Betalogue

To say that I am thoroughly disappointed with Apple would be a massive understatement. I am actually angry and disgusted. After months of testing and fine-tuning (?), the Mac OS X 10.8.3 update is out, and… it fails to fix the kernel panics that have been afflicting Mac Pro users with multiple GeForce video cards driving multiple monitors ever since Mac OS X 10.8.2 came out.

In fact, I can confirm that I myself have been experiencing at least one kernel panic with each build of Mac OS X 10.8.3 that I was provided with as an AppleSeed participant. The latest build, 12D78, which is the official release, is no different, and I had a kernel panic with it yesterday morning.

I have been reporting on these kernel panics since last September. In fact, I starting sending bug reports to Apple as part of my AppleSeed involvement as soon as the kernel panics first started occurring, with early builds of the Mac OS X 10.8.2 update last summer. In late September, Apple even sent me a reply acknowledging that this was a “known issue” and closing my bug report as a “duplicate”. And there are multiple reports online of other Mac Pro users with multiple GeForce video cards who have been affected by the exact same issue ever since they updated their machine to Mac OS X 10.8.2.

What has happened since? In October, Apple released a “Mac OS X 10.8.2 Supplemental Update” that updated one of the kernel extensions involved in the crash. Unfortunately, it did not eliminate the kernel panics.

In December, I decided I had had enough of the random kernel panics and bought and installed Apple’s Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter (not cheap!) so that I could connect both my 30” cinema displays to the same video card, and I didn’t get a single kernel panic after that, although I definitely noticed a significant degradation in video performance due to the fact that I now had only half as much video RAM available for my two monitors.

Then Apple started issuing early builds of Mac OS X 10.8.3 via AppleSeed and I saw that the three kernel extensions involved (IOGraphicsFamily.kext, IONDRVSupport.kext, and IOPCIFamily.kext) were all updated, so I thought, “Finally! Apple is doing something about this…” I switched back to driving my two displays with the two separate video cards, without using the Mini DisplayPort, and have been using this setup ever since.

Overall, the frequency of the kernel panics has decreased somewhat in Mac OS X 10.8.3, at least on my machine. But they are still occurring on a regular basis. In the past few weeks, I have had several kernel panics while playing Flash video in Firefox. It is not the only type of activity that triggers a kernel panic, but it certainly seems to be a contributing factor.

Given that, as far as I can tell, Mac OS X 10.8.3 also fails to fix several other long-standing bugs in Mountain Lion, such as the fact that some applications (like Preview, or Numbers ’09) completely fail to resume after a restart, and that some others, like Safari, resume from a state that is not the very last state before the restart, these on-going kernel panics are a royal pain in the neck. There is the risk of data loss if you don’t save your work regularly, and then there is the time wasted waiting for OS X to restart and to reopen (or not, as the case may be) all that was open and running before the crash. I am fortunate enough to have an SSD drive as my startup volume, so at least the rebooting process does not take too long on my machine, but it is still a royal pain.

At the same time that Apple has been working (or not working, depending on your point of view) on the Mac OS X 10.8.3, it has been working, apparently, on an SMC update for MacBook Pro Retina users that “resolves a rare issue where users may experience slow frame rates when playing graphics-intensive games on the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display”.

I am very glad for MacBook Pro Retina owners, but to me, this seems to indicate that Apple finds it more important to improve the frame rate in video games for gamers that to fix kernel panics for users of expensive towers with expensive multiple monitors who are trying to get work done with their machine.

It is a nice feeling indeed to know that one’s needs are being addressed so vigilantly by a company that has tens of billions of cash in the bank and is said to be the largest tech company in the world, if not the largest company in any category.

Sure, there might be far fewer Mac Pro users with multiple video cards than there are MacBook Pro Retina video gamers… But still, what exactly does such an attitude say about Apple’s priorities? Video game frame rates are now more important than overall OS stability and reliability?

I am royally pissed off. Exactly how long is it going to take for Apple to finally take this kernel panic issue seriously and fix it once and for all? They don’t have the excuse of not being able to reproduce the kernel panics. They themselves said that the kernel panics were a “known issue” six months ago. I find it hard, if not impossible, to believe that the issue is so complex that a team of video card driver engineers at Apple is not able to address it after six months.

I don’t even know for sure that they have been working on it! For all I know, the fact that the kernel extensions involved were being worked on was simply a coincidence and was due to a totally unrelated issue that they were working on and fixed in the update. For all I know, the fact that the kernel panics are no longer as frequent as they were (even though they are still far too common) on my machine is just a unintentional side-effect of a fix for another bug.

I don’t know, because, since acknowledging that the problem was a known issue, Apple has not said a word about the topic. I have been sending bug reports with panic logs on a weekly basis, if not more frequently, and all they do is acknowledge receipt of them with generic form e-mails. What else can I do?

I can write about it here, at the risk of incurring the wrath of AppleSeed employees, who might feel that I am revealing too much about the testing process. But frankly, I don’t care. It’s not like my involvement in the AppleSeed program is producing any tangible results. Most of the bugs I report on remain unaddressed. And Apple’s engineers manifestly have so little interest in my “enhancement requests” that I stopped sending those long ago. All they want from AppleSeed testers is to report on bugs, and even then, it’s hard to fathom exactly what they do with those bug reports, since so many bugs remain unaddressed, months and even years after they were first reported.

At this stage, it is becoming harder and harder to believe that Apple will really come up with a true Mac Pro successor this year. And even if they do, I frankly find myself feeling far from enthusiastic about spending thousands of dollars on a new machine with powerful video cards driving multiple monitors when I have no guarantee that this will finally give me back a work environment where I don’t have to endure a 1990s-like level of instability and unreliability. Does Apple really deserve more of my hard-earned cash at this point in time? It’s more than debatable, and from the feedback I have received since I first started reporting on this issue, I am not the only one feeling this way.

The really depressing part, of course, is that the alternative (Windows? Linux?) is probably even worse. And that might be part of the problem. Apple knows that it has a “captive audience” of professionals who would find it very hard indeed to abandon the platform completely. But still. This is no way of treating some of your most loyal customers, who have spent very large amounts of money on your products over the years.

Macworld has a new column by Dan Moren and Lex Friedman about Apple’s use of “silent email filtering” for iCloud accounts. As John Siracusa notes, this is nothing new. Apple’s silent mail filtering “has been going on since the .Mac days”. But I suppose people need to be reminded from time to time.

As a long-time .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud user, I distinctly remember the time the controversy first erupted. I had switched from my local provider’s e-mail account to my @mac.com as my main e-mail account, and had to switch again when I realized that I couldn’t count on Apple to be transparent about the whole process and let me control whether the e-mail I was receiving was undesirable or not. (Apple’s attitude then is not much different from its attitude today, and not much different from its attitude in other areas as well. It can be summed up as “we know what’s best for you, and we don’t feel you should have any say in it”.)

My solution at the time (back in the 1990s) was to do what I had been thinking about for a while, i.e. to purchase my own domain name and my own web and e-mail hosting with a provider that would not have any non-optional, opaque server-side filtering. That’s what I did, and I have been using my own domain with my own e-mail account(s) ever since.

Unfortunately, it’s not a panacea.

Unless you are willing to spend quite a bit of money on your hosting services, you normally get shared hosting, which means that your domain, with its web site and e-mail accounts, is hosted on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other domains. It’s all transparent for you, but it means that your domain’s IP address is the same as these other domains’ IP address.

And, as far as I can tell, there are a number of spam-fighting systems on the Internet that rely on continually-updated blacklists that block domains based not on their domain name, but on their domain’s IP address. This means that, if your domain happens to be hosted on a server that also hosts a domain that is guilty of spamming, this might cause the entire server and all the domains it hosts — including yours — to be flagged as suspicious by some systems.

Even though my current provider is, as far as I can tell, a reputable one, and I have been quite satisfied with the reliability and affordability of the service, this particular problem has happened to me on more than one occasion over the years. Typically, it does not cause my domain and its e-mail accounts to be flagged as spam and blocked by all e-mail servers worldwide, but it just takes one slightly overzealous server somewhere, relying on a blacklist that might not be updated as regularly or as reliably as other blacklists, to cause my e-mail to become undeliverable for those of my recipients that rely on that particular server.

When this happens, the e-mails don’t necessarily bounce back to you. Sometimes they simply disappear in the ether, with no indication that they were not delivered. And even if they bounce back to you, it might take several days for this to happen, which can be quite problematic for time-sensitive correspondence.

It’s actually happening to me right now. None of the e-mails that I have been sending from my @latext.com domain to a friend in France using the 9online.fr Internet access provider for the past several weeks have reached him, and they have not bounced back to me either. They are simply gone without a trace.

As far as I can tell, he’s the only recipient who’s been having this problem lately, so I can only assume it’s because 9online.fr has an overzealous spam filter that has someone flagged my domain as a source of spam. But what can either of us do about it? Not much. I suggested that he try and call them to discuss the issue, but with today’s tech support services being the way they are, we all know how time-consuming such a process can be, with no guarantee of any results. It’s just easier, for now, for me to use a different e-mail account to correspond with him, and hope that the problem will somehow disappear by itself over time.

Last month, I had a similar problem with my employer (I work from home), however, and that was much more problematic. In that case, the e-mails were bouncing back, but it still took us a few days to notice that there was a problem, and still a few more days to get my employer’s tech people to acknowledge the problem and eventually fix it.

During that time, no other correspondents had any problem receiving my e-mails. It only affected that one particular server, but it was the main server for my employer. (In fact, my employer also uses another server with a different domain, and this one was not affected at all, so I had no problems corresponding with some of my colleagues.)

When, like me, you work from home, with sometimes tight deadlines, it can be quite problematic to have such a issue happen to you all of a sudden, out of the blue, without warning, and with symptoms that only become visible after a few days.

But I am not sure that there is much that I can do about it. I could explore “industrial-strength e-mail” options with a dedicated server, but such options are probably priced way out of my range.

I guess the bottom line here is that, even if you switch away from a service such as Apple’s iCloud and its silent mail filtering and purchase your own domain with your own e-mail hosting, that does not mean that your e-mail life will be trouble-free. If my own experience is any indication, you will still have to deal with overzealous spam filters and occasional collateral blacklisting. This makes it hard to rely entirely on e-mail as your primary form of communication, no matter how convenient and useful it is in other respects.

That is why I was advocating for some kind of universal automatic mechanism for acknowledging receipt of e-mails several years ago, and my views haven’t really changed. Unlike direct, live communication over the phone, e-mail might never be 100% reliable (at least in terms of knowing for sure that your recipient has received your message), and so we need some kind of backup system to bring it closer to that elusive goal.

Long-time Betalogue readers know that I could write about how crappy Microsoft Word is all day long. However, there is only so much you can say before the sheer inanity of the thing makes you want to do unspeakable things to a Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer voodoo doll. At that stage, I guess you just have to let it go and try to write about how superior Pages ’09 is instead (even though it is, of course, far from perfect).

Still, from time to time, because the reality of your work still forces you to use Word 2011, you encounter a behaviour that is so absurd and so stupid that you cannot help but write a short thing about it:

Note the position of the insertion point. Note the formatting of the two paragraphs. Note the fact that hidden characters are visible and therefore what you see here is supposedly all there is to see. And then press Delete:

Where the hell does this change in formatting come from?

Oh, I am sure that, if pressed (which they never seem to be), Microsoft’s engineers could come up with an explanation for this. But it would and could never be a justification for such a stupid, infuriating behaviour.

For the record, I tried every possible combinations of cursor position + flavour of delete that I could think of (insertion point at end of first paragraph, forward delete instead of regular delete). Nothing helped. I ended up having to change the font back to Times New Roman 11 pt manually.

One way that people deal with this kind of stupidity in computers is that they describe the computer or the software as having “a mind of its own”. As if. The only “mind” that is behind such crap is the mind of marketing executives who are constantly trying to find new ways to milk a captive clientele of its hard-earned cash.

I for one cannot wait until the day Microsoft in its entirety becomes entirely irrelevant. We’re not quite there yet, but surely it will happen in my lifetime, in my working life. Surely?

Last week, I wrote about the problem with shortened URLs in Safari’s History feature. A reader wrote to express his agreement and also mention similar issues he was experiencing with unresolved URLs from Google searches crowding his Safari history instead of the actual resolved URLs.

I did notice, a couple of years ago, that, all of a sudden, Google switched to a system where every “live” link in its search results was actually a link to an internal Google URL that would eventually get resolved into the actual URL of the destination. I noticed this, because I had developed a habit of right-clicking on Google search results to copy of the URL of the destination, so that I could then paste it in the document that I was working on.

Of course, Google’s new mechanism meant that I could no longer do that and so I had to develop a new skill and learn to select and copy the green URL underneath the search result, which has always been the URL of the actual destination, but has never been a live link. It was a bit of a pain, of course, because it’s not as easy to select this green URL as it is to right-click on the link and then choose “Copy Link”, but I didn’t have much choice…

That said, I had never noticed that this “improvement” implemented by Google (probably for internal clickage counting or something like that) was interfering with Safari’s History feature.

So after I got the e-mail from this Betalogue reader, I went back to check. Much to my surprise, I noticed that not only Google was not cluttering my Safari history with unreadable URLs, but even the afore-mentioned “improvement” appeared to be gone. Indeed, right now, when I do a search in Google and then right-click on a search result and use “Copy Link”, the link that gets copied is the actual URL of the destination.

So we seem to be back to the situation of a few years back, which, to me, is very much a good thing.

I tried to do some research on the issue, but it’s pretty hard to identify the right combination of keywords to find information about this practice introduced by Google a few years back and now seemingly eliminated again. People who follow the technical aspects of Google’s activities probably know where to look, but I am afraid I am just a regular Google user myself and I don’t quite have the time to delve into developers.google.com.

I am also not entirely certain that the experience that I see on my machine with my current system is exactly the same as the one that other Google users get. There’s quite a bit that goes on behind the scenes when one uses Google (which is what makes some people perceive it as a rather more creepy company than its “Don’t be evil” motto would suggest), and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the experience of other people, even other Mac OS X / Safari users, does not match mine exactly. Indeed, I also wouldn’t be surprised if Google changes these behaviours again in the future.

But for now at least, it looks to me like we can once again copy links directly on Google search results pages without having to select the green URLs.

Alright, if you are in Safari, go to this item posted by someone on Twitter (chosen randomly), and then click on the link provided in the tweet (pic.twitter.com/ozBCyAmJ).

This should normally take you to a new window with the picture in question and the Safari window’s title bar and address bar should look like this:

Now, go to Safari’s history and look at how the last visited page (i.e. the page with the picture) there:

Incredibly useful, isn’t it? And it’s the same for each and every URL-shortened link that you open from within Twitter in Safari. Imagine opening ten such links in a row, and then looking at the corresponding history. How on earth are you supposed to figure out what URL corresponds to what web page?

This is not a new problem. Ted Landau wrote about it more than a year ago for Macworld. It’s still there, and there is no sign of Apple caring enough about the problem to actually fix it. It’s not a minor bug that only affects a small fraction of Mac users. It affects everyone with a Mac who clicks on Twitter links and then might want to use Safari’s history to go back to a page visited this way.

In my case, with kernel panics still unfortunately a regular occurrence for us with Mac Pros running multiple video cards and Safari’s failure to resume properly after quitting, I find myself having to use Safari’s history fairly regularly to bring back pages that I had loaded by clicking on links in Twitter but hadn’t yet had time to read properly.

The history feature is completely useless for those links. I have to reload all “(no title)” links manually one by one just to see which ones might be to pages that I hadn’t yet finished reading. It’s quite frustrating. And it’s an unforgivable flaw in Mountain Lion’s Safari.

UPDATE: Several readers have written to alert me of the existence of the Detox Safari extension. I didn’t mention it myself, because it was mentioned in the Ted Landau article referenced above. I agree with Ted’s take on it. It helps, but it’s not a panacea. It’s still unforgivable that, after all this time, Apple has done nothing to improve the situation.

Many readers probably remember the harrowing tale of the hacking of the Apple ID account of Wired’s Mat Honan from August 2012.

While my own experience qualifies as a tiny blip compared to his situation, I would still like to share it, because I cannot help but worry about it, especially since I myself was a victim of a hacker back in 2008. (The hacking was thankfully limited to this blog.)

Like many Mac users, I have an Apple ID account, which is a direct descendant of my MobileMe account, itself a descendant of my .Mac account. It is an @mac.com address, and it is also my account for iTunes purchases, and my account for Apple Store purchases, and my account for Mac App Store purchases, and my account for various other Apple-related memberships.

I am also a 1Password user and I treat my passwords seriously. I find it quite difficult to use a very complex password for my Apple ID/iCloud account, because Apple keeps asking for my password again and again, not just on my Mac, where I can easily copy it from within 1Password if needed, but also on my iOS devices, where things are far less straightforward.

But I try to keep my password reasonably complex, and I have changed it a few times over the years — probably not as often as I should have, but…

My current situation is the following. Six days ago, out of the blue, I received an automated e-mail from appleid@id.apple.com, with the subject line “Redefenir sua senha ou desbloquear seu Apple ID.” According to Google Translate, this is Portuguese for “Reset your password or unlock your Apple ID.” And the contents of the e-mail was of the usual variety, starting with “Prezado(a) Pierre Igot” (“Dear Pierre Igot” in Portuguese) and inviting me (still in Portuguese) to “click the link below if you want to reset your password or unlock your Apple ID. This link will expire in three hours after sending this message.”

The e-mail itself was clearly legitimate, with headers indicating its provenance and links to the Apple web site. And it’s not exactly the very first time I have received an e-mail from Apple asking me to confirm that I wanted to reset my password. But why was it in Portuguese? I have only ever used my Apple ID account in English, so it makes no sense for Apple to send me a communication about it in Portuguese.

Still, I didn’t worry too much. I assumed that maybe there was a flaw in Apple’s servers that caused them to send such correspondence in the language used at the time of browsing by the person (or robot) requesting a password reset. I just ignored the message (but kept it on file).

Then four days later I received another automated e-mail from the same legitimate Apple account, this time with a subject line in English saying “Please verify the contact email address for your Apple ID.” The really worrying part this time, however, was that the body of the message itself started with “Dear Carlos. De. Pedro” and not “Dear Pierre Igot” as expected. The rest of the e-mail looked normal and asked me to confirm my @icloud.com address as “the contact email address for [my] Apple ID”.

I can imagine a flaw in Apple’s servers causing them to accidentally use the wrong language when sending out the automated e-mail for a password request. But a flaw causing them to use the wrong first name and last name for the account holder? That’s something else…

My first reflex was to:

1. go to appleid.apple.com, log in, check all my account settings (including the security questions) and change my password to something entirely new
2. check my current credit card statement (there was nothing suspicious there, but things can take a few days to show up) and remove my credit card information from the Apple ID account (I was not planning on making any purchases in the following days)

I managed to do both, although now I cannot remember how I found the credit card information, since it’s far from obvious on the Apple ID web site in what section the credit card information is actually stored. (At the iTunes Store in iTunes, for my payment information, it says “No card on file”, so it seems that my credit card information is indeed gone.)

Then I decided to try and contact Apple about this. I didn’t really want to spend tons of time on the phone, so I tried the on-line facility to “contact Apple Support”, at www.apple.com/ca/support/contact/. It took me to the “Express Lane” web site and I found a section for “Apple ID” under “More Products & Services”. Under “Other Apple ID Topics”, I found an option labeled “Apple ID account security”, so I selected that option, and it took me to a page with a Knowledge Base note about “Security and your Apple ID”, which was of course useless to me, and then, under “More Options”, “Talk to Apple Support Now”, “Schedule a Call” and “Call Apple Support Later”. (I cannot give you direct links here, because it’s all part of a web app.)

But when I clicked on “Talk to Apple Support Now”, the first thing that the system said was: “Your serial number is required for this solution.” And it asked for a serial number!

How on earth can I give a serial number for an Apple ID-related issue? It makes no sense. I only have serial numbers for my devices, none of which is under warranty any longer.

If Apple really takes Apple ID security issues seriously, as it claims, why does it ask for a serial number for a hardware product at this stage? I could “cheat” and enter the serial number for my out-of-warranty Mac Pro, but what good would that do me? It would take me to a page asking me either to choose a $59 + tax per-incident support option or to “request an exception”, even though neither of the two reasons given as options for requesting an exception is applicable.

At this stage, I gave up. But as a last-ditch attempt, I went to the “Product Security” section of Apple Support at www.apple.com/ca/support/security/ and used the e-mail address that appears on the very first line:

To report security issues that affect Apple products, please contact: product-security@apple.com

I composed and sent an e-mail describing what had happened and telling them what I had done, and asking for further advice.

I did not have much hope for this. I did get an automated reply right away with a follow-up number, but within 24 hours, I also got this reply:

Hello Pierre,

Thank you for contacting us. Apple takes all reports of potential security issues very seriously.

You took a reasonable step by resetting your Apple ID password. You may also wish to confirm your account details are correct by logging into https://appleid.apple.com. If your account details are correct, we recommend deleting the message you referenced.

Best regards,
Jeffrey
Apple Product Security

I appreciate the fact that they actually replied to my request, but basically, if I understand correctly, they are telling me to ignore the message(s). Their answer addresses neither the fact that the first automated e-mail was sent in Portuguese nor the fact that the second automated e-mail had a different name associated with my Apple ID.

What am I supposed to think here? I don’t find the situation particularly reassuring. (I’ve replied and told them as much.) It really does not help one feel that Apple is taking security issues seriously when (1) the procedure to submit queries/concerns about Apple ID security issues is far from obvious and (2) the reply you get does not address the main concerns you have about a particular issue.

If nothing else happens in the next little while, I will eventually buy something else and enter my credit card information again, but I simply do not like this way of not addressing perfectly valid concerns about identity theft and Apple ID security.

Sometimes I really do wonder how much Apple’s engineers still care about small details. OS X still has a decent level of polish, but there are also obvious, blatant flaws that should never have slipped through in the first place and that Apple seems to have no interest in fixing. Here’s a perfect little example:

As the window on the right shows quite clearly, the Contacts application window is currently in the background. (The foreground window is a Finder window.)

It’s already bad enough that the one-of-a-kind window “chrome” used in Contacts looks exactly the same in the background as it does in the foreground (except for the shallower drop shadow). But what about the selection highlighting colour in the email field that I was in the process of editing when I switched Contacts to the background?

The universally standard behaviour for the selection highlighting colour in OS X is that, when the window that contains it switches from the foreground to the background, it should change from the default selection highlighting colour (defined in System Preferences, under “General”; in this case sky blue) to gray.

And yet, as this screenshot demonstrates quite clearly, even with Contacts is in the background, the selection highlighting remains in the foreground selection colour, which is a very misleading behaviour because, if you are not paying attention to other clues in the visual environment, you might think that you are still in Contacts, editing this field, and start typing, and then nothing will happen in Contacts and instead your typing will be registered and processed in your current foreground application.

Is this really so unimportant that Apple’s engineers can get away with ignoring the convention? I don’t think so. I find it highlight misleading myself. It might be because I have two large 30” monitors and often do a lot of things in different applications at the same time, but I can also easily imagine an inexperienced user trying to type something here and hearing system beeps and not understanding what’s going on at all.

This is just an example. There are other similar issues, in Contacts and in other OS X applications made by Apple, that suggest that attention to detail in OS X software development is becoming something of a dying art. And it’s rather sad.

There are two things in Word 2011 (admittedly, among numerous other ones) that are a constant source of irritation for me and that are so basic that it’s quite clear that Microsoft’s engineers have absolutely no clue about how people use their software in the real world, so much so that there is no hope of them ever fixing such problems.

Consider the following situation:

All I’ve done is that I’ve double-clicked on the first word in this paragraph to select it. And already the first problem appears: Word has included in the word selection the trailing space after the word. This is simply wrong. A double-click on a word means that you want to select that word, and that word only. There is no reason for the user to want to select the trailing space as well. Maybe once upon a time, this was useful because word processors were not smart enough to automatically delete the extra space if the user opted to delete the selected word. But today’s word processors, like Pages ’09 and indeed Word 2011 itself (!), are smart enough to delete superfluous spaces automatically, and so the automatic selection of the trailing space makes no sense whatsoever.

This trailing space is problematic because I often have to copy words (or phrases) and paste them into a search engine or another similar tool, and that tool is not necessarily “smart” enough to know that it is supposed to ignore the trailing space.

Yes, with smart clipboard features, most of the time Word automatically removes the extra space when the word copied to the clipboard with the trailing space gets pasted elsewhere (most of the time, but not always, depending on the presence of things like non-breaking spaces, which are not standard spaces, and are used quite often in French typography, for example). But what if you switch to another application with the copied word (and trailing space) in the clipboard? That other application won’t necessarily be smart enough to know that this trailing space is supposed to be ignored. And since Word is the only OS X application with this non-standard behaviour, inevitably there are problems with this extra space in other applications. But clearly Microsoft has no intention of ever fixing this issue.

The other problem only transpires once I copy the selection in the picture above, and then switch to another application and paste it. In other applications, the result is this:

As you can see from the position of the insertion point, and as predicted above, OS X has pasted the copied word with the trailing space, even though it’s completely undesirable in this context (the Spotlight search tool in LaunchBar, but it’s just one example among many).

But even worse, OS X has also pasted a bullet and a tab character before the copied word! This is completely idiotic. It makes absolutely no sense to treat the automatic bullet formatting, which applies to the entire paragraph, as if it applied to the first word of the paragraph that was selected and copied by itself. And Word’s engineers clearly know this, because if you copy the selected word above and paste it in another Word document, Word does not include the bullet formatting with it. It’s only when you paste the contents of the clipboard in another application that, for some reason, Word includes the bullet formatting along with the word, in the form of this bullet + tab combination.

This is quite clearly because, when you copy something in Word, even a single word by itself, Word 2011’s handling of the clipboard mechanism is such that multiple versions of the selection are included in the clipboard, included a “plain text” version that includes the bullet and the tab, which never gets used by Word itself, but which somehow someone at Microsoft believes is useful to have when pasting the contents of the clipboard in another application that will only accept the plain-text alternative.

It drives me nuts, because, again, I encounter the problem (along with the trailing space) whenever I copy a word that’s at the beginning of a formatted paragraph and paste it in another application, like a search tool or a database tool. And the problem does not just affect the automatic bullet formatting. It also affects the first word of paragraphs of text formatted with automatic numbering. When copying such a word in Word, the plain-text alternative includes the plain-text version of the automatic number (i.e. the actual alphanumeric characters, along with the punctuation) as well as the tab character — and again, the extra characters are pasted along with the word in other applications. And it also affects any selection that includes the first word, so I also get the extra stuff if I select and copy, say, the first five words of the paragraph.

I constantly find myself having to delete this extra cruft that Word automatically adds to the plain-text alternative in the clipboard before I can submit my search request in the other applications that I use. Or I submit the search request before I notice the problem and of course, the search results are completely irrelevant, because my search tool or database does not know how to handle a search string that includes a bullet or a number before the key word(s)!

Today, I decided I was really tired of this, and so I came up with this simple Keyboard Maestro macro:

It highjacks Word 2011’s own “Copy” command and instead, does the following:

1. It tests the clipboard’s contents to see if it contains the bullet + character sequence. (Fortunately, KM applies this test to the plain-text alternative, so it finds it there.)
2. If so, it runs a small BBEdit text factory that remove it.
3. And then it applies the “Trim Whitespace” clipboard filter that’s included in Keyboard Maestro, which removes the trailing space at the end.

It is, at this point, a far-from-ideal solution. First of all, the best test I can come up with in KM is a test to find the bullet + tab sequence anywhere in the clipboard. As far as I can tell, there is no way in KM to test to see if this sequence appears at the beginning of the clipboard only, and also to test whether the clipboard contains entire paragraphs of text, where removing the bullets might not be the preferred scenario.

Then, it fails to test for the presence of an automatic number converted into plain text, followed by a tab. This, again, would require a much more refined test than what KM’s own control flow features allow. Fortunately, the bullet is the most common manifestation of this problem that I encounter, so the macro still helps in the majority of cases. But ideally I’d like to have a macro that tests for the presence of any automatic list formatting converted into plain text by Word behind the scenes in the plain-text alternative of the clipboard’s contents.

As well, the BBEdit text factory I designed is a simple search/replace function that replaces all occurrrences of the bullet + tab combination anywhere in the clipboard with nothing. Ideally, I’d just want to replace the first occurrence with nothing, or trim the first two characters of the clipboard, but BBEdit’s options are too limited to enable me to do this. (It should also be noted that I could ditch the test altogether and apply the replace-all operation in all cases, but I am still hoping to have a more effective detection test some day and be able to apply the transformation only if the bullet + tab appears at the very beginning of the string of copied text.)

Finally, the “Trim Whitespace” clipboard filter is probably too agressive and removes whitespace that I might not want to remove in some situations.

I suspect that, if I took the time, I might be able to come up with AppleScript-based solutions for some or all of these issues with my macro. But I am afraid I just don’t have the time to explore things further at this point. So this macro will have to do, with its own flaws and limitations. I’d much rather have a macro that works properly for the most common scenario and only requires further adjustements in less common ones, than have to continue to live with a situation where Word forces me to make manual adjustments each and every time I encounter the most common scenario.

If you too are constantly frustrated by Microsoft Word’s multiple annoyances and flaws, I urge you to explore the use of a third-party tool such as Keyboard Maestro to remedy or at least alleviate the most common issues you have with the software. (Don’t waste your time trying to fix Word using its own customization features. You’ll ultimately be punished for it, because the carelessness of Microsoft’s developers extends to these customization features as well, and there is also absolutely no guarantee that your fixes will remain supported. Remember what happened with VBA in Word 2008.)

Sometimes I really feel as if I am somehow cursed. The reality is that I am just too reliant on modern technology, of course, but so is almost everyone else. And the thought that most people have to go through situations like the one I went through yesterday morning is, strangely enough, not particularly comforting.

What happened is that we had a power outage during the night, probably due to high winds. The first sign was of course the alarm clock blinking, with the wrong time, when we woke up. Power outages are unfortunately a fact of life especially in rural Nova Scotia, although I must admit that, since our move to Annapolis Royal last April, we’ve had very few of them.

I didn’t think much of it until I went to the bathroom and walked past our Time Capsule, which is located in a corner of the corridor. (I find it too annoyingly noisy when it comes on to keep it in my office.) I saw that the normally solid-green light was amber and flashing. “Oh well,” I thought, “yet another network-related glitch after a power outage.” If only…

Of course, I soon discovered that our entire home network was down. Power-cycling didn’t help, so it was time for more advanced troubleshooting. I was soon able to narrow the problem down to the DSL modem itself. Its own power indicator was flashing red instead of solid green. The “DSL” indicator was solid green, but the “Internet” indicator was off.

I started fearing the worst. I called the phone company. To their credit, I didn’t have to wait long and the tech support representative was a very friendly lady. But she soon had to give me the very bad news that the power outage had somehow fried the modem and that they were going to have to send me a new one.

Of course, everything with phone companies is now centralized and there was no way that I could just go to a local office and pick one up. I had to wait for it to arrive in the mail. And it would take… “two to five business days”. Right in the middle of the holiday season, this very clearly meant that I might not receive it until the new year!

And so I was facing the prospect of a holiday season with no Internet access. Delightful!

Fortunately, I immediately thought of my sister-in-law’s house. They also have Internet access with the same company, and they are away at this time of year. I asked if I might be able to borrow their modem and use it in my house. The tech support representative didn’t see why not, although I did warn her that it was probably a different, much older modem. She said that I had nothing to lose by trying, and so I went to retrieve it. It turned out that they had two modems (for two different phone lines) and the second one was a more recent model, albeit still a different one from mine (which is also a wireless router, although I only use it as a modem and have my AirPort Extreme connected to it).

After much plugging and unplugging and waiting patiently (not!) for devices to recognize their environment and adjust to it, I was eventually able to make this modem work with my own phone line and achieve the same regular speeds as with my own modem. Phew!

And then I had a kernel panic. ARGH. It had been more than two weeks since the last one. (This particular problem is completely unpredictable.) When exactly is Apple finally going to take these problems with NVIDIA video cards and kernel panics in Mountain Lion 10.8.2 seriously? As far as I can tell from on-line research and from the feedback I have received via my blog and my Twitter account, quite a few people are affected, including people with Mac Pro machines that have more than one video card, but also MacBook Pro owners.

Of course, as soon as I restarted, I also had to deal with the fact that Mountain Lion’s Safari fails to resume properly after a restart, and also that, because of the experimenting I had had to do with the replacement modem by accessing its settings via the web, Safari had actually completely lost my last session with probably about 30 different web pages loaded in tabs and windows. Grrr.

And then I had another kernel panic.

That’s right, two in less than an hour, after none for two weeks. It looked like this power outage was really trying to completely ruin my holidays!

I finally gave up and unpacked the Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter that I bought last month in anticipation of such a situation. It’s a pricey device (over $100), but it enables me to connect both my 30” monitors to the same GeForce GT 120 video card and not use the second one. My hope is that this will somehow avoid the kernel panics altogether, since they only seem to affect Mac Pro owners with multiple video cards. I haven’t taken the unused video card out of the Mac Pro yet, but I will if I still get another kernel panic after all this.

For additional safety, I also went to the hardware store and bought a surge protector for the DSL modem in the basement. I don’t know if the modem failure was triggered by a power surge when the power came back on (no other equipment in the house was affected), but I’d rather not take any chances.

Then this morning I read Ted Landau’s recent column at Macworld, titled “Bugs & Fixes: Turning power off turns trouble on”. And I found more reasons to worry! Clearly the simple fact of turning stuff off and back on can bring about unwanted problems, and surge protectors themselves can add to the frustration.

Can I have a glitch-free holiday season now, please, Santa?

The one thing I hate the most about cloud-based computing is the sense that I have lost control, that the computer does things on my behalf with very little input or feedback, and that things can fairly easily go wrong. And so I tend to avoid it like the plague.

That said, as a tech support guy, I am also expected to help other people out with their use of cloud-based features. So I do feel a need to try and experiment a bit, although I always do it with things that are not of a critical nature.

A few weeks ago, I experimented with creating a couple of Pages documents in the cloud, with my (first-generation) iPad. They were just plain documents that I created (as far as I can remember) using the default “Blank Document” template, and in which I just typed a few lines of plain text, with no formatting, no images, no layout whatsoever.

It appeared that things went smoothly. The documents were saved with the names I gave them, and the next time I went to my computer, brought up the “Open” dialog box in Pages ’09 and switched to iCloud, the two documents were there and I was able to open them and view them on my Mac.

Then yesterday I had a kernel panic (sigh) and after the computer restarted, I got a weird dialog asking for my iCloud password (I’m not even sure which application the dialog belonged to), so I went to System Preferences to check the status of my iCloud account. I was signed on with the various features checked, so I clicked on the “Manage…” button to see what was going on in more detail. And, among other things, I saw this:

According to this information, each of the two documents that I had created on my iPad weighed a whopping 5.2 megabytes!

That didn’t quite make sense, so I had to double-check and went to icloud.com to view the documents there. The site told me the same thing, i.e. that each document was over 5 MB. I tried downloading one of them from the web, and checked the result in my “Downloads” folder: It too was over 5 MB.

I opened the document package to see what was inside and here’s what I saw:

Needless to say, I am not the one who put any of these “storyboard_paper” files in there. It looked like the document was based on some kind of template with various background image patterns stored in it, even though none of the patterns actually appeared in my document.

I had to try again from scratch and so I went to my iPad, and created a new document in Pages. I made sure I selected the “Blank” document template, which was not hard to do, since all the other ones had all kinds of stuff in them by default. There is simply no way that I accidentally selected anything other than this “Blank” template when I initially created these two documents a few weeks ago.

I gave my new test document a name (“Test”). And then I went back to icloud.com and tried to download it. And I got this:

See what I mean about having a feeling of not being in control? I had just created the document two minutes ago, and now iCloud was telling me that I had to choose between this version and an older version from… April 2012? What the hell?

Now, maybe I did create a Pages document with the name “Test” on my iPad six months ago, as part of another testing procedure. It’s possible. But there is no other document called “Test” in the iCloud storage for my Pages document! So where on earth is iCloud seeing this other version that is somehow in conflict with the one I just created?

It just mind-numbingly impenetrable.

I ended up downloading the “newer” Pages document and, sure enough, that one only weighed 99 KB, so I guess whatever caused my original documents from a few weeks ago to weigh 5 MB each is gone. But still… I just don’t see how Apple expects us to trust a service like iCloud with behaviours such as those. In many ways, to me cloud-based computing feels like an extension of the feeling that most computer users have with their machines, especially on the PC side of things, i.e. a feeling that the user is not in control, that “the machine” does incomprehensible things and that there is no point in trying to figure them out.

As an experienced Mac user, I of course know better and my experience as a troubleshooter means that, in most situation, I am able to come up with an explanation, even if it boils down to “a bug or flaw in the software” (most of the time) or “a glitch” (far too often). But with cloud-based computing I too am starting to feel like we have entered a realm of endless glitches and bugs, with incomprehensible behaviours that there is no point in trying to figure out. Of course, with anything that is network-based, there is the added dimension of unreliability and server unpredictability, which means that in many cases one encounters behaviours that one cannot even reproduce five minutes later. Which makes the whole situation even more unfathomable.

I suspect that, in many cases, cloud-related glitches are just going to become a part of life and that even experienced troubleshooters such as myself will increasingly be forced to endure them along with everyone else, with a shrug of the shoulders as the only possible response when faced with things that don’t make sense and do not work as expected.

I cannot say that this paints a future that is very attractive to me.

Here is a telling example of everything that is wrong, in my opinion, with the current state of the music industry.

Yesterday, I was listening to an Etta James mixtape from 2009. The mixtape included one song that I particularly liked, titled “Quick Reaction & Satisfaction”. So I decided to try and find more about this song and where it came from.

I quickly found the Wikipedia page about the album Etta James Sings Funk, from 1970, which indicated that, unfortunately, the “album was released as a 12-inch LP record and has not been reissued on compact disc in its entirety although five tracks were included as additional cuts on the reissue by Kent of Etta James’s Losers Weepers album in 2011”.

I found the Losers Weepers album at Amazon.ca, but it was a bit expensive and I wanted to try and hear samples of the other tracks on the Etta James Sings Funk, so I went to the iTunes Store (for Canada) and searched for “Etta James”. And I got this:

Since I was looking for an album, I switched to the Albums results. And I got this:

Try it yourself. You get a full list of albums, in an undetermined order. You get no total count of search results. You get to scroll up and down and drown in a sea of album covers. There is no way to sort the results by album title, by release date, etc. How do you find a specific album in such a list of results? As far as I can tell, Apple expects you either to carefully scan the entire list or to already know the covert art of the album and try and locate it visually in the list. I didn’t expect (unfortunately) to be able to find the Etta James Sings Funk album. But I expected to find the reissued Losers Weepers album, and so I scrolled up and down trying to find it, to no avail.

This is downright ridiculous. How on earth does Apple get away with providing no options for sorting search results? Are the record labels aware of this? Don’t they care that it unnecessarily makes things more difficult for people to purchase?

Since I couldn’t find the Losers Weepers album, I tried to view the complete list of songs in the search results, so that I could at least compare it to the track list for the original Etta James Sings Funk album and see if individual songs were available:

Again, things are sorted in some unfathomable order and again, as far as I can tell, there is no way to change the sort order, i.e. to sort songs alphabetically!

What the hell? I just couldn’t believe that the situation was so bad, so I went on an on-line search and quickly determined that, indeed, apparently, the absence of sorting options for search results is part of the “new and improved” store in iTunes 11. And apparently, the only way to work around these limitations is to start all over again, by going to the store home page, switching to “Column Browser” view, and browsing by medium, then genre, then artist:

This assumes that you know that Etta James is classified under “Blues” or “R&B/Soul”, and then you get a full list of all the multiple copies of each track and you are supposed to sort through all this to find what you actually want — with all the associated iTunes sluggishness too: it takes 20 seconds to get the full list of genres, and more than 20 seconds to get the full list of songs! (All that to find that, out of the 11 tracks from the Etta James Sings Funk album, a grand total of two are available through the iTunes Store.)

Again, I ask: How does Apple get away with such an abysmal experience? I realize that, in all likelihood, most of the store’s revenue is derived from sales of the latest pop sensations and that the customer experience is probably OK for that. But still… to me this situation epitomizes the sad state of the music industry. It is, apparently, the best that they can offer. (iTunes is the top music retailer.)

There is probably not enough of a market for CD re-releases of older albums such as Etta James Sings Funk, but isn’t it a prime example of what a virtual store such as the iTunes Store could offer? Instead, we get compilation after compilation of the same most well-known tracks, that are all available in multiple, identical copies. And even recent re-releases, like the Losers Weepers album, are not available, probably because legal/distribution issues. (It looks like it was a European reissue, but it’s not available at the UK iTunes Store either.)

The end result is that I probably won’t buy anything at all. I am interested in this Etta James Sings Funk album, but only two of the tracks are available via the iTunes Store. And it was so painful just to get there!

I still prefer to buy most of my music on CD, whenever I can, and this latest experience isn’t about to make me change my mind. On the contrary, it just confirms my worst fears about the music industry, which is that, these days, it really does not care one bit about music lovers (if it ever did).

Apple has just released an update for iTunes 11 (iTunes 11.0.1) and I am glad to report that it appears to include improvements for two of the issues I mentioned last week.

First of all, the View › Column Browser submenu is no longer disabled when the sidebar is visible.

And then the egregiously bad performance issue when editing tags that I mentioned last Saturday appears to have been addressed to a certain degree. iTunes still re-saves the entire “iTunes Library.xml” and “iTunes Library.itl” files each and every time you make a change to a tag, but the process has become more of a background process and does not interfere with user interactions with the software as much as it did in iTunes 11.0.0.

I still worry about the number of times that iTunes saves and re-saves such large files. It strikes me as a very inefficient way of doing things. (These files are not “packages” consisting of small, individual files that are just hidden from view. They are actual single files and a change in their modified date means that they are being entirely rewritten to disk each and every time.)

And the saving process is not fully seamless and still triggers the appearance of the Spinning Beach Ball of Death on a regular basis. It just that it does not occur each and every time you edit a tag and jump from track to track using the Track Information dialog box or in the song list. So we are basically back to the performance levels of iTunes prior to the upgrade to version 11, with possibly some small improvements in some areas (like AppleScript script execution). iTunes is still painful to use with a large library of tens of thousands of music files, but it’s not longer outrageously painful.

The quick release of this update is appreciable (and appreciated), although one does wonder how such issues did not get noticed before the release of iTunes 11.0.0. Just like I cannot help but wonder how much effort Apple’s engineers put into testing their software on machines running multiple monitors as an extended desktop, I cannot help but wonder how much effort they put into testing iTunes with large libraries.

And I really hope that they will come up with some more elegant and less resource-intensive mechanism for saving the library files soon.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s definitely something that is not right with Safari’s Resume feature in Mountain Lion on my machine.

Well-behaved OS X applications follow the “Close windows when quitting an application” setting in System Preferences › General: If the option is not checked, when I re-open those well-behaved applications, the documents and windows that were left open before the application was quit are automatically restored.

Among these well-behaved OS X applications are Apple’s own applications, including TextEdit, Preview, the iWork suite, and of course Safari. Normally, when I quit and relaunch Safari, it automatically restores all the windows and tabs that were left open at quitting time.

I’ve already noted on this blog that the Safari application in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) suffers from a bug that causes it to fail to draw drop shadows around Safari windows restored on a secondary monitor. It’s annoying, but it’s a minor visual glitch.

More serious is the fact that, in my experience, the Resume feature in Mountain Lion’s Safari only works properly when the application is manually quit by selecting the “Quit Safari” command in the “Safari” menu.

If, on the other hand, OS X automatically quits Safari along with all other applications when I request a restart via the Apple menu or as part of an application installation process, then after the restart, Safari’s Resume feature restores… only some of the windows and tabs that were left open when it was quit. It looks like Safari restores not the most recent state of the application, but some earlier state, from some unidentified time.

Because of the numerous kernel panics that I have been experiencing due to a videocard-related bug introduced by OS X 10.8, I have had the opportunity to observe this behaviour very often lately. A kernel panic appears to have the same effect as a restart (as opposed to quitting Safari manually), in that, on relaunch, it causes Safari to restore an earlier state of the application’s windows and tabs. In fact, I initially thought this faulty behaviour was limited to restarts induced by a kernel panic, but I have since been able to confirm that it also occurs with normal restarts.

Fortunately, there is a way around this problem: When Safari relaunchs, I can just option-click on the Close button of any of the windows that it restores to close them all, and then choose “Reopen All Windows from Last Session” in the “History” menu:

This will in fact force Safari to resume using the most recent state of my windows and tabs. So clearly Safari does save the most recent state when it quits via a restart. The question is: Why does it not resume based on that saved state, but on some other state from an older session?

Now, it’s possible that this is a glitch that only affects a small number of people. (It’s hard to find information about this on-line, because the keywords involved are all very generic and lead you to all kinds of other, unrelated pages and posts.) On the other hand, in my experience, Safari is not the only application affected by problems with the Resume feature.

I have also noticed that several applications, after a restart, fail to re-open any documents or windows, even though there were windows and documents left open when they were quit. Again, this only occurs with a “indirect quit”, i.e. one that is triggered by a general restart command and not by manual selection of the “Quit” command in the application menu. Affected applications include Preview, TextEdit, and Numbers ’09. All these are Apple applications that are supposed to honour the the “Close windows when quitting an application” setting in System Preferences › General. And all these applications do honour it when they are manually quit. But not always when they are indirectly quit via a general restart. (For those other applications, in my experience, the situation is a bit more unpredictable. While Safari never restores the very latest state after a general restart on my machine, these other applications sometimes do restore their latest state, and sometimes don’t re-open any windows at all.)

I’d be curious to know if anyone else is experiencing similar problems with Mountain Lion. I’ve already submitted a bug report to Apple, but it might help if more of us do so.

In recent years, using iTunes to manage my music library has always been, for me, a major exercise in frustration. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death has always been part of my experience using iTunes.

While some aspects of iTunes’s performance levels have actually improved in iTunes 11 (notably the execution of AppleScript scripts, generally speaking), I am afraid I have to report that, for basic track management and particularly for editing track tags, the user experience has become even more painful for me.

If, for example, I go under the “Songs” tab and, using the column browser, I select a specific album by a specific artist, and then I try to edit the album tracks’ tags (name, artist, album artist, etc.) manually, whether I use the mouse directly in the song list or I bring up the modal track information dialog box for a specific track and then use the “Next” and “Previous” buttons to jump from track to track without having to exit the dialog box, I get constantly interrupted by the SBBOD, to the point that it easily takes me 20 seconds or more to make a simple edit.

As far as I can tell, this is because, each time I make a change, behind the scenes iTunes rewrites the two following files in full:

iTunes Library.xml
iTunes Library.itl

Given the size of my music library, these two files are respectively approximately 200 MB and 50 MB. Even though my operating system is on an SSD, including my user folder with the “Music” folder which contains the “iTunes” subfolder enclosing these two files (while the actual media files are stored on a separate conventional hard drive), saving a 200 MB or 50 MB file is far from instaneous and, while the saving is taking place, iTunes becomes completely unresponsive (although music playback usually continues uninterrupted) until it’s complete.

And iTunes also regularly creates and then removes temporary files in that same location, an operation which can also cause iTunes to become unresponsive, even in the middle of editing a track tag (i.e. before even pressing the Enter key or clicking elsewhere to validate the edit).

It’s just too painful for words. There are other contexts where editing tags is not as painful, for whatever reason (for example when doing it from within a specific playlist), but this is a basic task and the song list, even with the column browser visible (hiding it does not seem to make any difference), is a perfectly normal place to do it.

I do realize that my music library is somewhat “abnormally” large. I too have encountered the problem described here by Kirk MacElhearn, with the search feature seizing up for 30 seconds or more. Fortunately, other people have found a way to alleviate that particular problem somewhat (by deselecting “Search Entire Library” in the magnifying glass’s pop-up menu), but the search feature too remains slow even when it’s limited to music only.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to alleviate the problem with iTunes rewriting the entire library files every time one makes an edit in a tag. Does Apple ever test its software on machines with more than a few thousand tracks in their iTunes libraries? How can it consider such abysmal performance levels acceptable? Saving these library files is a background process that should take place behind the scenes without interfering with the user experience!

I might be ahead of the pack in terms of the size of my library, but sooner or later, more and more people are going to get to such levels too. And from an engineering point of view, how is it considered elegant or even acceptable to resave a 200 MB file each time the user makes a simple edit, by just adding or deleting a single word in an MP3 or AAC tag?

Fortunately, when I run an AppleScript that modifies the titles of a batch of selected songs, for example by applying or removing word caps, iTunes is able to run the entire script is a single process without being interrupted by the task of saving the library files after each and every edit, but that “background” task does occur sooner or later after the script has run, and also makes iTunes unresponsive then.

In my view, the entire system is badly broken. No matter how often iTunes actually needs to save those library files, it is simply unacceptable that this background task makes the entire application unresponsive.

And I also worry about the life expectancy of my SSD with such a behaviour. There are only so many times that individual “sectors” on an SSD can be rewritten before the hardware starts going bad. I find such frequent rewrites of such large files quite disturbing.

Last week, I wrote that iTunes 11 can no longer open playlists in separate windows. This creates annoying limitations for those who, like me, are used to editing playlists in separate windows while looking at their music library in their main iTunes window.

In particular, I wrote:

So now if you want to, say, copy track X from playlist A to playlist B, you can no longer choose where you are going to drop track X in the track list for playlist B. Your only option is to drop track X onto the playlist B icon, and then switch to playlist B, scroll down to the bottom of the playlist, and then drag track X to where you want it to in playlist B.

A Betalogue reader was kind enough to send me a message with this correction:

This actually isn’t quite accurate. You can’t open a playlist in a separate window any more, as you noted, but if you right-click on a playlist and choose “Edit Playlist”, or select “Add To…” at the upper right in the playlist view, you will get a split-screen view wherein you can drag songs to any point in the playlist you’re editing.

Intrigued, I selected one of my playlists in the sidebar and right-clicked on it, and I got this:

No sign of an “Edit Playlist” menu item or anything of the kind! Since I didn’t think that the reader was playing tricks on me, my suspicion immediately turned to the sidebar itself. We have already seen, with the bug about the column browser, that Apple’s engineers clearly have not tested the sidebar properly to make sure it works as can be reasonably expected.

And sure enough, when I chose to hide the sidebar and accessed my playlists through the “Playlists” tab in the main iTunes window, and then right-clicked on the same playlist, I got this:

The options are different, and they do indeed include an “Edit Playlist” menu item, which is not accessible anywhere else! (Whatever happened to discoverability?)

Selecting this menu item does indeed create a split-screen (or, more accurately, a split-window) view with the current tracklist of the playlist on the right-hand side and your music library on the left. iTunes 11 shows the “Albums” tab for your music library by default, but you can switch to “Songs” in order to get a full list of songs.

The tracklist on the right-hand side offers no alternate view options, however. The only available presentation is a numbered list with a small thumbnail of the artwork and the song title and artist for each track:

All you can do with this list is make it wider and change the sort order. This means that, even with a 30″ screen, you can only see about 25 tracks at a time.

Still, I suppose it’s better than nothing. And it seems to indicate that Apple’s engineers are at least somewhat aware of the limitations associated with a single-window view mode in iTunes, including for such mundane tasks as creating or editing a playlist.

I am still far from convinced that this is an improvement and that I won’t miss the ability to have several different windows at the same time. (It remains impossible, as far as I can tell, to have the iTunes Store in a separate window, in order to compare its offerings with what you currently have in your music library.) On the other hand, given that iTunes’s support for multiple windows was always somewhat buggy and unreliable, I suppose that this is just replacing one compromise with another.

I still find it sad that there is no “iTunes Pro” out there with top-class track management features (and better performance with large music libraries). As I’ve said before, I’d be willing to pay for this.