Major Problems with El Capitan: Continued

So I forgot some things in my last post and have since upgraded to 10.11.1 and wanted to share some more on my issues with El Capitan.

Photos no longer remembers my photo library and instead asks every time which one to use, though if it just used the last one it used it would be fine, but instead it starts up and says it can’t use the current library and I need to chose one. Fun fun fun.

Next continues from a problem I mentioned the last time. Because of the new security features of El Capitan, of which there are no fine controls, certain applications must ask permission to function, and you must give that permission every time you use them. One such program is iTeleport Connect, which I use to VPN into my computer. So when I restart it no longer can log into it, I must type in my Admin password to make it work. The problem arises when I must remotely restart my machine, or even worse when I do a system update.

Since I run a PC based NVIDIA GTX 670 as my graphics card, when I do a system update, it doesn’t function until the latest NVIDIA driver is installed. Previously what I had done, is install the update, wait for it to restart and then use iTeleport Connect to VPN into my computer and install the newest NVIDIA driver, and walla, when I restart my video card is working fine and I can go about my day. Since El Capitan no longer allows iTeleport to work without first entering my Admin Password, and since after a system update I can no longer see my computer, I have to pull my video card and re-install my old GTX 270 the machine came with, and then update the NVIDIA drive, restart to make the driver work, then shut down and install my GTX 670 and then start up. Then I have a working video card. Much more of a pain than being able to VPN in and install using my iPad. If I had money I would get a new video card that is flashed for Mac, so I could install the new driver, but I can’t afford that.

And now we come to the 10.11.1 update. Not only did I have to do the swapping video cards rigmarole to get my computer up again, but when I restarted the system was lets shall we say funky. I couldn’t open some programs and many of my system preferences didn’t work, they just wouldn’t launch. And the best part was the fix. I ran the latest version of Onyx, and repaired Disk Permissions, and when I restarted everything functioned again. So obviously the new internal Permissions Repair did not work correctly, and with Disk Utility no longer having that functionality I had to use a 3rd party software to fix the System Install and allow things to work again!

And I was hoping this would fix my Messages not being able to log in, but no of course it didn’t. I still get the stupid activation error when I try to sign into iMessages in the Messages app.

So far El Capitan is a nightmare, and nothing has wowed me to show me that this is a worthwhile update.

Scott Simmons at PVC has started a series on a Mac Editor switching to PC, well worth a read

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition was given a Dell Workstation laptop and has started a series on Editing on it after being used to Mac for years. The article is just getting started on it, but it is an interesting read and I look forward to reading more about it.

Personally I never edit on a laptop and do most of my editing on a Mac Tower (or even a QUO hackintosh at one place I work), but with the “new MacPro” (I put in quotes since it has been so long since the trashcan has been released without a single update) I have started to think that my next edit system may very well be a PC Workstation with an NVIDIA TITAN graphics card instead of the MacPro trashcan.

Photos for Mac is broken, no way to delete photos that you have imported! FIGURED IT OUT iCLOUD PHOTOS IS BROKEN

I was just importing my photos off of my iPhone into the new Photos for Mac, Photos being the replacement to iPhoto that Apple recently released, and I noticed a major issue.

In iPhoto when you imported your photos you had the option to delete them on import. Well in Photos that option is completely gone. There is only the option to import your photos. Well I just imported 2 gigs of photos, and want to clear up the space off my iPhone. Now I have to what, delete them off my iPhone myself? Well the only way to do that is individually, and this is 300+ photos and videos!

And I thought maybe I missed something and imported the photos again, and it happily imported the same photos and put them into my Photo library right next to the previously imported photos! What is going on here?

I get that the new iCloud features are to keep all your photos forever and safe, but the idea is to keep your full sized photos in the cloud, so you can access them from anywhere, not to never be able to delete your photos from your iPhone. If that is the case people are going to run out of space really fast!

And besides who can afford the iCloud feature? Apple is charging way too much for online space, especially when Amazon lets you store your photos for free!

And the removal of a trash can isn’t a good idea either? What if you accidentally delete a file? (I was wrong about this, there is a way to view Recently deleted photos, just now a menu item instead of a section on the sidebar)

Why has Apple changed to a company that doesn’t give you a choice on how you use your Apple devices, you have to use them how they tell you to and there is no other way (exactly why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X)?

••••

Well I think I figured this out, I had to turn off iCloud Photos on my iPhone, now when I import I get the option to Delete items after Import. So if I was to keep iCloud Photos on, my phone would fill with all my Photos.

So now I had to re-import all my photos again (making duplicates in Photos) with the checkbox checked and now I can have it remove the photos from my iPhone, though this doesn’t seem to work well as it only did about half the photos the first time, and I am having to do the process multiple times to get the photos off my phone, creating duplicates in Photos every time. And now it seems frozen about half way through!

Is this seriously a feature? Being unable to remove photos from my phone? Seriously? This is a joke, if I want to store all my photos in iCloud I don’t want to keep copies on my iPhone or it will completely fill up really fast! This is completely broken! FIX THIS APPLE!

Not only that, but Apple help doesn’t work for me with Photos. So how am I supposed to figure out how this works?

iCloud Bookmark sync on Mac is Garbage!

Was just on a bit of a vacation last week and realized that my iOS bookmarks were completely screwed up again.

I use Chrome as my main browser, with Firefox as my second browser (mainly for it’s plug-ins and tabs), and I only use Safari to sync my bookmarks with iOS. As I have written before, pre iOS 7 I used iTunes to directly sync my bookmarks from Safari, as my iCloud bookmarks constantly were screwed up. Well once again my bookmarks on iCloud were screwed.
I keep my bookmarks synched with xmarks ( http://www.xmarks.com ) and have a good very cleaned up set of bookmarks that I recently cleaned. I tried downloading these using xmarks for safari, but it would download and then sync with iCloud and be screwed up again.
So I booted up Windows 8.1 in Parallels, and booted up Chrome, opened xmarks settings and downloaded my clean new bookmarks, and amazingly iCloud sync for Safari correctly overwrote my iCloud bookmarks. Why does Safari on the mac not do this?
Apple still needs to add syncing control, so you can overwrite bookmarks on iCloud from your Mac, especially since it is the only way to get bookmarks to your iOS device! This whole simplicity thing only works when everything works, but bookmark cloud syncing often gets screwed up so you need advanced controls. Hide them from users if you want to Apple, but they should be there! And why the hell does the Windows syncing work better than Mac syncing!

MacWorld on why you should use OS X Spaces

A great article on why you should use OS X spaces. I love it personally, though I think you had more control with older versions. And it is especially great for laptops, but I use it to separate power apps on my macpro and couldn’t function without it at this point.

It is now part of Mission Control (though should be it’s own thing). It makes your mac have a virtually bigger space, as if you have a bigger desktop and are only seeing part of it and can set individual apps to different spaces.