, as it currently stands, is an abomination that’s completely contrary to the goals and ideals of the Macintosh experience — in fact, it’s contrary to the goals of the file locking system itself. It’s inelegant, pointless and potentially dangerous.

There is one bit of good news, however. You can turn it off. Yes, buried in Options section of the Time Machine preferences, of all places, is this little gem:

Here you can set the time limit for Locked Files, and you can also simply disable file locking altogether. Until Apple improves the ridiculous behavior associated with Locked Files, I think I’ll disable them. Something tells me I’ll be okay without the extra protection.

But here’s the grind: I’m not sure how you’re supposed to get the update.

My first attempt was via Software Update, but SU tells me I’m all up to date.

Next I tried the Mac App Store, where I met with what is becoming an all-too-frequently frustrating experience. Under the Purchased tab I see Final Cut Pro, and I’m given an option to Install.

But hitting Install gives me an error message telling me to use Software Update, which I already know doesn’t work.

After some option-click finagling I get App Store to allow me to attempt to install the update from the Final Cut Pro X product page, which currently lists the version as 10.0.1, the new version. But when I attempt to do so I get this message:

This is maybe the worst error message I’ve seen yet in the Mac App Store, because it shouldn’t even be possible. If I didn’t buy FCP from the Mac App Store, then where, pray tell did I buy it from? Are you accusing me of stealing it? Really? Because you should know better, shouldn’t you?

Isn’t this just the sort of licensing crap the App Store was supposed to do away with? Doesn’t the Mac App Store know exactly what I’ve bought and where? Seems to me like, once I’ve made the purchase, I should be able to reinstall FCP any time I want, and any version, even if I already have it. I don’t get why the App Store forbids re-installs.

Ultimately I was able to get the update. I did so by deleting the Final Cut Pro application from my Applications folder, then reinstalling it from the Mac App Store. Which, I say again, is just the sort of ridiculous user experience the App Store was supposed to prevent.

So far the Mac App Store user experience has been pretty terrible, particularly when installing Apple apps. This is in large part because, contrary to what they allow every other developer to do, Apple uses the App Store for large, complex application installs. Ironically, the most complex install yet, Mac OS X Lion, was their biggest success. But Xcode and now Final Cut Pro have been terrible. Just terrible.

Sloppy: Why Is The Header Not Centered?

Moreover, the App Store UI really needs and overhaul. It’s ugly, unbearably slow, cluttered and lacks features common to most browsers around today — features that would really aid the buying process, where their lack certainly hinders it. Features like tabs and bookmarks, for starters, would be really useful for comparison shopping. A shopping cart would be good for buying multiple items. Instead we’re stuck with this crap.

The Mac App Store is the single least Apple-like Apple product I’ve ever used. It’s kludgy and feels cheap. It’s just terrible. And it’s now been out for some time and is presumably mature as it’s now baked into the OS, so there’s no excuse for this. Unfortunately, for some products, it’s unavoidable, which is a real shame.

More and more I’m bothered by Apple’s tendency to force their vision on their customers. It was fine when they did so with wonderful products. but when the products suck, it becomes time to start looking for alternatives.

UPDATE:
I almost forgot! There are additional updates which bring additional inconsistencies to this update process. Compressor has also gotten an update, and this one can be had in the normal way, by simply hitting the Update button in the Updates section of the App Store (I presume the Motion update works similarly, but I don’t own it, so can’t say for sure).

But there are also CODEC updates, and these must be gotten via a webpage:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1396

So there are actually four different updates to the FCP suite, and three different ways to obtain the various components. None of which are Software Update, so none of which make the updates apparent to anyone who isn’t reading the trades. If you didn’t read Apple news sites, I’m not sure how you’d even find out about these updates.

The Software Update mechanism is a very good way to deliver updates — and vastly superior to the Mac App Store — but it’s been completely abandoned for the Final Cut Suite updates.

I’ve argued several times now that, as great as Google’s products are, they could be made even better if Google were to begin to concentrate even just a tiny fraction of its mighty will on the issue of design. And the new Google pages are distinctly better — nicer to look at and easier to use — than ever.

Mail and Calendar are most improved, but then perhaps they were the most in need of help. Both are now lighter and more spacious; colors have been muted, borders softened and emphasis placed in all the right spots. Both are easier to look at, and easier to read or just skim. Visually parsing the new interfaces for particular nuggets of information in the sea of crap that is my calendar and email is just plain easier.

The new interfaces look really nice too, at least to my eye, and that makes me want to look at them more, makes checking mail more of a pleasure, less of a chore.

By the way, if you want to see the new Gmail interface, you’ll need to apply one of the themes built special for the purpose. Just hit the Gear icon in the upper right, go to Settings and then Themes and select either “Preview” or “Preview (Dense)”.

I’m not a designer. I don’t know precisely how design works nor how to do it. But I am and admirer of good design, and I can certainly appreciate when it makes the tools we use work better.

It’s great to see Google embrace design in the manner.

Mac OS X 10.7 — or Lion as it’s affectionately codenamed — is certainly no exception. In fact, Lion looks to be a very exciting release, both for its wealth of new features and for its refinements to Apple’s already sparkling OS.

It’s an exciting time to be an OS junkie, really. Snow Leopard was a wonderful release that brought stability and refinement to what can finally be called a mature Mac OS X. From here on out OS development seems to be less about making Mac OS X work quickly and succinctly — less about the guts of the OS —  and more about making it work well. That is, from here on out, Mac OS X developers are concentrating on making the Mac OS X experience a wonderful one. And that means even further refinement to an already polished OS, with maybe a dash of experimentation thrown in for good measure, thanks to convergence with Apple’s mobile OS.

I haven’t installed the beta, but I’ve read as much as I’ve been able to find. Here are some images and links, with just a dash of commentary from yours truly thrown in.

Mac OS X Server
One of the shockers about this release is that Mac OS X Server will be included, for free, with the standard Lion DVD. It will be a separate install, but has been discontinued as a separate, paid release. Looks like Apple’s professional server platform is dead, but I’m glad it will live on in some form, at least for the time being.

Images Via AppleInsider

Administrative Tools and Goodies
One of the great things about OS updates — particularly the latest Mac OS X updates — has been further expansion and refinement of any and all administrative tools. This is, needless to say, of particular interest to SysAdmins like us. Here are some updates that Lion brings to the table baked right into the About This Mac window.

Images Via AppleInsider

The Finder
Of course I’m always, always, always happy to see Finder improvements and refinements, and it looks like there will be plenty in Lion.

We have some new and potentially very useful Finder views, though I must admit to not being a great fan of the iOS-like buttons in the toolbar. The sidebar is also toned down (a-la iTunes) and features some new and potentially useful items.

Image Via AppleInsider

Spotlight in The Finder is now smarter and more useful.

Image Via AppleInsider

And my favorite Finder view, column view, even receives some love.

Image Via AppleInsider

And finally, the big Finder news: windows can now be resized from any edge. Just like in Windows.

Image Via TheAppleBlog

Other Improvements
There are a bunch of additional refinements to the core OS. One of my favorites is support for automatically saving documents, or Auto Save as they’re calling it.

Images Via AppleInsider

Auto Save is accessed just like Time Machine, which is just brilliant.

A signature capture utility also makes its way into Preview, allowing you to sign digital documents using that app and your built-in iSight camera.

Image Via 9to5Mac

Dock and Exposé get refinements as well.

Images Via Engadget

Even Spotlight gets better, with larger icons and inline previews.

Image Via AppleInsider

All-in-all, from what I’ve sen so far, Lion is shaping up to be a very nice release. I’m sure there will be under-the-hood improvements that will add performance gains as well. I am, as always, really looking forward to using Apple’s next OS release.

After the last update I pretty much just gave up and started keeping the Install Xcode.app in the /Applications folder where it’s expected, despite the 4.5 gigs it takes up. So when I went to update to Xcode 4.0.2 I expected everything to just work. I ran the Updater from the App Store, which took about 20 minutes as the entire Install Xcode.app, we now know, must be downloaded and installed from scratch (which, to be fair, was how it always worked in the old days as well).

Once that completed I knew, from cold hard experience, that despite the App Store reporting that the update was complete, the Install Xcode.app still needed to run and update the actual Xcode components. I find it very sloppy that you are not instructed to do this. Or, hey, better yet, why doesn’t Install Xcode.app just launch when the update in finished? That seems like the best way to go. Either way, some instruction here are really needed to make this work like an Apple product. Fortunately, I know the deal, so I ran Install Xcode.app, and this is what I got:

If you’re following along at home you’ll recognize this as the same message I got when I first bought and installed Xcode 4. Nice to see somethings never change. This is what the log said:

Apr 16 10:33:07 hassium installer[39689]: Free space on "SysApps": 9.96 GB (9962598400 bytes).

Apr 16 10:34:28 hassium installer[39689]: install:didFailWithError:Error Domain=PKInstallErrorDomain Code=110 UserInfo=0x10817b630 "An error occurred while extracting files from the package “OtherDevDocumentation.pkg”." Underlying Error=(Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=2 UserInfo=0x106722570 "The operation couldn’t be completed. No such file or directory")

Apr 16 10:34:28 hassium installer[39689]: Install failed: The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Not particularly helpful. So I decided to hit that “Try Updating Again” button, see what happens. This time, at least, I get some useful error info:

Okay, so this is just like before. We’ve run out of space and I need to clear some off. I still think this is the wrong place to bring this up, or at least not the ideal place. But still, I know what to do.

And sure enough, once I’ve cleared some space up (by deleting /var/vm/sleepimage, btw) the update works fine and dandy and Install Xcode.app automatically launches my updated Xcode (oh! sure, now you auto-launch!).

So it looks like, for me and Xcode anyway, third time’s a charm.

Oh, by the way, if you’re looking for the plist editor that used to be included with the Developer Tools, it no longer exists as a standalone application. Instead, it’s built right into Xcode itself (makes sense to me). So if you want to edit .plist files, you just open them in Xcode now. Simple enough.

Today Apple released an update to Xcode. And here we go again.

Let the Good Times Roll
First off, there appears to be no way to update the software from the application page:

Nor does it appear in the Updates section of my Mac App Store:

To install the update I had to go to the Purchased section:

Ah! There it is, and it appears to see my current install. But this is what I get when I click the UPDATE button:

Nice. More useless error messages. See, I am signed into the account I used to purchase Xcode. So this makes no sense whatsoever.

Fortunately, I’m a SysAdmin, and this sort of thing is our forte. I figure App Store is probably confused because I moved the original installer app off my main hard drive due to space constraints that were causing the original install to fail. Putting the Install Xcode.app back in to /Applications should do the trick, I reason.

Sure enough, doing so allows me to run the update from App Store. Now I get this:

Well, that’s pretty ironic! Seems like that’s the message I should have gotten the first time I attempted to install Xcode 4.0. I’ll call this progress though, as it’s the first error message I’ve seen that might make any sense to a normal user. Still, though, there’s no indication of how to fix the problem. Just how much disk space I’ll need is never specified. Not before I began the process, nor during the process. This is simply terrible UI, folks. Simply terrible!

So I decided that probably the best way to clear up the needed space was to completely delete the current Xcode 4.0 install. I’m pretty sure that no matter what you do, the Install Xcode.app is going to overwrite everything anyway, so I may as well delete it.

Unfortunately, this leaves me with the original problem with the Update. I get this thing again:

So now I’m in a catch-22: If I keep everything I need for the Updater — the Install Xcode.app and the entire Developer folder — I don’t have enough space to complete the update. But if I remove any of these items, the App Store isn’t able to perform the Update because it doesn’t seem to recognize the app as being fully installed (despite the fact that it sees it on the product page as installed) or as having been installed by me.

The first thing I tried was using a symlink pointing to the Install Xcode.app on another drive to clear some disk space. No dice. The actual Install Xcode.app needs to be in /Applications.

Next, I tried deleting just a portion of the Developer install, particularly the folder /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform, which is just under 4GB. And now we’re back to the “sign in to the account” message again. I also moved this folder and tried using a symlink to it as well, with the same result.

Next I tried removing the Install Xcode.app payload, a hidden folder that lives inside the app that’s full of PKG bundles. Also no go.

It looks like the only way to update Xcode is to actually have Install Xcode.app and the Developer folder in their expected locations, and then, if you’re short on disk space, to find several GBs of non-Xcode files — how many GBs I can only speculate, but I’ll guess around 4 GBs (to give me a total of 10 GBs free) — to temporarily remove while I complete the update. Then, once the update is complete, I should be able to remove the Install Xcode.app (or move it to a backup disk) and put back the temporarily deleted files. Fun times!

Okay! So, after clearing up some space, the update still doesn’t work! Argh! I am STILL getting the “updates for other accounts” message.

I’m at a complete loss at this point. And what do we do when we’re at a complete loss, kids? That’s right: Time to reboot.

Reboot to the Rescue
After rebooting and opening the App Store, and signing in to my account, here’s what I see in the Updates screen:

App Store now sees my Xcode install and recognizes it as something it can update. This looks very promising. And this is what I see when I hit the UPDATE button:

Ahhh! Sweet blessed mercy! At last! It’s working!

But wait… After the 20 minute “Update” process completes, App Store says my app is updated:

But Xcode begs to differ:

Turns out it’s only the Install Xcode.app that’s been updated:

So I run the Install Xcode.app, and this is what it tells me:

Un-fucking-believable.

Now What?
In theory, the best way for me to clear up disk space for an Xcode update is to delete the older version. I tried this before, however, and App Store got confused. But, ever the glutton for punishment, I simply must know if the Install Xcode.app will work under this scenario. It absolutely should. So I delete /Developer. Again. I rerun the updated Install Xcode.app and:

Seems to be working. It’s about frickin’ time.

The Deal
So here’s the deal: Apple simply doesn’t provide an accurate figure for how much disk space is required for installing Xcode. If you’re wondering what the actual number is, I think I’m able to glean it from my experiments and am happy to provide this figure.

Also, there are a number of possible issues that can crop up if you happen to be low on disk space and are working around those constraints, so I’ll provide some info on just what’s going on under the hood with these updates.

Total Disk Space Required: 15 GBs

Itemized Disk Space Requirements:

• Install Xcode.app: 4.5 GBs
• Xcode and Related Developer Tools and Libraries: 10 GBs

What’s Actually Happening During an Update:

• When you update Xcode from the App Store, you’re not actually updating Xcode. You’re updating the Install Xcode.app.
• You must have enough disk space at update time to accommodate this update, about 4.5 GBs.
• After running the App Store update, you must run the Install Xcode.app to actually update Xcode.
• The Install Xcode.app does not actually update existing components, it instead wants to completely overwrite your current install of /Developer, and so will need the full 10 GBs of disk space that install requires.
• At this point, however, if you want to clear some disk space, it’s safe to delete /Developer.

Additional Possible Issues:

• In order to update Xcode, bare minimum, App Store obviously wants to see that Xcode is installed under the active account.
• If App Store is complaining about your install or your user account, I highly recommend a reboot of your system before proceeding. This will likely cause App Store to fully recognize the install and account info, particularly if you’ve been mucking around in any way, shape or form.
• The easiest way to manage all this is to keep the Developer Tools where they’re expected — in /Developer — and to keep the Install Xcode.app where it’s expected — in /Applications. If you have the disk space, this should make everything work more smoothly.
• There are workarounds for this, but as you can see, they’re not necessarily pretty.

All in all, I’d call this a major failure for the App Store. I’ll say again, the App Store is meant to simplify the application installation process, and is meant primarily for the installation of simple, drag-and-drop type apps. By breaking its own protocol and using the App Store to install a complex suite of applications and libraries, Apple is both setting a terrible example for other developers, and creating one of the worst user experiences I’ve had in a very long time.