Photos, Fear, and OS X

Cool new icon!

It’s a no-brainer that iPhoto needed to be rewritten from the ground up, no matter what they called the end product. Over the last couple years, I’ve found my iPhoto library increasingly slow, wonky, and crash-prone (to the extent that I actually made a new version of my library). So, I’ve been looking forward to the arrival of Photos for OSX, which Apple graciously allowed for test driving today.

First: a niggling complaint. They seem to have named this with the idea of making Google searches difficult. Photos, because a more generic name wasn’t actually possible. While searching for “iPhoto” gives you some pretty specific results, “Photos” is just a disaster as a search term. I understand that Apple is dropping the whole i-thing (expect a future iMac to just be a Mac), but have you every tried searching for information about “Pages” or even worse, “Numbers”?

I’ve got about 74,000 photos in my iPhoto library. Just a few snaps, really. I also keep coming back to a project to scan, date, and geotag the photos I took on film (remember film?). My iPhoto database is a tidy 215 GB. Really, nothing. Why should this be a problem?

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Yosemite — the Plunge and a Late Update

Another update? Why did no one tell me?

Probably because I have the App Store set to automatically update my apps, I haven’t been too observant about the latest updates to the Yosemite Public Beta. Maybe they showed up anyway. During the weekend, I decided that we were clearly getting close enough to the official Yosemite launch to make it my main operating system.

I was kinda hoping that the App Store would let me simply jump the the end of things and go for Beta 4. No such luck.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Closer to Yosemite

Beta late than never

I’ve been a bad beta tester. Over the last month, I haven’t had much opportunity to use Yosemite. I’ve found myself needing to use apps that I did not want to bring over to the new operating system yet, and I had to repair a troubled Time Machine backup.[1] I downloaded Beta 3, and then really didn’t use it. Two weeks later,[2] I finally booted into Yosemite, for the first time since September 22.

As soon as the computer booted into Yosemite, it told me that Beta 4 was ready to download. It’s been out for nearly a week, but has received exactly no attention. While it was downloading, I checked the various Apple-centric blogs I read,[3] and none of them have a post up specifically about Beta 4.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

The Lost Keychain

Your password will be…
Think you can remember that?

Keychain is one of those Apple products that sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know about anyone else, I’ve had a lot of problems with it. For those who don’t know, Keychain is Apple’s password management system. At its best, it would create passwords that were difficult to break and then manage them so that the password unlocking your device (should you have one) is the one big thing to keep secure. In reality, things are a little different.

My first problem is with the passwords themselves. They all follow the same pattern of four groups of letters or numbers, separated by dashes. If I were a hacker and could tell that the password was fifteen characters long, my first guess would be that the fourth, eighth, and twelfth characters were all dashes. And, of course, some sites don’t accept the passwords.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

A Problem with Numbers

Numbers

It wasn’t my usual problem with numbers (that is, that I am nearly innumerate), but instead that I had a problem with Numbers this morning. Numbers, for those not in the know is Apple’s spreadsheet program, which is cheaper (and I think nicer) than Excel.[1] The problem might have been related to being a Yosemite beta tester.[2]

On Friday, as I was updating Yosemite to Beta 2, the App Store told me that Numbers also had an update. It’s the only one of the iWork apps I’ve installed on Yosemite, so it didn’t tell me about the concurrent updates to Pages and Keynote. I downloaded the update.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Beta, Take Two

New icon!

If there’s one thing that Yosemite has taught me, it’s how reliant I have become on the cloud. Because of the incompatibly between iCloud Drive and iOS7, whenever I boot into Yosemite, I’m going “cloudless.” No working on a draft on my iPad while I do something else (such as rebooting to swap between OSes). Yesterday, Apple released Yosemite Beta 2. I had been busy using things I’m keeping solely in Mavericks for a bit, so I wasn’t able to check it out until today.

After getting a few things cleared away,[1] I quit everything, opened System Preferences, clicked the Yosemite drive as my startup, and rebooted…

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Yosemite — Out with the Old, In with the … Old

That's a suspiciously 3D graphic

I haven't booted into OS X 10.10 for nearly a week. I was using a few things that I'm keeping wholly in Mavericks right now (like iPhoto) or won't really work (no point in using Clear if it's not going to sync with my iOS devices). This morning, I decided to work in Yosemite for a bit, although some of the things I want to do today involve installing additional apps onto my Yosemite drive.

There's still plenty of room, because I've been keeping it tidy. I'm not backing up the Yosemite drive, so instead I transfer things over to the main partition of my hard drive. Finished documents are stored there. (And the main consumers of space on my hard drive are my photo library and my music collection.)

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

What I Miss in OS X

I'm nostalgic for Trash

During the presentation on OS X Yosemite, it was said that much effort went into the redesign of the Macintosh Trash. I think part of that was convincing Sir Jony Ive that skeumorphism should still prevail in this one bit of the operating system. But since the release of OS X 10.1 in March 2001, it actually hasn't been a trash can.

During the last thirteen years (fourteen, if we count in the OS X 10.0 public beta), it's been called trash, but it has looked like a wastebasket. With 10.10 it looks like a different sort of wastebasket (a plastic one, instead of a wire one). I miss Trash.

I've had a Mac since the days of System 4. Way back in 1984 or 1985, I got to play with a friend's Mac running the first System (on floppy). That was my introduction to Trash, which was a marvelous thing in the context of the day.

In DOS, if you wanted to delete a file, you typed something like "del myfile.txt" and it was gone. Forever. Being able to put something into the trash and then change your mind (unless you emptied it), that was amazing. That was the whole difference between marking a file for deletion and actually deleting it.

It will never happen, but I wish they had marked 10.10 by bringing back the Oscar-the-Grouch style trash can.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Is this Blog Legal?

On the one hand:
When I signed up for the OS X 10.10 public beta, I had to a agree to a nondisclosure statement. Apple does tell you that you aren't supposed to blog about it.

On the other hand:
On the other hand, they've stated that they have no objection to developers and the like discussing matters that they've made public.

If you look on Twitter for the hashtags #YosemiteBeta, you find all sorts of posts on it. Like this one:

It does, by the way.

So, I guess I'll keep posting my observations, keeping it within some kind of limit. Hey, Apple Computer, I'm trying to keep on the good side of the NDA.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

The Message Mystery

I wanted to follow up on a message I had sent but when I checked my sent mail (in Mavericks) it wasn’t there. I had sent it using Mail in Yosemite (my first one, actually). I was logged into Mavericks, but just to make sure I had sent it (though even a draft should show up everywhere), I logged into Yosemite. This should all work pretty invisibly. Failing to find it made me wonder if I deleted it when I intended to send it, though that would be strange. On the other hand, it was strange that it hadn’t synced up from the two installations of Mail.

I probably should have checked my iPad and iPhone as well. Mail should just quietly sync among these four places. Five, I suppose, if you count iCloud on the web.The Message Mystery
I went through the reboot and launched Mail (in Yosemite). It promptly hung up. The Spinning Beachball of Death. Damn. I force quit, sent the crash report to Apple, and told the program to relaunch. The e-mail was in my Sent box. I did send it.

While I was there, an e-mail came in that I decided to answer right away. Once that was done, I had something to do in Mavericks (specifically: photos; not opening the iPhoto database from Yosemite). Time for another reboot.

I think I like the Yosemite reboot better.

Now the e-mail that had sent me to the Yosemite e-mail in the first place was in the Sent box of Mail (Mavericks), but the one I had just sent wasn’t there. I waited. Nothing. I looked at my iPad. They were all there. Go figure.

I quit mail. No crashing this time. When it opened, everything was as I expected it.

A bit of a mystery and maybe one I would have had even without doing a beta test. No idea.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

A Drastic Solution to a Simple Problem

After that, they opened normally

I reformatted the test partition for Yosemite over what should have been a fairly simple matter. It came to a question of my ID. Long ago, when the iTunes Store started, I created a login using my (then) e-mail address (it’s still my e-mail address; I get all e-mail sent to it, but it forwards to the account I actually tell people to send to).

When I created my Yosemite install, I was asked for my Apple ID. The only problem is that my Apple ID is not my iCloud ID. That’s my @me address. The @me address showed up in the iCloud settings for Yosemite, noting that it was pending on response to an e-mail. I clicked the “Resend” button. Nothing.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

A Mavericks Interlude

Where did it all go?

For a while, it seemed that I didn’t need the help of a beta operating system in order to mess up my e-mail. In preparation for taking a look at Mail in Yosemite, I backed up my computer, and after both Tardis and Spegulo were up to date, I started transferring mail into offline mailboxes. I probably keep too much mail in my inbox, as most of it could be sorted into a folder the day it arrived (maybe I should create a way of filtering mail from vendors more than a week old out of my inbox).

I typically keep mail in my inbox for about six months, unless I’m on some sort of mad purge (like this time). Anything I’ve moved into offline mailboxes can’t be found on my iOS devices, so keeping some of this stuff around isn’t too crazy (though, once again, there’s no excuse to having a five-month-old e-mail from Sur La Table in my inbox.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!