This means that using Lion for work or play can be a rather frustrating experience. While these annoyances are not major, deal-breaking bugs, they affect me in my daily activities and their on-going presence feels like the itchy bites of a flea that you can’t seem to be able to get rid of. If that what we get for having OSes named after cats, it makes me long for a generation of the Mac OS named after snakes! They might not be the cuddliest of creatures, but at least they are slick and not furry, fuzzy creatures with all kinds of unexplored and unchecked nooks and crannies.

Here’s a quick survey of the bugs that I find most annoying in Lion because they cannot be worked around and regularly interfere with my use of my computer.

Lion’s Mail

I cannot remove attachments from my sent mail messages. I have written about this before. Based on this discussion thread at Apple Discussions (and the feedback I’ve received by e-mail), it is quite clear that this problem is very real for a number of people. But it is also quite clear, from that discussion and from the feedback I have received from Apple on my bug reports, that Apple itself is having trouble trying to replicate the problem. My current suspicion is that it only affects certain types of e-mail accounts, and only if these accounts were first created in a prior version of Mail or have some kind of “legacy” setting in them, or only if you have more than a couple of accounts. But who knows? Unfortunately, Apple’s engineers appear to have a tendency to avoid putting much effort into reproducing problems that cannot be reproduced from scratch with a brand new “clean” install of the latest OS and a very simple setup. This means that we’ll probably have to wait a long time for this problem to get fixed, if it ever does. One of these days, I might try rebuilding all my accounts from scratch once again, but it seems to me that I have done this before and it hasn’t helped.

The typing buffer in Mail ignores some keystrokes. When I press command-N to compose a new message, if I don’t wait for a fraction of a second before I start typing the e-mail address of the recipient, Mail misses the first few keystrokes and only starts registering my typing in the middle of the name, which of course is no good, because it then tries to autocomplete something that is totally irrelevant.

Mail’s rendering engine for HTML messages has significant performance issues. I often get HTML e-mails that cause Mail to freeze for a few seconds, and even when Mail becomes responsive again, scrolling through these messages is never smooth and always full of hiccups. Given that, with the three-pane layout, it is quite easy to select and display a message without really intending to (simply because you’ve just deleted the message above it in the list), these HTML performance issues can get quite annoying. Unfortunately, I’ve tried reproducing this in a separate user environment with no customizations and only one mail account in Mail, and I cannot, so I have little hope of being able to submit this as a reliable bug report to Apple so that they can do something about it. It’s probably one of these things that I’ll have to live with for the foreseeable future. Again.

I also find that the selection highlighting in the message list often fails to revert from the background grey colour to the foreground highlighting colour, even when the focus is clearly back on the message list and not on an individual message on the right. It might sound like a cosmetic issue, but even “cosmetics” have a function in Mac OS X. The selection highlighting colour changes serve a purpose (to show where the focus is), and the fact that they don’t work reliably destroys that usefulness.

Of course, Mail still suffers from the long-standing issues of messages sometimes losing their rule-based colour when replied to, and removing an e-mail message’s attachments sometimes causes it to disappear from the message list, as if it had been moved, when it hasn’t. The only way to make it reappear is to select a different mailbox and then select the inbox again. Miraculously, the message reappears exactly where it was supposed to be and should never had disappeared from. (This is undoubtedly due to the fact that, despite recent improvements, removing attachments is still a bit of a hack in Mail 5.x.)

Lion’s Safari

Safari, Safari, what have they done to you? I have already written about the abomination that is the new “Downloads” window (if you can call it that). But more generally the reliability of the application has taken a major turn for the worse. As soon as I leave more than a handful of web pages loaded in various windows and tabs, the performance of the application starts degrading very noticeably. The application becomes less responsive to keystrokes and mouse actions (especially scrolling gestures), and quite often whenever I switch from one tab or window to another, the tab or window that I am switching to goes blank (as in entirely white) before coming back to what it was displaying when I switched to it — much like web pages do on an iPad, where RAM is much more of an issue. (I have 12 GB of RAM on my Mac Pro. RAM is not or at least should not be an issue.) It’s not an actual reload of the page. (There is no network activity.) It just seems to be a reload from memory — even though the web page in question is very much loaded and visible in the background before I switch to the tab or window that contains it. It’s rather annoying, and it happens again, and again, and again, unless I only keep a very small number of windows or tabs open in Safari.

And then sometimes Safari gives up altogether and displays an alert saying that some of my web pages have “stop responding” (whatever that means for pages that have already been loaded) and asking me if I want to proceed and reload them all. I have little choice in the matter if I want to continue browsing, and when this happens I have to wait until Safari reloads all the pages that I had left open, which, with my limited bandwidth (1.5 Mbps), can take quite a while. It is, in effect, the same thing that would happen if I quit and relaunched Safari. In other words, Safari might not have had a crash per se, but the end result is that it behaves as if it had crashed and the recovery takes just as long. I am not sure I would call that an improvement over previous versions of the application. (I should also note that if you have a large download going on in the background in Safari when this happens, the download gets interrupted and, if it’s not resumable, you have to start again from the beginning.)

On top of it, when this happens, Safari sometimes “cheats” and does not actually reload all the tabs, but only the currently visible ones, i.e. the ones that are in the foreground in their enclosing window. If I then switch to another tab in the window, I have to wait until Safari reloads that one as well. Repeat this 20 times in a few minutes and it gets quite irritating. (Yes, I often keep more than 20 windows or tabs open in Safari. So sue me.)

It is probably a problem that depends on which sites you are loading, on whether they contain JavaScript or other stuff. (I use ClickToPlugin, so I normally don’t have any Flash or other crap loaded in my pages.) But how am I, as an end user, supposed to know which sites might cause performance/stability problems in Safari, or even whether their actual contents have anything to do with the problems? I simply shouldn’t have to worry about this, and I shouldn’t have to deal with these kinds of reliability issues on a powerful computer like my Mac Pro.

There are several other glitchy things about Lion’s Safari. For example, in certain cases, when a page is fully loaded, I get the Spinning Beach Ball of Death whenever my mouse pointer hovers over the page, even though the application remains responsive and I can even scroll through the page in question with the mouse wheel. I don’t know which part of Safari’s rendering engine controls the mouse pointer, but it obviously is buggy too.

Lion’s Finder

Lion’s Finder simply refuses to remember my open windows from one session to the next. Whenever I restart my computer, it reverses to some prior state where other windows that I closed long ago get reopened. I cannot reproduce this problem in a separate user environment, but I cannot get rid of it in my regular user environment, no matter how many times I trash the Finder’s preference files. I’ve given up on trying to fix this and switched back to using the TotalFinder plug-in. I had stopped using it when I first switched to Lion because it was not fully compatible. In particular, it had very serious problems with windows sorted by “Date Added,” which is a useful new feature in Lion. These problems in TotalFinder appear to have been fixed now. There are still numerous graphic glitches when switching windows or applications that appear to be caused by TotalFinder, but these are purely cosmetic and I can live with them. I like TotalFinder’s approach to tab-based file browsing, and, you know, TotalFinder actually remembers which windows and tabs I have left open from one session to the next. It’s too much to ask of Apple, but a small developer like Binary Age can deliver it.

The Finder is still unable to reliably display the pixel dimensions of my graphics files (especially PNG files) in its preview column or file information window/inspector. That something so basic is still not working properly after so many months drives me insane. Should I really have to open a file in another application just to be able to see what its dimensions are?

The Open and Save File dialog boxes in Preview and TextEdit appear right away, but take forever to become responsive. Since I am an avid user of Default Folder X, I have given up on even trying to report such bugs to Apple, because I know very well that they’ll blame the problem on Default Folder X, when Default Folder X works perfectly fine in other Mac OS X applications. It also works perfectly fine in Preview or TextEdit once the dialog becomes responsive, and I have tried to disable Default Folder X in Preview and TextEdit and the responsiveness issue is still there. But of course if I switch to another user environment with no customizations, I cannot reproduce the problem. So what’s the point?

I am not sure the next bug is directly linked to Lion’s Finder, but let’s say I have strong suspicions. See, for many years now my computer has been set up to do automatic backups of my stuff during the night using SuperDuper! to a separate internal hard drive, on which the backups are stored as disk images. Every night, SuperDuper! does a “smart update” of these disk images where it only changes what has changed on the source volumes since the last backup session the night before.

SuperDuper! is pretty much a one-trick pony, but it does its trick well and reliably. In other words, I normally don’t have to worry about it, which is the ideal situation when it comes to backups. (Of course I still need to remember to maintain off-site backups, but that’s a separate issue.)

Usually when there is a major system upgrade, SuperDuper! requires a minor update, and the developer delivers it pretty fast. He is also fairly responsive when you experience problems. But for this particular problem that I have been experiencing since upgrading to Lion, he told me he cannot do anything about it, because it’s a bug in Lion. But of course it only manifests itself during my SuperDuper! backups, so… Here we go again: stuck in a “feedback loop” where bugs are not obvious or bad enough for anyone to do anything about them.

The symptoms are as follows: When I go back to my computer in the morning, I see that several CPU cores are maxed out, that the fans are running faster than normal, and that everything in the system is very unresponsive. When I check Activity Viewer, I see that several applications, including the Finder, but also Microsoft Word, Pages, BBEdit, Safari, and a few others, are each constantly using over 100% of CPU power. And when I look at what’s going on the Finder, I see this happening right before my eyes in the sidebar:

“Documents” is the name of the source volume of one of my scheduled backups, and “Internal – Documents” is the name of the disk image file itself, which should never appear here, since the name of the disk image in the sidebar should be the name of the volume and not the name of the file. Why the Finder alternates between the two and failed to unmount the disk image once the backup was done in the first place, I do not know. All I know is that the SuperDuper! developer has told me that nothing could be done by him and that it was a bug in Lion. (It also does not always happen with the same disk image, so I don’t think it’s linked to a particular disk image file.)

Needless to say, a Lion bug that requires the specific use of a third-party application in a specific way is never likely to get high on Apple’s radar. But I see this bug at least once every 10 days, and I have also seen it for some manual backups done on disk images with SuperDuper! (Thankfully it does not seem to affect the reliability of the backups themselves.)

I initially thought that the only way out was to reboot my machine, but I have since discovered that if I quit all the applications that are using over 100% of CPU power for no apparent reason, including the Finder, the problem goes away and I can then relaunch the applications with no ill effects. But if I only quit the Finder, the problem remains with the other affected applications (Safari, BBEdit, Microsoft Word, Pages, etc.) until I quit them as well. So who knows what’s going on exactly here? All I know is that it’s always the same bunch of applications, even though I have many other applications left running in the background as well.

There are other, more minor glitches in Lion’s Finder. For example, I always have the “Path Bar” visible at the bottom of my Finder windows. This bar is automatically updated to display the path of what’s currently selected. (If you select more than one file, it displays the path to the enclosing folder.) If I trash or move what’s currently selected so that it is no longer in the list of files in the enclosing Finder window, Lion’s Finder fails to update the Path Bar and continues to display the full path (before the move) of the file I’ve just moved, including the name and small icon of the file itself. It might be mostly cosmetic, but I find it annoying, because it misleads me into thinking that the file is still there in the folder when it no longer is.

Wanted: Radical Flea Treatment

As you will undoubtedly have noticed, many of the bugs that I am writing about here are bugs that are a bit tricky to reproduce. If I switch to a “clean” user environment with no customizations and try to reproduce the problem, I often have difficulty doing so. But this does not mean that the bugs don’t exist! And I simply do not have the hours that one would need to try and isolate the particular source of each and every one of these bugs in my regular user environment. It would involve refraining from using many tools that I consider essential for my work, and I would suffer a significant loss in productivity for an extended period of time — not to mention the time it would take me to communicate with Apple about these problems and try to get them to fix them.

The reality is that trying to live and work with these bugs, no matter how hard it is, is less problematic than trying to do work with a “pristine” operating system with no customizations. But this does not make them any less annoying. And I find it highly discouraging that we have to go through this again and again, each time there is a major system upgrade. (And it’s a cumulative process too, because quite often several bugs from previous upgrades fail to ever get fixed.)

It seems that, in the case of advanced computing systems, we have no choice but to try and live with their many bugs, no matter how annoying and persistent they are. Something about the bug reporting and bug fixing process appears to be broken, and given the ever-shrinking share that advanced computing represents in Apple’s overall activities these days, I am not very optimistic about seeing any significant improvements anytime soon — even though Apple has, now more than ever, lots of resources (like 100 billion dollars in cash!) available to actually try and do something about this.

I cannot help but feel that Apple’s priorities are elsewhere, and I cannot help but fear that, in the long term, we advanced users and other professionals might even have no choice but to switch to another technology provider altogether. We stuck with the company even when it was in the doldrums, and it would be more that a little ironic if it were Apple’s renewed success (and what success it is!) that was the final straw forcing us to abandon the company.

We are not there yet, and it will really take much more than the above-mentioned bugs to cause me to question my loyalty to Apple’s pro-level products, but it is definitely a concern in the long run if things continue to evolve the way that they have been evolving for the past five years or so.

But sometimes I do not want to use “Paste Without Formatting,” precisely because I want to keep the formatting of the text that I am copying and pasting. Even then, Word manages to screw up in spectacular fashion.

Consider the following situation:

Here, I have selected the last paragraph before a bullet list (by clicking in the left margin, which selects the paragraph with its paragraph mark). I copy it to the Clipboard with command-C, and then I scroll down the document and select another paragraph before a bullet list (again by clicking in the left margin, which selects the paragraph with its paragraph mark), which I want to replace with what I have just copied:

And then I press command-V to paste the copied paragraph with its formatting.

What do you think happens? This:

The pasted paragraph has now taken on the formatting of the following paragraph, which of course is the first item in the bullet list, thereby turning itself into a new first item in the bullet list!

Good grief. I would very much like to know in which completely warped alternate universe this behaviour actually makes sense. But there’s no point in asking, because there’s nobody home. The “brains” behind Microsoft Word is actually an empty cranium. I am willing to bet that, of all the Microsoft engineers working on Microsoft Office, there is not a single one who’s even aware of the absurdity of this behaviour, let alone willing or able to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, in the real world, real Mac users are trying to get things done. And with Microsoft products, that is always much more complicated and painful than it should be.

The problems even affect things as basic as window management.

I’ve already written about the fact that Word 2011 fails to properly support setups with multiple displays. I have two 30-inch monitors side by side in an extended desktop setup, and if I leave Word document windows open on my secondary monitor, after a while Word 2011 starts switching the windows back to the main screen all the time. The only way to stop this behaviour is to quit and relaunch Word.

Word 2011 also fails to preserve a document’s window position when you close and reopen it.

And if you use the “New Window” command in the “Window” menu to open the same document in a second window — this feature is one of the few advantages that Word has over Apple’s Pages, because it lets you view two different sections of the same document side by side at the same time — and then press command-W, Word closes both document windows in one fell swoop, which is totally absurd. (The command-W command should be strictly equivalent to clicking on a window’s red close button, i.e. only close the foreground window.)

Word also fails to keep the current selection highlighting visible in a background window, using the background highlighting colour (a light grey).

Here is a new one to add to the list of Word’s failures in window management. Say you are using Word’s split bar to split a document window into two sections, each able to display a different section of the same document.

Then you switch to another document window, leaving the document window with the split bar open in the background.

Now take your mouse pointer and start hovering above the split bar in the background window. Here’s what happens in Word 2011 on my machine:

Yes, this is the cursor hovering over the split bar in a background window. Whenever you move the mouse pointer, Word displays the tooltip and the alternate cursor, which seems to indicate that you can actually click and drag on the split bar to adjust its position.

Of course you can do no such thing, because the split bar is in a background window, and one click on it will simply bring the window to the foreground, without doing anything with the split bar.

I regularly find myself forgetting this and clicking and dragging to adjust the split bar’s position, which of course does not work because the window is not in the foreground.

It would also help if, when a document window with the split bar visible is in the background, Microsoft would change the colour highlighting used for the split bar control itself from blue to grey, in order to reflect the fact that it is in the background and cannot be used. But of course Word does no such thing:

The only sign here that the window is in the background and that the blue control is actually disabled is the drop shadow from the foreground window next to it. But if I move that window away, there is no visual difference between the control in the background and the control in the foreground.

(Word also does not change the blue colour in the ruler controls when a document window is in the background.)

It’s all incredibly sloppy, but of course we all know that a Microsoft application will never have the level of polish and compliance with OS conventions that a proper Mac OS X application demands.

But with Lion’s version of the application (no. 6), I fear that, under the influence of the corresponding iOS app (called “Contacts”), Apple has taken a big step back in usability, and I’d like to explain why here.

To begin with, there is the obviously problem with the switch to what is called a skeuomorphic design that imitates the look of a “real” address book:

Beside the purely aesthetic aspects, what is obviously problematic about this design is that, unlike the previous version of Address Book, it can only ever display two colums of stuff at any given time: either the list of groups on the left and the list of entries in the currently selected group on the right, as in the picture above, or the list of entries in the currently selected group on the left and the card details for the currently selected entry in the list on the right:

(If you are really masochistic, you can even reduce the interface to a single column by clicking on the button with the square icon in the bottom-left corner.)

When you think about it for two seconds, it’s obvious: in a real address book in which you write down your contacts by hand, the very concept of a group does not exist. The best organizational tool you get is the alphabetical order. You cannot organize your entries in groups. The very concept of groups is one of the key benefits of having a computerized address book in the first place! With an electronic address book, you can organize your contacts not just by alphabetical order, but also based on specific categories. In an age of ever-expanding social networks, this is an essential feature if you want to try and be somewhat organized in your work or in your life.

By forcing us to adopt the two-column approach imposed by the skeuomorphic design, Apple is effectively deprecating groups as a feature. They are still there, but using them has just become much more painful. You cannot see groups or select one at all while you are viewing the contact details of a specific card. You first have to click on the red bookmark button at the top:

(Apparently, Apple has also decided that tool tips are now optional and that Mac users are smart enough to figure out what this button does by themselves — whereas in iOS the two-head icon is replaced by a text label that says “Groups.”)

In addition, when you are viewing the column with the groups on the left, as in the first picture above, the currently selected group is barely visible. The only sign that it is selected is that the name of the group is in blue instead of being in black. Where else in the Mac OS X user interface is text colour a form of selection highlighting? The nearly universal way of highlighting a selection is to change its background colour. (To highlight the selected card or cards, Address Book 6 changes not just the text colour, but also the background colour, to a light shade of blue. But it does not do that for groups.) And there is no icon next to the group’s name to indicate that it is a group instead of a card. Visually speaking, it’s almost as if groups no longer existed. It’s as if Apple was really trying to discourage us from using them at all.

(And when you are viewing a specific card after selecting it in “All Contacts,” there is no longer any direct way to tell which group(s) it belongs to. In previous versions of Address Book, you could hold the Option key down while a specific card was displayed. This would highlight in yellow the parent group or groups to which the card belonged. If you want to do this now, you first have to switch back to the view with the groups on the left and the list contacts on the right, so that groups are actually visible. Then holding the Option key down still works, but the parent group(s) are highlighted in the same faint way as the highlighting used for selection, i.e. the groups’ text colour changes to blue. And of course because of the new skeuomorphic design, the number of groups visible at any given time on the left is smaller than it used to be, even if you make the window as big as you can. So if, like me, you have a large number of groups, there’s lots of extra scrolling involved.)

What justification can there be for deprecating the Groups feature like this? Sure, I know that many computer users don’t even bother to maintain a proper address book at all and just rely on their software’s automatic memory of previously-used recipients (such as the “Previous Recipients” feature in Mail). But is that really an excuse? Did Apple really have to make the Groups feature in Address Book more difficult to use because of this? What is gained by removing groups from view? Simplicity? Obviously, if this many computer users don’t bother to maintain an address book at all, it is because even a simpler user interface is still too complicated for them. I’d very much like to see the scientific studies of Mac users Apple has conducted that prove that a “simpler” user interface like the one in Lion actually makes the address book more useful and more likely to be used.

Yes, it now looks very much like the Contacts app in iOS, but is that a sign of progress? To me, it is just a sign of dumbing things down and catering to the lowest common denominator. (And, despite appearances, it does not even work the same way. There are numerous differences between the way the Contacts app works and the way Lion’s Address Book application works. More on that below.)

I would also very much like to know how Apple’s engineers can rationalize the fact that, when you are looking at the Address Book application with the groups on the left and the list of contacts on the right, there is no button to create a new contact. As I’ve written before, I find this completely mind-boggling. In this view, the only way to add a contact to the currently selected group is either the “New Card” command in the “File” menu or its keyboard shortcut. Why on earth is there a “+” button in the bottom-left corner for creating a new group and not one on the right for creating a new contact? How often does the average user create a new group compared to how often he creates a new contact?

I submitted an “Enhancement Request” to Apple about this a few months ago, and in December I got the following answer:

Hello,

Please let us know if the problem you reported below is fixed or not in the latest version of the software available to you.

Also, You can use the File > New Card menu item, or its Cmd-N shortcut.

Needless to say, the latest version of OS X that they were referring to did not contain any improvements, and the “New Card” menu item and the command-N shortcut remain the two only ways to create a new contact. Sometimes I feel like I am talking to a wall.

(In the Contacts app in iOS, at least, as soon as you select a group, the app automatically switches you to the view with the list of contacts on the left and the card details on the right, where there is a “+” button at the bottom to create a new card. In the app, there is no such thing as a view with the groups on the left and the contacts in the currently selected group on the right, so the problem does not exist. On the other hand, this means that, when you go back to the list of groups, the entire right-hand side of the address book remains blank and is a complete waste of screen space. So the Address Book application and the Contacts app don’t work the same way, and are both flawed in different ways.)

There are other problems with the new Address Book interface in Lion. As with previous versions of Address Book, if a specific group is currently selected, the “Find” function only searches for matches within that group. If you want to search for matches in all your contacts, you have to remember to first go back to the list of groups and select “All Contacts.” It was already like that in previous versions, but now with the two-column view, it requires even more mouse clicks.

As far as I can tell, there is no shortcut for automatically selecting all contacts before starting a search. With previous versions of Address Book, I had written a Keyboard Maestro macro to automatically select all contacts before selecting the search field. Of course, with Lion’s Address Book, I was forced to rewrite my macro. I managed to do so, but even with my rewrite, the skeuomorphic Address Book UI is significantly more sluggish now, which means that there is a very noticeable delay when I trigger the macro before I can actually start my search.

It’s all very irritating.

I am not even talking here about the absurdity of this skeuomorphic UI in the first place. Think about it: when is the last time you had in your hands a “real” address book where there was a list of groups on the left and a list of contacts on the right and when flipping a page actually switched the contents of the right page to the next left page and showed the contact details on the right? Last time I checked, a handwritten address book consisted of plain pages with stuff written on them, and flipping pages just took me from one item to the next.

And if the idea is to imitate some kind of “index” or “table of contents” page, then tell me, do you really know of any book readers who have never wished that they could look at both the index or table of contents and the actual contents of the book at the same time? It’s so obvious that this is an improvement! Yet, that’s exactly what Apple has taken away from us with this “new and revamped” user interface.

It drives me so mad that I have finally given up on it and am now using a third-party application that I once bought as part of a cheap MacUpdate bundle without thinking I’d ever use it. The application is called Contactizer Pro. It’s far from perfect, and it too requires extra mouse clicks compared to what the pre-Lion Address Book application used to require. I’ve also send feedback to the developer (Objective Decision) about a bug and never received any answer, so I am not particularly impressed. (As well, the application offers all kinds of other features that I don’t use, which makes for a more cluttered interface.)

But at least, it has, you know, a three-pane view mode that lets you view groups, their contents, and card details all at the same time! And there is a “+” button for adding a new contact no matter what you are currently looking at!

Contactizer Pro uses the same contact database as Address Book, so any change to your contacts is immediately reflected in any application that uses that database, such as Mac OS X’s Mail.

Sadly, there is no way to tell which group(s) a card currently belongs to, in part because Contactizer Pro has its own “Category” feature that works separately. This is frustrating to me because my whole Mail/Address Book environment is built on a series of groups that I used in Mail rules to apply different background and text colours to incoming messages depending on which group(s) their sender belongs to. I am completely dependent on this colouring scheme to make my Inbox more manageable, but obviously Apple’s engineers don’t feel that it is a valid or important use of Mac OS X’s feature set. (They still haven’t fixed the bug that causes some messages to lose their colour when you reply to them either. Unfortunately, contrary to what I wrote in that older blog post, the bug also affects background colours, not just text colours.)

The whole situation reeks of arrogance. Apple’s engineers make assumptions about the ways in which we use their software, and apparently feel no qualms about deprecating some important features or making them more difficult to use in the name of “simplicity” and “user-friendliness.” I don’t know about you, but to me there is absolutely nothing user-friendly about this new skeuomorphic user interface and, once again, it makes me fear the worst about Apple gradually dumbing down the Mac OS X environment to make it more like iOS and less like a user environment that real people actually try to do real work with.

Then the button image is replaced by a different one with a miniature progress bar:

If you want to see what’s going on in more detail, you have to click on the button, which brings up one of these weird balloons or “bubble”-like pop-up windows that Apple also uses in iCal:

This “window” stays open until you click again on the button or anywhere outside the window’s borders.

As the “bubble”-like visual design indicates, this “Downloads” window is somehow attached to the button and its enclosing browser window, which means that, when you leave it open and try to move the underlying browser window, the “Downloads” moves along with it.

This should be compared to what the user interface used to be in Safari prior to Lion. There was a separate “Downloads” window that looked like a regular Mac OS X window and was not tied to a specific browser window.

My view on this new user interface is that it’s a typical example of how Apple’s engineers appear to be hell-bent on dumbing down the computing experience in Mac OS X, presumably in an attempt to bring it closer to the iOS experience.

Why? Because the new model used by Apple for downloads in Lion completely breaks down and becomes totally nonsensical when you try to download two or more files from different sites at the same time.

It appears to be based on the assumption that Mac users only ever download a single file at a time, and only use a single browsing window. This might be true for a large number of Mac OS X users who are not particularly “advanced” in their use of their computer and don’t ever try to exploit its multitasking capabilities. But there are also many Mac OS X users out there, myself included, who try to get as much stuff done in as little time as possible, because they like to be efficient and productive in their activities.

Even though our machines are more than capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, we are apparently a category of users that Apple cares little about.

There are numerous problems with the new interface for downloads in Lion’s Safari when you attempt to download several different files at the same time.

First of all, the progress bar in the button can only show a single process at a time. If there are multiple downloads going on at the same time at different stages of progress, how can this single bar display the combined status of these multiple processes? I don’t know what kind of algorithm (if any) Apple uses to calculate the level of progress in the button’s progress bar, but whatever it is, it can only be pretty much useless as a source of information about the status of the various downloads.

So if you want to monitor the progress of multiple downloads, you need to leave that strange “bubble”-like window open. But it’s impossible to separate it from the “Show Downloads” button of the underlying browser window that you clicked on to bring it up.

Even though the several different downloads might have been initiated from several different browser windows and even though the “Downloads” window shows the combined list of the downloads currently in progress, that window remains tied to a specific browser window at all times. You cannot leave the “Downloads” window open without leaving the underlying browser window open — even if that underlying window has nothing to do with the downloads currently in progress. And if you want to move the “Downloads” window, your only option is to move the underlying browser window to which the “Downloads” window is tied.

(It should also be noted that, even though the “Downloads” window is tied to its underlying browser window, you cannot have two different browser windows with two different instances of the “Downloads” window open at the same time. If you leave one instance of the “Downloads” window open on top of a given browser window, then switch to another browser window and attempt to bring up the “Downloads” window on top of that window, the original “Downloads” window disappears as soon as you click on the “Show Downloads” button in the other browser window. I guess that’s one way to deal with the absurdity of having the “Downloads” window tied to a browser window.)

It gets better. Even if you have sufficient bandwidth with a high-speed connection, sometimes when you click on a link to a downloadable file, the download does not start immediately. If, instead of waiting, you switch to another browser window to do something else, when the download process finally starts, the animation mentioned above is triggered in the other window that you are currently viewing, even though the link is not even there in that window! The animation starts somewhere in the window (presumably in the position corresponding to the position of the original link in the original window, which might be a totally empty spot in that other window) and then jumps to the “Show Downloads” toolbar button in that other window too. Visually speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever, since the download has nothing to do with the browser window that you are currently viewing. But again, that’s what happens when you choose a visual model that simply does not work for multiple simultaneous activities.

On top of all this, in my experience the new “Downloads” window is actually buggy and unable to keep track of all the downloads that I initiate. More often than not, once a download process is complete, the corresponding line in the “Downloads” window disappears altogether, so I don’t even have a trace of the elapsed process and the only way that I can check and make sure that the file was actually downloaded is to open my “Downloads” folder and see if the file is there. (Thankfully, in Lion, you can sort items by date added, so that recently added files actually show up at the top, so even if you don’t remember the name of the file, it’s fairly easy to find. Don’t ask me how Snow Leopard users manage to deal with this bug.) This bug might be linked to the fact that I switch windows without waiting for downloads to start. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I shouldn’t be forced to wait.

It’s all very maddening, because there is no way to work around the problems. The new “Downloads” window interface is the only way to monitor downloads in Safari. It’s an interface that might make sense for Mac OS X users who only have a single browser window open at any given time and only ever initiate a single download process at a time and patiently wait for it to finish before doing anything else. But for the rest of us, it’s an immense source of frustration and a loss in productivity that is inexcusable.

Whenever I have to deal with this interface, I cannot help but feel that it’s a perfect example of the totally misguided dumbing-down of the Mac OS X interface in Lion that appears to be the result of the influence of iOS devices — even though iOS’s version of Safari has supported multiple browser windows (or tabs) from the very beginning. Of course, the very concept of downloading files is somewhat foreign to the iOS experience, so the limitations of that interface are a separate issue. But if even iOS’s Safari supports multiple browser windows, how can you design a user interface in Mac OS X’s Safari that clearly only makes sense if you only have a single browser window open and do only one thing at any given time?

(Even if one assumes that Lion’s users all use the full-screen mode, which is a major stretch, you still have a “Downloads” window tied to a specific window. Safari’s engineers avoided the issue by making the “Downloads” window disappear as soon as you switch to another window or exit the full-screen mode.)

Maybe one day in the distant future, when Apple’s engineers have managed to make even the very concept of files and folders obsolete and bandwidth is so readily available that all download processes are pretty much instantaneous, things might start to make more sense, but right now people in the real world using their computers for real work still have to deal with files, download them, wait for the download processes to finish — and they need a proper user interface to manage all this. The Safari interface in Lion is a major step back and an unacceptably dumbed-down approach that makes no sense whatsoever for serious users of Mac computers who are simply trying to get work done.

Back then, I didn’t have time to explore the issue, so I just turned bookmarks syncing off on my Mac Pro altogether. The syncing still appeared to work for the few minutes that it was on, so I was still able to get my bookmarks synced (at least the most visible ones, in the Bookmarks Bar and in the Bookmarks Menu), before the process started crashing again and again.

What I did do after a while is that I submitted a bug report to Apple via Bug Reporter. I tried to attach a Zip archive including my entire ~Library/Safari/ folder, but it was too big and I had to upload it to Apple’s servers via FTP.

They got back to me after a while and obviously didn’t manage to get a hold of the file I had uploaded, so I submitted it again. After a few weeks, Apple got back to me asking me to “enable BookmarkDAV logging” using special instructions via Terminal, and send the logs back to them. I followed their instructions and was able to gather all the logs that they needed, and I sent everything back to them.

A week later, they got back to me again, this time saying:

Thank you for providing the information needed to pinpoint this issue. In the meantime please delete the “Search Category – Auteurs Amateurs” bookmark, that’s causing his crashers.

The “Search Category – Auteurs Amateurs” bookmark in question is not what you think… It was actually a very old bookmark that I had created once for a specific category of amateur poetry web sites in Netscape’s on-line directory (back when they had an on-line directory). When I say “very old,” I mean that this was a bookmark that I had created about 15 years ago, in the early years of the Internet.

And sure enough, when I searched through my Safari bookmarks on my Mac Pro, I found such a bookmark. In fact, I found about 50 copies of the bookmark! Whatever this bookmark contained in its URL, it was definitely not agreeing with Safari’s bookmark management engine and causing serious problems, including the SafariDAVClient crashes.

The problem was that, while I was able to delete all the local copies of this bookmark in Safari on my Mac Pro, as soon as I turned bookmark syncing back on, iCloud would merge my local bookmarks with the ones stored in the Cloud and put the offending bookmark back in, triggering the creation of multiple copies of it again, and causing the SafariDAVClient crashes again.

I was caught in some kind of vicious circle.

I figured that the way to get out of this vicious circle was to go in the Cloud itself and delete the bookmark there, so that it would be gone once and for all. But guess what? You cannot do that. True to its name, the “Cloud” in iCloud is a partly opaque thing that you have very limited control over. If you try to go to icloud.com and log in using your iCloud ID and password, this only gives you access to a few things, and bookmarks are not one of them. In other words, there is no user interface to manage your bookmarks in the Cloud itself.

So how was I going to get rid of the offending bookmark? I searched through the Apple Discussions forums and found several threads with titles such as “how do I delete my iCloud bookmarks?,” “deleting bookmarks in iCloud,” “How can bookmarks be replaced in iCloud?,” and so on.

Clearly, I was not the only one struggling with this type of problem. But none of the threads offered any really satisfactory answer that would help in my particular case.

Then it finally hit me. While iCloud is opaque and the merging process appears to prevent you from actually deleting stuff, it’s obviously not true. What you need to do is delete the bookmarks in a way that forces iCloud to remove the bookmarks in the Cloud itself. I was not able to do this on my Mac Pro, because of the constant crashing of SafariDAVClient. But I could do it on the other device that I have that also syncs with iCloud, which is my iPad.

In other words, I could:

1. Turn bookmarks syncing off on my Mac Pro.
2. Delete the offending bookmark(s) in Safari on my Mac Pro, noting where they were stored exactly in the bookmark folder hierarchy.
3. Turn bookmarks syncing on on my iPad.
4. Go in Safari on the iPad and delete the offending bookmark in Safari’s bookmarks there. That was the crucial step: since bookmark syncing was working fine on the iPad, and at that stage the iPad was the only device syncing with iCloud, deleting a bookmark on the iPad would delete it in the Cloud as well.
5. Then wait until the bookmarks on the iPad were synced properly, and turn bookmark syncing back on on the Mac Pro.

Now of course the problem is that the iPad user interface is far from ideal for this. Bookmark management features are fairly limited. You can only bring up the complete list of bookmarks and browse through it manually and then click on the “Edit” button to edit the contents of a particular folder. With multiple folder levels and hundreds of bookmarks in the folders (and no way to sort them), it makes it a bit challenging to find a specific bookmark and delete it. It’s also hard to tell when the bookmark syncing process taking place in the background is complete. The only sign of any activity is the indefinite-wait animation in the top bar in iOS indicating network activity. (If you try to edit bookmarks while iOS is still in the process of syncing them, you also get a warning asking you to wait until the syncing is done, which is quite frustrating since there is no real visual indication of the process taking place.)

Finally, the bookmarks syncing process appeared to be over, and I turned bookmarks syncing back on on my Mac Pro and… it worked! I no longer get SafariDAVClient crashes, and my bookmarks are now constantly in sync between my Mac Pro, iCloud, and my iPad.

Phew.

I still find the fuzziness of this Cloud thing rather frustrating. It seems to me that there definitely should be a way to edit bookmarks directly in the Cloud, via a web-based interface. And other Mac users share the same frustration. But at this point Apple’s engineers don’t appear to agree, and the only way to deal with the opacity of bookmarks syncing is to use a process such as the one I described above.

Notice anything?

Allow me to make it clearer for you:

Or:

Unless Word 2011 is lucky and its splash screen happens to appear on top of a fairly uniform background, you inevitably get ugly see-through effects that make it look as if the splash screen itself is badly drawn and “dirty.”

I guess that’s what happens when you put a delicate concept such as translucency in the hands of clueless software engineers.

A while ago, I wrote about a new bug that I am experiencing in Lion’s Mail, where any sent message containing attachments is displayed in the message list without the expected paperclip attachment icon, and, more important, where the “Remove Attachments” command is disabled when the sent message is selected, which means that it is impossible to remove the attachment from the message.

This is a problem that really bothers me, because it means that large sent messages are accumulating in my Sent mailboxes and I cannot file them away, and the size of my entire Mail folder is ballooning. In less than three months, I have accumulated nearly 400 sent messages with a total file size of over 600 MB. It is simply ridiculous.

Apple still hasn’t done anything about this bug. I am not the only one experiencing it. I have received e-mail from other people complaining about the same problem, and there is a discussion thread on the Apple Support Communities web site.

Yesterday, I just got tired of waiting and decided to try and do something about it. Here is what I did.

First, I sorted my sent messages by attachment, which amazingly still appears to work. Since Mail does not display the paperclip icon, it’s a bit hard to tell where the list of messages with attachments actually starts, but one can use the message size as a guide.

Then I selected all the messages with attachments and moved them to a separate mailbox.

I selected that mailbox and chose the “Export Mailbox…” command in the contextual menu. This enabled me to save the entire mailbox as a .mbox file on my hard drive.

I then imported the .mbox file back into Mail, using the “Import Mailboxes…” command. And sure enough, once the messages were imported, they showed up in a list with their paperclip icon fully visible, and the “Remove Attachments” command was working, so I was able to remove the attachments from my sent messages.

I then deleted the original sent messages with their unremovable attachments from my Sent mailbox, and moved the stripped sent messages from the Import mailbox back into the Sent mailbox. Et voilà! My sent messages are now attachment-free, and instead of the attachments they include the proper line between square brackets indicating the names of the files that were originally attached.

Phew. Obviously the export/import round-trip using the .mbox file format does something to the message files that restores normal behaviour. It confirms my long-standing suspicion, which is that something is broken in the way Lion’s Mail encodes the sent messages. (When you upgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard, if you have sent messages with attachments in your Sent mailbox that were composed using Snow Leopard’s Mail, they behave properly, even in Lion’s
Mail. It’s only sent messages created by Lion’s Mail that pose a problem.)

I am not sure whether the round-trip actually removes useful information from the messages, but there is nothing that I can see missing. They still have the correct information in the headers (sender, recipients, etc.) and Lion’s Mail still organizes them by conversation properly, with the messages that they were originally connected to. The only glitch I have noticed is that, when a message includes both a plain text and a rich text version, the line between brackets with the name of the removed attachment only appears in the rich text alternative and not in the plain text alternative.

Obviously if you have rules that apply various colours to your messages, like I do, you’ll have to reapply the rules to the sent messages to restore their colours (via the “Message” menu). But after that, everything will be in order.

It’s obviously not a fix for the bug, but at least it enables you to periodically remove the attachments from your sent messages, which helps keep your overall Mail folder size reasonable.

Now if anyone has any tips about the steps required to provide a 100%-reproducible scenario to Apple via a bug report, I am all ears. Even though I can reproduce the problem in two different user environments on my machine, including one with zero customizations, it is apparently still not good enough…

In both applications, you can define paragraph styles for various things in your documents, including headings, sub-headings, etc.

When you define a paragraph style for a heading, you usually want to make it so that, when you apply the style to a paragraph and then press Return, the word processor not only starts a new paragraph, but also switches from the heading style you’ve just defined back to the regular body style for your text.

Here again, both applications provide such a feature. In Word 2011, it’s called “Style for following paragraph”:

And in Pages ’09, it’s called “Following Paragraph Style”:

There is, however, a significant difference in the way that the feature works in real-life tasks. For instance, let’s say you have a Clipboard containing several paragraphs of plain text with no formatting (or several paragraphs of formatted text that you are going to paste without formatting).

In Word 2011, if your current paragraph style is the heading style, and you paste the unformatted text, you get… several paragraphs of text in the heading style. In other words, Word 2011 automatically applies the current heading style to all the paragraphs of plain text that you are inserting.

In the same scenario in Pages ’09, on the other hand, the word processor actually takes the style definition into account. Since the style definition include a “Following Paragraph Style” option that specifies that the style of the paragraph following the paragraph in heading style should be different, Pages ’09 actually follows those specifications when inserting the plain text.

In other words, if your current paragraph in Pages ’09 is in the heading style, and you paste several paragraphs of plain text, Pages ’09 automatically puts the first pasted paragraph in the heading style and the remainder of the pasted paragraphs in the style specified in the “Following Paragraph Style” option in the heading style definition.

It is quite obvious to me which of the two behaviours is preferable. After all, if your paragraph style definition specifies a different style for the next paragraph, it indicates quite clearly that your heading style will only be used for a single paragraph at a time. What then is the point of applying that heading style to a whole series of paragraphs, as Word 2011 does when you paste plain text paragraphs into a paragraph in the heading style?

This, I believe, is a nice example of those little touches that, after 30 years, Microsoft’s software is still utterly unable to provide, even though they make perfect sense and a relatively young upstart such as Apple’s Pages is smart enough to include such a behaviour.

It’s not a flashy feature. It’s not something that will look good in a marketing presentation. And of course most people using Word 2011 don’t even know how to use paragraph styles, because the user interface for using them is so atrocious. But that is not an excuse. I am willing to bet that the majority of Pages ’09 users don’t know how to use styles either, simply because they have never learned, because they have been forced to use crappy word processors such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect for too long. (The user interface for styles is much better in Pages ’09. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s readily accessible and reasonably simple. One hopes that, over time, more people will learn to use styles. It might take decades, though.)

But that didn’t prevent Apple’s engineers from making sure that the behaviour when pasting several paragraphs of plain text into a paragraph formatted as a heading made sense.

Good luck finding any sign of such intelligence and attention to detail in Microsoft products.

Yes, this InDesign file was downloaded from the Internet. But how does that make it an “application”?

And I don’t get this just for InDesign files. I get it for all kinds of other media files, when they are downloaded as part of a Zip archive that I then expand in Mac OS X’s Finder.

These files are not “applications.” They are just documents. Yes, I know that things downloaded from the Internet can contain viruses and other sources of problems. And yes, I know that Zip archives in particular can contain hidden stuff. But that does not make an InDesign file an “application.” It’s already hard enough to get the average user to understanding the basic concepts of files, folders, windows, and so on. If you start calling documents “applications,” how do you expect such users to understand what a real application is and what the dangers actually are?

To me, it seems that this dialog is just some generic blanket statement that Apple’s engineers couldn’t bothered to customize based on the actual nature of the files that have been downloaded. It’s on part with iCal displaying something like “1 days before.”

It took Apple years to finally fix iCal so that it uses the singular rather than the plural when the number of days or hours is 1. Is it going to take that long again before Mac OS X speaks some language that ordinary folks can understand when it comes to security features and issues?

The latest one I have encountered has to do with the Clipboard shortcuts (command-C, command-V) within “Save As” dialog boxes.

If, for example, in a “Save As” dialog box in InDesign CS5.5, I select the current name of the file and press command-C to copy it to the Clipboard, I get a system beep and the name is not copied. Similarly, if I have something in the Clipboard and I bring up the “New Folder” sub-dialog and try to press command-V to paste the contents of the Clipboard, I get a system beep.

However, the menu commands themselves (in the “Edit” menu) are not greyed out and are still accessible. So I can use the menu commands to perform the operations I wish to perform in those dialog boxes. I just can’t use the keyboard shortcuts, which is a bit of a pain.

Adobe’s applications are the only ones where I have noticed this problem. So it is likely a bug specific to those applications. However, I cannot rule out the possibility that it is actually a bug in an old routine in Mac OS X that has not been updated and that only Adobe still uses, because they are so far behind in their adoption of modern software development standards. But if only Adobe uses the old routine, that proves that Apple is not really to blame, because it’s probably some deprecated routine that will be eliminated eventually.

Unfortunately, with developers like Adobe and Microsoft, it’s only when you eliminate old stuff that they are finally forced to do something about such problems, because their software ceases to work properly altogether. Until then, they are just content with buggy software that sort of works, as long as you are willing to live with all the quirks and annoyances that you paid hundreds of dollars for.

My own personal experience with noise levels is that, overall, things have improved dramatically since the days of the horrendous PowerMac G4 MDD. Of course, I’d like my 2009 Mac Pro and my external hard drives to be even quieter (if not silent), but on the whole, most of the time the fan noise is tolerable and there are no whines or hums.

As for speed, I find that we have really reached a plateau in the past few years, partly because CPU performance has been increased, not by ramping up the chip’s frequency or so-called “clock rate,” but by multiplying the number of cores — and most software programs fail to make full use of these multiple cores — and partly because hard drive technology itself appears to have reached some kind of plateau too, if not in terms of capacity, at least in terms of speed.

At the same time, lately Apple and other Mac software developers don’t seem to have been as focused on performance improvements as they were a few years ago. Remember the days when one of the big selling points of a new version of Mac OS X was that, in spite of the addition of numerous new features, the new version was actually faster than the previous version on the same hardware? I haven’t heard Apple make such a claim in a while, and Lion, on the whole, certainly does not feel any faster than Snow Leopard was.

I shall not even mention here the abysmal performance levels of Microsoft and Adobe software on Mac hardware… It is positively embarrassing and shameful, but apparently these developers do not feel any embarrassment and certainly have no shame.

All this is to say that, as a power user who tends to work very fast and expect high responsiveness from his machine, I have always been highly aware of speed/performance issues and find myself on a never-ending quest for a faster, more responsive workstation. Because of this, for the past few years I have been keeping an eye on the evolution of the technology known as “solid-state drive” or SSD. I didn’t want to be an early adopter, because of the high cost involved (for limited capacity) and the uncertainty associated with this new technology, so I didn’t include an SSD drive in my custom configuration for the Mac Pro I bought in 2009, but I knew that, eventually, this might be an upgrade worth considering.

Then the other day, after I posted a blog item about performance levels in iTunes 10.4 and iTunes 10.5, I got an e-mail from a reader sharing his own experience with using iTunes to manage a large music library. He too had experienced problems with iTunes 10.4, but said that he had managed to work around them (to a certain extent) by replacing his machine’s startup hard drive with an SSD, even though his large music collection was still, of course, on a separate hard drive. His view was that one of the bottlenecks in iTunes performance is the library file itself, which can be kept on the startup volume, separate from the music files (by choosing the appropriate option for the iTunes Media folder in iTunes’s preferences). Even though his music files were still on a hard drive, the basic library files were now on the startup SSD, and this appeared to have helped significantly.

This got me intrigued, and I started to do some reading on the current state of SSD technology and available options for my Mac Pro. Because I have to use Microsoft and Adobe software in my work (and I am also a Logic Pro user), I knew that capacity would be an issue. I examined my startup drive carefully to identify what I could get rid of in order to reduce the total footprint of my system and applications, and determined that I would still probably need a drive with a capacity of at least 200 GB.

I checked a number of reviews, and ended up deciding to go with OWC‘s 240-GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD. It was definitely not the cheapest option, especially for me in Canada, since OWC is US-based, but I felt that it offered the right mix of performance, reliability, and support for me as a Mac user. It was still a hefty chunk of change ($499US + shipping, duty, and tax), but I felt that it was worth it at this point in time. Best of all, after discussing this with my employers, they agreed to cover the cost of the upgrade, given that they hadn’t made any contribution to my home office equipment in quite a while. (I purchased the 2009 Mac Pro with my own funds.)

I have never had any problems with OWC over the years, and I didn’t have any this time either. The shipping options are still rather expensive for Canada, and there is no escaping the duties and taxes at the border, but other than that, the delivery was super fast and I got the drive within a few days.

For the installation process itself, I had two options: either I could start again from scratch in order to create a clean Lion install and reinstall only those applications that I really needed, and then rebuild all my customizations and settings, or I could trim my existing startup volume and then just mirror it. In the end, I decided against doing a clean install, simply because it would have been a rather time-consuming process. I mounted the small 2.5″ SSD drive on the special Mac Pro adapter I got from OWC, and put it inside the Mac Pro in one of the four regular storage slots. (I already had a hard drive in that slot, but it was one that I wasn’t using much.)

I then used SuperDuper! to copy my startup volume (which I had managed to bring down to 160 GB of disk space) onto the SSD. The process took less than two hours. (I didn’t stay in front of my computer the whole time, so I don’t know exactly how long it took.) I then selected the SSD as the startup volume and rebooted.

I have now been using the SSD as my startup volume for a couple of days and my observations are as follows.

The transition was pretty much seamless. I didn’t have to reinstall any applications, and the vast majority of my settings and preferences were fully preserved.

The machine’s startup process is now significantly faster, especially after logging in. The trick that Lion uses to make you believe that everything relaunches instantly (by showing an image capture of your work environment first, basically) almost works. (With a regular hard drive, it is rather more frustrating: it looks like everything is launched instantly, but then you have to wait quite a bit just the same before things actually become usable.) This is important for me because, for a number of reasons, I probably end up rebooting up my machine more often than the average user. One of the reasons is that I am a member of the AppleSeed program, so I have to install new versions of Mac OS X on a regular basis and reboot. Another one is that, for some reason, in my work I tend to encounter bugs that require a restart. (The latest one is an occasional bug with SuperDuper! backups that causes an endless loom of mounting/unmounting disk images that can only be stopped by rebooting. Apple is investigating.) Yet another one is that I have yet to invest in a UPS system for my machine and our power utility here in Nova Scotia is notorious for its crappy service and frequent outages.

The process of launching the big, slow crap applications from Microsoft and Adobe is also significantly improved, which again is important in my case not just because I have to use these applications, but because they crash on a regular basis, which forces me to relaunch them again, and again, and again. They do not launch instantaneously now (like more lightweight, better designed applications do), but they do launch much faster, and that helps alleviate the issue somewhat.

The responsiveness of the system as a whole and of individual running applications is of course significantly better. It all depends on how much they depend on access to hard drives, of course. My SSD volume only contains my system, my applications, and my user folder, but all my documents and all my media files are still on separate hard drives. The reason for this is an issue of disk capacity. I have to leave some space free on my SSD (so that Photoshop can use it as a scratch drive, for example) and having the necessary disk space for all my files in SSD would cost me thousands of dollars.

But still, just having the system, the applications, and the home folder files (preferences, application support, caches, etc.) on a SSD does make a significant difference. On the whole, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s an order of magnitude faster. But it does provide a nice, significant overall speed boost. I don’t have time to take detailed, scientific time measurements in order to compare the responsiveness and performance levels with what I used to get with a hard drive, so my observations are inevitably subjective and impressionistic.

You also need to remember that this upgrade does not change anything to the situation with my Internet connection, which peaks at 1.5 Mbps and is sometimes significantly less than that. There is nothing that I can do about this for now, but things will change next year when we move into a new house with better Internet service. That will be the next big “upgrade” for my computer system and it will probably have a significant impact on the overall responsiveness of my system as well.

What about the situation with iTunes and my large music library? Well, things are definitely better, but I have to admit that the situation is definitely not as improved as I had hoped it would be. I still get the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, and the iTunes interface still suffers from far too many inexplicable hiccups and temporary freezes that don’t have any obvious cause. The performance of the third-party AppleScript scripts that I use regularly in iTunes is still totally unpredictable. I would say that, on the whole, things are twice as fast in iTunes as they used to be with a startup hard drive, but iTunes has such a long way to go that twice as fast is still not enough to bring it to an acceptable level of responsiveness with a large music library like mine. (Like I said, only the iTunes application itself and the basic .itdb, .itl, and .xml files are on the SSD. The music/media files themselves are still on a separate hard drive.)

I should also note that one of the ways that I managed to trim down the disk space requirements for my startup volume was to move the entire contents of my “Downloads” folder to a separate volume. The folder itself cannot be moved or replaced with an alias, but you can select a different folder in Safari and in other applications as the destination for downloads, so that most downloads will go to that new destination instead of the built-in “Downloads” folder in your home folder. Even then, some applications are still not well-behaved and will continue to use the built-in “Downloads” folder, so I’ll need to continue to keep an eye on it from time to time, but most of my downloads will now go to a separate folder on a hard drive.

The reasons for this are not just that I tend to download quite a bit of stuff (mostly live Prince bootlegs, but also other stuff, like HD movie trailers, etc.) and that takes up quite a bit of disk space. My “Downloads” folder just a temporary storage space and the stuff I want to keep ends up being stored elsewhere. So there is a lot of reading and writing activity involved with this particular folder and I feel that keeping that activity on a hard drive instead of the SSD will help extend the life expectancy of the SSD. As well, most of these files do not need to be readable at a higher speed, since they are media files whose playback does not require more than HD-level speed anyway.

There are drawbacks to this approach, of course. Like I said, even though you can change the default destination for downloads in Safari’s preferences and in other applications, there is still stuff that will end up in that built-in “Downloads” folder. In addition, you can give your separate “Downloads” folder a custom icon if you want to, but as Lion users know, this won’t help in the Finder sidebar, where all folder icons have the exact same appearance, except for the built-in ones. So there is no way to give that separate “Downloads” folder a non-generic icon in the Finder sidebar. (I personally find this restriction maddening. What on earth is wrong with wanting to use colour and custom icons to make things more intuitive and easier to see and target? Isn’t that what having a GUI is all about?)

But on the whole, having a separate “Downloads” folder that is not in the default location is not a huge problem, and can help keep the disk space requirements for the SSD at a manageable (and affordable) level.

Apart from these improvements, the only small problem I have noticed with the SSD so far is a new behaviour in NetNewsWire that I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes, when I browse RSS feeds, when I select the next entry in a feed, there is a small hiccup of a second or two before NNW actually switches to that next entry. Then again, maybe I had the problem before, but whenever it happened, I would hear lots of hard drive activity and sort of know what was going on, whereas now, of course, a SSD is perfectly silent, so I can no longer tell when there is, for whatever reason, lots of disk activity that might explain a temporary slowdown.

The bottom line here is that my startup volume in my Mac Pro is now a 240 GB SSD, which is only two-thirds full, and this provides me with a really nice overall performance boost, especially in those crappy applications from Adobe and Microsoft that are so painful to use, yet so necessary in today’s professional world. Switching from a hard drive to a solid-state drive is not a life-altering experience, but it is probably as good as, if not better than, getting a brand new machine (i.e. a 2011 Mac Pro) with regular hard drives.

With a five-year warranty on the SSD, I am reasonably confident that this investment will bring lasting benefits and that, whenever I upgrade to a new machine, I will be able to continue to use this drive, if not as the main startup volume, at least as another fast drive for some of my applications or documents.

And that’s if I am lucky. If Lion’s Finder is in a particularly bad mood, not only will it not show the dimensions of the picture file, but it won’t even recognize its kind, and will just show “–” instead of “Portable Network Graphics image” or “Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)” or whatever the picture file’s kind should be.

I can live without the file’s kind (I know what it is), but the absence of the dimensions is rather irritating, as it forces me to retrieve that information through some other means, which usually involves multiple steps for each and every file.

It’s not like it is only a problem for brand new files that have just been created. I get it for older files as well. And it’s completely random. For any given picture file, when I select it in column view, either the Finder displays all the expected information, or it displays “–” instead in some lines, or some lines don’t even appear at all. Here’s another example:

This time the “Dimensions” line is not there at all! And then if I just press the Up cursor key once to select the previous file and then Down to reselect the same file, I get this:

This time, the “Dimensions” line is there, but it contains no information. It’s totally unpredictable.

Needless to say, reporting such a bug to Apple is a major pain, since there is no 100% reliable way to reproduce it. Then again, I hope that it’s so obvious that even Apple’s own developers will have noticed it. Presumably, it’s just not very high on their list of priorities.

What is relevant, however, is what happens to existing MobileMe users when they complete the transition to iCloud (if they choose to do so, and most of them probably will, since iCloud is free). I didn’t attempt to do this while I was testing early builds of the Mac OS X 10.7.2 update, even though I could have (I simply didn’t have any time), and I didn’t try to do it as soon as Apple officially released the 10.7.2 update and launched iCloud, on October 12th, because I figured that it would probably take a little while for things to settle down.

A week later, I had a bit of free time and decided that it was worth taking the plunge. While there are ways to use iCloud and continue to use MobileMe as two separate accounts, I decided against this option and chose to “migrate” my MobileMe account to iCloud right away.

On the whole, it went relatively smoothly, although I didn’t end up with duplicate calendars and had to manually delete the old MobileMe calendars. But as soon as I started using iCloud syncing, I noticed a pretty significant issue. I kept getting this dialog box:

And it kept happening, again, and again, and again.

Needless to say, there is no application called “SafariDAVClient” among the various applications that I use in my daily life. It is obviously a background process used by Lion for iCloud that is supposed to remain behind the scenes… except when something goes wrong. And something definitely went wrong on my machine.

The little bit of research that I did online didn’t return any specific hits for “SafariDAVClient crashes,” but I did find this thread in the Apple Support Communities about processes called SafariDAVClient and SafariSyncClient hogging CPU and RAM. And further down the thread, I found the solution: turning Safari bookmark syncing off in iCloud eliminates the problems with SafariDAVClient acting up:

Of course, it also turns off bookmark syncing, which is not particularly desirable if one of the reasons you use iCloud is precisely for syncing your bookmarks across various Apple devices.

But as far as I can tell, turning off bookmark syncing on my machine is the only way to make the SafariDAVClient crashes stop. Needless to say, I’ve sent a bug report to Apple, and they have already responded asking for more information, so I have reason to hope that they are taking this issue seriously and that it will be fixed in a future update.

While waiting for this update, I could try to delete all my Safari bookmarks and rebuild them from scratch, with syncing on, but frankly, I don’t need bookmark syncing that badly. I guess I can survive for a few more weeks or even months without it. For other people, it might be a bigger problem.

I realize that iTunes is much more than a music player these days and indeed, even I use it for a number of other things, including purchasing digital music, books, and apps from the iTunes Store and managing my various iOS devices (several older iPods and a 2010 iPad). But that’s not by choice. It’s the only way to do these things… The fact remains that my primary use of iTunes is as a music player, and here again, I have little choice, if I want to be able to use and manage my iPods the way that they are meant to be used.

But I also have a huge music library (over 80,000 tracks) that keeps growing, and I want to have access to all of it at all times. This means that I have to suffer through iTunes’s performance issues on a daily basis. Given that I am using a fairly powerful machine (a 2009 Mac Pro with 12 GB of RAM) and that most of these files are relatively small MP3 or AAC files stored on a fast internal hard drive, I really think that it’s not too much to ask that things work relatively smoothly… But iTunes has a long history of struggling with larger music collections, and really you can tell that parts of the software have not been revamped in a long time. Compared to other OS X applications, it makes poor use of the multiple cores available on my machine. (I keep an eye on things at all times with MenuMeters.)

I know that lots of what I try to do is hard-drive based and that I have to accept the limitations of hard drive performance, but when I compare iTunes to, for instance, the way that third-party applications like Amadeus Pro and Fission can breeze through large numbers of music files in various formats, making full use of available CPU power, I can just tell that iTunes is not as optimized as it should be.

So my frustation with performance issues in iTunes is nothing new. But when iTunes 10.4 came out, things took a decidedly worse turn. As I wrote at the time, all at once, I started experiencing several new issues, including much worse overall responsiveness and a very problematic behaviour when attempting to import hard-drive based music files. This made the software almost unusable for me, and for a while that’s exactly what I did: I stopped using it almost entirely. I happen to have been extremely busy with work lately, and so other activities were on the back burner for a while, including iTunes-related stuff.

But still… I am not one to give up so easily when faced with software issues. So I still tried to see if there was anything I can do to make things better. I found some workarounds for the worst problems. I reported obvious bugs to Apple. And I scoured the net to try and find out how many other people were experiencing similar issues. Keep in mind here that I might not be your typical iTunes user, because of the size of my music library. So I tend to encounter issues — especially performance issues — that might not affect other people as severely. Still, I did find some reports of similar issues, unfortunately without any easy solutions.

One thing that I did come across is a suggestion that maybe my iTunes library had somehow become corrupted, with a link to an Apple Knowledge Base article about how to “re-create” one’s iTunes library and playlists. I was very wary of attempting such a thing, partly because I was not sure that library corruption was indeed the problem (the fact that it occurred at the same time as I upgraded to iTunes 10.4 was more that a bit suspicious), partly because I definitely did not want to lose any of my existing playlists, and partly because I just knew that it would be a challenging task for iTunes, due to the size of my library.

But try it I did, albeit with some precautions: I kept copies of the crucial files on the desktop, just in case something went wrong. And then I went through the procedure recommended by Apple. And iTunes started doing its thing… For a while it looked like it would work. iTunes went slowly through all my files and the progress bar… progressed, albeit slowly. And then after about an hour or so iTunes just threw a useless error message in my face saying that the rebuilding had failed. And of course I was left with only a partially-rebuilt library and no custom playlists. I quit iTunes and replaced the crucial files with the backup I had kept on the desktop, and fortunately everything went back to the way it was.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, iTunes 10.4 still demonstrated the same range of performance issues and bugs, so I had not made any progress. At that point, I had already had spent more time on this than I really had available, so I simply gave up and went back to my work.

Things remained the same for a few weeks, and then Apple released iTunes 10.5 earlier this week, ostensibly for compatibility with iOS 5 and all the new features and products launched this week on the “Massive Wednesday” of October 12th. While the new stuff interests me somewhat, I secretly hoped that the version number change indicated that the new iTunes featured more than just compatibility updates.

And after fooling around with my music library for a couple of hours this afternoon, I am happy to report that it is indeed the case and that the most egregious issues introduced by iTunes 10.4 appear to have been fixed. In fact, things even appear to be somewhat better that in the last iTunes version before iTunes 10.3. The performance is significantly better, the importing of files works as expected again, and even third-party iTunes scripts that I use a lot seem to perform somewhat better.

Mind you, things are not perfect. There are still inexplicable and unjustified slow-downs and temporary (but long) freezes at times. However, on the whole things are much better, and iTunes is indeed usable again for me.

I should also note that, although Mac OS X 10.7.2 came out at the same time, I am certain that the improvements were due to the iTunes 10.5 update itself, because I had been using early builds of Mac OS X 10.7.2 for several weeks now as part of the AppleSeed program, and the latest build (also the official release) for several days, and things were definitely not better until I actually installed iTunes 10.5 on Wednesday.

So, back to normal at least with iTunes 10.5, and even maybe a bit better than with iTunes 10.3… I still dream of an iTunes Pro, but I also realize that, unlike the situation with other, simpler applications that are part of Mac OS X (like iCal and Address Book), this pro-level replacement application cannot come from a third-party developer (that would offer a better application while maintaining compatibility with the built-in Mac OS X stuff, like Contactizer Pro for Address Book and BusyCal for iCal), because of DRM issues, and the tight integration with iOS devices, and the fact that iTunes is used for so many things beyond music playing.

I doubt very much that Apple will ever come up with an iTunes Pro (I for one would be willing to pay for it!), but at least I know that every one’s library will keep growing in years to come and that Apple will be constantly forced to improve iTunes so that it performs better with larger numbers of files.