Versions Part 1: Locked Files

October 14, 2011 – 12:19 PM

I’m starting to not like Lion’s whole “Versions” implementation. It’s a system that’s supposed to simplify file management, but is, in fact, complicating it in certain situations.

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.

By systemsboy | Posted in Interface, Lion | Comments (0)

Buyer’s Lament

October 9, 2011 – 5:08 PM

I’ll be honest: I wish I could stay with AT&T.

I just pre-ordered an iPhone 4S. From Verizon. And while I’m excited to get the new phone, and thrilled at the prospect of improved call quality and coverage, I do feel a pang of regret at having to leave AT&T.

I switched to AT&T when the first iPhone first hit the streets. A very big part of that decision was that I was at that time a Sprint customer. And here’s the thing about Sprint: I hate them. I truly hate them. I was a Sprint customer for probably ten years, over which I had several problems. Once, for instance, after moving from upstate New York to New York City, Sprint continued to bill me for my upstate land line for three months after I’d cancelled it. Correcting this took numerous calls to customer service, making me really question the competence of the company.

If competence had been the only issue, I might’ve stayed. But then, years later, I continued to have problems, once when upgrading to a new phone, and then later with billing. At one point Sprint charged me several hundred dollars for a few hours worth of data use that occurred in the wee hours of the morning, when I can assure you I was quite asleep. I managed to have that charge removed, but it took over an hour on the phone — much of it on hold — during which I was, at one point, berated by a Sprint technician for using the phone improperly.

That was when I vowed my revenge.

That day I vowed to leave Sprint at my earliest convenience. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life. And when the iPhone hit, I knew it was my chance. That was the day Sprint lost my business forever.

I’ve been pretty happy to see where Sprint’s landed in the ensuing years. They’re currently the #3 carrier, and they’ve only just gotten the iPhone. Ha! Serves you right, Sprint. You guys suck!

I do not have such feelings of ill will toward AT&T, however. In fact, all my personal experiences with AT&T — be they over the phone with customer service, or just using AT&T’s customer website — have been quite pleasant. Their customer service folks have always been courteous and quick, and I’ve never spent more than a minute on hold with them in the handful of times I’ve ever even need to call them. Their customer billing site is also quite good, with clear, user-friendly graphics and explanations of my bill that always make perfect sense. Overall I’ve been pretty happy with AT&T.

There is one area, however, in which AT&T has not fared so well. It will likely come as no surprise to readers of this site that AT&T’s cellular reception, particularly in large urban areas — particularly New York City, where I spend the vast majority of my time — is less than stellar. Reception at my workplace is especially bad. There are areas where I often need to be in which I simply get no signal whatsoever. But coworkers with Verizon iPhones have no problems anywhere in the building I work in. This more than anything is the reason for my switch; it’s purely technical. It’s not everyday I need phone service at work, but when I do it’s usually pretty urgent, and having to use the land line while I’m troubleshooting a server or a projector with a colleague over the phone is incredibly frustrating. It just plain slows me down, and when time is of the essence, that’s a real problem.

So I’ve made the switch. I don’t feel completely good about it — I like to think I’m as loyal to good service as I am damning of bad service. But there is it. It’s done. Sorry AT&T. I wish I could stay.

But, Verizon, consider yourself on notice: treat me like you don’t want my business, and you will most certainly lose it.

By systemsboy | Posted in iPhone | Comments (5)

Goodbye, Steve Jobs

October 8, 2011 – 12:15 PM

It’s kind of amazing when the passing of a person you never knew affects you. So it is with Steve Jobs.

I was a bit shocked to hear of his death. I mean, it wasn’t surprising per se. When he finally bowed out of Apple, it was pretty obvious to me that he was dying. I think only imminent death could force him out of Apple a second time. He loved that company. Truly loved it, I believe.

But still, to have such a powerful presence in the world one minute, and then, suddenly, to not. That was shocking. And sad.

Like I said, I never knew Mr. Jobs. But a great deal of my life is tied up in things he made happen. A great deal of my life is the way it is because of him. And I think it’s important to remember that, and to pay some respect when someone who’s influenced so much and so many leaves us.

Whatever you might think of Steve Jobs as a person, there’s no denying that he was, if nothing else, interesting. He did interesting things with his life, and he did them in grand fashion. There was no one quite like him, and there probably won’t be again in my lifetime.

Even to many who never knew him, he will be missed.

John Stewart best summed up my feelings:

By systemsboy | Posted in SteveJobs | Comments (0)

It’s Oh So Quiet

September 27, 2011 – 10:00 AM

Not long ago I posted about my plan to aggressively filter bacn — messages that aren’t quite spam, but that I don’t actually want to read — out of my Inbox.

So for three or four days, I let the bacn accumulate, and then I created a couple choice filters from that collection of mail. After putting these filter into action, it’s been very, very quiet on the email front.

It’s actually a little shocking how seldom I receive email now. That’s how much useless email I was getting. So much, that once the signal-to-noise ratio is leveled, it actually feels like I rarely get email at all. maybe a few times a day do I actually receive anything of real, genuine interest.

But it’s been great. I’m now spending zero time managing mail I don’t care about. I never look at my Inbox now unless there’s something worth reading. Email, on the whole, just takes far, far less of my time and brain power, and those are two things I can always use more of.

As a New Yorker, I’ve both come to accept and to truly hate excessive noise of any kind. Bacn management gives me a rare opportunity to squelch some of that noise, at least of the virtual kind, and the resulting quiet has been truly blissful.

If you’re not already filtering your bacn, I highly recommend you take a bit of time and do it. You won’t be sorry.

By systemsboy | Posted in Internet | Comments (0)

Updating Final Cut Pro X: More Mac App Store Woes

September 21, 2011 – 8:57 AM

Apple has released Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1, a small point release with some important new — or maybe I should say “returned” — features. Most important among these is XML import/export which should allow users of FCPX to open their legacy FCP projects.

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.

By systemsboy | Posted in Applications, Interface | Comments (0)

Lion Beefs

September 19, 2011 – 4:25 PM

Well, it wouldn’t be new OS season without some complaints, now would it? Yes, as always, I have some beefs.

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.

By systemsboy | Posted in Lion, MacOSX | Comments (13)

Bacn Management

September 14, 2011 – 12:13 PM

I’ve recently realized that probably about two-thirds of my email is stuff I just don’t care about or want to read. But it’s not exactly spam, either, as it comes from trusted sources that, if only peripherally, I know or who know me from somewhere. Turns out there’s a name for this type of email: bacn.

In some ways, bacn is worse than spam because you have to decide what to do with it; you can’t just mark it as spam, so there’s a great deal more cognitive effort that bacn requires. But the main problem with bacn is that I get a lot of it, and it commands far more of my attention than I’d like. In fact, it’s a constant distraction. It’s like those people on the streets who hand out flyers or try to get you to donate to their cause. You know, the ones everyone hates. But dealing with bacn is like having to deal with one of those people every hour or so, all day long. It’s just awful. So I’ve finally decided to do something about it.

Where possible I’ve tried to be conscientious and unsubscribe from the mailing list in question. Beyond that, the obvious solution to the bacn problem is email filters. Just create filters for all the bacn you get and be done with it. And that’s largely what I’ve done. But creating filters for every type of sender is tedious, requiring you to set up a new filter, enter the criteria, test it and then apply it. Ideally, there would be a way to create a filter using a selected email as an example.

Well, it turns out that there is — at least in Gmail, which is my email client of choice for most of my mail — I’ve just missed it all this time. To create a filter from an email, simply check the tickbox next to the email, then, under the “More” menu select “Filter Messages Like These.”

You’ll get Gmail’s standard filter interface with the sender info correctly pre-filled and you can set up a label and add whatever actions you want. It works with multiple selections as well, so if you choose two emails with different senders, the filter will be set up to handle any email from either sender.

I know it only eliminates a couple steps. But being able to create filters directly from my Inbox based on the exact type of email I want to filter will really be a boon to my bacn management. It’s much easier, more direct and less error-prone. And reducing the amount of bacn I have to directly deal with will be a boon to my productivity, happiness and sanity.

By systemsboy | Posted in Internet | Comments (0)

Lion Impressions

August 28, 2011 – 7:24 PM

At long a last the time has come for me to post my impressions of Mac OS X 10.7, affectionately referred to as Lion. Lion is a mixed bag, for me. There are few areas where I think it really impresses and then some areas that are a bit less well thought out. Overall it’s a decent release with some really nice features, but the fact is, Snow Leopard was really, really good. Maybe one of the best, most capable and stable OSes I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. It’s a tough act to follow.

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.
  • 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.

By systemsboy | Posted in Lion, MacOSX | Comments (2)

A Funny

August 25, 2011 – 9:47 PM

I’m working on a fairly lengthy post about my Lion impressions. Meantime, here’s a funny I like from Malcontent Comics.

By systemsboy | Posted in Art, Humor | Comments (0)

Web Hosting Is Hard

August 10, 2011 – 9:15 PM

Two and a half years ago I switched from Web Hosting Buzz to MediaTemple for the web hosting of this site. When I made that switch I made it clear that I would be monitoring the situation, and that if MediaTemple’s hosting service ever became problematic, I would move on to yet another provider. Today I’ve done just that and I wanted to share my experience with you, because let’s face it, finding a web hosting provider is hard.

Why The Switch?
If you’ve ever moved to a new hosting provider you know it’s a real pain in the ass. Files and folders must be moved, databases modified, DNS entries changed. And I’ve been with MediaTemple for over two years. So why, a sensible person might ask, did I decide to go to all the effort to switch, and why now?

In a nutshell: my needs changed. But let me add some detail.

The plan I use — the only MediaTemple plan I can really justify the money for — is called the Grid Service, or GS for short. The GS is billed as being shared hosting that can handle a sudden, huge spike of traffic, so, in theory, your site never goes down. When I first began using the GS, it seemed fine. In fact it was fine, at least for this site, for systemsboy.com (or TASB, for short).

Over the years I’ve built several other sites that I use to showcase my other non-systems creative pursuits. And I’ve frequently had a great deal of trouble with them. This was always perplexing to me; TASB ran fairly well most of the time, and other GS-hosted sites seemed perfectly speedy as well. But my other sites were always dog slow, and as I’ve spent increasing amounts of time on them, it’s become a bigger and bigger problem.

After a great deal of research I found, buried amongst the Internets, an article on Media Temple’s GS that completely described the symptoms I was having. According to the article, the GS does indeed handle sudden traffic bursts gracefully, and performs fine for sites that receive a certain level of daily traffic. But for sites that don’t get much traffic, the GS’s performance leaves much to be desired. Since my new sites were new, they weren’t really getting a lot of traffic, and, if the article is correct, this explains why they were so slow. It also explains why TASB was okay; TASB gets a decent amount of traffic.

The Plan
MediaTemple’s GS is 20 bucks a month. That’s expensive for shared hosting these days. These days, commodity hosting is ubiquitous and extremely cheap. And while Host Gator’s 5 dollar hosting doesn’t offer protection against traffic spikes, it’s essentially the same idea: You share server resources with other users on your server. If someone on your server is hogging all the CPU, for instance, you can see major performance issues on your site.

These days, however, an alternative to shared hosting, VPS hosting (short for Virtual Private Server) has dropped dramatically in price, to the point where it’s quite competitive with the GS. In a VPS scenario, the server hardware is still shared among users, but each user’s share of the resources is dedicated and walled off from the other users. This, I’m told, generally yields significantly better performance than shared hosting plans.

So I decided to give VPS a try.

The Provider
Choosing a web host is like choosing a doctor: it’s a huge pain in the ass, requires a great deal of both research and faith, and you don’t want to have to do it twice, at least not in a short space of time. It’s also similar in that one good way to go about it is to ask a friend. So when a good friend recommended 1&1 hosting, I read up about them, checked out their plans, and, in the end decided to give them a go.

Aside from the glowing recommendation, 1&1′s VPS provided the best value for the money. In fact, 1&1 offers a VPS plan for $30. That’s only ten bucks more than I was paying on Media Temple.

Purchasing 1&1
A note about the actual purchase of my 1&1 VPS. I ordered my service on a Friday night (hoping to have it for the weekend), but I had problems with the online order system. Specifically, the system expects you to purchase a domain name from 1&1, and if you, like me, already own a domain name and aren’t planning to get one from 1&1, the site gets confused, or at least confusing. I got to a point in my order where I just ended up having to close the page and start from scratch. Not cancel the order, mind you, as that option was gone, but close the browser window and pray. Having received no confirmation email, I decided to try ordering a second time, and this time I was able to complete the order successfully. I then did receive an email confirming the order and telling me that my VPS was being provisioned and would be ready within 24 hours. When it was not, I sent an email to 1&1 explaining my situation.

In under 24 hours I received a call from a human at 1&1 telling me that the order was ready and apologizing for the delay. Seems my failed initial order had likely caused a flag on the order requiring some sort of verification. So, though I didn’t have time to use it that weekend, the order did at least go through without too much pain. And though the online order was a bit wonky, at least 1&1 provides humans to help with problems, and on weekends no less. All good things to know.

The Test
Before migrating all my sites, I decided to set up a test site based on my slowest site and see if 1&1′s VPS truly did perform better than Media Temple’s GS. If you’re considering making a similar switch, and you can afford to overlap for a few months, I highly recommend you do something similar. Buy a domain or recycle an old one. Sign up for the new service. And then set up a site, preferably one you know was problematic on the old host. It’s very useful and a real confidence boost to know whether or not all this work you’re about to do will be worthwhile. As I said, migration’s a bitch, but having some assurances that it’s worth it is a real boon. It will also give you a chance to see how the provider’s systems work — they’re all a bit different — and if you can refine your migration process it will speed things considerably when the time comes to actually move your sites.

There were two main things I gleaned from my 1&1 tests: 1) Their server setup tools are a bit more complicated and harder to use than Media Temple’s; and 2) the performance of my slowest site on 1&1′s VPS was far superior to that of the GS. Pages that used to sometimes take 12 seconds to load on the GS now generally appeared in as little as 2-3 seconds on the VPS. A huge improvement, well worth the extra cost.

Getting Started
I actually had five separate sites that needed to be migrated, and four of them were WordPress sites, so migrating was no small feat. I did this over a couple weeks, and, yes, it was a huge pain, but it got done and so far it’s been worth it.

The biggest difference between 1&1 and Media Temple is the tools. And I’ll be the first to admit that Media Temple’s tools are a bit easier to use. Media Temple’s Grid Service provides a single control panel for all server administration. There’s an overview section where you can add domains, and an admin section where you can install databases and CMSes and what-not. It’s all fairly self-contained and very well done. I believe Media Temple has custom-made this tool, and they’ve really done a great job.

I happen to know that Media Temple’s VPS is a bit different. Their VPS service has a control panel for account management, but all the server administration is done via a wholly separate interface, the venerable Plesk. This seems to be par for the course where VPSes are concerned. Media Temple’s done a good job here too, though, and managing one of their VPSes is a fairly straightforward affair once you get familiar with Plesk.

1&1′s service is not so well organized. 1&1 also provides an account management control panel, as well as Virtuozzo Power Panel and Plesk — three separate areas — for server management. But when my VPS was first provisioned it was still up to me to install Plesk via the 1&1 control panel. I assume this is because there are a few options for which version of Plesk to install.

But after installing Plesk and kicking the tires by attempting to set up a test site, I found that there were a number of problems. The most dire was that MySQL and PHP were woefully out of date, so much so that my WordPress sites would not run properly. I attempted to update them via the command-line, but this only ended up completely hosing my server. My only recovery option was to re-image the server.

Re-imaging the server is really easy, and it’s kind of cool thing to be able to do. It essentially lets you put everything back into a pristine state, as if you’d never done anything on the server at all. Most VPSes have this capability. But the big bonus I got when I re-imaged my 1&1 VPS was that all of a sudden I had a newer version of Plesk and updated MySQL and PHP. Moreover, this new Plesk version allowed me to update MySQL and PHP to even newer versions, though doing so took a few attempts for some reason.

I don’t understand why my 1&1 VPS started out so crippled, and I don’t understand why re-imaging it brought it to a state that was actually better than when it was new, but I’m happy it did. It would seem that their initial image is a bit out of date with the image used for re-imaging. All I can say is that if you ever end up using 1&1 for VPS, my advice is to re-image the VPS first thing.

Site Migration and Management
Once my server was finally usable I went about the odious task of migrating my sites. I won’t go into too much detail. It’s pretty much been the usual: copy files, recreate databases, fix inconsistencies and change anything that’s specific to the new server.

I will say, however, that Media Temple’s tools are superior in this realm as well. The main problem with 1&1′s tools is that there are too many of them, with too much redundancy, and this makes setting up services far more confusing and difficult than it is on Media Temple. For example, to set up a domain to be hosted on Media Temple’s GridService you simply go to the control panel and add it, then make the appropriate DNS changes at your domain registrar. There’s only one way to do this, only one interface for it at Media Temple.

On 1&1 you do most of your work in Plesk, but there are certain things that must be done in the 1&1 control panel, outside of Plesk. Things like domain management. Unfortunately the tools for domain management exist in both places — both in the control panel and in Plesk — so it’s unclear where you need to make the change. And since you’re usually working in Plesk, there’s a tendency to attempt setting everything up there when, in actuality, you can’t; it must be done in the control panel. Until you realize all this, you may spend quite some time setting things up in Plesk, realizing they don’t work, and re-setting them up in the control panel. I know I did. It’s a drag, and far more confusing than it ought to be.

Media Temple’s online help is also really, really good. They provide you with a terrific knowledgebase, forums, server information and guides for doing most anything you’d want to do with the GS. 1&1′s online help is much more scattered, poorly organized and just has less information.

Nevertheless, once you’ve finally ironed out all the procedural kinks, migrating and managing sites is pretty straightforward. SSH and root access are all there and working normally at the outset. Coda is easy to set up, if that’s your thing. And I was even able, with some difficulty, to get my local SQL editor to connect and edit databases.

So: Is 1&1 VPS Better Than Media Temple’s Grid Service?
I guess the thing is this: when it comes down to it, while Media Temple clearly has better, easier tools to use, once you’re done setting up your server, you probably won’t use them all that much. What you will access — and what your users will access — every single day is the site. And this is where 1&1′s VPS just kills the Grid Server.

As I stated earlier, some of my sites used to run very sluggishly on the GS. And now these same exact sites run very fast on the 1&1 VPS. I’d say on average maybe five times faster, and that’s a fairly conservative guess. That increase is totally worth a bit of extra setup hassle and ten bucks a month. I finally feel like I have a decent server behind my sites now, and I feel like I can send people there with confidence. The speed of my sites before this switch was, frankly, embarrassing. And I’m fairly certain I lost traffic because of it. Even my mom said, at one point, “Honey, I go to your website, but nothing happens.” Even with easy setup, that’s just depressing. And, in the end, untenable.

The Future
I’ve only been running on 1&1′s server for a few weeks now. So far, I’m a very happy customer. As with anything, if my happiness levels fall, I will again go in search of yet another host. But for now I can confidently say I’d recommend 1&1′s VPS service to a friend. It’s not perfect, but the bang-to-buck ratio is pretty great.

All About the Money
Oh, and one last thing: If I’ve managed to convinced you to order from 1&1, use this link to do so and I’ll apparently get some sort of kickback. Mmm… Icing…

Thanks! And happy hosting!

By systemsboy | Posted in Internet, TheBlog | Comments (5)