OS X Lion: fixing stuck wallpaper

One of the many small annoying bugs in OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ that seem of too low priority to get fixed by Apple is that sometimes the desktop wallpaper gets stuck at the same image. When changing it in System Preferences, everything indicates that it has changed but still the same image stays on the desktop. A reboot fixes this and for some people (I suppose especially those used to working with Windows) this seems a satisfactory solution, but the more seasoned Mac users frown upon rebooting for something as trivial as this.

There is a more elegant solution, being only restarting the process that is responsible for the desktop wallpaper. This process is the Dock, and it can be restarted by either typing “killall Dock” in a terminal, or by using Activity Monitor. Mind that this could have some side effects. Eventually you will probably end up rebooting anyway to get everything right, but this fix will work if for some reason you badly need to change the wallpaper.

OS X Lion: oplossing voor vastgelopen bureaubladafbeelding

Een van de vervelende kleine bugs in OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ dat blijkbaar van te lage prioriteit is om door Apple opgelost te worden, is dat de bureaubladafbeelding soms blijft steken. Als deze veranderd wordt in de systeemvoorkeuren wijst alles erop dat er een andere afbeelding moet verschijnen, maar de oude blijft staan op het bureaublad. Het ganse systeem herstarten is een ‘oplossing’ maar voor wie dit niet gewend is vanuit Windows lijkt het overkill voor zo'n triviaal probleem.

Er is een elegantere oplossing, namelijk enkel het proces herstarten dat verantwoordelijk is voor de bureaubladafbeelding. Dit process is Dock, en het kan herstart worden door ofwel “killall Dock” te typen in een terminal, ofwel door Activiteitenweergave (Activity Monitor) te gebruiken. Het is mogelijk dat dit wat neveneffecten geeft, maar deze oplossing is bruikbaar als u om een of andere reden dringend de afbeelding wil veranderen.

Apple XCode 4.2 & SetFile command

A little-known fact is that Apple's XCode ships with two command-line utilities called GetFileInfo and SetFile. They allow to query and set various file attributes. Many of these are obsolete properties from the Classic Mac OS days but some are still relevant and pretty handy, like creation date (which cannot be changed with ‘touch’ AFAIK). An even lesser-known fact is that since OS X Lion, there was a bug in the SetFile command that caused it to set incorrect dates when used with the -d or -m arguments. The date was always set one hour before the specified date. This bug has been fixed in XCode 4.2.

Weinig mensen schijnen te weten dat Apple's XCode ook twee handige terminalcommando's installeert, namelijk GetFileInfo en SetFile. Deze laten toe om allerlei bestandsattributen op te vragen en te veranderen. Veel van deze attributen zijn relieken uit de tijd van Classic Mac OS, maar sommige zijn nog steeds relevant en nuttig, zoals de aanmaakdatum (die voor zover ik weet niet veranderd kan worden met ‘touch’). Nog minder bekend is dat sinds OS X ‘Lion’ er een bug zat in SetFile waardoor deze verkeerde datums instelde met de -d of -m opties. De datums die het bestand uiteindelijk kreeg waren altijd een uur vroeger dan gespecificeerd. Deze bug is opgelost in XCode 4.2.

Mac OS X Lion: showing file path in Spotlight / pad tonen in Spotlight

In versions prior to Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, when hovering over a file in Spotlight's results for a while, the file's path would appear. It could also be shown instantly by holding down the Command key. In Lion this has changed. The path will not appear no matter how long you hover over the file name. When holding down Command, a small pop-up at the bottom of the preview window will first show you where your search term matched (the file name or contents), and only ±four seconds later you will be shown the file path. That is pretty annoying if you quickly want to skim through the results for file paths!
Luckily someone on the Apple discussion forums has discovered that if you press Option (alt) together with Command, the file path will be shown instantly. Phew.

In versies van Mac OS X vóór 10.7 “Lion” kon het bestandspad zichtbaar gemaakt worden voor zoekresultaten in Spotlight door er ofwel een tijdje boven te blijven staan met de cursor, of Command in te duwen. Dit is veranderd in Lion: het pad zal niet verschijnen hoe lang u er ook op blijft staan. En als u Command induwt, wordt eerst getoond waar uw zoekterm overeenkwam (inhoud of bestandsnaam), en pas na een viertal seconden zal het pad tevoorschijn komen. Zeer vervelend als je snel de locaties van een hoop zoekresultaten wil weten.
Gelukkig heeft iemand op de Apple-discussiefora ontdekt dat als je Option (alt) tegelijk met Command induwt, het bestandspad ogenblikkelijk verschijnt. Oef.

Mac OS X Lion: one month later

It has been about a month since I upgraded to Mac OS X “Lion”. In short, here's what I like and dislike so far:

Like:

1. ‘Natural scrolling’: it took surprisingly little time to get used to and after this short adaptation stage it proved so much more intuitive, even for the scroll wheel. And I don't even have any iOS device. I even tweaked my Linux environments to reverse their scrolling.
2. Applications and their open windows are remembered between logins. Especially handy for Terminal, which will even show previous output in gray.
3. The weird LCD backlight issue where the screen would sometimes light up again after dimming is fixed.
4. The acceleration curve of the mouse has changed to more resemble the acceleration under other operating systems. I believe the previous acceleration curve had remained unchanged since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1983, but I have always been annoyed by its extreme acceleration behaviour at very low cursor speeds. When going from OS X to Windows/Linux I never noticed anything unusual about the mouse, but when coming back the weird acceleration always took a while to get reaccustomed to.

Dislike:

1. My mouse cursor will often make unexpected jumps. Many other people have this issue and Apple is aware of it, but it still isn't fixed. It seems to happen mostly with third-party mice like my Razer Imperator. If you also experience this and want to have it fixed sooner, file a bug report at http://bugreport.apple.com and refer to bug ID #9701670.
2. The Finder does not play well with the remembered windows feature. Sometimes I see my previous windows vanishing into thin air immediately after logging in.
3. Instead of the LCD backlight issue, now the keyboard backlight will sometimes be blazing at full intensity when I return to my MacBook Pro after a while, even though I had turned it off.
4. There is often an annoying delay in ‘open/save file’ dialogs, with the hard drive rattling for reasons unknown.
5. There is still no good free Lion-compatible VNC server that I'm aware of (I'm waiting for an update to Vine VNC) and the built-in screen sharing is awful. It only supports bandwidth-gobbling lossless compression, it incorrectly assumes the command key is pressed at certain moments and worst of all, logging in requires a dozen attempts on average — unless you know the following trick. The issue is that when connecting, the login screen will only start to react to input after about five seconds and only during a random time period that ranges between zero and ± seven seconds. However, anything you do in those initial first five seconds will be buffered and executed. Therefore, click your login name as soon as it appears and immediately type your password + enter, even though you don't see anything happening. Just wait for ten seconds. If you're not too unlucky the connection will not freeze before your cached clicks and keystrokes have been executed, and you will be logged in. This still does not work every time but it increases your chances of getting in to something like 50%. Have fun playing login roulette!
6. The lack of scroll arrows makes it hard to impossible to advance a single line (or other unit) while scrolling.
7. Joesoft's ‘Hear’ still is not Lion-compatible, therefore I have to do with the standard sound quality of my headphones, which is not stellar despite them being from Sennheiser.
8. The XiphQT plugin has not been upgraded to 64-bit. No biggie since iTunes can be set to run in 32-bit, but I don't like to have to do tweaks like that.

Despite the ‘Dislike’ list being much longer than the ‘Like’ list the overall experience is still positive, but if there is no immediate reason for you to upgrade to Lion I would recommend waiting until it is a bit more mature and software developers have caught up.

If you're using Fink and can live with sticking with current release versions for a while, you can do an upgrade to Lion and keep using most of your existing Fink installation. I have found only few things that stopped working. Eventually you will need to reinstall everything from scratch however. When you're going to do that, be prepared for a disappointment because many packages are still not compatible.