End of The Line?

There's been lots of discussion here about whether or not Apple has lost interest in the Pro market. The big turning point for me was the release of the wholly inadequate — at least for many video professionals — of Final Cut Pro. A complete ground-up rewrite of Apple's flagship professional video editing application, for which Apple reportedly never once consulted a professional.

Now comes this latest salvo in the barrage of evidence that points to major focus shifts at Apple: It appears they are considering ending the Mac Pro line of desktop machines.

Now I quite realize that this is just at the rumor stage. But I actually think it's very likely that this will come to pass, that Apple will end the Mac Pro line, or at least radically transform it to such a degree as to be unrecognizable to its former user base. Apple is aggressively cutting out parts of the business that aren't big money makers. Everything they've done with their pro-oriented products speaks to a company that's pretty much only interested in mass markets, huge ones like cell phones, not niche ones like pro workstations and software.

I may be proven wrong, but I do think this is the beginning of the end, not just of the Mac Pro line, but of Macs as powerful tools for creative professionals.

I hope I'm wrong, but that seems to be the way the wind is blowing.

Versions Part 2: Unsaved Files

Here's a Versions mistake I've made numerous times at this point.

1. I open a document.
2. I make some temporary or test changes — changes I don't intend do actually keep.
3. Once I've seen what I need to see, I quit the application.

In the past I'd have been asked if I wanted to save the changes to the document. I would say no, because these were only temporary changes. But now these changes are saved to the document, and I've likely forgotten that I've made those changes. The next time I open the document I'm shocked to see that it looks completely wrong.

Yes, it's true, the upside is that I need merely look through the previous versions of the document in order to find and revert to the correct one. But I still find this problematic, and there are two reasons why.

First of all, under Versions there is no good way to make temporary changes to a document. This is something I do way more than I ever realized. It's not so much a feature of the old document saving paradigm as a side-effect of it, nevertheless it's extremely useful. And it breaks in potentially jarring and disconcerting ways under Versions. If you're used to making temporary changes to documents, then simply reverting by not saving the document, you may be in for a surprise one day. Let's just hope you remember to check your versions.

Secondly, the way this all works is simply too quiet. I've just opened a document, made changes to that document, and closed the document. There's nothing now to confirm that these changes have been made, and so they are committed to this new version quietly and without warning. Attempting to edit a locked document, on the other hand, is completely the opposite experience, with warnings and multiple dialogs replete with confusing text. It's a strange juxtaposition. But frankly, if I just made a bunch of unsaved changes to a document, a little confirmation dialog at quit time might be nice.

Look, I get that this is a new paradigm, and behaviors need to be adjusted to some extent. But the way Versions works isn't perfect, nor is it set in stone. It can and should be better.

It Should Be Noted

Here are a bunch of little things I've noticed, worthy of sharing but not big enough for their own post.

A Lion Correction

I had originally reported that one of my favorite new Lion features was that Quicklook stayed active even when switching away from the Finder to another app. This apparently only happens on my 30" monitor at work, and I don't believe it is the intended behavior. Kinda sad when a bug is preferred over proper operation. Go Lion!

Lion 10.7.2 Update

10.7.2 fixes a few things that were bothering me.

For one, the bug where Desktop icons disappear when you partially swipe to another Space, stop swiping, and stay in your current Space, has been fixed. Do this now and you'll even see the Finder redraw the Desktop icons.

Also, when navigating sorted columns using arrow keys, the headers now don't get selected.

Finally, performance and memory use seem to be a bit better in 10.7.2. Specifically, the green slice of the memory pie in Activity Monitor is consistently larger than in previous iterations of the OS.

iOS 5 On iPhone 3GS

If you're wondering why Apple's new Reminders app doesn't give you the option to geofence your reminder — i.e., you can't set a location — it's because that particular feature is for users of iPhone 4 and up. Now you can stop twiddling your GPS settings and get some sleep.

iOS 5 Little Thangs

A few other things I stumbled upon while playing with iOS 5.

In the Camera app, swiping right now takes you to your camera roll. Also, you can now set macros, so typing "omg" will actually write out "Oh my gawd!"

Also, custom ringtones! Huzzah!

UPDATE:

Reader Matt points out that Quicklook does, in fact, stay active when viewing apps other than the Finder on his system. So I started investigating, and it seems that the feature works for other users on my computer; there is a problem specific to my account which is breaking it for me for some reason. I'm presently looking into a fix. For now, suffice to say, this is a real feature in Lion and, for most folks anyway, should work just fine.

Thanks, Matt!

UPDATE:

Got it! Trashed my Finder prefs. Now I got the Quicklook all the time!

Lion ASR

Call me crazy, but I still prefer ASR for disk cloning. It's simple and accurate. But ASR in Lion no longer allows file-level cloning. This means that block copying is now the only option. Block copying is great, but it requires the unmounting of both disks. This means that cloning a boot drive while booted from that drive is no longer possible in Lion.

This Lion-specific problem has a Lion-specific solution: boot from the Recovery Partition. Despite the fact that Lion's ASR has been inexplicably hobbled, the Recovery Partition is quite full featured and provides many SysAdmin-friendly tools, including a full featured Terminal and ASR command.

Running ASR from the Recovery Partition allows you to unmount and, thus, block copy your boot partition without reaching for an external boot drive or DVD.

Versions Part 1: Locked Files

I'm starting to not like Lion's whole "Versions" implementation. It's a system that's supposed to simplify file management, but is, in fact, complicating it in certain situations.

Case in point: Locked Files.

Lion now locks files that haven't been edited for a certain period of time. It does this in order to prevent accidental changes to documents opened in applications that support auto-save. But, unfortunately, it can cause its own problems and unforseen changes to documents.

Here's what happens when I try to simply add an action to a locked Automator Workflow.

1. I open the file (note: it's locked, but this is only apparent by looking at the grayed-out text in the document titlebar).

   

2. I attempt to edit the document (in this case, I added an action to my workflow).
3. I get a dialog box regarding how I want to handle the locked file. The dialog is wordy, and if I were a new user I would find it confusing and alarming.

   

4. It seems fairly obvious to me that I want to make changes to the document — that's why I opened it. But the preferred and presumably safest choice, as indicated by the button highlight, is to Duplicate the document, so that's what I do.
5. This produces a copy of the document — indicated by an informative animation — and yet another dialog that now asks how I want to deal with the edits I just made to what I was just told was a locked document. This dialog is even wordier and less clear. Moreover it's unnecessary and makes no sense, because it shouldn't have been possible to edit the locked document in the first place, and presumably you made this decision in the last dialog by choosing to work on a duplicate. Also, the button text is completely unclear: What is the difference between Older Version and Last Opened Version? What happens if I click Cancel? Why do I have the option to unlock the file from this dialog when I just made the decision to not unlock it in the last dialog? Insanely confusing!

   

6. Here, the highlighted safe choice is indicated as "Last Opened Version," so let's just go with that. But wait! Doing so gives me an error that says that the document could not be reverted. Now, the document I just took pains to duplicate and, thus, not edit has in fact been unlocked and edited. Moreover, I now also have a duplicate of the document with the same edits. So now I've got all sorts of file management to contend with.

   

Mind you, all I wanted to do here was add an action to a preexisting Automator Workflow. In the past I'd have opened that document, made the change, and saved the file. Done. Now a simple document edit has become an exercise in frustration and confusion. Mac OS X Lion has actually attempted to prevent me from editing my own file. And then, when failing to prevent me from editing my file, it has failed to clean up after itself and left everything in a state of disarray. Worse, there is now a good chance for data loss here, for a mistaken edit to occur.

And can someone tell me what the point of all this is? What's the payoff? Why is the OS locking my files? It presumes I'm making a mistake by editing a document, implying I'm some kind of careless child who can't be trusted with his own data. And while I get the idea of protecting the user from himself — or just from accidents — this is overkill. There is certainly a better way.

Locked Files in Lion, as it currently stands, is an abomination that's completely contrary to the goals and ideals of the Macintosh experience — in fact, it's contrary to the goals of the file locking system itself. It's inelegant, pointless and potentially dangerous.

There is one bit of good news, however. You can turn it off. Yes, buried in Options section of the Time Machine preferences, of all places, is this little gem:

Here you can set the time limit for Locked Files, and you can also simply disable file locking altogether. Until Apple improves the ridiculous behavior associated with Locked Files, I think I'll disable them. Something tells me I'll be okay without the extra protection.