10.9

Why did they name it this??

I upgraded from MacOS 10.8.3 to 10.9. I didn't want to, but it was bound to be necessary eventually.

Pro tip: if you want to do a clean install, but don't want to spend 48 hours restoring your photos and music from backup afterward, you can now do it like so:

1. Boot the installer.
2. Open Disk Utility from the installer's menu and mount your drive.
3. Open Terminal from the installer and rm -rf everything except /Users.
4. Install. /Users will remain.
5. chown to taste.

I've been using it for about a week, and here are the things that suck most about 10.9:

1. You can't use iTunes 10.7 to sync a phone.

   I was careful to download the iTunes 10.7 package before upgrading, and not let iTunes 11 touch my Music directory before deleting iTunes 11 and re-installing 10.7. However, it turns out that while you can run iTunes 10.7 on OSX 10.9, what you cannot do is sync anything. No local backups, no transfer of local MP3 files to the phone. Presumably no Xcode. So if your phone has no music files on it and you do your backups through iClod, I guess you can keep using 10.7. Otherwise, you're fucked.

2. It goes without saying that iTunes 11 is a complete disaster.
   1. No "iTunes DJ" ("Up Next" is a terrible substitute).
   2. No way to play higher rated songs more often.
   3. No way to anonymously request songs from Remote.app.
   4. No way to open multiple windows.

3. The multi-screen support has gone completely insane. It's nice having a menubar on each screen, I guess (though honestly I don't care) but they changed the behavior so that apps no longer remember which screen they were on! When I launch iCal, for instance, sometimes it's on my main screen and sometimes on my second screen instead of staying where I put it.

   There's a workaround for this, but it's a hassle:

   1. Run "Mission Control" and click the "plus" box in the upper right corner of your main screen (it doesn't look much like a plus box) to make a second, blank, "space" on that screen.
   2. Now the context menu of each item in the Dock will have a new option, "Assign to Desktops on Display 1" or "Assign to Desktops on Display 2". Using this, you can lock an app to a particular screen.
   3. You have to do this for every app.
   4. But if you don't want all of a particular app's windows on the same screen -- for example, you want the main window on one screen, and status windows on another -- you're fucked. You have to move them manually every time they open.

   But I have just discovered that you can go back to the old way by de-selecting "Displays have separate Spaces" in Mission Control preferences, but then you have to reboot. I didn't realize it was working.

4. The Mail.app icon is no longer badged with the number of unread messages.

   As before, I have my "Dock unread count" and "New message notifications" prefs set to a smart mailbox that includes the various folders in which new messages appear. Notifications work, badges don't.

   Oh, except then I rebooted and now Mail.app is permanently badged with "1" regardless of the number of unread messages. How very.

   Oh, this appears to be because my "Biff Mailboxes" smart mailbox is permanently badged with 1 unread message. Though when I sort by unread, it shows me no unread messages in it. This seems to now be true of most of my smart mailboxes: they all have completely random and untrue unread counts.

   Maybe blowing away Spotlight -- again -- will fix it. I'll know in a couple of days.

5. Mail.app removed the "Hide" button next to the "MAILBOXES" section. Since I have multiple identities that arrive at the same IMAP server, with different inboxes per account, I never use the privileged and undeletable "Inbox" folder. It's always empty: nothing is delivered there. Before, I could move the "MAILBOXES" section to the bottom and close it with "hide" but now I can't so it's always there taking up space.

6. The CPU load meters in Activity Monitor are even more hideous than before. I thought skeuomorphism was out of favor now?

7. And they are no longer restored when the app restarts.

8. For some reason, using Privoxy as Safari's proxy server has become really unreliable: about 10% of URLs get an immediate "proxy server not responding" error (not a timeout). Nothing in Privoxy's logs or system.log indicating the failure.

9. Safari removed the ability to take the "Top Sites" icon out of the Favorites bar. Fuck you.

10. Safari auto-quits all the time if no windows happen to be open. Thanks for making it take an additional 5 seconds for me to open a page.

    Possibly this fixes it?
    defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes

    I kind of liked it that Preview and certain other apps auto-quit, so I wish I could turn it off just for Safari. That seems to be global.

11. I have a fun Filevault bug. When the machine cold-boots and asks for a password to unlock the disk, there are certain letters I can't type. Let's say I can type A, B and D, but not C or E. It's crazy. This is with my favored old keyboard, through a PS2/USB adapter. So I plug in the "official" Apple USB keyboard. Can't type the characters there either. Unplug my "real" keyboard: now I can type those characters on the Apple keyboard. That's right, the presence of one keyboard is disabling keys on the other.

    This only happens on the boot screen, not once the machine is up and running. After that, it's fine. So I have to have a second keyboard around every time I reboot. Oh and it only happens most of the time.

12. It is currently only 45°F in San Francisco. I know this is not strictly Apple's fault but I'm going to blame it on "Mavericks" anyway.

Previously.