The inaugural article on this blog was a piece called Tiger Beefs. Tiger was — and remains — my least favorite Mac OS release of all time. I really hated it and couldn’t wait for the next version. Tiger was very much a transitional release. It contained a lot of new and largely unrefined features, and it also had a lot of forward-looking stuff going on under the hood that would later lead to great things. But it had a shitload of problems and not all that much to recommend it.

Lion, like Tiger, is very much a transitional release. It contains a wealth of new features, but many seem unfinished or poorly thought out. And there’s a ton of new stuff going on in the guts of this new OS that will someday lead to great new things. But right now, today, my main complaint with Lion is that it’s just slow. Slow and a little buggy. And, as with Tiger, after several weeks with this new OS, there isn’t much about it that’s truly compelling. There’s no real “gotta have it” feature in Lion.

Bear in mind that my point of comparison is Snow Leopard. The spirit of Snow Leopard is the complete opposite of Lion. It’s an OS with few new features that focuses on stability, consistency and performance. It’s a refinement of a previous OS (even sharing a surname). And it just happens to be my favorite version of Mac OS X to date. Maybe — no, I’ll go ahead and say definitely — my favorite OS of all time. Snow Leopard was, and continues to be, a superb operating system, with very little to fault it.

To give you an idea of how slow Lion is, earlier this week I needed to use some resources that only properly worked in Snow Leopard (for some reason, the upgrade to Lion broke my ability to use certain fonts in certain Director projects I still need access to), so I booted into my Snow Leopard partition, the one I cloned just before I upgraded to Lion. The one on the firewire drive. It felt as fast if not faster than Lion. That’s right, Snow Leopard running off a firewire drive felt as fast if not faster than Lion running from the internal hard drive. I say “felt” because I didn’t really run any scientifically accurate tests of performance. But generally speaking, when you boot off an OS that lives on a firewire hard drive, it’s noticeably slow. My experience was the opposite; it was seemingly faster than the local boot drive. I’ve never seen that before.

On Lion I see latency everywhere, and I think this is part of why Lion feels so slow. Even at login, when I click the round icon to select my user, there is a lag of at least a second or two in which nothing happens. And let me just take a moment to say, this is something I’m really getting tired of. It just should never happen. Clicking on something should always produce some kind of immediate response, even if it’s just something as simple as a highlight, because when nothing happens, I don’t know that I’ve properly clicked something, so I may start re-clicking or clicking other places, assuming that I’ve done something wrong, when in fact the interface is just hung. It’s really unacceptable, and I see it everywhere. It happens all the time on my iPhone, and now, in Lion, it happens all the time on my Mac. There’s really no excuse for it. This sort of latency never occurred in Mac OS 9, I don’t see it in Windows XP — if there’s a lag in those systems, it means something’s really wrong — but latency has sort of been a problem since Mac OS X came to life, albeit an increasing minor one, until now. Lion brings latency back with a vengeance.

I’m seriously thinking of reverting my Lion install at work to Snow Leopard. My home system fairs better, as I have 8GB of RAM —Lion seems quite RAM hungry as well — but at work I really need to get things done, and Lion is just slow. Slow and a little buggy.

And after going back to Snow Leopard for a day, I realize how much I miss it.

There’s a lot to like about Lion, and I still like it better than I ever liked Tiger. I still really like the new Lion aesthetic, its focus on content and lightness. Going back, Snow Leopard’s round Aqua jelly buttons and scrollbars already look kind of clumsy and silly. But Snow Leopard’s performance, stability and consistency are really a joy. Apple was right to keep Snow Leopard around for so long. Maybe they should’ve kept it around a while longer still.

But just because they didn’t, though, doesn’t mean I can’t go on using it. And by gum, I think that’s what I’ll do.

Preparation & Installation
I want to begin by talking a bit about my preparation for the upgrade, as well as the installation process itself. As everyone knows by now, the primary avenue for installing Lion is the Mac App Store. When it comes to complicated monolithic installs, I’ve had some issues with the Mac App Store. But Apple has nailed it this time. Installing Lion from the Mac App Store was quite painless, and on two machines went largely without issue.

I want to point out that, before installing Lion, I downloaded the installer from the Mac App Store, where it was saved in my Applications folder. I then cloned my system partition to an external drive, making a fully bootable backup of my Snow Leopard system and, at the same time, a backup of the Lion installer itself. Since the Lion installer deletes itself after installation, this may be something the more paranoid among you want to do.

I also did some house cleaning before installing Lion, deleting old apps that I no longer use, and particularly PPC apps, which are no longer supported in the new OS.

I first installed Lion on my work computer. The installation itself took about 30 minutes, during which my computer was unusable, naturally. But if you’ve ever installed a Mac OS from an external drive, it was much like that. Just like a typical DVD installation, only much faster.

Of course, now there are no alternative install options; no Erase and Install, no Archive and Install. Lion is an upgrade only process, which, at this stage in the game, frankly, I’m comfortable with. This was, however, the first time I’ve ever not used either Erase and Install or Archive and Install; it was my first Upgrade. Very exciting.

At Home & At Work
My work computer has three partitions. The first contains my system and application files; the second contains my user account data; the third is a Boot Camp partition. While I was able to install Lion on this system there were some features that will be unavailable to me without changing my partition configuration.

For the most part the install went without issue. But, because of the way my work machine is set up, I did experience some exceptions worth mentioning. In particular, I am not able to take advantage of the new full Disk Encryption feature, nor can I use the Restore Partition functionality. The workaround is to redo my partition scheme, upgrade to Lion, and then install Boot Camp. But I think I’ll pass for now. While those features do sound intriguing to me, I think I’ll manage without them. I just don’t have the time to redo everything right now.

The other point of contention was that after installing Lion on my work machine it began running very, very slowly. I had assumed that this was a side affect of the rather lengthy Spotlight indexing process that happens after any update, but the problem persisted even after the indexing had stopped. What ultimately made the problem go away was an upgrade of my Parallels install, of all things. So if you’re having performance issues after your Lion upgrade, you may want to make sure you’ve updated all your software, particularly Parallels. Once I did that, things ran much more smoothly.

I should also point out that at home, where I have the same partition scheme sans Boot Camp, and no Parallels, my Lion upgrade was about as perfect as you could imagine. Which is to say I had no problems or oddities whatsoever. My only complaint is that the Spotlight indexing took several hours to complete, but this is a very minor gripe.

Recovery
Because I don’t have a Boot Camp partition at home I now get the Recovery partition. The Recovery partition is really cool. When you boot holding the option key you’ll now see the Recovery drive. Booting from it is just like booting from the Mac OS X Install DVDs of days gone by, only with the speed of a local disk. The usual suspects are there: Terminal, Disk Utility. But now Safari is there as well. This is because Lion allows you to surf the Internet to research whatever problem you might be having. That’s right, the Lion Recovery partition is Internet-connected. This is exceptionally cool.

Disk Encryption
I have not tried Disk Encryption yet. While I can use the feature, my understanding is that it will only encrypt my boot drive, and since I keep all my personal data on a secondary partition, there’s not a huge advantage to doing this. I may try it at some point, just to see how it works, but for now I’ve left it off.

General
Once Lion is up and running, there is a lot to take in. Let’s start with some general observations.

iOS Scrolling (“Natural Scrolling”)
I was surprised by the fact that Natural Scrolling, as Apple calls it, actually feels pretty natural indeed. This is probably because it makes more sense than the way we’ve learned to scroll for the past decade. But, while the idea of Natural Scrolling does make sense, and I’m sure I’d eventually get used to it, I’m not sure what the point is. Is there some reason to relearn this oldest of behaviors? Some advantage? Because if not then it’s just another novelty I just don’t need. I am leaving it off until there’s a reason for it.

Scrollbars
Much ado has been made about the new scrollbars, which, like those on iOS, are invisible until you begin scrolling, at which point they fade up as a translucent overlay, only to fade out again when scrolling has stopped. The switch to this new scrollbar style is in line with the premise that permeates Lion: a focus on content. The big complaint is that the old-style scrollbars provided always-available information — position in a window, amount of content, and the simple fact that scrolling was an option in whatever view you happened to be in.

Personally, I like the new scrollbars. I do think they remove visual clutter in a subtle but significant way. The information we’ve lost is still very easy to obtain — a trivial swipe of the trackpad is all it takes — and frankly, when was the last time you looked at a scrollbar for information. It’s a tradeoff, sure, but I think it’s a good one.

In-App Resume
Quit an application, then relaunch it, and you’ll notice that your windows are all back in place, exactly as they were during your last session. It’s a simple addition, but a sweet one that has greatly simplified my life and reduced the amount of time I spend at login each day setting everything up the way I had it when I left.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering (I certainly was), In-App Resume works for all apps, even ones that haven’t been updated to take advantage of Lion’s new features.

Saving (Or Not Saving) Documents
Along those same lines, applications that support Lion’s Versions functionality simply don’t require you to save your work anymore. Moreover, as the name implies, these applications will now seamlessly and invisibly keep versions of the document saved at sensible intervals. These versions can be accessed in a Time Machine-esque interface that’s both fun to look at and easy to use. I really like this direction, and feel like it’s been a long time coming. For years I’ve wondered, from time to time: “Why do I have to save this document? Isn’t that something that computers can do?” And versioning is a really terrific icing on this document saving cake.

Still, it’s going to take some time to learn to stop hitting the Save button every couple of minutes.

Login Resume
Log out of your computer and you’ll see a new tick box that says “Reopen windows when logging back in” in the confirmation dialog. Leaving this checked will enable what I call Login Resume, which is just like In-App Resume for logins. Next time you log in the OS will reopen all the apps you had open at logout. Coupled with In-App Resume it’s a real time- and brain-saver. I highly approve of this new direction. It just makes good sense.

The only problem I have with Login Resume is that sometimes an application will take a long time to quit (Firefox, I’m looking at you) and when that happens, logout gets cancelled. But the logout process has already closed a bunch of apps, so now, when the problem app finally quits and you log out, your session only includes the problem application, and that’s what gets saved. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, boy is it annoying.

Oh, and just for the record, Login Resume can be bypassed post-logout by holding the shift key while logging in.

Gestures
While I like a lot of the new gestures in Lion, there’s still some work to be done in the consistency area before I can fully endorse them. Gestures, when they make sense, are terrific and work great. But inconsistency is their downfall, and there is much of it in Lion’s implementation.

For instance, some gestures when reversed will back out of the action; others will back out when repeated. And this means that some gestures trigger different behaviors depending on context. I’ve set Launchpad to activate with a four-finger pinch in. To deactivate Launchpad, I reverse the gesture, a four-finger pinch out. But if I’m not in Launchpad, four-finger pinch out activates Exposé’s Show Desktop. Same gesture, different behavior depending on context. It’s confusing, and that confusion will likely make gesture adoption less likely.

Switching Spaces, on the other hand (no pun intended), is supremely natural and intuitive, mainly because it relates to the physical. I use that gesture all the time, because it just makes sense. But gestures that don’t make sense are harder to learn than key-commands, for me anyway, and I predict the difficult ones will fall by the wayside.

Odds ‘N’ Ends
A few other things I’ve noticed, apropos of nothing in particular.

• Badge text for apps like Mail is now thinner, uglier and less legible. I don’t think I like it.
  
• Directory Utility now features Directory Editor, presumably for editing your local (or otherwise) ODDB.
  
• Here’s a weird one: the softwareupdate command now requires root.
• This breaks my Software Update Downloader Automator Workflow.
• Limited local Time Machine, which makes local backups on laptops while the Time Machine disk is absent, is very cool.
• Lion uses a lot of RAM, about 2 GBs at login.

Finder
The Finder has received another fairly significant overhaul, with numerous visual changes and a handful of new features.

The new Finder graphics are, overall, flatter, lighter and less intrusive. The rounded rectangle is everywhere; buttons now use the shape as opposed to the ovular incarnation we’ve had since the inception of Mac OS X. The bottoms of windows even use the shape now.

The Finder window Sidebar now uses the flat, monochromatic icons we’ve seen in the latest version of iTunes, making it also less visually obtrusive than before. In some ways this hinders functionality by making the icons less distinct targets, but it’s also in keeping with Lion’s goal of reducing visual clutter. Indeed, this does all have a cumulative affect, and that affect is to focus one’s attention on the contents of the Finder window itself. Personally, I think it works well, and I like this new direction.

Column view in the Finder — the view I use almost exclusively — gets some love in the form of a few new views. You can now arrange any column-viewed window by Date Last Opened, Date Added or Application. Moreover, the column will now show headers for each category you’ve chosen to sort by, which is great. There does seem to be a bug, however, when navigating arranged columns using arrow keys, the header gets selected as you navigate to the right. It’s not a crucial problem, but is an odd detail for a company like Apple to miss, and it makes the new OS seem buggier than maybe it actually is.

The Finder also continues to be slow when viewing network folders, particularly ones with many items. At one point, while viewing a folder with thousands of items over the network, Finder and hdutil spiked, and the Finder would not show any other network folder contents. I was able to get the Finder working properly again by restarting it, but this is a problem that’s gotten worse, not better. Hopefully it will addressed down the line.

Quicklook
Quicklook is greatly improved in Lion. I use Quicklook all the time, so this is great news.

In Snow Leopard, the Quicklook window would retain the size and shape it initially took based on the size and shape of the first selected item; but now the window resizes dynamically based on each selection, more accurately reflecting the size and shape of each selected item. If you modify the Quicklook window, however, it will retain the custom size and shape no matter what you select. The best of both worlds!

Quicklook is also smart about displaying .webloc files, fetching and showing the actual web page referenced by the file. Nice!

Quicklook also works in Spotlight now; hovering over an item in Spotlight’s menubar dropdown will display a small preview.

Quicklook also, oddly enough, seems to be a better media player than QuickTime Player. I was able to view a transport stream MPEG with a .TS extension just fine in Quicklook. But QuickTime Player, for some reason, hung when attempting to view this file; QuickTime Player Pro 7 simply refused to play the file at all.

But my favorite thing about the new Quicklook is that it remains active even when you switch to a different application. In the past, switching to a different app make the Quicklook window disappear, and switching back to the Finder made it reappear. It was conceptually confusing and it made comparing something in Quicklook to something in another application very frustrating. now it behaves properly. I’m very happy about this.

Overall, Quicklook is one of my top happy surprises in Lion. It’s a feature that I’ve always loved, and now it’s much improved in ways that make it even more useful.

TextEdit
I use TextEdit all the time, especially for writing blog posts like this one, so I can’t help but commenting on a few of the things I’ve noticed about the venerable and essential app’s Lion incarnation. TextEdit is, admittedly, largely unchanged, but there are some minor points worth noting.

Some of TextEdit’s previously buried formatting options have now been moved into the toolbar, but the toolbar itself is now miniscule. I mean, it’s really tiny. And there seems to be no way to enlarge it. Sure, I can live with it, but I really kind of hate it. It’s hard to see and hard to hit with a mouse cursor, particularly as we begin to use less accurate input devices like trackpads. It’s also incongruous; I don’t see this change anywhere but in TextEdit.

Also, where is fullscreen mode for TextEdit. There’s fullscreen for iTunes and Safari but not TextEdit? TextEdit is the one app I usually want to really focus in, and there are all sorts of text editors out there with a “concentration mode” that blocks out all other apps, so I know there’s an audience for this sort of thing in TextEdit. Seems like a natural place to showcase this Lion feature, but it’s just not there. Very disappointing!

Mail
Mail in Lion gets a major facelift. Now with a horizontal orientation, Mail displays the message in a pane to the right of the message list, taking greater advantage of the horizontal nature of computer screens. The mailbox sidebar is now hidden by default, again emphasizing content over administration. And the message list now displays message previews a-la-iOS and Gmail.

As in the past, I won’t use the message pane. I appreciate the smarter use of screen real estate, but using it it precludes two things I need to do all the time: deleting spam emails without opening them; and opening multiple emails. But the inline message previews are wonderful. This is something that both Gmail and iOS have had over Mail.app for some time, and which have become a major limitation in Mail.app. Good to finally see this arrive.

Mail is one of those app that doesn’t make sense to me in fullscreen mode, but it does feature the capablility. Perhaps most significantly, Mail in fullscreen mode prevents you from looking at more than one email at a time, which is something I often need to do.

The new thread viewing capabilities are very nicely implemented, and to some extent mitigate my need to view multiple emails at once.

Searching is also much better and full featured in Mail. I haven’t used it much, but so far I like the interface and increased functionality.

Overall, the changes in Mail are welcome and well done, though I still prefer Gmail (in the browser) for its ability to Undo sending emails, among other features.

Launchpad
Launchpad is a great idea gone pretty badly awry. Borrowing heavily from iOS in terms of appearance, it’s actually closer in concept to the way we used the Apple Menu back in OS 9 when it was configurable. Remember that? We used to put folders full of application aliases for quick, easy access. Launchpad is the same basic idea, but with very limited setup capabilities and an interface that takes up your entire screen.

There are lots of problems with Launchpad. The overarching one is that customization is entirely too limited at this time.

Launchpad populates its interface with every application on your system. This is the right idea in theory, but if you’ve got a lot of apps on your system, Launchpad becomes very full of useless items. And unfortunately the only way to customize this is by opening Launchpad and moving things around in the same way you move things on an iPhone or iPad, by clicking and dragging them. But there is no multiple-select in Launchpad, so you must arrange you apps one-at-a-time. And arranging things this way is just as clumsy on the Mac as it is in iOS. Dragging an item to a spot that is occupied by another app causes all the other apps to change positions, making targeting very challenging to even seasoned users. And if you hit an item and linger too long, Launchpad will try to create a folder for the group, just like in iOS. it reminds me of many of the pitfalls of the Dock, but it’s a thousand times worse, because it’s much easier to trigger the wrong behavior, and because you may be dealing with a huge number of items scattered across multiple screens. It’s disaster.

Deleting items from Launchpad is also extremely limited and confusing. You can click-and-hold on an item and this will start the jiggling behavior familiar to iOS users. But only some of the items in Lauchpad feature the X icon that indicates that they are removable. Why are only some items removable? Turns out that apps in your ~/Applications folder can be removed from Launchpad, but others can’t. Launchpad is clearly made for novice users who are confused by the Applications folder, but no novice will understand what’s going on here.

Also, the items in Launchpad are needlessly large, and there is no way to customize this at all.

Launchpad’s conceit is a noble one: create an easy way for novice users to find and access applications. But, because there is no easy way to manage a large collection of applications, Launchpad is really only appropriate for the most basic of user with the smallest of application collections. And even those users, without better tools for managing the interface, will likely outgrow Launchpad in short order.

Launchpad takes everything that’s limiting and frustrating in an iOS interface and ports it wholesale to the Mac OS. It’s an affront to everything decent and good in interfaces. There is the potential for good here, but it is deeply buried within a frustrating and confounding interface.

Mission Control
Mission Control, on the other hand, takes the best of Spaces, Exposé and Dashboard and combines them into one vastly simplified and intuitive interface.

I was never a big fan of these earlier incarnations. I tried to use Spaces for a long time, with limited success, but ultimately gave it up. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of problems with window management. My tendency is to just hide things I’m not using, and command-tab switch liberally. And this works well for me.

But Mission Control is so well implemented I may just end up using it after all. The gestures really help a lot to make it useful and intuitive.  I find myself creating Spaces again, just to simplify and compartmentalize certain tasks. I’m not sure I’ll stick with it in the end, but Mission Control is the best implementation of this sort of window management I’ve seen so far, so it’s possible.

There is one minor bug: If I use three-finger swipe to switch to a new space, during the transition all my Desktop items disappear. They then reappear in the new space. But, if I three-finger swipe to begin the transition, then change my mind and stay in my current space, the Desktop items again disappear, but they never reappear. To get them back I must fully switch to another Space.

Terminal
Terminal is an app I obviously use a lot, and it’s always nice to see it get some new features.

Terminal when launched now shows a buffer of the last window state, a-la-resume functionality. This can easily be cleared with a simple command-k.

The location is now displayed in the titlebar, and can be command-clicked for the same sort of navigation and access features that have been available in the Finder for years.

You can now specify the working directory and settings that both new windows and new tabs open with in Terminal.

And Terminal now has a fullscreen mode. Not sure I’ll really ever use this, but who knows? Maybe.

iCal
Great God almighty, what did they do to iCal. Man, is it ugly!

Other than the new appearance, it seems pretty much identical to the old iCal. I even still get a cascade of error messages as it attempts to load my Google Calendar delegates.

I think the tagline for the new version should be: iCal: Same Crappy Behavior; Brand New Shitty Interface!

Address Book
Address Book’s interface has been similarly redesigned to look like an actual, physical address book, for some reason. I personally don’t like the look. It’s contrary to the focus of the Lion Finder, a focus on content. The focus in Address Book and Calendar seem to be on cuteness to the detriment of both content and usability. The graphics distract from the content, and in the case of Address Book, functionality has been compromised.

To wit: where are the Groups? There are no Groups shown by default. Yes, you can see them by choosing Groups from the View menu. But you can’t see contact info from this view. And as soon as you double-click a contact to view it you are taken out of Group view via a ridiculous and completely superfluous animated page turn. The old Address Book was simple and showed you everything — Groups, Contacts and Contact details — in a single, unified window. The new Address Book attempts to follow the behavior of a physical address book to such a great extent that it actually nearly defeats the purpose of having a digital address book. All the advantages that can be reaped from a digital interface are now eschewed in favor of a physical analog. And for what purpose? One can only guess.

This seems like a huge step backwards for interface design, and one that is largely in contradiction with the direction seen in other parts of Lion. It’s a real shame.

There is one good thing about the new Address Book: I can finally search by nickname. Now was that so hard?

Conclusion
So there you have it. There’s lots of good and some bad in Lion. Overall I’m pretty pleased, but I agree with a lot of the punditry that this is a transitional release. Transitional to what remains to be seen. But it seems clear to me that Apple has thrown a lot of stuff into this release, much of it simply to see what sticks. My sense is that a lot of the innovation in Lion is still not yet fully baked and that Apple is both aware of this and okay with it. But this is how change happens. You try stuff; you keep what works and throw out what doesn’t.

There’s a surprising amount that works in Lion. In particular, many of the resume features as well as the new versioning paradigms, while still in need of some refinement, will be huge boons to productivity, and will likely reshape in no small way how we expect computers to work. That is, more simply and sensibly, and in ways that reduce our workload rather than add to it.

I also really like the focus on simplicity and reduction of visual clutter to emphasize user content. As people continue to create and house ever larger stores of data, as they continue to do more and more on their computers, as they continue to create more and more documents, finding better ways to focus on content will be essential.

My takeaway from reading this — and mind you, I have not seen the software yet — is that it’s another step towards the convergence of the Mac OS and iOS. There are a lot of iOS configuration tools, and lot of simplification, and even the removal of some GUI configuration tools. Most surprising to me is that for any sort of web server customization you’ll need to use the command-line; the GUI tools are gone:

“There is something odd going on here though. Go take a look at the web service pane in Server App. Let’s see, on/off; make PHP go and folder paths. That’s it! There isn’t a web service module in Server Admin anymore either. So, um, yeah. What’s up with that?

“What’s up is that it’s all about the command line again. Need a web redirect or an alias? Command line. Need to enable some Apache modules? Command line again. In all this madness is something pretty cool though for web apps.”

Apparently they also removed Windows PDC functionality. I can see no technical reason for these removals, frankly. They seem to be all about communication. They seem to be Apple saying, yet again, we’re moving towards less Professional, less customizable, simpler, more iOS- and consumer-focused products. Get used to it.

Nevertheless, some of the simplifying sounds good to me; it’s ease-of-use that made Mac OS X Server such a fine product. I don’t think I would have ever used it for a web server anyway. Still, it’s worrisome to see things removed for no particular reason.

My guess is that some version of Mac OS X Server will be around for a while. But more and more it will be focused on iOS device configuration and, perhaps (I hope), user management, which is what I always used it for.

Still, as I’ve been saying in the comments lately, it’s probably a good time for Mac Admins to start learning some Linux, or dare I say, even some Windows.

Check out the article and let me know what you think. Or, if you have some experience on Lion Server, I’d love to hear about it.

iCloud
First off, iCloud. iCloud is really the engine behind the bulk of this year’s significant announcements.

As I see it, iCloud provides centralized storage and services that are primarily aimed at managing all your various devices — your iPhone, your Mac, iPod, iPad, all of it. For the most part, iCloud is meant to sit in the background and do all this seamlessly and invisibly, which is terrific. I think it’s a great start and Apple is approaching this with the right idea: Make everything as easy as possible.

The $25 portion of the iCloud service that will allow you to store all your music on Apple’s servers for anytime access — dubbed iTunes Match — doesn’t seem like something I’d ever really want or need. Other folks who are more into having all their music with them at all times might feel differently. But I predict this won’t be a huge success for the company, because most folks just won’t really find it compelling.

The free music synchronization that iCloud provides, on the other hand, should prove wildly successful, because it makes purchasing music from iTunes even easier and better. And since it’s already available in the latest builds of iTunes, I offer myself as an example of its probable success and obvious usefulness.

Until recently I’ve used Amazon to purchase music. Their songs were generally cheaper and not burdened by DRM. But now that Apple has largely (completely?) done away with DRM, the services no longer compete on that level. Now it simply comes down to convenience. And since all my computing devices are Apple kit, I’ll pretty much be using iTunes to buy my music when possible. Because now, with iCloud, I can do so from any device without penalty or hassle: anytime I purchase something from iTunes it will propagate to any other device that has my Apple ID on it. iCloud effectively provides backups of my purchased music as well, by allowing me to re-download any purchases I’ve made.

This is how it should have been all along. The fact that it wasn’t this way in the past — that getting my music onto my various devices was such a hassle — was always frustrating to me, and it kept me from buying music from iTunes as much as I might have liked to. The fact that they’ve fixed this glaring issue means I’ll likely buy a lot more music from iTunes now. In fact, I’ve already bought eight songs from my Mac. And getting them onto my iPhone was not just a piece of cake, but a complete delight.

Hallelujah.

Oh, and one last thing: I really dislike the new iCloud icon. A cloud etched on brushed metal buttons? Seriously? Blech! I hope this isn’t a new trend because I think it’s ugly.

Lion
I’ve written a bit about Lion already, and there wasn’t a whole lot of new information at this year’s keynote. There were a couple surprises, though.

For one, I was somewhat surprised to see that Apple has backpedaled on offering Lion Server as simply another “part of Mac OS X Lion.” In the original sneak peek promotional materials Apple had written:

“Lion Server is now part of Mac OS X Lion. It’s easy to set up your Mac as a server and take advantage of the many services Lion Server has to offer.”

And indeed most people took this to mean that Lion Server would be free. This is longer the way it’s presented; in fact Lion Server has its own page now. And if you read that page you’ll notice that Lion Server will be 50 bucks.

Now don’t get me wrong. At a tenth what it used to cost, Lion Server is still a bargain. I’m certainly not complaining about this. I was just a bit surprised is all. Though maybe I shouldn’t have been, as reader LeRoy had pointed out this likelihood in the comments to my original article. What can I say, LeRoy? When you’re right you’re right.

That said, $50 for the easiest, most powerful server software available is a steal. I will probably buy a copy just to kick the tires on it. If I were still a Mac Sysadmin, I’d be so jazzed.

The next surprise was the price of Lion: 30 bucks. If you’re keeping track, that’s $100 cheaper than Mac OS X upgrades used to be, about a quarter what it used to cost. That’s phenomenal.

And finally, I was quite surprised by the fact that Mac OS X Lion will be delivered though the Mac App Store. I’ve had my fair share of issues with the Mac App Store, so I’m skeptical that this will be a great delivery method for an OS update. But Apple’s pretty good at making great OS update experiences, so they might manage it after all.

iOS 5
The notifications look great, as do many of the refinements in iOS 5. But then, that sort of stuff is to be expected in any iOS relase.

The real game-changer, in my mind — and it’s deeply tied to iCloud — was PC Free. The iPad and its ilk are clearly the future for Apple, and likely for the computer industry as a whole. But, as I’ve said before, the iPad doesn’t become a real computing device until it can stand on its own without the need for a Mac. Well, now it can.

The iPad is now a full computing citizen. If it serves your needs it can be your only computer. And I think that will be the case for huge numbers of people. PC Free really sets the stage for the iPad to be the revolutionary device its been hailed as. It’s a very important step.

Conclusion
Overall I’m pretty impressed by this year’s announcements. I really wish there had been a revised iPhone announcement, or at least a hint of when it might happen. I’m dying — really dying — to switch to Verizon as I can hardly get calls at work anymore. But I don’t want to switch right before they announce the new phone. So I wait…

Still, it was a good year, with lots of cool advancements for the platform and lots of cool stuff to look forward to in the near future. I think (despite having just renewed my MoblieMe subscription — Doh!) iCloud is on the right track, enabling all kinds of great things, from better music purchasing to PC Free iPads. And, of course, I’m totally psyched about Lion.

Well, it looks like someone at Apple has agreed, at least where such buttons are used for Preferences sub-panes:

I much prefer the standard sub-pane buttons for an OS in which clicking — rather than gesture — is how interaction will occur. It just makes sense.

I’m glad to see this reversion. It may be small and subtle, but this is a change for the better.

And I love that Apple still thinks so hard about these things.

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.

Thwarted Expectations
For starters, the big appeal to me of downloading and installing stuff from the App Store is that I don’t have to manage it. All that management stuff is handled by the store itself. I make my purchase and the app installs correctly and in the proper spot. Not so with the Xcode install.

In fact, once you’ve clicked on the buy button in the store, had the $5 clams removed from your account and waited the half hour it takes for the 4.5 GB install to do its thing in your Dock, what you end up with is not Xcode installed on your system. No, instead what you get is an application called “Install Xcode,” which is essentially just a wrapper for the old-style installer you used to get for free.

Buying from the App Store in this case doesn’t seem to manage anything except Apple taking my $5 bucks, which was never a problem before because it was free. But wait, it gets worse.

Install Xcode.app
So I run this installer app — this Install Xcode.app — and it’s going okay. The inteface has the new Lion-style buttons and animations, which is at least entertaining, as well as usual stuff, license agreements and the like. Oddly, it even discovers my old install and tells me that it’s going to rename it — not upgrade it, rename it — to Developer-old. No choice here, that’s just what it’s going to do, just so ya know.

But then it fails, and not exactly gracefully. No, it fails ugly.

Um… What now? Consult /var/log huh? This is what I paid $5 bucks for? This is what you wrote an installer app for? Crappy error reporting? So you could tell me to “consult /var/log/install.log”? Not even open Console, but consult a log file in an invisible folder? Really? You think Joe Average App Store User will have any freaking idea what this means?

And isn’t this just the sort of thing the App Store is supposed to prevent?

Wherefore Failure?
So I open the lo file and this is what it says:

Mar 10 15:02:38 hassium runner[557]: Administrator authorization granted.
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Will use PK session
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Starting installation:
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Configuring volume "SysApps"
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Preparing disk for local booted install.
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Free space on "SysApps": 8.51 GB (8505917440 bytes).
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Create temporary directory "/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee+++++++++++/-Tmp-//Install.541PaUH12"
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: IFPKInstallElement (40 packages)
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Failed install preflight: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=640 UserInfo=0x103555a90 "You can’t save the file “Developer” because the volume “SysApps” is out of space."
Mar 10 15:02:39 hassium installer[541]: Install failed: The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Yup, you guessed it. Out of disk space. Now, there’s a whole list of fucked-up here, so let me just take you through it.

1. The Xcode Installer application failed because of a lack of disk space, but somehow can’t just say that.
2. The traditional, old-style (and, ahem, free) installers will simply check disk space during preflight and tell you if you don’t have enough space right there in the installer, but this custom app that I paid for cannot.
3. Nowhere on the App Store does it say that you will need 15 GBs — yes, fifteen or more gigabytes, if you count the Install Xcode app and it’s payload — of free disk space to install Xcode.
4. The Install Xcode app itself is 4.5 GBs, which is a big part of the reason my disk is too full now for the install to complete.
5. The traditional, old-style Xcode installer always used to offer customization options so you could preen certain Developer resources from the install to conserve space. Not everyone is an iPhone developer, for instance, and not installing the iOS SDK will actually save upwards of 8 GBs of disk space. But these options are no longer present in the custom-built Install Xcode app.

The fact is, there are at least a couple points at which this problem can and should have been detected. The most logical place would be at the app store itself — preferably before I ponied up the dough — where a simple declaration of disk space requirements would be exceptionally useful, particularly for an app and installer that together take up over 15 GBs of disk space. Instead we get this, which, if anything, seems to suggest that all you’ll need is 4.24 GBs of space.

It also would be lovely if the Install Xcode app could tell me all the same useful stuff as a regular installer. But then they’d have to charge $10 bucks, and who’s going to pay that for something they used to get for free.

The Fix
After all this I decided to see what was inside this Install Xcode app. I presumed that there would likely be a standard PKG or MPKG file that would allow me to install Xcode in the usual manner. Sure enough, that turned out to be the case.

Running that MPKG file, by the way, did, in fact, allow my to customize my install, had I wanted to go that route. (Though I would point out, it did not seem to want to upgrade my existing components as past installations of Xcode had. Take that info for what it’s worth.)

Instead, however, I decided to see things through with the Install Xcode app. So I copied it to another drive partition and erased it from my /Applications folder, which freed up enough disk space to complete the full install and ran the Install Xcode app from the secondary partition (happily, the Mac App Store still recognizes that I have installed Xcode on this system).

This time, success.

Finally!

Conclusion
So that’s my tale. In the case of Xcode, it seems clear to me that the only thing the App Store is really facilitating is payment, which was never an issue in the past because Xcode was blissfully free. Unfortunately, the overall experience of installing Xcode from the Mac App Store is more opaque and, if there is any sort of problem, far more difficult to fix. Given the lack of information provided by the App Store, it also seems far more likely that you will run into problems.

My conclusion: The Mac App Store is simply not well suited for complex application installs. It works great for drag-n-drop apps — self-contained applications that can simply be dropped into /Applications (or anywhere else for that matter). But for complex suites of applications, the Mac App Store doesn’t simplify, it complicates. And that ain’t right.

Finally, I don’t mind that Apple is charging a small fee for the Dev tools. I always thought it was pretty generous that they were free in the past, and $5 is still cheap enough to grab them casually. What I don’t particularly care for is paying five dollars for a singularly crappy installation experience. Those two things just don’t mix well.

UPDATE:
For folks just joining us in this saga, please note that there are some additional installments dealing with the recent Xcode updates, how they’re handled by App Store, and how to deal with them on space-constrained drives. Installment 2 deals with some general App Store issues I had. Installment 3 deals with the 4.0.5 update, which was the smoothest — though by no means perfect — so far.

Also, one reader points out that he was able to keep his file size down but still have success with updates by simply removing the .PKG files (found inside the .MPKG mentioned above) from  Install Xcode.app. He also points out a very cool trick that will allow you stop an in-progress update: simply option-click the INSTALL/UPGRADE button and App Store will give you the option to cancel the update. Handy!

The Mobile Situation
I had initially found MobileMe problematic, especially compared to Dropbox, and especially when dealing with, of all things, Mac-specific metadata. But it turns out that Dropbox is not without its own problems either. In fact, after looking more closely at my Dropbox data, not only are my custom icons and labels missing on one of my computer’s Dropbox folders, but a good many of my image files, for some reason, don’t display properly on my iPhone (or, for that matter, on an iPad I’ve had the good fortune to test out — more on that later) when viewed from the mobile Dropbox app.

Dropbox: Corrupted Image

The images seem fine on my computer, and when viewed from the web, but when viewed or downloaded to my iPhone they are corrupted, so it would seem to be a problem with how they’re downloaded to the mobile app only, not corrupt data per se. Nevertheless, it’s a problem.

Moreover, it’s problem I don’t have with MobileMe. The same images viewed on my iDisk app look fantastic.

iDisk: Beautiful Images Every Time

Behavior-wise, though, I much prefer the Dropbox app. As I’d mentioned in my last post, it’s capable of displaying text files with the .sh extension. But it’s also a lot more friendly when it comes to viewing and managing images. Dropbox, for instance, allows you to use the swipe gesture to flip between images that are in the same folder, much like you can do in the native Photos app; iDisk doesn’t. It also has a gallery view for image folders that iDisk lacks.

Dropbox: Image Gallery

Dropbox allows you to create folders and add photos from your phone to your Dropbox; iDisk doesn’t. iDisk, on the other hand, does allow you to share a file right from the mobile app, but this is something I never do, so it’s not particularly useful to me. Dropbox’s features are useful, and are ones I use all the time.

The Dropbox app is the clear winner in terms of behavior; I much prefer it. But it doesn’t do me much good if my images don’t display properly. Dropbox fails on a core piece of functionality, and that makes it hard to fully recommend if photos are your game.

Decisions, Decisions
I find myself ping-ponging between MobileMe and Dropbox: Dropbox is simple and easy to use, but MobileMe includes more features; Dropbox lets me read my shell scripts from it’s mobile app, but MobileMe lets me view my photos more reliably. Overall, I like Dropbox better, but the image issue is quite possibly a deal killer.

Find My iPhone
Apple recently announced that iOS 4.2 will include the Find My iPhone service for free with the current crop of hardware. Though I’m still using an iPhone 3GS, I will almost certainly purchase the next revision of the phone, and that will probably be right around the time that my MobileMe subscription is set to expire. Since Find My iPhone is one of the few reasons I’ve continued to hang on to my MobileMe subscription, I’m seriously debating not renewing it when the time comes. My foray into Apple’s cloud services has been largely disappointing. If Dropbox can fix this image issue by that time, it will make this decision a no-brainer.

It’s a shame, really. Everywhere the iPhone shines, MobileMe falls down. Where my iPhone instantly allowed me to consolidate my Mac and mobile data (remember when your Address Book and phone contacts were completely separate?) MobileMe seems to offer a Mac-specific service that’s easily replaced by free and more cross-platform solutions. Mail, contacts and calendar can all be provided better and for free by Google. And there are much better, faster and cheaper ways to get synchronized data storage and backup. What’s more, I already give Apple most of the money in my technology budget, so I can’t help feeling cheated when I have to fork over additional green for these services.

So, while not perfect in some really key areas, I will likely end up giving my money, this time, to Dropbox. Here’s hoping they continue to improve their excellent, if not quite perfect, service.

UPDATE:
One other admittedly very minor beef I have with Dropbox that I just have to get off my chest: if you want gallery functionality, the folder used for images must be called “Photos.” As a person who uses this folder almost exculsively for either drawings or computer graphics, I’d prefer something more neutral. iDisk uses the word “Pictures” which I much prefer.