In Plain Sight

Leopard A Disaster

Listen, Apple better get on top of this quick because Leopard is a disaster in the making. As time allows I am going to provide a more detailed account of the problems here - though, frankly, I'd rather be doing something else. In essence I will have to do what Apple QA should have done.

Steve, get on top of this ... quick!

1. Profile migration finds only ONE profile. If that happens, on install (assuming you get through the known problems noted previously), to be a restricted account then you cannot log in as an administrator (to complete the install) without booting from the install disk and changing the administrator password. Then you can log in as root to complete the install and create new profiles. However, the migration tool still does not help you recover old profiles (in my case, my primary profile).

2. In the finder. Dismount (eject) of mounted volumes closes (crashes) the finder window. Some volumes cannot be dismounted (happened to me with the iLike iTunes sidebar dmg from Facebook, for example). Finder hangs and cannot be forced to quit.

3. Spaces. Not all apps integrate with Spaces. So selection of the app from the dock changes the finder menu but does not switch to the app space (where the app window resides). It happens to me with Oxygen (a widely used Java app) and now happens to me with mail and Safari all the time (it did not happen initially).

4. Need a way to fix all the files with permissions belonging to "unknown" after a "Install and Archive" of Leopard and a failure to recover the user profile (per the migration bug above).

5. iDisk is broken on client and server. After install and attempt to great my iDisk locally produced a 41GB virtual disk (filling my entire disk) before I saw it and killed the sync. Subsequent attempts fail without notification.

... more to follow. I am focusing on Bugs, not design issues, I would have another list for those.

Leopard Again

Seriously, am I the only one to notice that Leopard is flakey? The finder windows crash all the time, disks stay mounted, Spaces does not have consistent behavior - I just moved Safari to space 5 on my machine and selecting Safari from the dock does not switch to Space 5, like a lot of other apps the finder menu does change. iDisk is a disaster (I know this is partly a .Mac problem).

Look I love my Mac, I love Apple too, but it seems to me that everyone is in denial.

Additional Note on Leopard Blue Screen of Death

Everyone is waking up to the Leopard BSoD problem and beginning to wonder how extensive the problem is. I think it is more extensive than reported and the small software company Unsanity has been made the scape goat. Even if the problem is Unsanity, the responsibility for the problem lies with Apple's QA department who are supposed to catch such things. The Unsanity software is in wide enough use.

In addition, I am not buying into all the excitement and hype associated with Leopard. It seems like a flakey and premature release to me. I still have not yet been able to sync my iDisk, I've seen various font muddling and artifacts in the finder menu, Spaces does not have consistent behavior (but it takes me back to Fedora, whose implementation seemed just as good three years ago).

The migration utility is, essentially, useless. This is the source of my earlier reported problem when I first booted. It still only finds my son's profile and not my old one. As a consequence I have many files on my system now owned by an "unknown" user (no, these are not causing the other problems).

A bunch of things simply do not appear to work. For example, I have a sync conflict resolution problem but nothing happens when I attempt use the conflict resolver.

In addition, the new mail app sucks, it seems impossible to get a consistent set of fonts and the mail header bar is in some horrible fixed font that cannot maintain proportional size if you change the message font. The ALLCAPS sidebar titles - which are the same through-out finder - are grey and stay. The desktop image is way too noisy but the old Tiger desktop doesn't suit. It shouts design incompetence. Tiger was a better animal.

Including Apache 2.X was well overdue. Numerable other questions exit. Like, why is iWeb no longer placed on the dock but the other iLife apps are?

Sorry these notes are so rushed, I don't really have the time to f*** with this.

Please Do Not Fight

The Please Do Not Fight Album is due for release on the 5th of November, so please to remember. It will be available on iTunes. More videos available on Facebook.

Leopard Blue Screen of Death et al.

Fedex delivered my Leopard install disk at about 10:30 Friday morning.

I must have been one of the first callers yesterday to Apple about the installation problems with Leopard. I called at 3:00PM PDT, immediately as they started providing Leopard support. It really is so disappointing. I missed the Leopard party at my local (Palo Alto) Apple Store as a result.

The tech support guys were caught entirely unaware and I spent 3 HOURS on the phone Friday afternoon.

Here is a note on the problem for those that are stuck today.

The problem is that you have installed applications that are trying to start up at boot time but fail and lock up (or have some similar side effect). You will see this if you boot from the installation disk, open a terminal and look at the system log. Leopard has installed correctly, it just can't start.

So, how to fix? Here is what you do - Jo the product specialist gave me this - and IT IS A PAIN. You have to reinstall but before pressing continue select the options button (you'll find it) and select "Install and Archive User." This will install Leopard but copy out your user space - including all your application profiles (one of which is causing the problem). In my case it looked like HP software that was causing the problem. So it was not one of the esoteric genetics or molecular biology programs that I have installed, it was something that is widely distributed. I had 3 HRS but that was not enough for a full diagnostic on my part.

Of course, if you know what you are looking for, by analyzing your system log that contains a record of the boot problems, you can go in and fix it from a terminal when you boot from the install disk. But this is not for the weak at heart. Given that, I wish now that this is what I had done - Jo did not explain exactly what this would do and it may not do exactly what he expected.

So, this will boot Leopard to a login screen and ONE, and only ONE, of your profiles. Which sucks because in my case the chosen profile was one that I had made for my son that was restricted and I could not get an administrator login immediately - and of course, the install had not copied any administrator profiles.

You have to use the install disk again to boot and reset the admin password - and then reboot and log in as root.

How to boot from the install disk or get back to the install disk from the blue screen? Restart (hold down the power key if necessary) and press and keep your finger on "C." This will bring you back to the install screen. The terminal and other utilities are on the menu bar of the second or third screen (as is the "options" button mentioned above).

Your old profiles will be in a top level folder called "Previous Systems" and you will have to copy the files you want to a new profile (including your iTune Library). You will have to reinstall some of your applications too - and I hope you kept all your licenses. I had to go dig for my Oxygen license.

One other thing. I tried to sync my iDisk - it spent some time filling up my entire disk, eating ALL the disk space, before I realized the problem and had to delete the 41GB sync it had created (I only have about 600MB on my iDisk and 10GB space, to the most it should have done is create a 10GB virtual disk).

It really is unfortunate that the problems manifest in a "blue screen" - expect Microsoft to be sympathetic and say "Look, see how hard it is!"

Someone in QA will be fired. In fact all of the Leopard team QA should be fired.

United States Patent: 7284202

Link: United States Patent: 7284202.

8 years in the making, Microsoft has today been awarded my precious Affinity Universes patent - the product of my company The Kiss Principle, Inc. Nice job. Now they can fix up their future interface strategy and get back into the race. :-)