<p>I have, since the day the iPhone came out, and I subsequently purchased one that same day, loathed all note taking options. Obviously the first iteration of iPhone OS iOS did not have third party apps or any ability to sync notes of any kind. It had a notes app and any notes one took there were forever siloed in that app. And any notes one took in any form on a Mac were also not able to be synced to one's iPhone. There have been various web based solutions, none of them good.</p>
<p>With third party apps came note taking apps. I have never been happy with any of them. I've tried various services and apps, like them all a little for a time, found them frustrating and moved on. For a while, I used Evernote. And to some extent I liked it. But both the Mac app and the iOS app have been through various stages of bugginess. I have had trouble with sync between the apps, sometimes, notes simply, stubbornly refused to sync at all. Additionally, I found the interface for both confusing and cluttered.</p>
<p>The last straw for Evernote came when the app ate a very VERY important note. I was editing the note on my phone when the app crashed. When I returned to the app, the note was gone. My computer had been left on, connected to the internet in another location so it naturally synced the lack of note and that was that. I could never get that note back. I left Evernote.</p>
<p>For a time I used the built in Mac and iOS notes app, which strangely, uses an IMAP mailbox on your mail server to sync. I find this to also be buggy and unreliable, but it never offered to flat out eat any of my notes and the interface is much less cluttered. But in the end, it just was not powerful enough.</p>
<p>I moved on to Simplenote. It's too simple, and syncing can again be a bit of a pain.</p>
<p>So in frustration, about a week ago, I complained on Twitter about the state of note taking and syncing.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s 2013, can we please have a really good note taking app that syncs between computers and phones now? So far I hate all the current ones.</p>
<p>— TJ Draper (@tjdraperpro) <a href="https://twitter.com/tjdraperpro/status/297473239645569024">February 1, 2013</a></p>
</blockquote>

<p>I received several recommendations to try Evernote again, they've been through a major overhaul and are rock solid now. I was skeptical, but thought it could not hurt since I was simply not happy with any note syncing solution/app in any capacity.</p>
<p>And I’ve been using Evernote since February 1 and I'm impressed. The interface has been seriously cleaned up, note syncing is rock solid and instantaneous (so far... knock on wood), and it is doing almost exactly what I want a note app and note syncing to do:</p>
<ul>
<li>Multiple Notebooks</li>
<li>Tags</li>
<li>Nice, Lion Mail style wide screen layout on the mac, very intuitive interface on the iPhone</li>
<li>Nice, simple and clean, WYSIWYG note editing (in the past I found the WYSIWYG note editor to be very buggy, that seems to be gone)</li>
<li>A lot less cluttery feeling.</li>
</ul>
<p>In short, if you have not used Evernote in a while due to frustrations with syncing and the interface, give it another try, it has changed much for the better and so far, this is the happiest I have ever been with note taking and syncing.</p>

Note Taking and Syncing

<p>So... this is just about the craziest bug I have EVER seen! Seriously. If you type the following into a standard plain text entry field in OS X, the app WILL crash. I mean, CRASH!. Thankfully, I'm using WYGWAM for ExpressionEngine for entries and I can type the offending text in the WYGWAM field because it's not a standard OS X text entry field. But I couldn't type it in the title field for this entry because that is a standard plain text entry field. Here's the crasher text:</p>
<p>File:///</p>
<p>Yep. don't type that unless you want your app to crash. And it has to be with a capitol "F". I've reproduced the crash in Safari, Chrome, TextEdit, Coda, and Mail. As far as I can tell, it's any plain text entry field generated through standard OS system controls. Pretty crazy.</p>

Don't Type This On a Mac Unless You like Crashing Apps


<blockquote>
<p>It’s a great free PS alternative, but Mac users have long had to install X11 to get it to run. But not anymore! The newest version of Gimp for Mac OS X is bundled as a self-contained native app, that means no X11 installations, no Xcode, nothing but a simple dmg download.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hey, guess what? It still sucks!</p>
<p>Could someone <em>please</em> come out with a viable Photoshop competitor?</p>

OS C Daily

Gimp Goes Native on OS X

<blockquote>
<p>Encoding video files on a Mac has only had roundabout solutions up till Mountain Lion. If you haven’t heard the good news, there is an all-new solution for video file conversion right from your Mac’s Finder or Desktop in Mountain Lion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a Mac Geek, I’m appropriately ashamed of myself for not knowing about this until now. The bonus tip is this also appears to work with Audio Files. The options for either don’t appear quite powerful enough for me, but it’s still great to know about.</p>

Jiving Jackalope

Encode Video (and Audio) with Finder

<blockquote>
<p>That mindset and development schedule — “What can we do to make this nicer by next year?” — may well be the most important thing from iOS that Apple has taken back to the Mac.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finally got around to reading this. I think this may be the most important line in the piece. But there are, as always, astute observations and good takeaways throughout. Well worth the read.</p>

John Gruber

Gruber on Mountain Lion

<blockquote>
<p>CUPERTINO, California—July 30, 2012—Apple® today announced that downloads of OS X® Mountain Lion have exceeded three million in four days, making it the most successful OS X release in Apple’s history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A smashing success, no doubt spurred on by the almost unbelievable price. Whoever heard of buying a desktop OS for $19.99?</p>
<p>Additionally, I have to say that this release is, so far as I can tell at this point, the most stable initial release of OS X. Period. When I really started getting into Macintosh and first bought my own, the current release of OS X was 10.3.4 Panther. Panther was always rock solid for me.</p>
<p>After that, it seemed to me that general system stability only declined with each release, especially initially. With of course the normal ups and downs. Lion was a particularly buggy, messy, unfit and un-Apple like release. It is <em>really</em> good to see how stable Mountain Lion is. It really is the first time I have upgraded to a new version of OS X and really felt that my system was as stable as previously.</p>

Apple Press Release

Three Million

<blockquote>
<p>By any measure, Apple’s transition from physical media to networked OS upgrades has gone smoothly. Perhaps most customers get their OS upgrades by buying a new Mac with the new OS preinstalled, while the few who do want to upgrade an existing Mac are tech-savvy (and bandwidth-endowed) enough to handle a multi-gigabyte download from the Mac App Store. Whatever the explanation, it seems that most people who wanted Lion were able to get it with a minimum of hassle. The same will likely be true of Mountain Lion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The process is actually quite brilliant in my estimation, and the actual install time is much reduced from physical media, although the download can indeed take some time. And yeah, I know a lot of people who do not upgrade their OS after buying a computer. That computer came with 10.6, and that’s what it will have forever.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As has been the case for all non-server versions of the Mac operating system, Mountain Lion has no serial number, no product activation, and no DRM of any kind. The standard Mac App Store license terms allow customers to install a copy of the software on “each Apple-branded computer […] that you own or control,” including two additional copies on each Mac inside virtual machines.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have always loved the lack of DRM and product activation in OS X. Having been in the Windows world for the earlier part of my computing life, the Windows XP and beyond product activation has always been such a pain. And the worst of both worlds. I’ve had to get on the phone with Microsoft before to convince them that, no I’m not pirating Windows or putting it on another computer, but indeed your garbage OS crashed and was unbootable and I’m reinstalling again (for the 4th time this year).</p>

John Siracusa's review of Mountain Lion, Page 2

Notes on Siracusa's Review - Upgrade through Mac App Store


<blockquote>
<p>The glassy Dock appearance introduced 5 years ago in Leopard has finally been retired. In its place is a very handsome semi-gloss metal finish. The blurred reflections of windows and icons appear on its surface. Though the competing vanishing points and edge treatments of the Dock and the icons that sit upon it still make for a somewhat incongruous visual design, this is still the best the 3D Dock has ever looked.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t agree with his statement about the design being incongruous, but I definitely agree that this is the best the 3D Dock has ever looked. In previous incarnations of the 3D Dock, I always thought it was a cool look and idea, but wound up hacking the preference file to make it flat again because all the sheen and reflections were too distracting. This version of the 3D dock is very nice looking and has not been distracting or irritating to me thus far. I may not need to hack the preference file.</p>

John Siracusa's review of Mountain Lion, Page 3

Notes on Siracusa’s Review - The Dock

<blockquote>
<p>At first glance, Contacts (the application formerly known as Address Book) does not appear to have strayed much from its boldly skeuomorphic incarnation in Lion. But there are some important differences.</p>
<p>First, the much-bemoaned loss of the three-pane view that shows groups, the contact list, and the details of a single contact has been reversed. The new incarnation of this view feels a bit like it’s been shoehorned into the book design, which dictates that the left and right “pages” be the same width. Still, it’s a lot better than being limited to two views of your contact information.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is one of two changes that I am so glad happened. The address book was almost unusable to me in Lion. Though I’m still irritated that it’s limited in size, and you can’t change the size of the two main panels, having the three panel view available again is such a step back up to where we were. It’s at least usable again.</p>

John Siracusa's review of Mountain Lion, Page 6

Notes on Siracusa’s Review - Address Book

<blockquote>
<p>I’m disappointed by Apple’s decision to remove the button, but when life hands you lemons…</p>
<p>My beta-quality, more-or-less unsupported Subscribe to Feed extension adds a handy button to the toolbar that, when a page offers RSS or Atom feeds, can be clicked to easily open the feed:// link, which should automatically open your favorite news reader.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Doesn’t solve the underlying issue and disappointment with Apple, but for us who would like a way to easily subscribe to feeds, even for sites that don’t prominently display their feed link, this is the way to go.</p>

Daniel Jalkut

Safari Feed Extension

<p>Being in the midst of several projects which require my only Mountain Lion compatible computer in my possession to remain stable — which means not taking a chance that Mountain Lion might break something in a bad way — I am sadly not upgrading to Mountain Lion right away. But I didn’t want to feel completely left out, so I upgraded to Safari 6 in Lion.</p>
<p>I actually ran the beta for about a week some time back but wound up rolling back due to serious and quite nearly show stopping bugs and crashes. The release version of Safari 6 feels better but there are still some disappointments. But there are also some things I like.</p>
<h2>The Good</h2>
<h3>Omnibar</h3>
<p>I do not use Google’s Chrome as my primary browser, but I do keep it around. One of the things I really admired about Chrome is it’s omnibar. Why is it, I asked Safari one day, that we have to have two boxes up there, one for typing in URLs and one for typing in Google Searches. Safari explained to me some gobbledygook about user confusion. I told Safari I had never once been confused by Chrome’s omnibar. Safari mumbled incoherently and shuffled off. But here we are in Safari 6, sporting this quite borrowed feature. And it’s great. I am still re-training my muscle memory not to tab over to the Google Search field, but it really is great.</p>
<h3>Faster</h3>
<p>When Safari 6 is working properly (we’ll get to that in a minute), it seems to be faster than Safari 5. Noticeably so.</p>
<h3>View Source</h3>
<p>As a web developer, I often times need to view the source of a web page. Chrome was again ahead of Safari in this way and often times I would use Chrome to view source. The primary reason for Chrome’s superiority was because Chrome provided code coloring that made sifting and sorting through the code much easier for my brain to decipher.</p>
<p>Safari 6 leap-frogs Chrome. Right-clicking and selecting “Show Page Source” brings up the web inspector in code view with one click. Code is colorized, and you get a few more goodies too, such as a sidebar to show resources and frames for instance.</p>
<h3>Password Management</h3>
<p>Safari for Mac has always been able to prompt you to save passwords you just entered for when you visit the site again, and made use of the Mac OS system Keychain. Which, really is great. I love Keychain. There is, so far as I know, no direct equivalent for Windows, certainly not first party, and I know of no good third party equivalent quite like Keychain. I have never had to worry about forgetting a password if I saved it in Safari (or any other password that gets saved in Keychain for that matter). With a couple clicks, and my computer local account password, I can get any username and password I need.</p>
<p>Safari 6 still makes use of the Keychain, but it also now has an interface in the Safari Preferences for managing the usernames and passwords right in Safari.</p>
<h2>The Bad</h2>
<h3>Tabs</h3>
<p>I was one of those people who loved tabs on top in Safari 4 Beta. But I never loved that the tabs changed size, with one tab taking up the entire tab bar, and shrinking with each new tab. It breaks muscle memory very badly, not to mention it looks stupid. Safari 6 takes us back to changing tab sizes. But the tab bar remains, stubbornly, at the bottom of the tool/address bar. So Safari 6 has none of the upsides of the tab bar from Safari 4 Beta, and all the down sides. Not to mention it makes one of my favorite use cases unavailable. It <em>was</em> my habit to double click the tab bar to create a new tab. Since the entire tab bar is taken up with the tab(s) now, there is obviously no way to do this anymore.</p>
<p>Seriously, I hate the tab bar so much in Safari 6 that I’m still considering researching the option of downgrading back to Safari 5. It probably won’t happen, but my loathing for the tab bar cannot be explained with any known words in the english language.</p>
<h3>RSS</h3>
<p>I don’t remember anymore which version of Safari it was, Safari 2 perhaps? But early on, RSS was touted as a big feature of one of the upgrades. And RSS is such an integral part of the web experience I can’t imagine anymore an internet without it. Even users who know nothing of RSS and have no idea what it is benefit from it. Many people use Twitter in place of RSS, but often, even the sites they follow make use of RSS to populate their Twitter feed.</p>
<p>RSS support in Safari has always been minimal and feature lacking, but it was my first RSS client and introduced me to the world. And I know the same is true for many others. It brought awareness and understanding to the world of RSS.</p>
<p>Well, Safari 6 has no RSS support. Or I should say, no user-facing RSS support. If you enter a URL to an RSS feed, or click on a link to an RSS feed, you are given the option of adding the RSS feed to Mail, <a href="#fn:rssmntlion">1</a> and even that has cryptic language so that a typical user probably won’t even understand what they are seeing. What’s worse, there is still no way to view the source of an RSS feed so I’m still forced to use Chrome for that. I’ve dinged Chrome before for not supporting RSS feeds except to show you the XML source, and now Safari has sinned far worse. I make no excuses for Apple, this is simply very poorly done.</p>
<h3>“Safe” “files”</h3>
<p>The option to “Open “safe” files after downloading” is still in the preferences. Since I upgraded my installation, and the first thing I do to Safari is turn that egregious option off, I can’t say for sure if the default is for that to be on, but the very fact that this is even an option tells me Apple is still not taking this area of security very seriously. And this is not good. NOT GOOD. I cannot tell you how dangerous having this setting turned on is for the security of OS X. Sure Apple keeps a list of safe files updated, but that does nothing to stop a new threat for the first few hours. This setting <strong>should not even be available</strong>. This is a MAJOR problem that Apple should remove.</p>
<h3>Stops Loading Sites - Restart Required</h3>
<p>Occasionally, Safari 6 just stops loading sites. I thought it was my internet connection at first, so I grabbed my iPhone, and it was loading sites on my network just fine. So I restarted Safari and amazingly, sites were loading again. This has happened to me about 3 times so far and I haven’t even been using Safari 6 for twenty four hours yet. This was one of the problems in the beta that made me go back to Safari 5. Admittedly the problem was much more frequent in the beta, but I’m disappointed that Apple did not really fix this problem in the final release.</p>
<h2>Quibbles and Annoyances</h2>
<h3>Downloads</h3>
<p>I have not been a big fan of the downloads popover window, and it is still here in Safari 6. Admittedly it is better than the separate window we had in days of yore, but bringing popover windows to OS X from iOS for iPad is not ideal. This UI mode simply does not work well in a desktop OS environment with a mouse. It is, I think, better than a separate window. But what I wish they would do is make it a sidebar (like reading list). But, I suppose I’ll live.</p>
<h2>Mixed Bag</h2>
<p>That’s about all I have for now. Suffice it to say that I have pretty mixed feelings about this update to my beloved Safari.</p>
<hr>
<ol>
<li>At least this is the behavior in Lion. Since RSS support in Mail for Mountain Lion is MIA, I have no idea what this behavior will be like. <a href="#fnref:rssmntlion">↩</a></li>
</ol>

Safari 6

<p>Even though I’m not installing Mountain Lion on my primary boot drive just yet, I did install it on an external drive for testing purposes. I need to make sure Final Cut, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Coda, and many other applications are working as expected and not somehow broken by the update.</p>
<p>I should be working on a website, but the server is having some issues so I’m taking some time to test out Mountain Lion today. Here are some of my initial thoughts (this is just a collection of random musings and not a focused review).</p>
<h2>First Impressions</h2>
<p>It is clear that after the buggy release of Lion, Apple didn’t want to go down that road again. There seems to be far less bugs so far than I had encountered with Lion by this time. So we are definitely off on better footing on that front.</p>
<p>Having started my computing life proper with Windows 2000, I am always amazed at just how little effort and time modern versions of OS X take to install. I didn’t time it exactly, but it was roughly 35 minutes from click on installer to Mountain Lion desktop. This of course was a clean install on an external drive so your mileage may vary, but I remember when that process was longer and took more steps to get there.</p>
<h2>Final Cut 7</h2>
<p>Because I’m an editor, and still need access to Final Cut 7, the first thing I did was test this application which Apple is no longer updating, to make sure we weren’t on the short road to complete obsoletion. To my relief I would say Final Cut 7 functions better on Mountain Lion than it did on Lion. There were some minor annoying bugs with FCP 7 on Lion that are not present on Mountain Lion.</p>
<h2>Other Pro-Level Apps</h2>
<p>As expected, Final Cut X functions fine in Mountain Lion, as does Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Motion 5, and After Effects.</p>
<h2>iCloud</h2>
<p>During the shorter then ever before set-up process after the install, but before getting to the Desktop, I was asked if I wanted to set up iCloud. I entered my iCloud ID and password, and <em>almost</em> everything to do with iCloud was set up for me. Strangely Mail was not set up, but a quick trip to System Preferences and a tick of a checkbox corrected that problem. It was strange that Mail was not turned on by default, but not a huge deal.</p>
<p>I look forward to more and more settings carrying over through iCloud. I’m thinking here of wallpaper, dock icon arrangement, <a href="#fn:dockarrange">1</a> general system preferences such as mouse speed, keyboard key repeat speed settings and more.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p>The new Notes application is exactly what I have been wanting for many years. Simple, easy notes, with folders and completely cloud syncing. And it actually works very well. Of course I changed the font to something manageable (the default is Noteworthy, which is utterly horrible).</p>
<p>One minor annoyance, there is a nag dialog every time I want to delete a note and no preference to disable it.</p>
<h2>Space Theme</h2>
<p>Seriously, the space themed default wallpaper is getting ridiculous and old. I changed it to something much more manageable almost right away.</p>
<h2>Twitter</h2>
<p>Tweetbot uses Twitter’s official authorization API of course, which means sending me to the website, logging in to Twitter and authorizing. Upon successful authorization, OS X asked me if I also wanted to add the account to the system preferences. This I felt was a nice touch.</p>
<h2>Reminders</h2>
<p>Moving Reminders out of iCal Calendar and to it’s own app is great. And of course still synced with all devices via iCloud.</p>
<p>Medium annoyance: I wish there was a way to view <em>all</em> reminders — in both iOS and OS X. Only being able to view them by list is a little annoying.</p>
<h2>iCal Calendar</h2>
<p>The calendar list sidebar makes a triumphant return and thank goodness. I <a href="/blog/2011/07/25/lion-day-one-in-actual-working-environment">complained</a> about the pop-over introduced in Lion so I am very glad they fixed it.</p>
<h2>The Dock</h2>
<p>The new, more subtle, almost blurred look is welcome. The reflections, the gloss, everything about the Dock is much more subtle, and that’s good. I liked the new 3D dock when it was first introduced, but it soon started to feel a little too garish. In fact I find that a lot about things like this. Don’t get me wrong, I love polish and beautiful interfaces, but it can be overdone. This is just more of the refinement process that OS X has been going through to tone down the more garish aspects of the interface and it’s welcome change.</p>
<p>One interesting and nice refinement to the Dock is that you can’t just drag apps out of the Dock by accident anymore. You have to drag up a little further from the Dock than you would expect, and hold for a moment before the “poof” cloud appears and you can let go to remove the icon from the Dock. This will save me a lot of frustration and headache, as I imagine it will most users.</p>
<h2>Notifications</h2>
<p>Great to see native, Growl-like notifications coming to OS X, but as with notifications on iOS, I wish there was a way to see when there are unread notifications. A badge on the icon in the menu bar or something.</p>
<p>Notifications did bump spotlight from it’s place of glory in the coveted left hand space of the menu bar, and that feels little odd. Somehow it feels off that spotlight hangs out so close to the side, but not docked to the side. I’m sure I’ll get used to it.</p>
<h2>Total Finder</h2>
<p><a href="http://totalfinder.binaryage.com">Total Finder</a> brings some great enhancements to the Finder and I like it. It seems to work fine in Mountain Lion.</p>
<h2>Safari</h2>
<p>The loading progress bar is… interesting…</p>
<h2>Software Updates</h2>
<p>All software updates that previously went through the stand alone “Software Update” application now go through the App Store. I think this mostly brings unity to the user experience, but there’s still “some” strangeness. Like getting my Final Cut Pro 7 updates through the App Store was a little weird from the stand point that the software didn’t originally come form there.</p>
<p>System updates coming from there make total sense however.</p>
<p>That’s all I have for now. More will follow in the weeks to come I’m sure. Still not sure when I’ll update my primary boot drive.</p>
<hr>
<ol>
<li>Yes, I realize that Dock syncing was a part of Dotmac and Mobile Me, but it was so poorly executed as to be useless. I kept it turned off because it would frequently re-arrange my dock or remove icons that I had placed there. It was nightmarish. <a href="#fnref:dockarrange">↩</a></li>
</ol>

Posts tagged “OS X” from the blog