OS X Mavericks Release and Update – The Buggiest Ever?

Well, now that OS X Mavericks has a .1 update, with the concentration being on Apple Mail and Graphics, it would be safe to say that OS X Mavericks, like iOS 7, is possibly the worst release of OS X ever. The completely untested releases, not to mention the non-existent UX.

Mavericks, true to it’s name, is one. Almost nothing works as expected. Although Apple acknowledged issues in Apple Mail, it was limited to Gmail related accounts and mentions nothing else. It still has a clutter of draft/versions and sync issues. The rendering of standard HTML email still does not work.

The Contacts still retain the bloat and duplication issues of earlier. All iCloud applications require manual run to sync them across devices. The iCloud Keychain does not work for Exchange accounts…try changing an Exchange account password after the policy expires it. The more iDevices you have on the iCloud Keychain, the worse it becomes.

Extract files from ISO images from a command line script on Mac OS X

I recently ran into a situation where I needed to extract files from ISO images in bulk. Unlike Windows where one has so many popular and free applications for this task, I just made up a multi-line process for the same on OS X.

I used the hdiutil to mount and unmount the ISO file and a simple cp to extract files as follows…

for m in *.iso
do
	if [ "$m" = "*.iso" ]; then
		break
	else
		echo -e "\nFound $m"
		dd=`hdiutil attach "$m" | cut -f3`
		echo -e "\nFound ${m%%.*} - $dd"
		cp -a "$dd"/ .
		if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
			exit 10
		else
			hdiutil detach "$dd"
			rm -rf "$m"
		fi
	fi
done

Just in case…this is a bash script snippet. The actual script is longer and does some more work, but, this should give a fair idea as to how one can automate the extraction of files from ISO images.

Another Nothing Event from Apple in October 2013!

Excepting for the MacPro, which has been in the works for quite some time, this was yet another “nothing” event from Apple.

Seems that all the presenters were in a hurry to get home. There was no interest and nothing captivating about the presentations. Apple has not only forgotten all about innovation and design, they also seemed to have forgotten all about captivating presentations and pride in their products. It was mechanical words all over again.

To be fair, can one actually blame just the presentations? In reality, there was nothing to present excepting “customers wanted this and we did that (since we could not think of anything more or better)”.

Take the MacBooks for instance. Intel has a better processor, nVidia has better graphics, etc etc. All these innovative companies made progress and Apple put these together in the same old box. That’s innovation for Apple!

Mavericks will be a free upgrade because it’s the worst OS X upgrade ever made. But, to make it look better, a nothing demo of Safari and iBooks was on. Oh, BTW, let no one find out the next great feature for the next OS X release…cut-n-paste. It’s a top secret and Apple has been working on it for years to make the technology available “for it’s customers”. In a few years from now, OS XX will have a brand new feature which will allow you to cut-n-paste files right from the finder…another few years later, that would be expanded to the ability to cut-n-paste directories, full of files, at one go!!!

Personally, I doubt if people at Apple actually use their own products anymore. If that was not the case, how come they never ran into all the issues that my colleagues and I ran into with Mavericks? Perhaps this article is true.

Now that Mavericks is on the AppStore, there is an interesting line on it…the iCloud keychain requires iOS 7.0.3, which is also just released. I guess no one at Apple realised that this feature needed a future version os iOS 7 at the earlier presentation of iOS 7 and Mavericks! The only logical reason for Mavericks to be a free upgrade would be to get the majority of OS X users onto a current version, which would make the overall ecosystem even more powerful. I doubt if the current release of Mavericks is going to cut it.

Also, more more stuff will roll out for free, since Apple already has more money than it can actually spend. Hold on…Apple can always offset the free stuff by making more “official” accessories in “gorgeous” colours and can start charging the original .mac and .me paying users. Yep, sounds like an excellent strategy since Apple cannot do more than to create “innovative” accessories anymore!

Interestingly, this is the first instance where Apple will be cannibalising the sales of the iPad Air with the iPad Mini since they have the same specifications (supposedly). I think they would have crippled the Mini in some way that we will find out about once people get their hand on both.

Once again, unless there are more updates/changes to the formal Maverick release, than the current GM, it would not be an advisable upgrade for any normal user. Even the techies would have issues with figuring out work-arounds. So, unless you have a default OS X installation with a single partition and do not have multiple user accounts, do not have a time capsule and do not use multiple networks, stay off Maverick till Apple fixes the critical issues. Also, for good measure, you local HDD access will also be a nightmare using Finder. The command line in Terminal will come to your rescue most of the time. Of course, the overall UI/UX remains the same from the good old *nix and Solaris days…nothing changes there!

More on the official Mavericks once I download and check it out…although, I have very little hope of any improvement in this “free” upgrade.

Apple Quietly Updates OS X 10.9 Mavericks GM

In an unprecedented move, Apple updated the GM build for developers yesterday. Not sure of what was fixed, all the issues I faced in the earlier GM build still remain. My advice for the normal OS X user remains the same. Do not upgrade when Mavericks is released, wait for feedback on the overall functionality and not go by Apple’s hype of new features and technology as you might land up with a practically un-usable system, depending on what you use. In short, if you are using a Time Capsule, or, use multiple users on the same system, or, use multiple networks, Mavericks, in it’s current build, would cause pain.

Apple iOS 7, iTunes, iPhone 5x and OS X

As already mentioned in an earlier post, I believe that Apple has lost it. The design, the innovation, the ease of use, the relatively stable software…it’s all been thrown out of the door. Jobs put Apple light years ahead of the competition with the iPod and then the iPhone. Apple continues to make money because of this legacy, despite the current state of affairs.

Let’s take iOS 7 to begin with. The radical re-design is more like a kiddy project with garish colours and the overall UI being harsh and the UX almost completely destroyed. The maps disaster remains intact, the UI/UX almost completely destroyed, the ease of use and the visual clues gone. The release contains security bugs as before. The interesting part about the “maps” is that Apple continues to use Google Maps on the web site for “Find my iPhone” rather than it’s own, so called, non-existent, Apple maps. This, itself, shows the complete disconnect in Apple today.

Apple iOS 7 – The “maps” disaster continues…

After a year of the iOS 6 maps disaster, Apple worked really hard and managed to map out Paris as well! Now, you have another city where everyone should be living in since Apple managed to map it out…or…so they claim.

When you also consider the fact that the current iOS 7 beta is available for the iPhone only, one has to wonder what Apple has been up-to with iOS 7 after the iOS 6 disaster. BTW, for those who are trying the Apple dev centre site, nope, it does not work and is down.

Although, iOS 7 does seem to have some of my wish list, it does not seem to have the buttonless experience that people would still want to jailbreak for. Consider the fact that any half decent Android phone has touch buttons compared to the most expensive iPhone which still requires the use of a regular (read lame) tactile button.

The Apple “maps” disaster continues! Effectively, all location based apps will still remain useless excepting the two cities mapped out by Apple in 2 years, one in the US and now one in France. Notice the fact that even in the iOS 7 Paris demo, at no point did the “maps” move beyond the known Apple mapped points.

Excepting for the maps disaster that continues, and extends to the new OS X, the rest of iOS seems to be on track…just a year or more late. Wonder who gets fired this time around for continuing the “maps” disaster!

The new OS X, like earlier versions, retains the old 17th century UI although some UX improvements seem to be there. While the announcement of iBooks on OS X etc might seem exciting, it should have been there at least a year or more ago.

The new MacBook Air with all day battery life seemed a good step forward for the line, but, it was somewhat overshadowed by the new MacPro preview. The new MacPro seemed to be impressive in the preview. Let’s see how it performs when it is actually released.

Overall, it was a mixed bag of announcements. While the “maps” disaster continues and extends itself to the desktop, the rest of iOS 7 seems to be on track. The new OS X is just an incremental change in UI although the UX seems to have improved, but, it’s not what one would call a major update. There are simply too many issues with OS X that need to be fixed before it can be called a major update from a user viewpoint. The hardware that was announced, as usual, was way beyond the current software capabilities of Apple.

Let’s wait and see what happens when iOS 7 and the new OS X are formally released. Will the Apple “maps” disaster remain? Will the new OS X actually fix at least some of the long standing OS issues? Will iOS 7 actually includes a buttonless experience? Will the iPad 3G version of iOS 7 have SMS capabilities? Will Apple continue to artificially limit features on older devices?

We are still around 3 months away from the final answers…

Get the most out of the Apple AppStore and Mac AppStore

Although most Apple iDevice and Mac users know about the AppStores, very few actually look for good deals on the same. Looking for good deals on the AppStore is actually quite simple…there are apps for the job. Most of the better such apps will cover both, the AppStore as well as the Mac AppStore.

There are quite a few “App Discovery” apps on the Apple AppStore that will help you in getting good deals. These apps allow you to look at all the apps that are on sale, apps that have gone free for a brief time, set watches on the apps you want to purchase as and when they are on sale and more. Most of these apps will also allow you to look at the top of the lists like the top liked, sold etc etc.

Although I have tried quite a few of these apps in the past, I have settled on two such apps for now. Both these apps have paid and free versions. I got the paid versions of both these apps for free from similar App Discovery apps. The first one is AppTicker and the second is AppZapp. Personally, I prefer AppTicker, but, sometimes it does not list some of the apps that come into the AppZapp lists. AppZapp also has a user community with a live feed which can be interesting to look at.

I have used these apps to watch and buy some apps that I wanted when they went on sale. The other aspect that I use is the “Now Free” apps. These are paid applications that have gone free for a brief time. If you keep a watch on these “Now Free” lists on occasions (Christmas, New Year etc), then, you can really get some very neat apps for free.

For example, when Flickr recently announced the free terabyte space for all, I was able to get some of the best Flickr related apps like FlickStackr for Flickr and Flickr Studio for free since they were listed in the “Now Free” section of these apps.

Of course, none of this comes without Apple stepping in with their own whims and fancies. They randomly come up with arcane reasons, to remove apps from the AppStore. A recent example being a similar “App Discovery” app called AppGratis. For those of you who are interested in the AppGratis story, a simple Google search will come up with all the details.

An interesting consequence of Apple’s action, in this case, was to speed up the AppGratis release for the Android platform. AppGratis launched it’s Android app a month after the app was removed from the Apple AppStore.

The reason for mentioning the AppGratis story is that you never know what apps might be removed by Apple for what arcane reasons. Don’t be surprised if the “App Discovery” app you really like vanishes from the AppStore…

Howto: Shift the location of the iTunes default library path

Quite a few people, specially those using the SSD based MacBook Air, run out of space very fast with the iTunes library. The iTunes library of music, movies and apps can get extremely large over time.

I recently ran out of space on my iMac with my kids accounts going over 30 GB a piece on the primary drive. This happened within a months time. Although I have plenty of external storage and a secondary partition, the primary partition under OS X needs to have around 5-10 GB of free space for optimal performance.

The solution to moving the iTunes library is actually very simple.

First, copy the “/Users/username/Music/iTunes” directory to any other partition or external drive. You can use the finder, go into the “Music” folder and copy the “iTunes” folder there to where ever else you have space.

Next, delete the “iTunes” directory in the user/home so you will free up all the space it was occupying.

Finally, click on the iTunes application icon while pressing down and holding the ALT/OPTION key. When you start iTunes with the Alt/Option key, it will start up with a prompt for the iTunes library location. Select the location you copied the “iTunes” folder to and then select the iTunes library file within that “iTunes” folder.

That’s it. Done!

All future downloads/updates will now go into the new location. There are a couple of caveats to watch out for…

1. You might have to drag-n-drop your apps from the new location onto the iTunes apps folder under some conditions. It happened to me on one account, and I did not investigate the reason for it.
2. If you moved the iTunes library to an external drive/location, then, you have to make sure that the location is ready and available before starting iTunes. For example, if you move the library to a Time Capsule, click on it to wake it up and make sure it is accessible before you start iTunes.

Although the second issue can be a pain at times, the work-around is simple. In case you forget to wake the external storage, just quit iTunes, make the storage available, then start iTunes again.

BTW, my own iTunes library is over the 400 GB mark…just for iDevice apps. Of course, it includes a lot of good and some free deals over a few years. I will outline how to get good deals on apps in another post a bit later.

Apple Time Capsule Issues

After having used the Apple Time Capsule for over 2 years, I wish I had gone for something more conventional. I have 3 major issues with the Time Capsule, beside other, not-so-major ones.

• The drives go off to sleep in under a minute or so if no activity is detected. There is no option to change the timing of the sleep.

This can be extremely irritating as nothing will actually work on a system start if it resides on the Time Capsule. Most applications, including Apple’s own (iTunes etc) cannot deal with the sleeping Time Capsule. For example, I put all my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on the Time Capsule and I have to make sure that the Time Capsule is awake before I run these applications. If this was not enough, the whole Finder freezes if you select the sleeping Time Capsule till it wakes up. This is very unlike Linux/Window, where any such timeout has to be real, otherwise the system waits till the device is ready. Just this fact, with no option to fix it, makes the Time Capsule useless for any regular/daily use.

• You cannot access the Time Capsule from different logins on the same system simultaneously.

For example, If I put some files on the Time Capsule and want to switch logins to copy the same files to a local account, it is not possible. Again, this is very cumbersome and irritating to work with.

• The list of files on the Time Capsule in Finder will not be refreshed automatically if you copy files to the Time Capsule.

If you copy files to the Time Capsule, 95-7% of the time the list of files will not be refreshed in the Finder window. You can keep changing the sort order etc, but, nothing will change. Some files will remain greyed out. Even though you can copy these files, to actually see the file types/icons in the Finder window requires manual intervention. The simplest intervention would be to copy or delete a single file.

If you use the Time Capsule only for the occasional backup/archival and the router, it is probably amongst the best such devices you can get. For anything beyond this simple requirement, look elsewhere.

Given the fact that the Apple Time Capsule, iMacs and Macbook Pros have been around for years running OS X (9 etc), these issues are simply not acceptable today. The software/firmware at Apple lags a few light years behind the hardware. Will hardware alone be enough to carry Apple forward? Seems very doubtful.

iTunes 11.0.3, Mac AppStore and the iMac – All seem to spell trouble!

It seems that Apple is really undertaking a huge change on the desktop apps and the iCloud backend, or, is headed further down ever since Steve Jobs left the scene and iOS 6 came along.

The new iTunes release is probably the buggiest and slaggiest of all that I have used so far. There seems to be a complete dis-joint between all the product teams at Apple currently and I will give examples of the same.

Firstly, iTunes 11.0.3. Since this release, I have had a hard time getting to the AppStore screen or checking for App updates. It seems to get stuck, comes back with the “memory” error (as mentioned in a previous post). This happens regardless of the AppStore I access, US or otherwise.

Just when I though the state and status errors seem to be fixed, not to be. Although the update apps seems to be fixed in the sense that if you click on “update all” apps, it will happen only once, the older issues still remain. Some apps will keep showing “update” on a perpetual basis even when there is no update as such, even after downloading an app, it would still show “free”/”buy (price)” on iTunes. The worst part is that you can actually re-download the app even when you already have it.

A very interesting fact is that the size of the app shown in iTunes description, when you actually download it (iTunes download window), and the OS X finder size of the app are all different. Seems someone forgot the basic computation of a size translated from bytes to kilo/mega/giga across teams at Apple! It’s not just the size, it’s also how long file names are displayed. While in the iTunes download window, you would see the first part of the file name following by “…”, in the OS X finder, you would see the first and last part with the “…” in between. Also, the order of the updates displayed in iTunes is completely different from the order of the actual downloads. Although this last one might seem to be insignificant, but, to an experience eye, the dis-joint across teams shows. In reality, there are simply too many such small issues that show a dis-joint and a complete lack of experience or a complete un-willingness towards improvement and excellence.

The biggest issue of iTunes (and iDevices) still remain. The pathetic, single threaded download of apps. music etc. I have never had this issue with any Android handset so far. Even though Google does not have an equivalent of iTunes, I have faced no such issues related to downloads on the Android devices. The main reason I still use iTunes is so I can start/stop downloads to get the maximum speed in the process. More often than not, a small, few MB download on iTunes (or iDevice) can take hours.

Another major issue with iTunes, which, actually, stems from the download issues stated above, I use different user accounts (for my family) on my iMac for all (almost) the iDevices to sync them from iTunes. iTunes wants re-authorisation of every account every time I sync a device. Pathetic!

Is that was not enough, the moment I have 6 or more user accounts on my iMac, the logins go off the screen and the only way to get to them is by using the keyboard since a mouse or a trackpad cannot scroll the login screen. Once again, Pathetic!

Even though you can set a magic mouse or the trackpad to respond to a tap for a click, it does not work on the login screen. Just to repeat, Pathetic!

The MacAppStore as it stands in the current release is no exception. It suffers the same numbers and single threaded download issues. It is clueless as to which screen to start with. More often than not you will notice the progress circle with nothing happening. If you click on “updates” and then click on “featured”, nothing will change until the search for updates has been completed, or, times out. Okay, so now I am tired of the repeat, so one last time…Pathetic!

Another interesting fact that I noted was that if you switch your internet connection in between a download, the download cannot resume and it is re-started!

About the iMac, after the earlier screen quality and warranty issues, I got another scare today from both, my iMac as well as my older MacBook Pro. Both of them just “hung” and then refused to boot at all!

Turned out to be a temperature related issue. It was a hot day today (like it is at this time of the year) and since it had gotten quite cold from the air-conditioning, I switched it off for a while. While the iPhone and iPad had no issues, the iMac and the MacBook Pro just stopped working. I had to shut them off, forcibly, turn on the air-conditioning, wait for about an hour, and then they started working again. This happened without any warning from the system.

Considering the fact that OS X still has an 18th century UI/UX and that the iOS UI/UX has been stagnating since arrival, I can only wish and hope that either Google or Microsoft come up with viable and reasonable alternates to the iPhone and iPads.

Personally, unless Apple really comes up with some drastic changes and quality control, I would probably never purchase an iMac or a MacBook ever again. For me, it was an investment based on the iPhone and iPad experience and I can only say that I regret buying the iMac for the bad screen quality and flawed warranty. The two MacBook Pros I regret since OS X is worse than Ubuntu Linux as it stands currently and the UI/UX is light years behind Windows (barring Windows 8 which I deem unusable by the majority).

Small wonder that the OS X updates, initially, seemed so attractive based on their price compared to Windows. While one can actually see and feel the changes and work put in by Microsoft (good or bad is a separate issue), there is no change on OS X that warrants even the marginal update cost. For example, consider one of the latest and greatest and touted features of the latest OS X Mountain Lion…it finally show you file copy progress!!! Hello…we had all this and more even in the good old console and DOS days!

This fact is even mentioned on the Apple web site…they are proud their lame designers and programmers finally managed to show file copy progress on OS X, which, incidentally, is meaningless since the progress has no details and can only be seen in the folder the files are being copied to.

In case someone thinks this is Apple bashing, yes, it is! Excepting for my iPhones and iPads, the rest of Apple stuff seems to be a big no no in every way. This exception, I hope, Google or Microsoft (or some other major) takes away, some day. The Apple hardware, the screen, volume, warranty etc issues are all too prevalent on the net, including the Apple forums, with apparently no answers from Apple about these.

For me, like for most people, the expensive Apple hardware and ecosystem is an investment. This investment, seems to be going down the drain as of now. I still have hopes that there will be changes within the Apple top management that would allow the iPhone legacy to continue and carry forward all with it, let’s see.

The WWDC should come up with some pointers. Meantime, we would have some time to see what Google comes up with after the announcements at the recent I/O. If all that Apple can come up with is a lame iOS 7 update and cheaper and a larger number of iDevices along with the same old incremental updates, one can be certain that the Apple and iPhone era is indeed going to end very very soon.