2012-09-21

£0.02 on the Latest and Greatest Software from Apple

Everyone else has an opinion, here's mine.

Upgrading both the Mac (OS X 10.8.2, iTunes 10.7, iPhoto 9.4) and the iPhone (iOS 6) at the same time was a mistake. It's made determining which side of the equation is glitching harder.

I did both late last night, so this is preliminary. In particular I may be mis-assigning glitches:

OS X 10.8.2

  1. I got prompted on login to supply a password for "Back To My Mac". I've never enabled that before, so this was a surprise. Not as much as being told I was using the wrong password over and over though (As it's the same iCloud account that works for everything else....)
  2. Attempting to change an iCloud account setting caused System Preferences to hang. Killing it and launching again got a pop-up about changed terms of service. And "Back to My Mac" now enables (although it doesn't appear on icloud.com; should it?)
  3. Facebook integration's a bit intrusive, isn't it? 

iPhoto 9.4

  1. Seems to have improved performance over previous versions; it navigates faster than the previous point-release on my library, which is welcome
  2. Not sure if PhotoStream agent is working; I had to kill the previous incarnation due to it sucking up bandwidth during the patch download, even though it was uploading photos. Reboot / relaunch and the new agent is sitting there idle making no attempt to upload. We'll see, we'll see.

iOS 6

  1. iCloud settings appear to have gotten messed up a bit: Reminders weren't syncing to the cloud. I thought that was a Mac problem but changes/updates made on the iPhone weren't appearing on icloud.com either. If you're affected, disabling the service (Settings -> iCloud -> Reminders OFF in my case) then re-enabling seems to cure it
  2. Maps is hopeless, isn't it?
  3. I'm mightily annoyed that Podcasts have completely disappeared from the iTunes Library. I've got the Podcasts App, and the latest version is moving closer to working territory but for years I've used a smart playlist in iTunes to manage what and how I go through Podcasts and now that doesn't work.
  4. Whilst Podcast loss on the phone itself is irritating, it's a real blow to me using it in the Car: my car's iPhone integration pulls across playlists from iTunes on the phone. So now I've lost that, and if I'm lucky the override "just act like aux in" option will let me use the podcasts app as a substitute.

iTunes 10.7

On balance, most of my issues with this update lie here, particularly with syncing:
  1. Photo syncing got mightily screwed up. On first attempt I ended up with duplicates of about 1,000 random photos in the iPhone's library. Not stuff that was also on PhotoStream, stuff that's older than that. Had to turn off all syncing, which left me with only the "orphan" duplicates, then sync to a blank directory to wipe those, then turn iPhoto Library syncing back on. 
  2. Even after this, I've got 20-30 phantom Events appearing in iTunes's Event List. I sync "last 3 events" plus some favourites and this is now broken because I have 10 entries saying "20 Sep 2012" with no photos in (all newer than the latest actual events in iPhoto itself). I don't know what got messed up but I've checked and there's no empty events in iPhoto... Doing  Repair Library in iPhoto doesn't seem to fix this either.
  3. Similar sorts of Orphan Data glitches with Music syncing. e.g. my Voice Memos are set to sync, but don't appear in the library any more. I've turned OFF Music sync to wipe the library and start again, and I've still got (empty) playlists on the phone.
  4. After initially contacting but not completing a sync (for some reason), WiFi sync just flat out would not work last night. This morning it's back again. My best guess is that the uPNP port assignment magic got screwed up on my router; it's got a time-out for all that so leaving it for a bit sorted it out. 
Edited 2012-10-02: iPhoto '11 9.4.1 update, just applied, fixes the phantom events problem nicely.

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