Monday, December 24, 2007

OS X Bugs of the week: Image Capture and GarageBand

Two OS X bugs this week: one new and one probably older. Note I run as a non-admin user.

The new one is Image Capture. I presume this one came with this past week's batch of sercurity fixes. When I use IC to transfer files from a memory card, I usually create a new folder to hold them. This week I can create the folder, but I can't use it. IC isn't quite sure it exists. I have to restart IC to get it to see the new folder. Finder can see it. I wouldn't be surprised if this bug shows up elsewhere.

The other bug comes with GarageBand, and it's more of a design flaw. I've never bothered with GB, but my niece is a fan [1]. She created a GB project that I wanted to move from my account to a guest account. I found:
  • When moved to Share and then to the Guest desktop the Guest had no access (privilege problem -- the privilege/Share dysfunction is a deep OS X design flaw -- moving to Share should revise privileges)
  • When I changed privileges and opened the project in GarageBand GB crashed (I submitted the crash report)
It turns out to share a GB project you need to export as 'archival' so it includes loops rather than references them. Fair enough, the bugs here are:
  1. Blowing up because of a reference error is a bug.
  2. Why don't the references work on a single machine? I'm suspecting this is yet another case of Apple's depressing move away from global file identifiers to DOS 2.1 hard coded paths, probably coupled with incorrectly storing a referenced file in a user account.
  3. The old, old design flaw that moving a package to the Shared folder doesn't set access privileges in a sensible fashion (maybe 10.5 fixes this?).
[1] I've wondered with Apple bothers with GB. Turns out kids like it -- a lot. GB is the reason my niece is getting a MacBook for her birthday. If Apple gets the bugs out of 10.5 by then that purchase may lead to another Mac in that home (their XP machines are routinely rendered useless by viruses and XP entropic decay). So Apple has quality issues, but they know how to optimize the iLife package to sell machines.

Update 12/27/07: Image Capture PPC doesn't show this bug. It's only in Image Capture Intel, and I suspect the bug isn't truly a part of Image Capture, but rather some Intel specific Finder bug.

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