QA. Look into it. Then perhaps you’ll learn about things like “iTunes 10.6 can’t see my iPhone 4S” before you release. There’s not a lot I can do about usbmuxd core-dumping.

The key error seems to be when you start up the new iTunes:

3/7/12 4:34:18 PM	iTunes[10876]	_SubscribeForMuxNotifications (thread 0xb081b000): USBMuxListenerCreate: Connection refused

[Update: you have to reboot your machine to get it to work. Nice.]

In Lion, there is a single global setting for “applications reopen every document that was open the last time you launched them”. The intent is to blur the distinction between putting your computer to sleep and rebooting it, and is supposed to mesh seamlessly with the new “silently save every change you make to a document, requiring you to restore from previous versions to undo them” and “relaunch every open application on reboot” (which does not have a global on/off setting; you have to override the default every time you shut down).

In Lion, they’re poorly-tested “version 1.0” code that have caused a lot of people to revert to Snow Leopard or simply not upgrade. But Apple knows the best way for you to work, so even if the design is flawed and the implementation is broken, you’re stuck with it (much like the initially-broken-and-still-a-bit-flaky Spotlight replaced the search systems from earlier releases).

So, enter RestoreMeNot and iKluge’s login hook, which get rid of two of these annoying misfeatures. Sadly, only Apple can fix the brain damage in their autosave implementation, and they seem to be too busy pushing everyone into iCloud.

Note that the installation method for iKluge’s fix is a really bad idea, and I’ve reproduced his run-once shell script below.

#!/bin/bash
echo "#!/bin/bash" > /tmp/loginfix.sh
echo "rm /Users/*/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*" >> /tmp/loginfix.sh
mv /tmp/loginfix.sh /usr/bin/loginfix.sh
chmod +x /usr/bin/loginfix.sh
defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /usr/bin/loginfix.sh

It used to be that the phrase “Mac marginalization” referred to poor support for Mac users by peripheral makers, bank web sites, etc.

Now that Apple has announced that the now-annual OS releases will accelerate the iPadification of the Mac user interface and dependence on iCloud, it appears that Apple will be doing most of the marginalizing.

Although they do promise that Mountain Lion will be renaming applications for consistency, so the fact that Preview silently modifies your documents should cause them to rename it FuckWith.

OS X Lion apparently changed the cookie storage format in one of the recent minor releases. If you use Safari 5.1.x under Snow Leopard, cookies are in Apple’s well-defined Plist format, which is generally stored as XML. If you use Lion, that file still exists, but the actual cookie storage has moved to binary garbage.

Not the Core Storage model they usually push on everyone, which is a perfectly sensible SQLite database, but an on-disk representation of the NSHTTPCookieStorage class, containing a mix of big-endian and little-endian data. Use Apple’s method calls to read and write it, or prepare yourself for pain.

(via jwz, who is quite naturally baffled by this giant leap into the Nineties)

Siri has a bit of a problem with foreign names.

From the comments on Macintouch:

"How much other Lion functionality depends on guessing that if you wave the rod with the star a crystal bridge will span the chasm?"

I said, “Find me a picture of Seven of Nine”.

Siri passed the request on to Google, who came back with this:

That’ll do. (source)

For the past several releases, Mail.app has had a problem where it creates multiple offline drafts of a message that stick around after the message is sent successfully. Usually, I just clean them out when I spot them, no big deal.

Today it happened with a message that contained a number of rather large binary attachments (~30 megabytes), which I was sending to my Sony Tablet as a test. The test went fine at the office, but when I got home and plugged my computer in, the Internet went away.

Mail.app was frantically trying to upload four copies of the huge draft message to my IMAP server, and completely saturating my uplink. The only way to fix it was to force-quit Mail and empty out the contents of the .OfflineCache directory for that account. This was, of course, not the first solution I tried. Grrr.