Photos, Places Wanted

Finally released.
But is it ready?

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with iPhoto. It can do some wonderful things. It you want to turn your photos into books, cards, or calendars, it’s a great thing. On the other hand, with the number of photos I’ve jammed into it, it’s incredibly slow. Leaving it open never seems to be a good idea. It’s also a real pain to open and close it. The problem is that, over the years, I have added tens to thousands of photos to it. My iPhoto library is, after I trimmed it down a bit, just a mere 215 GB.

I knew that someday Apple would come out with a successor to iPhoto, or at least a total reworking of the application (just as they did with the iWork apps, which have gone through this a couple times). I was anticipating Photos for OSX. I was delighted that it was included in the Yosemite Beta program. Every times there was an update to the beta of OS 10.10.3, the first thing I would do was to open Photos and see if the ability to geotag photos had appeared in this update. Now with the full release version, I know that I’m going to have to wait for a future release. Alas, that means that I’m going to be sticking with iPhoto for a while longer.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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More Thoughts on Yosemite

So, do I take the plunge?

I’ve been using the Yosemite public beta for three days now, and it’s time to check back in. I’m beginning to feel that I need to rethink my initial reluctance to play with Mail in the new OS. Mail is one of the big changes. Should I really wait until the final release to look at Mail?

I need to take some precautions. I’m a sloppy Mail user, typically keeping the last six months of mail in my main mailbox on the Apple mail servers (it doesn’t take up that much space). That can be a bit of a pain when I travel; a couple of time my mail has undergone a lengthy synchronization, as everything gets updated to the time zone I’m in. First step, trim back on the Inbox.

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My Trip to Yosemite (the OS not the place)

Ready to take the plunge?

I am one of the million people who signed up for Apple’s public beta of OS 10.10 Yosemite. I suspect that I am not unique among my friends and that the few hundred people I know probably contain a few others who are either also in the public beta pool or have Apple developer accounts (no limit on the numbers, pay your $99 and you’re in). The developer accounts also have the chance to download XCode 6 beta and play with the new Swift programming language, and they can download the beta versions of iOS 8, though I’m not trusting my phone to beta software. Nor am I trusting my computer to beta software.

I took the reasonably prudent course and installed Yosemite on a second, smaller partition. That was, itself, a bit of a trial. Or, several trials. I opened up Disk Utility and attempted to create a new partition. And I locked up my computer. So, I quit everything, and tried again.

And I locked up my computer.

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