The toolbar styles control, in particular, has become completely useless. Unlike the styles palette or “toolbox,” it cannot be customized and always shows all available styles, including the whole slew of default styles that Microsoft includes in every document and that you cannot remove even if you never use them:

As you can see, this menu is also very limited in that, no matter how big your screen is, it won’t show you more than 10 items at any given time. Combine these two things, and it makes for a control that is barely usable.

And that does not even include the cases where it simply does not work. Compare this:

to this:

In the first case, the “black triangle” part of the control that is used to pull down the menu is not in blue, which means that it won’t work. Why? The mouse pointer’s so-called hot spot is quite clearly on the control. There is no way that you can argue that the mouse pointer is too far to the right. No, the reality is that the work of Microsoft‘s engineers is so sloppy that the control’s “clickable” area does not even match its visual appearance.

How pathetic is this?

Obviously, Microsoft’s engineers have decided that, if people really still want to use styles, they have no choice but to use the so-called “toolbox” for it, which comes with its own set of flaws and limitations. (It too is far too small and forces you to do way too much scrolling.) It truly is maddening.

The absurdity is such that this double-click behaviour extends even to the search field itself, when double-clicking on what you’ve typed in the field not only selects it, but also causes the dictionary to attempt to jump to the corresponding entry. Of course, if you’ve typed an incomplete word or made a spelling mistake and want to select the word to type over it, this behaviour is utterly maddening, especially in the Grand Robert application, where you get a modal dialog box telling you that the word you’ve just clicked on is not an entry in the dictionary. (Doh!) You also get such a modal dialog if the word you clicked on exists in the dictionary, but has more than one corresponding entry. Argh!

At the time, I also sent a link to my article to the Robert developers, and actually got a response back, full of outrage and shock that I would dare question their wonderful user interface that so many of their users love. After a bit of back-and-forth, I did manage to get them to admit that, while the double-click behaviour in dictionary entries was debatable, this same behaviour in the search field itself was completely nonsensical. They then told me that they would address the issue in a future update.

They never did. Three years later, it still happens to me all the time. I double-click on something in the search field to select it, and the Grand Robert or the Robert & Collins application selects it and proceeds to attempt to jump to the corresponding entry in the dictionary.

Then ten days ago I wrote about an unrelated issue introduced in the Grand Robert application by the latest OS X update (10.7.4). I wrote two subsequent articles, one about the fact that the Grand Robert developers had acknowledged the problem and promised a fix (still not there) and another one about a temporary workaround provided by Betalogue reader and fellow Grand Robert user Yoto Yotov.

In fact, in his e-mails M. Yotov went beyond that and also got back to me about the other outstanding issue with the double-click, which presumably he read about by exploring my older blog posts on the product. And here again, he offered a fix for the problem. Since the Grand Robert application is based on HTML and JavaScript, he found that the following works:

1. Use “Show Package Contents” on Grand Robert application.

2. Browse to “/web/js” folder and open file called “main.js” in text editor. (I used BBEdit.)

3. In the file, replace:

function ShowSelectedWord()
{

with

function ShowSelectedWord(event)
{
	if (event.element() == $('inputText')) return false;

4. Save and close the file and relaunch the Grand Robert application.

This indeed breaks the unwanted double-click behaviour in the search field. Brilliant!

It does not break it elsewhere in the interface, meaning that you can still double-click on a word in the current entry to jump to the entry for the word. If you just want to select a word in an entry, you need to right-click on it. (But you cannot right-click-and-drag to extend the selection. If you want to select more than one word, you need to use a simple click-and-drag without double-clicking. So you cannot extend a selection word by word, only character by character. Besides, there is little point in attempting to do this, because even if you create a selection range like this, when you use the “Copy” command in the “Edit” menu, the Grand Robert application ignores your selection and puts the entire entry in the Clipboard.)

Once I got this fix working in the Grand Robert application, I tried to find out if the same would also work in the Robert & Collins application. It too suffers from the unwanted behaviour with double-clicks in the search field, but at least there the dialogs are not modal, which means that it is slightly less annoying. But it still would be nice to be able to fix it.

Well, if you do “Show Package Contents” on the Robert & Collins application, you will also find a “/web/js” folder with a file called “main.js.” But it does not work with the exact same line of JavaScript. Instead you need to replace:

function ShowSelectedWord()
{

with

function ShowSelectedWord(event)
{
	if (event.element() == $('inputEntry')) return false;

(The internal name of the search field is obviously different.)

Again, save and close, and relaunch the Robert & Collins application. Now double-clicks on words in the search field no longer cause the application to try and jump to the corresponding dictionary entry.

Thanks again to Yoto Yotov for his help!

Since then, I have received some feedback from Betalogue readers, indicating that, since the Grand Robert application was obviously based on Safari-dependent technologies, there might be a way to hack the application to fix the problem. Indeed, when you use “Show Package Contents” on the Grand Robert application in the Finder, you can see that the package contains a folder called “web” with all kinds of HTML and CSS files, which are quite clearly used to render the Grand Robert application interface itself:

However, there does not appear to be an obvious fix for the black background colour in the search field. The “gr.html” file itself contains the main user interface, but a preview of it in BBEdit or Safari shows that the search field has a white background, as expected:

So the black background colour is not caused directly by the HTML or CSS code. I had a look at the code, and I cannot see anything obvious that would cause a black background colour.

While I have some experience in web development, I am not a JavaScript expert. It is quite possible that the bug has to do with JavaScript.

In the meantime, however, a Betalogue reader has come up with a temporary solution. If you quit the Grand Robert application, add the following lines:

input
{
	color: white;
}

to both the “main.css” and the “dialog.css” files in the “css” folder in the package, and then relaunch the application, you will now have a white colour for the input text itself. Since the background is black, that makes the text somewhat readable again:

It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than having to type in the dark. Since we don’t know how long it will take the Grand Robert developers to release an update, we can use this hack in the meantime. Of course, it will have to be reversed (but removing the added lines) once the update is released — unless the update itself overwrites the fix and makes reversing it unnecessary.

Thanks to Yoto Yotov for the tip!

I have since received a couple of e-mail responses from the developer, indicating that they blame the problem on Apple and on version 5.1.7 of Safari more specifically, rather than the OS X 10.7.4 update. Since both updates were released on the same day, it might help explain the confusion. (It also appears to confirm that, while Grand Robert is a stand-alone application, it apparently relies on Safari’s underlying technology, which makes it particularly vulnerable, especially if, as I have long suspected — because of a history of other rendering bugs —, the markup used in Grand Robert is not quite up to snuff.)

Now the Grand Robert developer has also posted a short tech note (in French) about the issue, indicating that the bug affects several of their products and that a patch should be released “soon.”

When you look at the tech note’s URL (which is not even part of the lerobert.com web site), the fact that they spelled “SAFARI” in all caps and also wrote “5.1..7” instead of “5.1.7,” it really does not reflect well on the developer. In addition, it should be noted that the Grand Robert application has no built-in software update mechanism (it does not even have a link to the developer’s web site) and that users are just expected to find that tech note and keep an eye on it until a link to a patch appears.

The Grand Robert application is not a cheap product and one would really expect better service and better software. But unfortunately that is all we are getting, and we just have to put up with it.

And now look at what I got in the mail today:

Yes, it’s a promotional e-mail sent by Adobe to the e-mail address under which my current copy of Adobe CS6 is registered, inviting me to “upgrade now” to Adobe CS6.

For the price we pay to Adobe every year or so for these upgrades, you’d think that they would at least have the decency of filtering out from these promotional e-mail marketing campaigns the e-mail addresses of registered Adobe users who have already upgraded and registered their upgrade with Adobe — especially since these e-mails are obviously targeted to existing users of the previous version in the first place.

But no, it’s obviously much easier to just carpet-bomb and pollute everyone’s mailbox with the same e-mail. It’s always nice to see how a major software corporation really feels about the fact that you’ve just flung several hundred dollars in its general direction: it hasn’t even noticed.

Yes, that’s the search field in the top-left corner of the application’s main window. It’s the singlemost important control in the user interface of this crappy application, and it now has a black background that makes it impossible to read what’s typed in the field (also in black).

The only way to (barely) see what’s in the field is to select the contents, so that the selection highlighting colour (vaguely) reveals the black characters:

The problem also affects text fields in other dialog boxes in the application, but this is the main one.

Needless to say, I reported the bug to Apple as soon as I saw it, but they didn’t do anything to address it between the time I reported it and the final release of 10.7.4. In actual fact, there was another manifestation of the bug much earlier in the beta-testing process, which made the Grand Robert application totally unusable. I reported that one too, and it was fixed in the next build (but it might just have been fixed “accidentally” as part of more general bux fixing processes).

Then the bug resurfaced in this new incarnation in a later build, and now the software is out and the bug is with all of us.

The developers of the Grand Robert application have a pretty poor history in terms of OS X support, so I am not optimistic that, whatever the problem is, it will be fixed any time soon. Given the history of previous bugs that we have had with this Grand Robert app, I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular bug was due to poor application code and not Apple’s fault at all. And of course the market for the Grand Robert application is too small for Apple to really care. It’s up to the developer to make sure his app works properly.

Until then, we Grand Robert users will all be typing our search requests in the dark. Yey.

Regular Betalogue readers know that I have had fun describing the installation process for previous versions of the software over the years, most notably Adobe CS4, in a blog post that attracted quite a bit of coverage and ended up prompting an Adobe representative to contact me and invite me to be part of the beta-testing team for the next version.

I got a free copy of the Adobe CS5 Master Suite for my troubles, so I am not complaining, but since most of my criticism remained unanswered and I continued to report on subsequent versions of the suite and their flaws on this blog, I haven’t been invited back, and so now I am just another paying customer interested in seeing what one gets from Adobe for a yearly splash of hard-earned cash. Since I got the Master Suite with CS5, I figured I should continue to purchase the upgrade for that particular version of the suite, and so what I am reporting on today is the installation process for the Adobe CS6 Master Suite upgrade disk.

Upon inserting the disk, you get this:

Adobe obviously still does not do long file names, and their taste in file icons is, let’s say, on the spartan side. But never mind. Here’s what you get when you open the disk:

My long-standing issue about what this first icon is supposed to look like and whether it indicates a file (an app) or a folder (containing other stuff) remains unanswered. The only way to find out is to double-click on it:

So it’s a folder… I still don’t understand why I, as a user, have to see folders called “deploy,” “packages,” and “payloads” in addition to the installer app icon, with all kinds of folders and subfolders inside them, but this is clearly something to which Adobe is very attached, and there is only so many times you can ask the same question before you start wondering whether anyone actually cares about such “details.”

So I double-click on the “install.app” icon, and I get an application called… Adobe Installer, which of course has to go through a long process of setting itself up before I can even start the installation:

One day, maybe, an Adobe engineer will understand that, when the user has to go through a lengthy installation process, the best approach is to let him enter all the required information (password, serial number, etc.) right away, and then — and only then — go through all the lengthy processes that are of no interest to him without asking for any user input, so that he can switch to something else and, you know, actually make valuable use of his time.

Instead, the user has to wait for this installation setup process itself to complete, with no real idea of how long it will take. It’s especially fun when the process reaches a stage where it’s close enough to the finish line that it cannot go back and so, you know, you can’t cancel anymore because you shouldn’t:

Of course, we are all familiar with these progress bars that reach the “full” stage and then stay stuck there for an indeterminate amount of extra time. Yes, it’s one of those. Eventually, though, the process does complete, and then the user is asked for more input:

As far as I am aware, all UI specialists recommend that buttons in dialog boxes be in the bottom-right corner, but hey, bottom-left is only the extreme opposite in one direction. It could be worse: the “Quit” button could be in the top-left corner.

While this might not be entirely obvious, the big area around the “Install” text is one massive button. At this point, I am not even asking how mouse-less people who use OS X’s built-in Full Keyboard Access feature for accessibility can even get to the button… Oh, what the hell, let’s find out:

Yes! Miracles of miracles! The installer does have some kind of FKA feature. It’s not the standard OS X one, but pressing the Tab key does cycle through all three available controls and put some kind of blue frame around the one on which the focus is. There’s hope for disabled people after all.

After entering the serial number, I finally get to the installation per se. And here’s the first real snag:

What is this warning sign next to the first item in the list? Here’s the tip:

For the record, I have never, ever used Flash Builder in my life, and I have only ever installed what Adobe has provided me, which is Adobe CS5.5 Master Suite, which includes Flash Builder 4.5:

But, who knows, it could be my fault, somehow… So I figure I might as well try uninstalling Flash Builder 4.5 before going any further. Bad idea:

Quit the installer to uninstall the older Flash Builder and start all over again? No way. It’s hopeless. At this stage, I don’t care, and I just proceed with the installation without Flash Builder 4.6. Thankfully it’s the only thing the Adobe CS6 installer is complaining about.

(UPDATE: A Betalogue reader also reports that he tried to deselect some of the installation options for things he did not want, such Adobe Bridge or Media Encoder, and the Adobe Installer still installed them even though he had specifically unchecked them. I personally gave up long ago on trying to customize my Adobe CS installation, precisely because of this very reason. The only customization I choose is to put everything in a subfolder inside my “Applications” folder. That at least works as expected. If you want to save space on your startup volume by not installing certain modules — an especially valid goal if you have an SSD drive — I suggest you go through the installed stuff after the fact and trash whatever you don’t want. It’s not ideal, and it might not eliminate unnecessary stuff put by Adobe in other locations, such as the “Application Support” folder, but it’s apparently the only approach that Adobe really supports.)

Finally, the installer asks for my admin password:

Note the nice generic document icon and generic application name (“Setup”) which does not match any of the application names that I have seen so far for the installer. Apparently, including the application icon and name for the installer that is actually running in the UI (“Adobe Application Manager” at this point, according to the Dock) in the dialog box, like other OS X apps do, is too much to ask:

But never mind… At some point you just have to trust Adobe, right? So here comes the admin password, and half an hour later…

It wouldn’t be an Adobe installer if it didn’t force you to quit Safari, would it? One day, maybe, Microsoft and Adobe will grasp the concept of “install now, relaunch later” that other, smaller developers have had no problem adopting. But clearly that time has yet to come.

So finally, after quitting Safari, and a couple of registration steps:

Phew! And yes, these are the new, “Genuine Adobe” software application icons. (Click on the pic to see the normal size.) Getting slicker all the time, Adobe…

But wait until you actually launch one of these apps:

Holy mackerel! Talk about a “splash” screen! Goes beautifully with the mess of windows in the background, does it not? InDesign is not much better:

But hey, I suppose it’s all a matter of taste. And that’s it for the installation process anyway. I am sure we’ll have more fun with CS7 next year!

Switching to an SSD drive as my startup volume has also helped somewhat. (There is of course no way that my music files would fit on an SSD drive, so I keep them on a separate conventional hard drive, but the iTunes library files themselves are on the startup volume.)

But I still wish that someone (preferrably Apple) made something like an iTunes Pro. I would be willing to pay for improved performance. Instead, I have little choice but to live with what we have. It’s free, but boy is it a pain in the neck at times.

That said, I recently discovered something that might be of interest to other iTunes users. See, for many years now I have been using the double-click on a playlist icon in the source list to open it in a separate window. I don’t like having to do everything within a single window. In managing my large collection, I often have to view more than one thing at the same time. The only way to achieve this is to open specific playlists in separate windows, using the double-click shortcut.

The problem is that, while this is a built-in feature in iTunes, Apple clearly doesn’t put much effort into supporting it. I regularly encounter bugs associated with the use of a separate window, for example when jumping from track to track from within the modal track information dialog box with the “Next” (command-N) and “Previous” (command-P) button.

But now I have been able to clearly determine something else, which is that trying to edit the tags of tracks listed in a separate window, either in the track list in the window itself or via the track information dialog box, is significantly slower than doing the same thing in the main iTunes window.

This performance penalty also extends to the various AppleScript scripts that I use for automating certain tag-editing tasks. When used with a selection of tracks in a separate window, sometimes they don’t work at all, and sometimes, even when they work, they progress at such a glacial pace that I have time to go and get a coffee before they are done. And yet the same scripts, applied to the same track selection in the main iTunes window, typically perform much faster.

Why? I have no idea. The issue is not the underlying cause(s), but the fact that Apple‘s testers clearly do not care much about performance levels when working with separate windows. Otherwise surely they would have noticed such a difference and tried to get things fixed.

This difference in performance levels is such that I am now pretty much forced to refrain from using separate windows as often as I can. In order to alleviate such a restriction, I find myself creating temporary playlists much more often, so that I can easily switch from one list to another in the same (main) iTunes window, in effect mimicking what I would normally do by switching windows. It’s not as good, of course, since I cannot view the two lists at the same time, but the performance is so much better that living with the restriction is worth it. It’s sad, because I have two large monitors and more than enough screen real estate to display more than one list at a time, but as long as Apple does not fix this issue, I am afraid I will have to continue to live with the restriction to what is more or less a single-window mode.

In addition, I should note that I have also noticed another significant source of performance degradation, which is trying to edit tags while viewing the results of a search. The list of results for a search might look like a playlist that you can work with like any other playlist, but in reality, things like jumping from track to track, bringing up the track information, and so on are, here again, significantly slower than they would normally be.

To avoid this, when I do a search and find what I was looking for, I end up having to exit the search and try and locate the same results “manually,” by browsing through my library. Again, it’s silly that, in 2012, I am forced to do such a thing, but I am afraid the performance gains associated with editing tags with no search active are so significant that I have little choice.

The iTunes Pro of my dreams would handle multiple windows, search results, and other selective “views” of my music collection with no performance penalty whatsoever. Unfortunately, this iTunes Pro does not exist, and the iTunes that currently exists forces me to refrain from using these built-in features of the software altogether.

If you have been struggling with performance issues in iTunes, you might find these tips interesting. They won’t alleviate all performance problems in iTunes but, if my own experience is any indication, they will be a significant help.

• “iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship” (Jason Snell, Macworld)
• “iTunes’ ball and chain: Windows” (Allen Pike)

I myself have done a fair amount of grumbling about iTunes over the years.

With every year that passes, it seems that we are getting closer to reaching a tipping point of absurdity, frustration, and outright rage. And yet we continue to live with this slow, kludgy monster among us, simply because we don’t have any real choice.

In my view, we don’t necessarily need a revolution. If iTunes wasn’t so darn slow and unresponsive, and if it actually made sense, it’d probably be much easier to live with it. Here’s a simple example:

It looks like a pretty straightforward situation to me: my iPad is running the latest version of iOS, I’ve turned Wi-Fi syncing on, and so my iPad shows up automatically in iTunes’s source list even when it’s not physically connected by a USB cable to my computer.

The only problem is that, in spite of all appearances, my iPad is not really there. I can look at a variety of things on the iPad via iTunes, like the “Summary” tab, the “Info” tab, the “Apps” tab, and so on, but as soon as I try to do something, like apply some changes or sync, iTunes starts looking for the iPad, first in its display:

then in a modal dialog box:

and then it just fails:

And the iPad abruptly disappears from the source list now.

Why? I have no idea. I didn’t turn my iPad off. It’s just asleep, and it shows up there in the source list, so why can’t iTunes find it? If I wake the iPad from sleep (which makes it reappear in the source list), and then put it back to sleep manually with the button (which does not make it disappear from the source list), and then try again, this time the syncing works.

So why didn’t it work the first time? Is iTunes able to “see” the iPad and communicate with it wirelessly when it’s asleep or not?

It’s infuriating. If iTunes can’t see/find the iPad, then it shouldn’t be there in the source list at all. If it can see/find it, then it should be there, and I should be able to do whatever I want to do with it. But it looks like iTunes is unable to keep in… sync with what is really happening. Or it does not really know what it can do or cannot do. Whatever happened to Apple and “It just works”?

No wonder people are increasingly frustrated with iTunes. The sluggishness and unresponsiveness are one thing. But the totally confusing behaviours and the general unreliability associated with wireless actions just add to the feeling that, when it comes to syncing and other mysterious processes, whether they involve the “cloud” or not, the user simply is not in control and is at the mercy of a finicky, unpredictable piece of software that seems to have developed a mind of its own and cannot decide, from one day to the next, whether it’s going to actually work or not.

David Pogue recently wrote an article for Scientific American titled “The Trouble with Wi-Fi.” But in it, he barely scratched the surface of the enormous pile of problems associated with wireless networking. From poor signal reception to mysterious network configurations, the Wi-Fi situation, especially for home and small-business networks, is simply a complete mess.

It looks like Apple is slowly, very slowly putting some effort into simplying things, for example with the recent introduction of the new AirPort Utility software that actually makes things like extending a network much more straightforward and accessible (instead of requiring complex manual WDS configuration work). But at the same time we still have a bottomless pit of syncing enigmas and “cloudy” behaviours (they couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate term, could they?) that make people wonder whether they can really trust any of these devices and software applications that have become such an integral part of their daily life.

Personally, primarily because of iTunes and the syncing mess, I don’t trust anything. I have multiple backups of everything that is important and even not so important to me. If — or rather when, because it’s bound to happen sooner or later — a syncing operation goes bad and loses my stuff, I should be OK, although it will no doubt be painful to restore things to their former state. But how many users out there take as many precautions as I do? How many people have simply resigned themselves to living in an unreliable world where touch screens don’t respond to taps, voice recognition services fail to recognize their accent, and software apps mangle their data or information in sometimes irreparable ways?

I refuse to live in such a world and, because of this, I am endlessly frustrated by all this technology that seems to be based on an engineer’s view of what’s “good enough” as opposed to a user’s view of how things should actually work. What frustrates me the most is that I know that things could be so much better, if only companies like Apple actually devoted sufficient resources to fixing the problems that they themselves have introduced by carelessly piling on “features” to please their marketing and legal departments. While I am not a full-time developer, I have enough technological expertise to know that things could be substantially improved. Apple in particular has more than enough cash in reserve to hire hundreds of specialists to fix these problems. But they too seem to have succumbed lately to the temptation of the “good enough,” and that too me is very depressing.

I also am much more of a nerd than the average Apple product user and tend to develop my own custom solutions long before Apple comes up with something “for the rest of us,” even if these solutions require more work and are less foolproof than Apple’s ready-made solutions.

Earlier this month, however, my wife and I went on vacation to stay with her sister in Austin, Texas for eight days. I managed to convince my sister-in-law to switch to a Mac computer many years ago, but my brother-in-law is still a Windows PC user and currently owns a Dell laptop with Windows 8. He is now retired, but still does a fair amount of work, and also does quite a bit of reading online. In particular, he is a New York Times subscriber and reads many articles online every day.

During our stay, the conversation inevitably touched on technology-related topics. (Although he’s not a techie himself, he used to be a senior strategist for Bell Canada and remains particularly aware of telecommunication issues.) After hearing me discuss Apple products in general and the iPad in particular, on a bit of whim, he decided to purchase one, nominally for his wife, my sister-in-law, although the idea was that it would be a “shared” product for the household. Obviously he wanted to take advantage of my presence for a week to set this up and iron out any kinks that might be encountered along the way.

They also had some long-standing issues with the wireless network for their condo, which I immediately decided I would try and do something about. The problem affected not his Dell laptop, but my sister-in-law’s three-year-old MacBook Pro, which occasionally lost its wireless connection to the router altogether (a cheap Linksys router), even though she never changed the laptop’s location in the condo. She said that it never used to do that, but that the problem started after her husband’s tech support people “changed something“ in the network configuration to fix a problem with the printer.

For the iPad itself, my brother-in-law left the aesthetic choices to her, and she opted for a white iPad with a blue cover. He didn’t feel he would need a large amount of storage, so he opted for a 16 GB model. Since both he and his wife have digital cameras, I also suggested the camera connection kit, so that they would be able to transfer pictures directly from their cameras onto the iPad.

There are two Apple stores in Austin and the first one we visited was the usual busy hive. Still, since there wasn’t much convincing to do, we soon managed to get a hold of a salesperson. The first disappointment was that they had no white iPads in stock, either in the 16 GB model or in the 32 GB model. The salesperson thought that they would get more soon, so we decided to wait for a couple of days.

A couple of days later, my brother-in-law phoned the store and, after having to wait on hold for about 15 min before a live person came on the line, he was told that they still didn’t have 16 GB or 32 GB white iPads in stock, which was rather disappointing. He then called the other Apple Store in Austin and was told that they had no 16 GB white iPads, but had some 32 GB models, so he decided to compromise and get the model with more storage, even though he didn’t feel he really needed it. We also got the blue cover and the camera connection kit.

Once we got home and started using the iPad, I immediately noticed that there were some significant issues with the wireless signal. Even though the condo was not very big, the office with the cable modem and the wireless router was at one end and the living room and patio at the other end. I had my own first-generation iPad with me and also noticed signal fluctuations on mine, although they were apparently not as dramatic as on the new white iPad.

It soon became clear that, in the living room at least, the white iPad was regularly losing its connection to the network altogether. We did a number of tests with the speedtest.net web site and got rather unpredictable results. I started to worry about a hardware flaw such as the one described in this recent post on 9to5mac.

However, further testing also revealed that my own iPad was getting less-than-optimal results. While the signal bars seemed to indicate that my iPad was getting a stronger signal in the same location, in actual fact I was also occasionally losing the connection altogether, so it looked to me like the difference between the two iPads might be more of an apparent one due to a different algorithm for the computation of the wi-fi signal level in the status bar at the top, rather than an actual difference in the signal and in the hardware itself.

It is quite possible that there is still something of a difference between the first-generation iPad and the latest models in terms of wi-fi reception, but it looks to me like both of them, possibly due to limitations of the form factor itself, suffer from worse wi-fi reception than laptops. (At home, where I use my iPad most often, I long ago gave up on relying on a single wi-fi router for my wireless network and have a setup with one AirPort Extreme and two AirPort Express routers, used in a WDS configuration, so that I never have to deal with weak signals.)

So the next step for me was to seriously try and fix their wireless network problems in their condo. The problem was that, for various reasons, they didn’t have all their account information readily available, and no one knew what the admin password to access the router’s configuration was, so I was going to have to reset the router altogether. I made sure I did this at a time where I would be able to contact the cable company’s tech support, just in case.

After resetting everything and recreating a WPA2 network from scratch, I was soon able to determine that the problem with my sister-in-law’s laptop losing its connection was fixed. The cable modem setup was DHCP-based and not PPPoE-based, so I didn’t actually need any login information to get access to the Internet. And her signal was four solid bars at all times. Reconfiguring her husband’s Dell laptop for the new wireless network was a bit more of a challenge, because of course, like all versions of Windows, Windows 8 sucks and requires convoluted trips to various control panels, and also a reboot just to make things work (even though it does not tell you so). But I got it to work eventually.

Unfortunately, the router reset did not improve the situation for the iPads. We still managed to use the new iPad and configure it, but there was clearly a problem with wi-fi reception that would need to be addressed. I was eventually able to convince my brother-in-law to forget about the cheap Linksys router and replace it with a combination of an AirPort Extreme in his office and an AirPort Express in the living room.

When we got to the Apple Store to get those, there was a stack of Apple TV boxes right next to the routers. Since we had talked about that device, my brother-in-law decided to get an Apple TV as well and thus fully embraced the “iLife” according to Apple.

We got home and I proceeded to set things up. Even after all the years, I still find setting up wireless networks infuriating, because of the Catch-22 situation with wireless routers not showing up in AirPort Utility until they are properly configured, and needing AirPort Utility to configure them in the first place. Maybe it’s possible to do everything wirelessly just the same, but I simply don’t have the patience required to wait and see if routers are eventually going to show up in AirPort Utility even though they have a blinking amber light. So I usually try to find an Ethernet cable and a laptop, and that’s what I did here.

Of course, one additional problem that can further complicate things is the Internet connection itself. In this case, it was a cable modem, and it obviously didn’t like my change of router, because I could get nothing but a self-assigned IP address. I could not get access to the Internet, so I had to get on the phone with the cable company. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait for long, and the tech support representative didn’t give me any grief about the cable company not supporting third-party routers, blah blah blah.

He insisted that I didn’t need anything specific settings, but suggested that a specific power sequence (cable modem first, then the AirPort Extreme) might help. And sure enough, it fixed the problem. I like the way that they tell you that no specific settings are required, but only mention in passing that a specific power sequence might help, as if it was just an optional thing, when in actual fact it is very much needed to get things to work properly! And just how the average user is supposed to figure this out by himself, I just don’t know.

As for the AirPort Express, I didn’t go for the full-blown manual WDS configuration, and simply chose the default option for “extending” the AirPort Extreme’s network with the AirPort Express. Eventually, everything worked fine, and I had a much stronger wi-fi signal in the living room, where both iPads worked fine without ever losing their connection. The network even extended all the way to the patio, which was never a problem for the Dell laptop (with a pure plastic enclosure), but was definitely a problem for the iPads. The signal was not very strong on the iPads, but it worked.

So that was the wi-fi network problem solved for all the devices. But it was not the end of our headaches.

The first difficulty I encountered on the new iPad itself was with the mail account configuration. It turned out that my brother-in-law actually had a Microsoft Exchange account on a server run by his son’s company in Ontario. This worked fine on his Dell laptop, of course (which was probably configured by the tech support people he deals with), but proved to be a challenge on the iPad.

See, the iPad does support Exchange accounts, but apparently only some specific flavours of it, probably the most common ones. And I soon discovered that my brother-in-law’s Exchange account was hosted on a machine running Exchange “SBS 2008” (as in Small Business Server 2008), which, as far as I can tell, is not supported out of the box by iOS 5. I figured that I might have to try and get in touch with the people running that server to see what could be done (if anything), which might prove to be quite an ordeal.

Fortunately, through a combination of impatience, online sleuthing and intuition, I managed to find out by myself that I could create a VPN from the iPad to the SBS 2008 machine, which worked, and then once the VPN was created, I was able to add the Exchange mail account without any further difficulty!

Stranger still, once this was done, I found that I could disconnect the VPN and still get the the Exchange mail account to work just fine in the Mail app on the iPad. And it was a good thing too, because the VPN had a pretty dramatic impact on network speeds. When it was on, speedtest.net indicated that I was getting something like 600 Kbps — whereas my brother-in-law’s cable connection was normally in the 6 to 12 Mbps range!

Once I got this Exchange account working, all his contacts were automatically imported, but of course since the iPad was going to be shared by him and his wife I had to find some way to organize things so that they would both have access to their contacts. I eventually decided to create a group in Address Book on her MacBook Pro and copy all the cards to it, then synchronize that group only with the iPad via iTunes. I named the group after her, and this way she had access to her contacts on the iPad. (Of course, this group won’t be updated in the future, but it’ll do. There is no easy way to do all this when a single-user device like the iPad is shared by more than one user.)

For bookmarks, I ended up exporting them as an HTML file from Firefox on his Dell laptop and sending the file to his email account. Since he only had about 40 bookmarks that were important to him, I just went through them with him manually on the iPad and added them to a folder bearing his name in Safari‘s bookmarks.

I did a similar thing with my sister-in-law’s bookmarks on the MacBook Pro, since, as far as I could tell, there was no way to “synchronize” bookmarks only without creating all kinds of synchronization issues in iTunes. Again, like many users, she only has a relatively small list of important bookmarks, so that was not too much of a problem.

I also showed them both how to add more bookmarks to their own folder of bookmarks in Safari on the iPad. They seemed to find the process relatively straightforward and intuitive.

The next major issue that we encountered on the iPad was with the App Store and the Apple ID. My brother-in-law did not have an Apple ID yet, so I proceeded to create one using his email address. But when it came time to specifying a payment option, I thought we had to use a credit card. Since he only had an American debit card, but two Canadian credit cards (they are Canadians and live part of the year in Austin and part of the year in Canada), I used one of his Canadian credit cards.

That was obviously a big mistake, because it turned his Apple ID account into what seemed to be a half-American, half-Canadian account. After that, when I tried to purchase stuff from the App Store, it would complain that I couldn’t buy it because I had a Canadian account, but there was no way that I could find of switching from the US store to the Canadian store on the iPad itself! When eventually I somehow managed to open the Canadian store instead of the American one, it still wouldn’t let me buy certain things. I cannot remember the exact details, but it was obviously very confused.

I tried to go to the appleid.apple.com web site to fix the problem, but try as I might, I could not find any option to change the nationality of the account on that site, which is more than ironic considering that this is the site that Apple refers you to when you encounter Apple ID issues!

Eventually, I lost patience and removed his Apple ID altogether. I used his wife’s Apple ID instead, which was already registered with the Canadian store with a Canadian credit card, and so was a fully Canadian account that at least let us buy anything we wanted from the Canadian store.

But when we set up the Apple TV, we encountered the problem again. On the Apple TV, as far as I can tell, you cannot choose the country. You are in the US with a US Apple TV, so you get access to the US store and that’s it. So we couldn’t buy anything! We tried with his Apple ID, and it was complaining about it being Canadian again.

I thought about creating a new Apple ID from scratch for him, but I couldn’t really do that, because he only has one email account and I didn’t want to add more complexity to his setup by forcing him to manage a separate email account with Gmail or some other service.

I then found that you could actually use an American debit card for the iTunes/App Store, so I switched both his billing address and payment options to the Austin address and his American debit card. But it didn’t help! Somehow, even though I had now entered an American debit card and an American address, the iTunes Store still thought that he was Canadian and we couldn’t purchase anything on the Apple TV.

I tried phoning Apple, but twice I was rejected because my issue was not with the hardware we’d just bought (the iPad and the Apple TV), but with the iTunes Store. And apparently when you want help for iTunes Store-related issues, there is no phone-based option, even if you’ve just bought new hardware that requires the iTunes Store. You have to go through the Express Lane web site, which means that you have no option but to submit a request and wait for an email reply, which can take 24 hours or more. (By that time, we were getting close to the end of our vacation, so we now had time constraints.)

Fortunately, I submitted my request in the afternoon and got a reply around 10 pm on the same day. The reply indicated that the only way to fix the country of an Apple ID is… through iTunes. While Apple refers you to appleid.apple.com for Apple ID-related issues, in fact some of them can only be fixed through the iTunes software itself and not on the web.

Anyway, I did manage to change countries, and after that his Apple ID worked fine and we were able to purchase American content on the Apple TV.

Our troubles didn’t end there, however.

First, one of the first things I wanted to do to show off the iPad and its capabilities was to get the New York Times on it for him. I downloaded the free New York Times for iPad app from the App Store, but quickly found that it was a complete piece of crap. Even though we had correctly entered his subscription information, half of the time, when we tried to view an article with the app, the article would appear on a darker background and then a white, empty rectangle would show up on top of it and hide half of the text, with no visible option to get rid of it! I suspected it wass some kind of popup advertising, but it was obviously buggy.

I searched the troubleshooting pages and found that, once you install the NYT app, there is a New York Times section in the Settings app. But you know that an app is a piece of crap when the only setting in that section is an option to… reset the app! We tried that once, and it fixed the white rectangle for a while, but then the problem came back, and we just gave up on it. Fortunately, my brother-in-law is not as impatient and frustrated by buggy software as I am and decided that he could live with reading the New York Times on his iPad via the paper’s web site in Safari, rather than using a separate app. I found him quite tolerant! If it had been me and I had found that the app for my favorite daily that I wanted to read on my brand new iPad didn’t work, I would have been mightily pissed off!

More generally, I couldn’t help but feel that this buggy New York Times app was somehow contributing to giving a negative image of the iPad itself. That’s the danger with a successful platform that supports all kinds of third-party software: users are not necessarily able to tell whether problems are due to Apple itself or to the third-party app developer, and it can give a negative impression. It’s to my brother-in-law’s credit that he didn’t let this problem with the app for his favorite newspaper impact his overall appreciation of his new iPad.

We were more successful with other apps, such as the ones for The Economist and The New Yorker, even though we did encounter a number of application crashes during our first 24-48 hours of using the device, which again does not give a very good impression of the machine as a whole. I certainly don’t remember experiencing nearly as many crashes in my first months of using my first-generation iPad. I guess it’s the price you pay for success and additional complexity. It’s still somewhat disappointing, because crashes are “inexplicable” from a user interface point of view. The reaction is, “What happened here?” All you can say is, “It looks like the app crashed. Try again.”

Fortunately, trying again can be done relatively quickly on the iPad, and a touch-based interface is inherently more error-prone than a mouse-based or keyboard-based interface, because touch gestures are so imprecise. So I found that there is a natural tolerance, in new users such as my brother-in-law and his wife, for things that don’t necessarily work right the first time you try them. Even if they don’t necessarily know that an application has crashed, they instinctively know just to try again. It’s only if it crashes repeatedly or otherwise exhibits behaviours that cannot be fixed, such as the white rectangle in the New York Times app above, that there is a real issue and it becomes quite frustrating.

Then we had more problems with the Apple TV. I purchased a couple of shows to show my sister-in-law. The first thing she wanted to try was Downton Abbey, which she had not seen. Unfortunately, as soon as we started playing it, we saw that there was a major problem, which was that the picture as skipping or “stuttering” all the time.

I was unable to reproduce the problem with movie trailers, or even with another movie title that we purchased, so it appeared to be an issue specific to this particular show, which was just our luck! I did some research online and could only find one lonely Apple user on the Apple Discussions forum asking about the same problem and not getting any answers.

It was very frustrating! My sister-in-law had purchased the entire first season and was really looking forward to it. This was not definitely the first impression I wanted the Apple TV to give her…

On the very morning before our departure, during breakfast, I decided to try a couple more things, because I am a troubleshooter and I like to shoot trouble. And I definitely do not like to leave things unfinished!

Again, through a combination of sleuthing and intuition, I discovered that the TV itself to which the Apple TV was connected via HDMI, a Sony Bravia, had a series of settings under “Video” for each HDMI input. And one of these settings had a name starting with “Cine-” (I cannot remember the full name), which appeared to have to do with frame rates and synchronization for various video signals. The setting was on “Auto.” I changed it to “Off” for the HDMI input to which the Apple TV was connected and tried playing the Downton Abbey show again. And it worked! It was now playing smoothly, without any video hiccups.

Finally, there was one more problem that I had to fix before I left, which was that the remote for the Apple TV kept launching Front Row on my sister-in-law’s MacBook Pro (which is still running Leopard) everytime we pressed the button on the remote, even though it was not pointing in the direction of the laptop, which was unfortunately located on a desk in the same room as the TV.

I had to do yet more research to find that the way to prevent this from happening was to go to the “Security” preference pane on Leopard, which has a setting for ignoring infrared signals altogether.

Phew! It really is unbelievable to me that we ended up encountering so many issues in the process of setting up this new iPad and this new Apple TV. I simply cannot imagine how my brother-in-law would have been able to make such purchases and set things up by himself, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to easily help him out over the phone from Nova Scotia, even with screen sharing via iChat! It was definitely a good thing that he made these purchases while I was there, but I had to actually spend several hours of my vacation time troubleshooting various technical issues that would have been enough to make many users simply give up altogether.

Granted, some of these issues were due to specific circumstances, such as the use of an Exchange mail account hosted on an SBS 2008 server or the fact that they spend half of the year in Texas and half of it in Canada. But still, this experience leads me to think that the market for technical support services of various kinds will not dry up any time soon!

Today, a couple of weeks later, everything seems to be fine, and my sister-in-law tells me that she’s already purchased and watched the entire two seasons of Downton Abbey! So I guess they have been able to embrace the iLife after all, even though it took more than a little work to get it all up and running.

So finally I have choice, and I have opted, for now, for ADSL service with the local phone company. The best that they offer here is what they call High-Speed Ultra, which is not great, but is OK. The download speeds are “up to” 7 Mbps and the upload speeds are “up to” 640 Kbps.

One of the reasons that I chose ADSL over cable is that, theoretically at least, you don’t have to share your connection with other people in your area. I had to do that with my local wireless service in my previous location, and there was a definite impact on available bandwidth at peak times, i.e. in the evenings and on the week-ends.

Much to my disappointment, however, I have since found that, at least in this area, there is definitely an impact on available bandwidth during peak hours, even with the ADSL service. While speedtest.net initially indicated sustained speeds of 6.5 Mbps or so, during our first week-end in our new house, I found that actual speeds could drop down to 3 Mbps or even less throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday. Because of other issues, I had to call the company, and I inquired about this issue and was told that, indeed, in this particular area, depending on the number of people using the ADSL service at the same time, there could be an impact on download speeds. (The upload speed does not seem to be affected.)

So that’s one theoretical advantage of ADSL over cable that I am definitely not enjoying here either.

That said, I seem to be getting peak performance in my work day during the week, so things are not so bad. I might have problems if I try to stream an HD movie or TV show during the evening, but I haven’t tried this yet and I’ve lived without real broadband for so long that, overall, I am still quite pleased with the situation.

One of the positive surprises of this move is that I have also noticed some higher lever of snappiness in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) itself. Speed is a rather subjective thing at times, but I am pretty sure that the move to real broadband access has had an overall impact on the performance of my system, beyond the expected speeding up of web browsing, downloads, and other standard Internet-based activities.

This would confirm what has become more and more apparent in recent years with Apple’s operating systems, which is that they have become so dependent on many Internet-based services that there is inevitably an impact on overall performance when your Internet access is, let’s say, less than optimal. Apple really has a rather poor history of accommodating users in low-bandwidth situations (see, for example, this post from three years ago), and it is quite obvious to me that their engineers are doing less and less testing of their technology in low-bandwidth conditions, and optimizing it for high-bandwidth conditions.

It is a rather elitist approach, but one that is probably, unfortunately, rather inevitable. (People with better Internet access probably tend to spend much more on Apple products in many areas.) After getting an SSD drive and buying more RAM, getting a better Internet connection is probably one of the best ways to get more out of your existing machine, not just for activities that are directly Internet-related, but for the overall performance of the system.

I force-quit them and decided to reboot my machine, just to make sure everything was back to normal. And that’s when things started to go really wrong. The first attempt to reboot resulted in a solid gray screen that would not go away. I then did a hard reset. After that, the login screen took a long while to appear, but it did eventually appear. Unfortunately, while the mouse pointer was moving, none of the login buttons were responding to mouse clicks, and the screen was not responding to keyboard input either.

After a couple more hard resets that didn’t yield any improvement, I tried booting with the Option key down. Here again, things took an abnormally long time, but eventually the screen with the various boot volume options did appear. The expected volumes were on the screen, but when I clicked on my Recovery HD partition, nothing happened. The button turned dark gray, but the booting process didn’t start.

I rebooted again, also holding the Eject key down to open the disk tray, so that I could insert my Lion DVD. Once again, things took a very long time, but eventually the tray did open. I inserted the DVD, and eventually got to the boot volume options screen again, but here again nothing worked.

I then zapped the PRAM, by holding the Option, Command, P and R keys down during startup. It worked, but here again, I found that the length of time between each chime was abnormally long. And unfortunately zapping the PRAM didn’t help. The machine still wouldn’t boot.

I was starting to get really worried. What if I had a general hardware failure and not just a disk failure? At that point, I was remembering my experience of a couple of years ago, when I had to fix a MacBook that wouldn’t even boot from disk and discovered that a simple hard drive failure was sufficient to make the whole machine unusuable, even when attempting to boot from an optical disk. So I was not ruling out the possibility that an internal disk failure was making the whole machine unusable, but I was still quite worried.

I wasn’t worried about loss of data. I had nightly backups of all my important stuff and surely I didn’t have several different drives failing on me at the same time. My worry was about the Mac Pro itself and having to replace the entire machine, which is no longer under warranty.

Then I started unplugging external stuff in an attempt to bring the machine back down to a simpler state. And one of the first things that I unplugged was an old external FireWire hard drive that I have been using for years to copy some less important files.

As soon as I did that, the Mac Pro started booting, not from my normal startup volume, which is an SSD drive, but from the internal backup of that SSD drive, which is a regular hard drive. The entire booting process was very long (more than 10 minutes), in part because I failed to intervene in time to stop Lion from reopening all the applications and windows that I had left open at the time of the last save, and also because a hard drive is slower than an SSD and the very first boot from a backup system volume, even one that is “blessed” as a booting volume, probably requires the building of all kinds of hard drive caches that help speed up subsequent reboots.

Once the booting was complete, I noticed that the backup was from the day before last, which confirmed that the scheduled SuperDuper! backup of my startup volume had also failed during the night. But I was then able to go to System Preferences, reselect my SSD volume as the startup volume, and restart from it without any further difficulty.

And sure enough, while the external FireWire drive was still on but not connected by FireWire to the Mac Pro, it started to make the typical, ominous noises that a failing hard drive makes, including those little “beeps” that a normal hard drive never makes.

Phew! I was mightily relieved, not just because I didn’t have a hardware failure in my Mac Pro or in any of its internal drives, but also because the SSD volume was intact and I didn’t lose my last 24 hours of work either. (And I had a very recent backup of that external hard drive too, so I wasn’t worried about any data loss.)

Still, the questions remain: Why did the simple failure of an external drive that was only connected to the Mac Pro by FireWire cause all this grief? Why is Mac OS X unable to deal gracefully with such disk failures? How come the failure of an external drive is enough to prevent a Mac Pro from booting from its internal volumes, and to slow everything down to an abysmal crawl, even something so basic as zapping the PRAM?

In light of my similar experience with the MacBook two years ago, I can only conclude that this is a flaw in recent Macintosh machines, possibly because of the switch to an Intel-based architecture. (In all my troubleshooting years, I don’t remember ever having to deal with such interference. If a hard drive failed, I was always able to boot from CD in no time and isolate the problem.)

I also cannot help but wonder about what the future holds. With regular hard drives, you can still actually hear the failures and hear when things are back to normal and the hard drive is churning away. As soon as I unplugged the defective FireWire drive, I started hearing all kinds of internal hard disk activity, and I also started hearing the beeps from the hard drive inside the FireWire enclosure, indicating a serious hard drive failure.

But with SSD drives, we no longer have such auditory clues. As far as I know, a defective SSD drive is just as silent as a functional one. I guess I will see (not hear) what happens when I experience my first serious SSD drive failure. It hasn’t happened yet. I was really worried that this was what was going on this morning, even though my SSD is less than a year old, simply because it is newer technology and I am not entirely sure how reliable it really is.

It turns out that my internal SSD drive was not the problem. But I really wish that Apple would put more effort into ensuring that Lion degrades gracefully when a disk failure starts happening, and provide better clues about the source of the problem. Right now, even an experienced troubleshooter such as myself has to go through many minutes of deep anxiety before he or she is able to circumscribe the problem and rule out more serious hardware failures. It is simply impossible to get a proper sense of how long any process is going to take. A computer that only opens the tray of its DVD player several minutes after the Eject key was pressed looks very much like a computer that will never open the tray of its DVD player. A computer that fails to respond to a click on the Recovery HD icon on the startup screen for several minutes looks very much like a computer that will never boot from the Recovery HD. Etc. There is no way for the troubleshooter to differentiate between extremely slow and dead, unless he’s willing to wait for several minutes every time he tries a simple action such as a key press or mouse click, even in the absence of any noise coming from the machine indicating some semblance of activity. This is simply not right.

Is there a better illustration of how little Microsoft cares about the quality and polish of their Mac OS X software? They cannot even be bothered to make sure that the icon looks decent.

(UPDATE: A reader has written to indicate he cannot reproduce the problem on his machine. I can reproduce it in both my regular user environment and a separate, customization-free user environment that I use for testing purposes. On the other hand, I cannot reproduce it on another Mac Pro I have running Mac OS X 10.6. So your mileage may vary, and there might be something else at play here. But that’s the thing with Microsoft’s products: they are never able to make sure that their software works well in all circumstances. There is always something that can and will go wrong, at least for some people. Maybe it’s really not their fault in this particular case, but my experience tells me that there is a good chance that it is, and the chances that Microsoft’s software will not behave properly in all circumstances are always much higher than for any other software company, except possibly Adobe. The usual excuse is that their software is abnormally complex, but who’s fault is that anyway? Pages ’09 is fairly complex too, and it does not have such problems. The standard that Microsoft software should be judged against is other Mac OS X software. And in that comparison Microsoft always loses.)

Of course, the installer itself is the usual load of crap, forcing you to quit Safari in order to proceed with the installation, whether you care to use any of its web-based software or not:

Any decent, well-behaved Mac OS X developer invites users to proceed with the installation without having to quit their browser if they wish to do so, just advising them that some functionality might not work properly until the browser is restarted. But, as we all know, Microsoft is not a decent, well-behaved Mac OS X developer. (I also checked after the update, and the most recent piece of Microsoft crap in my Internet Plug-Ins folder is a copy of the Silverlight plug-in from… August 2011. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that SP2 forces you to quit Safari even though it does not install anything that affects Safari!)

And of course, the updater fixes none of the most glaring issues, including, for example, the fact that you cannot include a forward slash in your file name. (Word 2011 will refuse to open it.) Given that the Service Pack only weighs a little over 100 MB, this is hardly surprising. In fact, with so few fixes, one wonders how they can justify calling it a “service pack” at all.

It’s all very depressing for Office 2011 users. To lift you out of this depressing mood, I strongly suggest alternatives, such as Pages ’09. They are not ideal, but at least you don’t have to deal with all this crap on a daily basis, only when you absolutely have to use Office.

I do have problems, however, with its implementation in Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). I have already talked about the totally unnecessary (in my view) elimination of the “Save As…” command in Apple applications, including the iWork suite. The “Duplicate” command that replaces it is simply not a good enough replacement, and the change irremediably breaks well-established workflows that cannot be adapted to the new command.

In addition to the questionable design choices and changes made by Apple’s engineers, however, there is also the very real and very problematic introduction of new bugs and new weaknesses.

For instance, in versions of OS X prior to Lion, if you saved a file under a given name in a given location, left that file open in its parent application, switched to the Finder, renamed the file in question, and went back to your application to continue working on it, OS X would automatically detect the name change and reflect it in the document window’s title bar, without complaint.

Now when you do the exact same thing, you get something like this:

Simply put, this is a change for the worse that takes us back 20 years in user interface design and brings OS X back to the level of brain-deadness usually demonstrated by Microsoft or Adobe software. We thought you were better than that, Apple. A simple name change and you can no longer find the file? Good grief. Don’t you have enough other metadata to keep track of the file?

(UPDATE: The problem does not occur with all applications. But I can reproduce it in iWork applications and in TextEdit on my machine. These are all Apple applications that fully embrace the Auto Save model in Lion.)

Then, there are outright bugs. If I leave a Photoshop file open in Photoshop CS5.1 open in the background, when I go back to Photoshop later on I inevitably get something like this:

Needless to say, I have not done a single thing to the file in question at any point since leaving it open in Photoshop. So what caused the change that caused Photoshop to freak out? Granted, it probably does not take much, but I am willing to bet that it has something to do with file version management in Lion, especially since the new features affect even applications such as Photoshop and Microsoft Word, which do not support Auto Save. (If you have document windows open in Photoshop or Word when you quit the application, OS X automatically reopens the documents in questions when you relaunch the application.)

(UPDATE: Since posting this, I have received reports of people experiencing the same problem in Snow Leopard and even in Windows. So in this particular case, the problem might not be linked to Auto Save. More testing would be required.)

And when you get a similar problem in one of Apple’s own applications, such as Numbers ’09, then this pretty much rules out any kind of accidental bugginess and demonstrates that there is something definitely wrong with Lion:

I got this “The document is on a volume that does not support permanent version storage” message out of the blue for a file that is on my default documents partition, which I use all the time, and for which version storage works perfectly fine, thank you very much, including for that particular Numbers file.

Of course, I do not know exactly what I did (or did not do) to trigger this particular alert, but that’s precisely my point: I shouldn’t have to deal with such problems. I shouldn’t have to waste time trying to investigate ways to reproduce bugs that should not exist in the first place, just so that Apple’s engineers will take them seriously enough and fix them.

I compare this with the situation with BBEdit. OK, it’s a single application and not an entire operating system. But they introduced an Auto Save feature a while back, without eliminating the “Save As…” command and disrupting workflows, and it has worked perfectly fine for me ever since. I don’t have to worry about saving files in the application. It keeps even unsaved and untitled documents for me, and it does not throw irritating alerts in my face.

That’s the kind of quality that Apple’s engineers should aspire to. Based on existing builds of Lion, they still have a long way to go.

This means that, as described in this Mac OS X hint, by typing:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES

in Terminal and restarting Safari, you can once again force Safari to download every PDF file to the “Downloads” folder when you click on a link to a PDF file in a web page, instead of having the PDF load and display in the browser.

Unfortunately, they have not fixed the other PDF-related thing that they broke in Safari 5.1, which is that saving a PDF when it’s displayed in the browser by clicking on the “Save PDF” button at the bottom of the window fails to include the metadata about where the PDF came from with the saved PDF file.

However, now that the native support for display of PDF documents within the browser window can be disabled again, this is not a problem for people who opt to disable the native support, since, after disabling it, all the PDF files are automatically saved to the “Downloads” folder and all the PDF files saved that way do include the “Where from” metadata.

Now, if they could also bring back a proper, functioning “Downloads” window, that would make me really happy. But that’s probably too much to ask.