App store innards - handy knowledge for basic maintenance

Excellent review, includes a few that are new to me. Read the entire article for the full story, I'll be checking for leftover app versions in my iTunes app folder.

iPhone Atlas - Ted Landau - Five “under-the-hood” things you should know about App Store apps

1. Where are iPhone apps actually stored on a Mac ...

2. I opened the Mobile Applications folder. All the files there end in .ipa. What’s with that?

Consider ipa an abbreviation for “iPhone application.” ... use the shareware program Pacifist. Specifically:

1. Make a copy of the app that you want to check (say Koi Pond.ipa).
2. Change the name of the copied file to Koi Pond.ipa.pkg.
3. Click “Use .pkg” when the dialog appears asking what you want to do.
4. Open Koi Pond.ipa.pkg in Pacifist.

...
1. Via Pacifist, navigate to Payload > KoiPond.app >Info.plist. Extract this file.
2. Open the file using Property List Editor (or any other utility you have for opening .plist files).

From here, you can confirm the version number (CFBundleVersion) of the app. This should be the same number you’ll find in the Version item of the Summary tab, if you select Get Info for an app in iTunes.

Also in the .plist file, note the line that reads UIStatusBarHidden Boolean Yes...

3. There are several copies of some apps in the Mobile Applications folder (with names like Koi Pond.ipa, Koi Pond 1.ipa, Koi Pond 2.ipa etc.) What gives with that?

First the good news: If you’ve updated to iTunes 8, this should no longer happen.

Prior to iTunes 8, these duplicates accumulated each time you updated to a newer version of an app (or even redownloaded the same version). All downloads were retained, even though only the latest copy was used.

... If you still have duplicates hanging around, drag them to the Trash and delete them. You only need to retain the copy with the most recent modification date. If there is any doubt as to which copy to keep, go to Applications in iTunes and select Show in Finder from any app’s contextual menu. This will take you to the Mobile Applications folder with the active copy highlighted. That’s the one you want to keep.

Although they are usually harmless, these duplicates can occasionally cause problems...

4. Can I run apps on my iPhone that other people have purchased?

No and Yes. The system for apps works the same way as for music and video purchased from the iTunes Store. By default, App Store apps can only be run on iPhones and iPod touches synced to the computer used to purchase the software. However, a user can authorize up to 5 computers to have access to their iTunes Store purchases. Thus, to use an app purchased by a friend...

Password twilight: bad from Gmail, not so bad from OpenID.

Bad news, then not-so-bad news, in the twilight of the password.

From Google, another scary installment in their online safety series:

When it comes to Gmail specifically, there are a couple of things that might cause account-related interruptions in access: a lost or forgotten password, unusual activity that triggers the safety measures designed to keep accounts from being compromised, or, in the worst case, someone has stolen your login info and changed it...

... we don't ask for much personal information when you sign up for Gmail, which can sometimes make it difficult to prove ownership of an account and trigger the recovery process.

Still, there are some simple steps you can take to ensure that your account stays in your hands, and to greatly improve the chances of regaining access if you have any problems...

• Always keep the verification number you get when you sign up for Gmail. When you sign up for Gmail, we'll ask you for a secondary email address and then email a verification number to that account. This number is the best way to prove ownership of your account, so be sure to hang on to it.

• If you aren't able to access your account, try resetting your password. As mentioned above, most of the support requests we get turn out to be lost or forgotten passwords, rather than something more serious. Resetting your password usually gets the job done.

• If resetting your password doesn't work, try our account-recovery process. We recently launched an account-recovery form in our help center that can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to verify ownership of an account and restore access. If you have the information necessary to prove ownership -- such as the verification code for the account -- this new process can help our support team restore access within a matter of hours.

The $%!%!#$% verification code for my Gmail account?!! The account I opened the month they launched? Did they even do verification codes back then? What's the chance I could find that now? At least I know it's not in my Gmail respository?

And, of course we know about Google's brilliant mafia-funded password reset approach.

I was on the verge of having nightmares about losing control of my Google account, but their "reassuring" message is giving me night terrors instead.

On the bright side, there's optional two factor identification for my myOpenID account.

About CallVerifID

... CallVerifID™ provides the most convenient and cost-effective strong security measure available for OpenID users. An individual can enable CallVerifID™ within seconds to add an additional authentication factor.

* Easy two-factor authentication for myOpenID
* Instantly receive a call when signing into myOpenID. Simply answer and press # to authenticate.
* No extra phone capabilities or text messages. Use any phone.

The basics of OpenID are pretty simple. From a user perspective it's like the old Microsoft Hailstorm/Passport scheme -- a single un/pw sign-on. So when I use my OpenID to sign on to a web service, I'm redirected to enter my password into the myOpenID site then return to my true destination. I can stay authenticated with myOpenID provider, then I don't have to keep entering my password as I move from site to site.

The big difference from Hailstorm/Passport is it's not controlled by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, IBM or your cellphone company. All kinds of places can, and do, offer OpenID services -- including my many Blogger blogs.

Of course these services are only as good as the associated security, and Google hasn't been wining any prizes for their security measures.

Even MyOpenID is vulnerable, like anyone else, to password theft. It's a "one factor identification" service -- a "what I know" factor. If I add CallVerifID though it's a "two factor" service -- "what I know" and "what I have". A thief would have to steal both.

So what happens if I lose my phone?

Well, that's kind of where the good news ends:

What happens if I lose my phone?

An alternate number can be set up by calling the support staff, once your identity is strongly established.

What happens if I lose cell phone coverage in a certain area?

Call the support staff from any phone to request a one time bypass. Once your identity is strongly established, they can allow you to authenticate one time without receiving a PhoneFactor call. They can also change your account to point to an alternate phone number, such as a land line.

Ooookkkkaaayy. What do they mean by "strongly established"? There's no detail on what that is, it sure sounds vulnerable to social engineering.

Still, it's a measure of progress.

What I think I need is some combination of two factor identification and a digital certificate stored on secured machines. Then if I lose the phone I could at least fix things from a secure machine with a digital certificate (eg. home computer, not a laptop) stored on an encrypted disk image.

I think it might be possible to do that with MyOpenID; I'm going to give it a try. The combination of digital cert access from secured machines with two factor phone id when in other locations is interesting. I do want to be able to secure the cert on an encrypted disk image, I'll have to research how to do that, I'd prefer not to encrypt my entire user account directory (the default OS X approach). The cert can be revoked, so if I knew the machine had been stolen I could revoke the cert. [ps. The digital cert is browser specific, not user account specific. So if you use more than one browser you need a cert for each one on the user account.]

Now if only Google would enroll itself in a remedial security training program. At least they could use some loose change to pay Schneier for a consultation ...

PS. It looks like I can create MyOpenIDs for my domains, such as faughnan.com or faughnanlagace.com. That could help with securing Emily and the children's accounts.

Update: Too bad! myOpenID missed the brass ring.

If you active the two factor identification, you still need the cell phone call even when signing in with the digital certificate. So there's no good fallback if you lose cell phone access. Arghh!! They should have had two different two factor identification schemes:

• password + digital cert (secure browser)
  
• password + phone ID

Then if you lose the phone, you could go to the secure machine and get access.

Oh well, maybe they'll read this blog and fix it.

Update 3/8/09: Sign. OpenID.com never did get a clue. BTW, more the horror of losing Gmail account access.

iPhone - layers of integrated functionality

It's easy to make a list of what my iPhone can't do. No cut, copy paste -- which I miss all the time. No cross-application search (I can imagine why not, but I sure miss it). No tethering - yet. No standard sync infrastructure, so every vendor has to roll their own.

I'll omit "no tasks, no notes sync" because I love Appigo's solutions and they wouldn't exist if Apple had done these things.

What gets missed is how much deep and integrated functionality there is ...

Gordon's Tech: iPhone notes you won't read elsewhere

... The silver on/off button has context dependent behavior. In standard mode it locks the phone and turns off the display. When a call comes in one push silences the ring, two sends it directly to voice mail. When you're on a call, one push locks the phone, preventing errant touches from messing up your call. (I lost a lot of calls until I learned this.)

... When you search for a business on the Map and select a pin, you get a pop-up with an arrow. Touch the arrow to see the contact. What's not obvious at that point is that if you scroll down, you can add this to your address book (you cannot, however, specify to which group). I do this all the time. The form of contact that's created is very complete, including a map link.

And, of course, there's the App Store, which gets more amazing every day.

It's the deep integration though that really impresses me. Very elegant, very, I must admit, Apple.

Update: Oops. Looks like a minor iPhone glitch led me to think pushing the wake/sleep button when on a call would lock the screen. In truth it's supposed to disconnect the call. I do wish there was a way to lock the screen during calls. I switch to another app to avoid pressing keys that will interrupt the call.

Clarifi iPhone case - must buy now ... cannot resist ...

This is just painfully brilliant ...

Griffin Technology: Clarifi

... Slide the Clarifi lens into place over the built-in lens of your iPhone.... ... With Clarifi's lens, your iPhone can image an entire business card with astounding clarity.... you can move in to 4 inches for crisp detail and great pictures.

And, of course, Clarifi is also a super-protective case, constructed of durable polycarbonate, with cutaways for access to power switch, headphone jack, volume controls, and dock connector. For use with Apple Universal Dock wells, Clarifi features Griffin's trademark EasyDock™ design: the bottom third of the case slides down and off to fit in standard dock wells.

I cannot resist. It's not on sale yet, but now I'm glad I haven't found a case I really like.

Evernote will do offline OCR of scanned and uploaded images. I assume they do something special for business cards especially if you pay for their enhanced service. I assume an OCR app for the iPhone is on the way ...

The Devil's Due: Qwest has been good

I've had a few nasty things to say about Sprint and AT&T.

So I was surprised when I recently realized that I've gotten quite good service from Qwest. It's been a year since I switched ISPs ...

Gordon's Tech: I switch to Qwest DSL Platinum

... The tech person was, again, very good. She promptly gave me my Qwest un/pw and, for what it's worth, my MSN un/pw (guess I need a mail forwarder there [1]).

So far it's been fine. I'll update with this post as I learn how well it works, and, most of all, learn how much it will really cost....

My DSL works, speed seems adequate, I pay my bills. Qwest doesn't even spy on me. They don't even spam me.

Weird.

Simple iPhone web app directory

iPhone Web Apps. A very simple list that renders well on the iPhone, from pure-mac.com. I had no idea Amazon had a web app interface.

Air Sharing: turn your iPhone into a file and web server

I have my copy:

Avatron Software: "Air Sharing's regular price is US$6.99. But don't miss this special introductory offer: For the first two weeks, Avatron Software will be giving Air Sharing away for FREE!"

So now my iPhone is a file server and and a web server. If you knew my IP address I suppose I could run my old web site off it.

Comes with a file viewer which did a fine job rendering a word doc.

This is a bit insane. Today I bought an HP41C emulator, got Air Sharing for free, and got a free upgrade to Apple's Remote app.

Ever since I found a fix for the "unknown error" on update bug the App Store has been my candy store. I'm already forgetting the suffering of switching from Palm to the iPhone...

The iPhone HP 41C emulator (i41CX) - because sometimes madness must be honored

An obsessed madman has created a full emulation of a legendary scientific calculator ...

i41CX

Advanced programmable and expandable RPN scientific calculator with virtual thermal printer/plotter suitable for a wide variety of scientific, engineering, mathematical, financial, and academic applications.

• RPN logic with 4 element stack
• Powerful rich set of numeric and mathematical functions
• Time, calendar, alarm, and stopwatch functions
• 12 character display with alphanumeric capability
• User definable keyboard with support for overlays
• Expandability: four module ports provide access to additional functions (e.g. matrix operations, programmer functions, equation solvers, etc.) beyond the standard built-in functions
• Ability to download module files from the internet
• Program features: automatic line numbering, labels, branching, subroutines, interactive alphanumeric input/output, loop operations, indirect addressing, flag operations, and synthetic operations...

Note the word "HP" does not appear anywhere on this page or on the screens. It's just an "scientific calculator". Nudge-nudge.

It cost me $8 to buy this. I might use the timer, and I might use the calculator every few weeks.

I bought it because sometimes glorious madness must be honored.

Update 12/23/09: There's a comprehensive (of course) FAQ on the AL Software site and a mini-manual. The original HP 41C manual is probably a bit hard to come buy, but, inevitably, another wonderfully insane geek has an online version and the i41CX manual points to PDF scans of the original manuals (252 pages!). Yes, and there's anHP41.org domain.

The only mystery remaining is who wrote this incredible application. The answer can be found on the HP-41 archive website emulation page. (Or you could just look at the author credits on the "mini manual").

I must add that I've recently scanned the "mini-manual" and "staggering" comes to mind. For example:

... Need to solve first- or second-order differential equations? Need to perform complex number operations and functions? Need to perform vector operations? Coordinate transformations? Number conversions and Boolean logic? Curve fitting? Solve time value of money problems? These are essentially the problems for which the HP-15C and HP-16C were developed. The Advantage Pac provides these capabilities to the HP-41CX. Thus, by loading the Advantage Pac and creating the appropriate key assignments, you can turn the i41CX+ into a virtual HP-15C or HP-16C!...

Oookaay. And let's not mention the GPS tools.

Wow, Safari for Windows is bad ..

In the course of closing out the last remaining RSS reader options for an unusual setting, I put Safari for Windows through some simple tests as an RSS reader.

Wow, it's bad.

No, the RSS stuff is pretty good. Much better than Firefox 3, and probably comparable to IE 7.

Problem is, the was very flaky and slow to process the Sharepoint and Community Server feeds I gave it. If it clicked too many times during operations on the bookmarks and feeds it would crash.

I can see why Safari gets so little attention on XP. On OS X it's a reasonably competitive browser (I prefer Firefox because Google builds for FF), but on XP it's kind of bad.

Really, Apple should kill Safari on XP and focus on getting Webkit based Chrome working with Apple products.

RIP Onfolio - the last of the standalone XP feed readers

In my workplace we live in a time warp of Office 2003 and IE 6 running on XP. I doubt we're the only ones.

So we need older solutions for Sharepoint 2007 RSS subscriptions; solutions with integrated Windows authentication. Products like Newsgator Inbox, Omea Pro, and Onfolio.

These are products that have been ground into the dust by Outlook 2007 and IE 7. (Neither of which are comparable to Google Reader, but we're talking corporate settings here. The IE 7 reader, by the way, is much better than the Firefox native reader.)

Newsgator Inbox recently failed my personal quality tests. Not their problem necessarily, Outlook 2003 is a terrible place to operate in.

Omea Pro is way too big and complicated to contemplate for our users and environment. It would be like using an aircraft carrier for water skiing.

That leaves old Onfolio

I have used Onfolio at work for years, and I've been happy with it ... but it was clear Microsoft didn't want a 3rd feed reader (after IE 7 and Outlook 2007).

Now it's gone entirely ...

Windows Live Gallery

... Sorry, there's nothing that matches your search in any item's title, description, or tags. Try using different or fewer search terms to get more results. If you still can't find what you need, share your ideas in Gallery forums so others can create it....

Here's the death warrant. Even the old Onfolio domain, www.onfolio.com, redirects there.

RIP Onfolio. Sniff. You were good software.

So that leaves ... nothing at all.

Update 9/17/08: Not quite nothing. Peter C, a colleague of mine, reminded me of Sage RSS reader for Firefox. I used Sage four years ago (Google custom search, my memory lives upon you) but had forgotten about it. It's come a long way, and is still actively maintained. Firefox does not use the Windows authentication framework, so users will be asked for their passwords the first time authentication fails on a domain. The password is stored for the domain. So with each password change our users will see this dialog once for our Sharepoint sites. Not too bad as a holding measure until we get to IE 7 or Outlook 2007.

Update 3/12/09: Sage really didn't work for us, far too weak a feed reader. I tried Omea Reader, but it's also abandoned. So there's still nothing out there ...

Does our family really need an OS X spreadsheet?

We don't have a spreadsheet for our OS X machines. Sure, I could install Microsoft Office, but I'm not all that fond of Excel - and it's overkill for most of our family. Besides, it includes Word which I despise, and PowerPoint which I prefer to forget.

Running office is why I have VMWare Fusion -- I'd rather keep it off our Macs.

That leaves Google Spreadsheets, which we use extensively. That works for most things, but, for some odd reason unconnected to echoes of 1929, Emily wanted a way to review our investments. We're not quite ready to expose them to Google (which was recently found guilty of an astoundingly bone-headed security screw-up).

The data lived in a spreadsheet in our old XP box [1], so at first I thought it was time to get a Mac spreadsheet. There are a few options in addition to Excel ...

Pure Mac: Spreadsheets - Software for Macintosh

AppleWorks
Excel
icExcel
Mariner Calc
Mesa
NeoOffice
Numbers
OpenOffice
Papyrus
Ragtime
Tables

I don't have the time to mess with anything but very reliable products, so based on my personal experience that ruled out most of the open source options. We already have AppleWorks (works on 10.5), but the fonts look ugly with 10.5 and it is pretty darned old.

That left Mariner Calc, Numbers, and maybe Tables. Of these I'd probably opt for either Numbers (get Pages and Keynote for free) or Mariner Calc (simplest, fastest, most tested, great vendor). If they save as .xls I could still use Excel from the XP box for editing of the iMac served file.

Still, it's a lot of bother to buy and install a desktop app given that we use Google Spreadsheets so much and that we so rarely need one.

That's when I remembered FileMaker Pro - version 8 (!). Yes, old version. Still works on 10.5, though if you don't have web sharing disabled the first startup is very long. I have it on my XP machine and our Macs, so it's cross-platform. It's easy to create a mini-app with running totals, filters, search, links to our FileMaker password file, security, simplified menus, etc.

I don't have to do it all at once, the beauty of FileMaker is I can import the spreadsheet, make a few tweaks, and evolve from there. Bento can probably do something simpler in a similar way.

Between FileMaker Pro (Bento?) and Google Spreadsheet we might be able to go a very long time without a true OS X spreadsheet. In the unlikely event that my daughters early enthusiasm for math persists, we might end up with Mathematica or MathCad rather than Excel ...

[1] I used Quicken 2.0 -- and almost every Windows version since - as well as 4 years on Mac Classic versions. Somewhere between 1997 and 2005 Intuit's quality hit rock bottom. I still use Quicken and the quality may be improved now, but really I don't have time for it anymore. Intuit killed my enthusiasm some years ago.

It was never all that friendly for anyone but a regular user anyway. We make do with the simplest possible approach -- we have too much complexity everywhere else.

Stack Overflow: a brave new take on supporting software developers

I don’t code, but I’m a frequent customer of sites that claim to support software developers. I can vouch for Joel Spolsky’s critique of existing sites – and it’s a critique that applies to technical support sites in general. Lots of options, quality low, extinction rate high, spam attacks severe.

Between Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and their friends and supporters, this one has a chance to be different. It uses a combination of private funding with a community wiki and voting/reputation management infrastructure.

I’ll be adding it to the top of my custom search engines (every software person needs a custom search engine). Here’s Joel on the service (emphases mine) …

Stack Overflow Launches - Joel on Software

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:

• A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
• A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
• An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
• And something in Japanese.

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck….

Well, technology has gotten better since those discussion forums were set up. I thought that the programming community could do better by combining the idea of a Q&A site with voting and editing.

Would it work? I had no idea. And it looked like there was no way to find out, because everyone at Fog Creek was really busy so nobody had any time to build this.

Then, out of the blue, Jeff Atwood called me up. His own blog, Coding Horror, was starting to rack in the dough, and he was trying to figure out if that meant he could quit his day job and just blog.

Pattern-matching rules fired in my brain. The hardest thing about making a new Q&A site is not the programming—it’s the community. You need a large audience of great developers so you have the critical mass it takes to get started. Without critical mass, questions go unanswered and the site becomes a ghost town. I thought the combination of my audience (#15 on Bloglines) and Jeff’s (#89) would bring enough great developers into the site to reach critical mass on day one. So Jeff and I decided to go in together on this.

… After a very short, five-week private beta, we’re opening Stack Overflow to the public today…

… Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.

Indeed, you can’t even have a discussion. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow, not knowing what to expect, and try to conduct a discussion when they should be answering the question. The trouble here is that answers are always listed in order of votes, not chronologically, so the discussion instantly becomes scrambled when the votes start coming in.

Instead, we have editing. Once you’ve earned a little bit of reputation in the system (and there are all kinds of ways to earn reputation), you can edit questions and answers….

… There are lots of good ways to edit things. You can improve spelling, grammar, and even copy edit any question or answer to make it better. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers will come to find out about enlarging fizzbars without overwriting snibbits. Anything you can do to clarify, explain, or improve the question or the answer will be a public service. If there’s code in the answer, you can debug it, refactor it, or tweak it to make it better.

You can also improve on the answers. If an answer is incomplete, expand on it. If an answer has a bug in it or is obsolete, you can edit it and fix it. Because Q&A in Stack Overflow are editable, you can safely link to a Stack Overflow permalink knowing it will always have a good answer. Stack Overflow won’t have the problem of other sites where obsolete or incorrect answers have high Google PageRank simply because they’ve been on the Internet for so long. If someone finds a security bug in an answer, it can be fixed… it won’t keep coming up in Google’s results for years and years poisoning future code.

Want to know an easy way to earn reputation? Find a question somewhere with several good, but incomplete, answers. Steal all the answers and write one long, complete, detailed answer which is better than the incomplete ones. Sit back and earn points while people vote up your comprehensive answer.

In addition to voting on answers, you can vote on questions. Vote up a question if you think it’s interesting, if you’d like to know the answer, or if you think it’s important. The hot tab on the home page will show some of the highest-ranked recent questions using an algorithm similar to digg or Reddit. If you’re generally interested in programming and want to learn something new every day, visit the hot tab frequently.

Want to test your knowledge? Visit the Unanswered tab. Right now, you just see a list of questions with no answers (and there are very few), but in the near future, we’ll actually tailor the list to show you questions that we think you have a chance of answering, based on questions you’ve successfully answered in the past.

We have tags. Every question is tagged so, for example, if you’re a Ruby guru, you can ignore everything but Ruby and just treat Stack Overflow as a great Ruby Q&A site. A single question can have multiple tags, so you don’t have to figure out which single category it fits in best. Like everything else, the tags can be edited by good-natured individuals to help keep things sorted out neatly. And you can have a little fun: stick a homework tag on those questions where someone seems to be asking how to delete an item from a linked list…

… What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

I’m extremely excited about Stack Overflow. It’s fast and clean. It costs us practically nothing to operate, so we won’t need to plaster it with punch-the-monkey ads; we plan to keep it free and open to the public forever. And it might make it a little bit easier to be a programmer.

Think you know how to update OS X?

You only think you know how.

I thought I knew too, but I've learned better. Not even Daring Fireball's update process mentions removing the network cable, but I now know that's essential:

Gordon's Tech: OS X major version updates - my approach

.... Pull the network cable (see below). You can plug it in when you need to get software updates. Nowadays there are all sorts of things a partly updated machine can destroy if it can get a the net....

An old version of MobileMe, launched on startup, can destroy your cloud data. Not to mention Spanning Sync, Missing Sync, etc, etc.

Pull the ethernet cable, disable the wireless -- heck, pull your home net connection!

I'll keep updating my post on OS X upgrades as I learn and see more. I'm right to approach this process the way I'd approach a rabid wolf ...

OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application

In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):

• LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
• Permissions - apps cannot be updated
  
• Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
• The unknown user and group bugs

Now I can add a fifth bug [1].

The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.

So her Missing Sync for Blackberry was running in my account -- at the same time as my instance of Spanning Sync was running (both products come from two unrelated and very good vendors).

Now I'm not a registered user of Missing Sync for Blackberry, so it shouldn't have run. But I am a registered user of a recently uninstalled verison of Missing Sync for Palm. Somehow remnants of both, whch both use the OS X sync services, interacted with an old Mark/Space data file that the Mark/Space uninstaller left in my library (I wish uninstallers were better at removing Library data folders, though this remnant might have been living in a Sync Services folder.)

This all caused a sync storm, with lots of reconciliation tasks. Unfortunately the current version of Spanning Sync doesn't give users much feedback about what it's doing, but that will change with version 2.0 (in beta).

I removed the errant login items and hunted down old Missing Sync data folders in my Library. The Sync Storm seems to be over, now I just have to clean up the wreckage.

Sync is hard. Bugs are bad. Sync bugs are the worst.

There's a broader lesson here, beyond my oft-expressed hope that Apple will concentrate on quality and bug fixes for 10.6.

Today's computers (I use XP at least as much as OS X, it's at least as bad) are absolutely not suited for non-geeks. I think my original DOS 2.1 computer was more non-geek friendly -- if only because it was so limited. The original Apple or Commodore GEOS systems were probably the best non-geek machines.

In some ways browser-based single vendor solutions are a move back to the limited power and relative simplicity of those days.

[1] Many of these bugs were fixed in 10.5.4 -- but as of a few months ago Apple still shipped 10.5.2 on their update/install DVD. So even those of us smart enough to avoid 10.5 until now are bit by these bugs. Bad choice Apple.

Screen Sharing in Leopard is a toy feature

When Leopard came out, I was very excited about the screen sharing feature. I thought I'd buy the OS in Jan 2008 for that feature alone, but there were so many bugs I waited until Sept 2008 to update my main machine.

During that long wait there was great excitement about how useful Screen Sharing in Leopard 10.5 was.

Cough.

Actually, there was total silence. A very suspicious total silence.

Which made it easier for me to wait until 10.5 was halfway decent; I knew my original expectations wouldn't be met.

Today, with both the MacBook and iMac running 10.5, I launched my long delayed test. It took about five minutes to make the call.

I'll keep it short. Leopard's VNC-based screen sharing is a toy compared to Citrix or Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Yes, it's marginally better than the worthless VNC tools I've previously used on OS X, but only someone who'd never used Citrix or Remote Desktop could think this imagine this VNC based solution was in any way comparable.

It is suitable only for use with iChat to do remote debugging, or with 'back to your desktop' to retrieve little fragments of data.

Typing lag is intolerable. The "scaling" is bitmap, not vector. There's no automatic vector resolution matches to the current display (which Microsoft has done for about 10 years).

The remote window is hemmed by the usual OS X chrome, so the usable screen space is very small. Keystrokes are not adequately captured; for example, I can't run LaunchBar on the remote display as the the local app captures my keystrokes.

Apple once marketed screen sharing as the #4 feature in Leopard, a few steps behind Time Machine (which has so far been of no use to me). Clearly Leopard was not about providing new features to users -- it was really about moving the development platform along.

OS X 10.5 was originally supposed to have a scalable Quartz-based UI with (screen) resolution independence. I can imagine that there was a screen sharing solution that went with that scalable UI, and that it was a serious Citrix/RDP competitor. Apple pulled the scalable UI before 10.5 was released; given how troubled 10.5 was, we know they made the right decision. Maybe, after the scalable UI was lost, Apple jammed this VNC solution in to fill the hole.

I'm sure I'll find a few uses for it, but nothing like what I was hoping for.

Update 9/27/08: BTW, you can only connect to the current user session. If it were possible to connect to a background session I'd have given screen sharing some points. It's obvious by the lack of objection to Apple's marketing that this is one of those capabilities that the vast majority of users really don't need or want!