More Lion Woes...

So my daughter brings over a movie someone burned for business on a DVD.  I put the DVD into Lion and it complains the media is in a format it doesn't "recognize."  Nothing happens and I can't view it.

I take the same disk to Snow Leopard and viola the movie plays with no issues right in the DVD app.

Some Googling reveals various unfixed "issues" in this regard.

Next woe.

I hook up some nice monitors to a Lion laptop (MacBook Pro).

Click, pop, click...

Hmmm....

No audio playing, nothing going on to make sounds, clean signal pro path that I have used before.

More Googling...

Oops!  Another Lion problem recognized by many, not resolved.

The worst one I found, though, I could not find much on.

I have a JamMan looper pedal.  It has a USB port which you can connect to anything that recognizes the standard, simple "camera" file system.  Basically files and folders.  I have a 10.4 Mac as well as others and this has worked on all of them without a problem for a couple of years.

You simply plug in the USB and you see a mounted file system.  You drag and drop files in the finder.

Except on Lion.

Lion sort of pretends this is working but in fact does not show the files you drag onto the JamMan.  So suppose I have a folder of a few files.  I drag it from the laptop hard drive to the JamMan.

Normally you would see a little progress window, it would process, end of story.

On Lion you see the progress window but the bar in it doesn't move.  Some of the files copy, others don't and it just sits there.  I gave up after a minute or two (the files were about 15 Mb and should have copied in seconds).

Lion then reports the folder copied.

Hmmm... I thought - perhaps the progress window is broken.

Nope, the folder was there but only on file in it (I had to navigate via the terminal window to discover this).

During this fiddling I had at one point renamed the folder.  That didn't work either - the folder kept the old name.

Eventually the only scheme that worked was to navigate via the terminal window to /Volumes/JamMan and copy the files there.

Come on Apple...  This is terrible!!

Something that worked for a decade now craps out on the vaunted Lion.

And worst of all it behaves like Windows!!  No errors, randomness, and terminating in failure.

I know the JamMan works okay USB wise so I did not bother to test Lion with other USB devices.

I also did some testing with a MOTU 828 via firewire.  I bought the laptop specifically to ensure I had all the right connectivity.  Sadly there were more problems there.

Clicks, pops, noise on the optical line.

I've had the MOTU for probably seven or eight years - never a problem until Lion.

Maybe I'll have to check out Windows 8...

Lion Misery - Step by Step... (Part I)

The faded circle slash says a Lion app won't run...

So I have a new laptop with Lion...

First off you have to spend an hour or so installing the automatic updates.  These include some firmware changes that get downloaded each time your run "Software Update."  The problem is that they don't take so after each successful "Software Update" you have run it again.  It took me about six (count'm six) tries before it would succeed and report that no more update are available.

These firmware updates cause the machine to make weird beeps and the "sleep" light to flash in a funny way.  A special "progress bar" (all gray) also appears during the process.

So after an hour or so at least I had the baseline of 10.7.2 (Lion) installed on this new mac.

During the install I had Lion transfer the contents of an older mac to the new one.

When I open the new mac I can see many of my apps in the task bar have a circle with a bar hash over them meaning that they are not compatible with Lion:  most of my Adobe products, various plug-ins, tools for Roland VX systems, older Office apps, Native Instruments apps, Enfocus browser, most of what I want to use.

So first off I have to re-install Logic 9 - the old machine did not have all the parts installed so I have to redo it...  Hopefully Lion won't break the installation.  This will be a several hour project.

In the mean time I have to get access to my other work laptop via screen sharing.  Fortunately this works pretty well and I am able to use the other laptop from this one almost seamlessly (the only thing that doesn't work is the sticky-note widget stuff...).  Sharing is easy to set up and it works.

Up until this point I have been able to get everything I need on a single mac - but today no more.

The new mac requires me to use the new, backwards iOS-style scrolling where the screen follows the direction of your finger moves instead of the opposite.  This is annoying though I may as well get used to it because the ghost of Steve Jobs will not let Apple go back to rational scrolling.  (This would be rational if the keyboard was also a display as with iOS.)

So I have been going through the task bar cleaning things up or removing things that won't work.  For some things they probably will never work again which means that what I use them for will eventually fail as well (for example the Roland XV-5050 stuff).  (I'll be stuck using the 1" x 4" B/W display panel after that... thanks Steve...)

Native Instruments software also fails.  I was able to get some working by checking the "run in 32-bit mode" box in the file Info dialog associated with the file.  This is what's really annoying.  Lion is supposedly 64-bit and wonderful.  Most of what I use is 32-bit I guess.  But there is no overt way to tell.

After installing CS 5.5 I tried to fire up Photoshop - after a completely clean and error free install.

First thing off it complains in needs a "Java Runtime."  Why and whatever for - who knows - but it does.  Mysteriously "Software Update" is invoked to find one.  The new PhotoShop appears to be a 64-bit one - oh oh - it will be slooooowwww...  (actually its okay so far...  not blazing but okay).

Native Instruments uses a "Service Center" software package that manages the rest of any Native Instruments packages you buy.  However, initially it seemed not to be working.  You have to go on their web site, download the latest version, go on your Mac and remove some .plist files (there is info at NE in the support area) and reinstall the Service Center.   Then when you run it you have to ask it to not try again when it fails with "Error 6."  The rest of Komplete 7 seems to work without a problem - but I have not tested it extensively (I did have to tell Kontatk 4 to run in 32-bit mode).

In the root directory ("/" or "Macintosh HD") Lion creates a folder for incompatible software (.kexts and other stuff like Parallels found its way there on my install).  So if things stop working magically I'd take a look in there to see if I could find the problem first.  Since Lion doesn't tell you this and just does it you're on your own...

I had to go to the app store for Mac to get the latest development environment (XCode).

You end up going through the BS Mac app store stuff and then it sits there.  You have no idea when its done or what it did.  After a while I had to go looking for XCode by doing a disk search.  Finally I found what I guess the latest version is in my Applications folder.  But its not an installed XCode - its an install XCode app!

I will report the adventures of my XCode xploits (no pun intended) over on the Synthodeon blog.

(More to come...)

On to Lion...

After a long debate with myself I have decided that I need to upgrade to Apple Lion.

Most of the computers I use at this point are Macs and so on the one hand upgrading to Lion would seem like a no-brainer.

But Lion is different to a large degree.

First of all it invalidates certain applications (list here).

Now, as a vendor with many customers for which I need my Mac to do certain things I feel a certain trepidation about replacing one OS with another that potentially would shut off some capability that I need to service a customer.

Now if I could somehow know what was going to break that would be one thing - but I don't.  So I cannot put myself in a position of being on a service call, needing something and suddenly and unexpectedly finding out I cannot do what I need to do.

From a developers perspective each new OS brings new features and breaks old ones at the programming level as well.  For example, I cannot use the latest XCode on a non-Lion system.  To me this is just wrong.  Why on earth does XCode require Lion.  Ditto for iOS 5 development - for some unknown reason I need Lion as well.

So at this point I have a 10.5 (Leopard), and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and now I will have a 10.7 (Lion) laptop.

Great.

The only ones just sit around as hot backups - at least until now.

What is troubling to me is why do these systems have to be incompatible at any level?

For example, going from 32-bits to 64-bits.  Suddenly with Snow Leopard things you built in the development environment might not work on a slightly older machine - and all you get was a cryptic message on the failure.

I think that companies like Apple are still in a position of dictating to their customers.

Microsoft, on the other hand, with such a large (especially comparable to Apple) base of customers has had to bend to the "compatibility" wind and make sure that each new version of Windows within a very broad swath remains exactly backward compatible.  (Yes I know that 16-bit Windows apps no longer work outside of Windows XP but, well, what can I say...)

Today with all the VM based technology I really don't see why we don't have systems that at some level are exactly backward compatible.

Certainly Apple, with its transition from the Power PC model to Intel accomplished this with Rosetta.

And today we have things like VMWare and Parallels that give almost perfect virtual machine representations of other machine environments.

Why are we still saddled with version upgrades breaking things?

One reason is money - every new version sells more machines (as is the case with me) as well as sells software.

I think, though, that there is a developer issue here as well.  Developers only look forward - what new features can I add, what new things can my box do, and so on.

Therefore they don't look back unless the boss tells them to.

So anyway, all things considered, I have to go and get a new machine.