Snow Leopard: Wrongful Things

By Francine Schwieder

Wrongful Things

First I want to say that so far I have been amazed by how well a simple upgrade install went, how few have been the problems, and how many things continue to work just the way they did before. This has not, of course, been true for everyone. And I have had a couple of things that either don't work right, or don't behave the way they ought to, and one thing that flat out broke (if I had thought about it I would have guessed that it would). I'm not going to try to cover all the things that have gone wrong for significant numbers of people, and that can be blamed on the upgrade breaking something, because many of these problems are things I know nothing about. For instance, I do not have Microsoft Office 2008, so I don't feel I can comment on problems some people seem to have had with it.

Also, the Leopard system that I upgraded was not my everyday working drive (that's still at Leopard 10.5.5, and there it will stay). Rather I upgraded a special installation of Leopard where I had installed very little beyond Apple's own programs, and had tinkered with the system only a tiny bit. There were no haxies, no third party Contextual Menu items, no Input Managers, and very very few third party programs of any kind.

Now on with the things that went wonky, that I do know something about.

Why Does Everything Look Funny?

Apple decided to join the rest of the world and set the default for monitors to a gamma of 2.2--I don't like it much, but almost everybody else prefers to be in step with Windows, which has always had a 2.2 gamma setting (the Mac has always used 1.8), and the Internet standard is also 2.2, based on the sRGB standard used by CRTs and then in digital cameras. What this means in practice is that everything will look darker compared to what you are used to seeing. Anyway, that would be the result if you simply change the gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. It seems to me, and to many others as well, that something else happened, and for some systems it appears that something went terribly wrong.

I've read a lot by some very technical folks commenting on this, and followed a large number of anguished complaints in the Apple Discussions Snow Leopard forum, and frankly came out no wiser than when I went in. What I know is that my monitor had been pleasant to look at, and what came out of my printer looked very much the same as what I saw on my monitor, given the limitations of light reflecting off of an inked surface rather than shining brightly. And that when I upgraded to Snow Leopard what I saw was not what I had recently printed out, and gazing at my monitor started to give me a headache. And I thought it looked awful: too dark, too saturated, too little detail visible, and just rather garish. Some other people have had the opposite problem, where everything looked washed out and flat.

I have two Apple monitors, one of which had a custom profile created by a friend of mine, who brought over his calibration tools to try to get the rather elderly Cinema Display closer to my new 30" display. I used that custom color profile for it, and the standard Apple profile for my main display.

I tried changing the brightness setting on the monitor, but that didn't help. So I went to System Preferences, selected Displays, and tried recalibrating my main monitor, using the Display Calibrator (accessed by clicking on the Calibrate button), and I just couldn't get it right. Applying the custom ACD Advanced Calibration profile, copied from my Leopard installation, to the second monitor didn't work quite right either. And as I struggled I noticed that both monitors would change when I was only working with a profile for one! This struck me as just weird. In Apple Discussions one poster reported that if you open the profiles and compare the numbers between the default in Leopard and default profile in Snow Leopard you will see lots of differences. Other people reported that for some laptops Apple simply forgot to include their specification in /System/Library/Displays/Overrides. And many graphics pros reported that Snow Leopard broke their very expensive calibration systems, or that their profiles would not "stick" between restarts, or else the calibration would simply revert when they closed the Displays panel after choosing their custom calibration profile.

What I finally did was remove everything from /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays and replaced the files with those from my Leopard installation. This seems to have worked for me. Oh, and one of the Snow Leopard beta testers said, in a private forum, that he had advised the engineers that things were not right and if it was released the way it was there would be problems, and that he was told no changes would be made because "it was working as expected"--but then I've seen other things working as expected, and they aren't right either.

Why Can't I Save That Song?

If you used to get links to free mp3 files you could click the link, the mp3 would open in Safari and play, if you liked it you could click the little triangle at the end of the control bar and, if you had QuickTime Pro installed, you could choose to Save as Source. It worked somewhat like this (I created the page with code that I hope forces Safari to use the QuickTime 7 plug-in if it is available): markmusic.html, except you would see just the controller in the middle of a black page. Now if you get a link that goes directly to an mp3, like this one to a New Lost City Ramblers tune http://folklife-media01.si.edu/audio/features/ramblers-pretty-little-miss.mp3, you should see the new QuickTime X controller in a black window. There is an icon to replay from the beginning, to play, the time, the scrubber, time remaining, and a mute button. That's it. If you right or control click there is no option to save. If you go to the Safari File menu there is no option to Save As, it is grayed out. The QuickTime Pro controller has a volume button, where you can actually control the volume, the play button, the scrubber, forward and back icons, and a drop down menu where you can Save As Source or Save As QuickTime Movie. And if you go to the File menu, you can choose to Save As.

The QuickTime X non-existent save options when going to a media file link. The example file is from Smithsonian Folkways catalog of the New Lost City Ramblers. The lost functionality in the program I can understand, but why the lost functionality in the internet plug-in? No ability to save, nor to adjust the volume?

I always thought it was a hideous mistake when the ability to click the arrow and Save As Source was removed from the regular QuickTime plug-in and reserved to QT Pro only. With QT X everyone will now have to resort to the work-around that worked for non-Pro QuickTime: if you see a link in a browser page, instead of just clicking on it, hold down the Option key and click and the file will download. If you want to hear it first, click the link, then go to the Safari menu item Window, select Activity, click the disclosure triangle to see the file on the page, and Option click to download it.

Why is iDisk So Slow?

I have used Apple's iDisk since the service started, when it was free, and suffered thru the transition to MobileMe with everyone else. The problems both before and after the conversion have been many and various, and have ranged from the serious to seriously annoying but harmless. From the very beginning putting files up on iDisk thru the Finder has been painfully slow. One might think the Apple servers, or the Apple network experts, just aren't very good at this sort of thing. Except they have run the world's largest on-line music service with spectacular success. I believe the problem is Apple's implementation of WebDAV, the thing that does the magic which makes it possible to use your iDisk just like any other connected disk. Very early on I switched to a different WebDAV client, Goliath, and discovered the Apple servers worked just as well, and just as quickly, as any FTP server I've used. So it was obvious it wasn't a hardware or networking problem, but rather the Apple software. Unfortunately Goliath has not been updated since 2004.

With every change to the iDisk service, and every new iteration of Mac OS X, I entertain the hope that things will get better. I'm always disappointed. Snow Leopard is no exception. Unbelievable though it is, I think things are actually worse. I've taken to accessing the iDisk thru Safari and uploading files to iDisk with my browser. There are several extra steps involved, but it is still faster than accessing the iDisk in the Finder. Unfortunately I did something the other day in Safari and somehow an entire folder got nuked. Just gone. No warning, no notice, no error, the folder simply vanished. I resorted to mounting the iDisk in the Finder to restore the folder. Aside from being glacially slow it also kept returning mysterious errors. I had to transfer files back in very small batches, sometimes one at a time. It took hours to restore a 4.8MB folder. That is just--well, pathetic is a non-obscene way to describe it.

The Unhelpful Help Window

The nonsensical Help window, which stays permanently on top of everything, was present in Leopard. I've tried to figure out what thought process led to this, and have only been able to come up with three possible explanations. The project manager in charge of the Help programming has two huge monitors and thinks everyone else does also, and just doesn't realize other people can't move the Help window out of the way while they try to follow the instructions; the people involved with programming Help are too knowledgeable to ever actually had to use the function, and so don't know how people do use it; finally, my personal theory, that Project Managers do not really use their computers for anything, is correct.

Whatever the reason for the unhelpful behavior of Help, in Leopard it was possible to use a simple default write command in the Terminal to make the Help menu behave like a normal window, you could click in the window you were trying to figure out and it came forward, click the Help window to bring it forward and read the next instruction, and so on. In Snow Leopard this little hack no longer works. We are stuck with a permanently on top of everything Help window.

Oh, and for those like myself who are not fans of the stripes in the Finder List view, the result of the defaults write command to remove them has also been disabled. Like the instruction to make the Help window normal, the instruction to not have stripes is ignored by the system.

Opening Multiple Files

This problem was first noticed in Preview, but since the cause seems to reside in a Finder function it can no doubt manifest in other programs as well.

What people discovered is that they would select a batch of files, jpegs or pdfs, in a Finder window, and then double-click to open them all in a single Preview window, something they had always done quite successfully. Only the result was not successful in Snow Leopard. Instead of all the files opening, only some of them would. If they were trying to open say 12 files they might get two Preview windows, one with 3 files, and a second with one file. Trying again they would again get two windows, one with 4 files, and the other with one file. And so on.

After a bit it was figured out that the files behaving this way were ones that had been downloaded from the Internet, and the problem was caused by the OS X quarantine feature. If you've ever downloaded and installed a program you got off a web site, you've seen this in action: when you first launch your program you get a message box informing you that this was something downloaded from the Internet, and do you really want it to run? What you may not know is that one of the very few examples of Mac malware, a trojan, was embedded in a jpeg. So Apple at some point expanded quarantine to include everything that is downloaded.

If you use a list command in Terminal to take a look at the properties of the files that aren't opening correctly you'll see something like this:

ls -le@ sts128_cooper.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 francine staff 2876917 Sep 12 09:50 sts128_cooper.jpg
com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms 108
com.apple.quarantine 38

The character @ at the end of the list options means you want to display the extended attribute keys in the output. This particular file has two extended attributes: a metadata entry that says where it is from (if you do GetInfo on the file you will see the web address from whence it came in the More Info section), and the source of the problem, the com.apple.quarantine flag.

One simple solution is to simply open such a file individually in the application, which will remove the quarantine flag. You may find this rather tedious if you have dozens of such files. Another method is use the application Open dialog box, select all the files you want from there, then click the Open button. This will accomplish what you want, namely open all the files in one go, but this batch opening does not remove the quarantine bit, so you'll always have to open the batch this way. Finally, you can use a Terminal command to remove the quarantine:

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine filename.jpg

People have been working on a shell script to get this to batch process an entire folder, rather than one file at a time. If you know shell scripting you might give that a try. But for most of us, until Apple issues a fix, I think opening multiple downloaded files from the Open dialog box, rather than from a Finder window, is the easiest procedure.

The Finder Has Died and Can't Restart

I'm sure all of us at one time or another have managed to kill, either accidently or deliberately, the Finder. All open Finder windows close, and the Desktop blinks as the Finder restarts. New in Snow Leopard is a problem where the Finder dies and doesn't restart. Indeed, you get a notice that it can't restart, with an uninformative error message:

The application Finder.app can't be opened.
-10810

Several savvy users discovered the Finder process had become a zombie. Zombie processes are things that aren't dead, but aren't alive either, and therefor can't be killed. There is a way to find zombies in the Terminal and issue a kill command using the zombie's pid number. At least one person reported this worked. Others haven't been so lucky.

The problem seems to occur most often with various sorts of access to networked drives, NAS boxes, your MobileMe iDisk, but it can strike with any external drive, such as USB thumb drives, or firewire hard drives, even Time Machine drives. Some people have been able to unmount the drives using Terminal commands, and then the Finder will restart. Some have tried the rather drastic approach of simply unplugging the drive, or powering it off and back on (I definitely don't recommend this approach, you may end up with a drive that has to be reformatted, thus losing everything that was on the drive). At least even with a dead Finder your applications will still work, so you can finish whatever you were doing, save your work, then restart by holding the power button. Even better would be to shutdown using the Terminal with this command:

sudo shutdown -h now

The problem was not solved with 10.6.1 (indeed some people think the update caused the problem for them). A bug report has been filed, so Apple knows about it. But if you are a victim and none of the things mentioned have helped, it looks like you will have to wait for Apple to address the problem in a future update.

The 30 Second Eternity

Quite a few MacBookPro users are reporting a 30 second lock-up, mostly involving Safari, but it can strike anything involving the Internet. Why MacBookPro users seem to be having this problem, but not others, I don't know. But many of those afflicted are inclined to blame a firmware update they received just before the release of Snow Leopard, which updated their EFI from 1.6 to 1.7. Perhaps they are inclined to blame that particular update since it got a whole lot of people very upset when it evidently caused a raft of hard drive problems. Anyway, at last count something over 225,000 people had viewed a thread about the update in Apple Discussions.

While the numbers viewing the thread discussing the mysterious hang are orders of magnitude smaller than those checking out the EFI Update problem, there are still thousands who seem to be experiencing the problem. The purest version seems to involve MacBookPros and an entry in the Console log about INSERT-HANG-DETECTED, and no, I haven't a clue what that means. A reboot fixes it for awhile.

I suspect the problem is caused by some third party goodies left-over from Leopard for enhancing various Internet related activities. Why they most commonly bollix up MacBookPros is rather mysterious. But getting rid of all of the third party gizmos, and replacing those that have Snow Leopard compatible versions with the updated goodie, has worked for some people.

Automatic Unwanted Log-outs and Restarts

This particular bug is rather more serious, since it will result in data loss of anything you haven't saved. You are working away when abruptly the computer logs you out, or simply restarts itself, and you find yourself back in the the login window, with whatever you were doing gone without a trace.

It seems to most commonly strike those still using Microsoft Office 2004, especially Excel, but can involve any Office program, and occasionally strikes other applications that run in Rosetta. I have briefly used Word from Office 2004, and even more briefly used Photoshop CS1, and still use Eudora as my mail client, but have not had this happen to me. The most obvious solution is get an Intel version of your program, so that you don't need Rosetta. If you can't afford it, or don't like the Intel version of your favorite Rosetta running application (as is the case for me with Eudora), then you will need to save your work frequently, and hope Apple Does Something in a future update to cure the problem.

There are anecdotal reports that if Rosetta is installed when you first do your Snow Leopard installation (as was the case for me), rather than getting installed by download when you launch an application that requires Rosetta, you are less likely to experience this problem.