Moving in with the Lion: the travails, 1

I just now got a text message: "MobileMe closes down in a month. Time to upgrade to iCloud". So, it is about time to prepare for the end and the beginning. It will probably take a bit to change, so the remaining weeks will be necessary. As I announced this blog to be about my personal experiences with Macs, and since I am in the process of making the big change, I guess I must chronicle this process day-to-day, diary style. For amusement or advisement, as appropriate.


Strategy: I have three Macs currently, an iMac at the office, and two regular MacBooks at home, all from 2007. Don't ask me why I have two MacBooks, long story involving lightning strikes and insurance policies, but that is what I have, and while it is a luxury, I decided to keep that setup, one of them is rooted to my home office, solidly tied down to external screens, keyboards, hard disks etc, and the other mobile for use on the road (e.g. powerpoints at lectures) and elsewhere in the house.

So, as you know, I only reluctantly move to Lion, since Lions means giving up things. As all my machines are five years old and have begun to feel a bit sluggish - the DVD in one has gone, and the Ethernet in the other - I decided that I might as well splurge a bit, and replace the two MacBooks with current models for great speed and comfort; some external funds will pay for one. Thus, I will still keep the existing two MacBooks running Snow Leopard and can use them when I need access to e.g. files that cannot be opened in Lion (I will probably just in case get a spare replacement battery for that model, as non-functioning batteries are what will eventually make them useless). The iMac, department property, I will keep and run it with Snow Leopard for the last month, and then upgrade the software only to Lion. I thus ordered a MacBook Pro for the home office, and a MacBook Air for the road and lecture purposes.
        According to my general philosophy, I go for "small and powerful", the smallest models (13" and 11"), but with the highest internal configuration in terms of memory, hard disk and processor (within the compact range). For memory, that means pre-fitted 4 GB for the Air, but for the Pro, I can add third-party memory. I saw earlier on that you could get 8GB for $56 from the US, which sounded like a good deal. However, I forgot to order at the time, and when I was checking up, I saw they are now selling 16GB modules for MacBook Pro (that is, 2x8GB), at $170. That is twice the officially sanctioned max of 8GB, but reports were that the modules work, and of course add to the speed of the machine. Is it risky? I worry a bit that these more tightly packed modules will generate more heat that over time may not be good for the machine, or maybe not. Shown the offer, I was greedy. I ordered them. They are in the mail.

So, this is a double upgrade: From 2007 to 2012 models; and from Snow Leopard to Lion.


Day 1: Both machines arrived today, and I took them home. I'll have to install them in order, and started with the MacBook Air. As we know, small (smaller screen than I expected, I'll have to zoom a bit, I guess), light and completely quiet. I wanted to open a webpage, but was told that "please install the latest version of Flash". Lion no longer comes with Flash pre-installed, as it used to (nor with Java-Script), in both cases you are told to install the first time you use a program that requires one of these. So I clicked on Download, and nothing happened. Again, still nothing. Then I realized (1) that Safari no longer displays the "Downloads" list when you download something, instead there is a small icon in the Bookmarks bar that flashes briefly, and (2) something had happened: the download had been so quick that I had not registered it with the naked eye. Impressive.

First, however, I had to set up the Air. While the flash drive of the Air is smaller than my previous Mac's hard disk, it could hold everything I actually had on it, so I wanted to use the Migration Assistant to move everything over, way way easier than any form of manual transfer of settings and identities. However, Air does not have the FireWire port that you normally use for direct migration, so I had to transfer over wifi. The Air told me to start the migration assistant program on the old Mac, which I did. However, neither machine could find the other, although they certainly were on the same network. "Cannot find other computer" both reported, and no resets or anything started that. So, I had to go through manual setup on the Air, and see if I could transfer manually after all - it would allow me to avoid transferring old files I did not need on the Air.

I would begin that by first setting up MobileMe sync, to get my email, Safari and address book from the server. It turned out that MobileMe wasn't happy about that, it just told me that it was "time to upgrade to iCloud", but there is still one month to go, and anyway, iCloud will not sync all I want to get. I was able to bypass that message and get into MobileMe, and set it to start syncing. It began, the wheel turned for a few seconds, and stopped. "Could not sync". Again, different choice, but same result. It refused again and again to download settings from the server. I still do not know why.

Then, I thought perhaps I could speed up transfer by connecting the Air to the Ethernet cable - it came with the USB-Ethernet adaptor (the Ethernet of the other was gone, so it was only wireless on that end). Try again the Migration Assistant - and now it found the other Mac! A bit back and forth about which machine should click the password accept, and it warned me that I had to modify the account name (as I had already created the first account with my regular name in the setup) but finally I was up and running.

Well, walking. But that was expected, migrating a full 100 GB hard disk does take time. Over FireWire probably a couple of hours, over the air, more like seven-eight. I left it over night, and by morning it was finished, and successfully: The MacBook Air had taken over the files and identity of the old MacBook. Time to call it a day and go to my paid work.


Day 2: Back home, time to play with the Air. I haven't come so far, but of course am amazed at the speed and usefulness of this new machine; also relieved that Migration Assistant seems to have ported most things across so I did not have change much except re-sign up with various passwords as it was a new machine. (On the old, I did two things to avoid confusion: De-install CrashPlan, the backup program I use, since the Air had taken over the old Mac's identity and backups and will be confused if the old starts to back up independently; and de-authorize iTunes, for which I can only have five Mac authorized to play/show copyrighted material I have bought. Of course, the old and new count as separate Macs in that respect.)

Nw things Lion: First unavoidable glance is that scroll bars, which we have used since 1984 ('86 in my case) have gone. Well, not completely gone, you can check a setting to display them, but they are still there only on occasion. Have not found the system yet when they appear and when not, but in any case, they do not look at all like usual blue scroll bars, but thin gray stuff like you have on an iPad. However, I understood the thing about the touchpad: Use one finger, and works like a touchpad used to; it moves the arrow / curser, like moving a mouse. Use two fingers, and it scrolls the text, as on the iPad (or the "hand tool" on the Mac). So, you must switch: first use one finger to place the cursor over the scrollable area (which would have had scrollbars before), and two to flick the text up or down as on the iPad / iPhone. Yes, OK, I can get used to that, but what I miss both here and on the iPad is the ability to drag the scrollbar very quickly to the bottom of a long text, here you have to flick and flick one screenful at a time. Tedious over 150 pages.

A couple of other less than fascinating things: On the old machines, I have held back from upgrading Safari beyond 5.0, because 5.1 broke with Evernote web clipper, which I use more than the things Safari introduced in 5.1. Lion's Safari is 5.1, but Evernote should have a new clipper for Lion. It does work, but ufortunately not properly (like the clip to bookmark alternative in Snow Leopard): It cannot collect a complex web page like an Amazon page, previously saved as it was, here it only captures some confused snippets of text. Not good, since I do that a lot, I hope they fix it, or I will have to find another method for saving web pages in a structured way.

The Air does not come with a remote, like all Macs used to, and which is important since I wanted it to use it for Powerpoints in lectures. So, I tried with my old one (the small white you can hide in the palm of your hand). No effect. And I quickly realized why (like so many before me): The Air does not have the infrared receiver to see the signals from the remote. It is physically impossible to use a remote with it. Strange, since that is surely one of the main reasons people buy tiny computers like this, to carry along for presentations. You can use your iPhone as a remote with the Keynote Remote app, but I could do that with the iPad, and the iPhone is not invisible in a lecturer's hand. So, I will probably stay with the iPad (or park one of the old MacBooks, which can use the remote, permanently at my office for this purpose, we will see). Kind of deflating to discover after you bought the machine.

Finally, for the same powerpoint purpose, or for connecting the Air to the TV, at least I did not need new connectors (I have a plethora for the MacBooks: for VGA, HDMI and S/Video); they still use the same mini-connectors; or rather, it is now Thunderbolt, but that can use the mini-to-VGA connector from before. So, I tried that then. No, it didn't - the connector's plug was twice as big and did not fit at all into the Air's Thunder socket. Consternation, is there such as thing as a micro-DVI? No, it clearly says mini, both for MacBook 2007, and Air/Thunderbolt. But they are clearly not the same! Then, dawn: read more closely: the old was "mini-DVI to VGA connector". The new was "mini-Displayport to VGA connector". Not the same thing, they switched over without telling me in 2008. So all my old connectors are out, I have to replace at least those I still use. Bummer number 2, although a minor one; it is acceptable that such hardware moves on after five years. But they could have found more distinctive names than call both "mini-Dsomething to VGA".

That ended Day 2. Spaces, Command Panel or whatever it is called and further new things left to discover, and probably more things that does not work as it used to.

To be continued.