Update: see OS X 10.5.7 overheats some Macs.

Apple’s OS X 10.5.7 update is dangerously unpredictable. Although many Mac users have updated without incident, many others have had nothing but trouble. Friends’ problems range from dead hard drives to frazzled MacBooks to freezes and beyond. In my case, the update destabilized both my home and office iMacs and the backup drives attached to them. Symptoms include:

• Multiple applications freeze inexplicably. Force-quitting does not work. The only way to move forward is to hold the power button for several seconds until the machine is forced to shut down.
• The Finder quits mysteriously and cannot restart.
• In normal mode, restarts time out (forcing you to hold the power button and pray no data was damaged or lost).
• In safe mode, restarts freeze (forcing you to hold the power button and pray no data was damaged or lost).
• The machines cannot communicate reliably with attached hard drives. (Backups fail in mid-activity. Attached hard drives disconnect themselves. Attached hard drives cannot be unmounted for repairs. And so on.)
• Lower-case letters replace capital letters when pasting copied text from one application to another. Yes, really.

These problems affected two iMacs and three connected hard drives by various manufacturers in two locations on separate networks. The only connecting thread is the OS X update.

Friends and readers have recommended various familiar techniques to “fix” the problem, but none of them have worked for me. The proposed fixes include:

Shut down everything. Disconnect printers, remove drives, iPod docks, and so on, from the iMac. Restart the iMac.

If a remote device or connection were at fault, this would reveal it. No such luck.

Restart in single Mode (hold down Control-S), type “fsck – fy” at the command line, and type “reboot” after repairs.

This is readily doable, but fixes nothing. There is nothing to repair. The computer in Single Mode indicates that the hard drive is fine.

Reboot from the install disks, run Disk Utility, and repair the internal hard drive.

Same deal: there is nothing to repair. The internal hard drive is fine, according to Disk Utility.

Run Disk Utility on attached back-up drives, and hit “Repair” until the attached drives are fixed.

There is nothing to repair on attached back-up drives, either (even though they fail). When it isn’t failing to operate because “it is impossible to unmount the drive,” Disk Utility reports that attached back-up drives are fully operational. Although Disk Utility finds nothing wrong with attached drives, they fail mid-way through back-up; thus it is impossible to back up work or home Macs, making it likely that I will lose work or data. Symptoms affect all attached drives, regardless of manufacturer and model.

Restart in Safe Mode and run the Combination Installer.

I’ve done that, too; it does not fix the problem. The update is either unstable in itself, or incompatible with the Mac’s own hardware (or with some very common third-party system addition).

And lots more stuff.

Twitter and the Apple forums contain the complaints of users whose computers have gone blooey after installing the update. Apple, of course, does not respond to these complaints.

At the moment, my options are:

1. Put up with the freezes and quitting and the inability to back up my work, and trust that Apple will issue a system update soon that returns stability to my machines, and that I won’t lose work or data in the meantime. Or…
2. Reinstall the original operating system from any installation disk. Run the combo updater. Test for two days to see if the system operates. Connect printers and backup drives. Test for two more days to see if all is well. Then painstakingly reinstall Photoshop, Illustrator, Office, and so on.

With one option, I’m continually frustrated and risk losing my work. With the other option, I lose four or five days reinstalling and testing operating systems, updates, and software.

I choose Apple’s products because they are elegant in every aspect of their design—especially the design of the user experience. Screw-ups like this update are the antithesis of the normal Apple user experience. While no one deliberately decided to make an unusable update, and while probably no one will die as a result, it’s still a very frustrating situation.

Filed under: Apple, Applications

Issue No. 273 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, looks at web design from both sides now:

Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA

by KEITH LAFERRIERE

IA is about selling ideas effectively, designing with accuracy, and working with complex interactivity to guide different types of customers through website experiences. The more your client knows about IA’s processes and deliverables, the likelier the project is to succeed.

Getting Real About Agile Design

by CENNYDD BOWLES

Agile development was made for tough economic times, but does not fit comfortably into the research-heavy, iteration-focused process designers trust to deliver user- and brand-based sites. How can we update our thinking and methods to take advantage of what agile offers?

About the magazine

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Issue No. 273 was edited by Krista Stevens with Erin Kissane and Carolyn Wood; produced by Erin Lynch; art-directed by Jason Santa Maria; illustrated by Kevin Cornell; technical-edited by Aaron Gustafson, Ethan Marcotte, Daniel Mall, and Eric Meyer; and published by Happy Cog.

Tags: agiledevelopment, agiledesign, informationarchitecture, scope, scopecreep, managing, client, expectations, alistapart, forpeoplewhomakewebsites

Filed under: A List Apart, Advocacy, Applications, Career, Design, Information architecture, Standards, Tools, UX, Usability, User Experience, Working, architecture, business, client services, development, experience, work

A proposal for a fonts working group is under discussion at the W3C. The minutes of a small meeting held on Thursday 23 October include a condensed, corrected transcription of a discussion between Sampo Kaasila (Bitstream), Mike Champion (Microsoft), John Daggett (Mozilla), Håkon Wium Lie (Opera), Liam Quin (W3C), Bert Bos (W3C), Alex Mogilevsky (Microsoft), Josh Soref (Nokia), Vladimir Levantovsky (Monotype), Klaas Bals (Inventive Designers), and Richard Ishida (W3C).

The meeting started with a discussion of Microsoft’s EOT (Embedded OpenType) versus raw fonts. Bert Bos, style activity lead and co-creator of CSS, has beautifully summarized the relevant pros and cons discussed.

For those just catching up with the issue of real type on the web, here’s a bone-simple intro:

1. CSS provides a mechanism for embedding real fonts on your website, and some browsers support it, but its use probably violates your licensing agreement with the type foundry, and may also cause security problems on an end-user’s computer.
2. Microsoft’s EOT (based on the same standard CSS mechanism) works harder to avoid violating your licensing agreement, and has long worked in Internet Explorer, but is not supported in other browsers, is not foolproof vis-a-vis type foundry licensing rules, and may also cause PC security problems.

The proposed fonts working group hopes to navigate the technical and business problems of providing real fonts on the web, and in its first meeting came up with a potential compromise proposal before lunch.

Like everyone these days, the W3C is feeling a financial pinch, which means, if a real fonts working group is formed, its size and scope will necessarily be somewhat limited. That could be a good thing, since small groups work more efficiently than large groups. But a financial constraint on the number of invited experts could make for tough going where some details are concerned—and with typography, as with web technology, the details are everything.

I advise every web designer who cares about typography and web standards—that’s all of you, right?—to read the minutes of this remarkable first gathering, and to keep watching the skies.

Tags: web typography, typography, standards, webstandards, W3C, fonts, embedded, @fontface, EOT, workinggroup

Filed under: Accessibility, Applications, Browsers, Code, Community, Fonts, Ideas, Layout, Standards, Tools, Typography, Usability, User Experience, W3C, Working, architecture, art direction, bugs, business, content, copyright, creativity, industry, links, spec, stealing

Tags: apple, ichat, firewall, hivelogic, danbenjamin, zeldman

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Filed under: Accessibility, Apple, Applications, Design, bugs, people

Between hurricanes and hericanes, you could easily have missed the technology news. Released yesterday in public beta, Google Chrome is a standards-compliant web browser created to erode Microsoft’s browser dominance (i.e. to boost Google’s web dominance) while also rethinking what a browser is and does in the age of web apps and Google’s YouTube.

The new browser is based on Webkit, the advanced-standards-compliant, open source browser engine that powers Apple’s Safari for Mac and PC, but Chrome currently runs only in Windows. You figure that out.

Here are the new browser’s terms of service.

And here’s an important early bug report from Jeremy Jarratt: Google Chrome wrongly displays alternate styles as if active, thus “breaking” websites that use them. (Here’s more about alternate style sheets, from Paul Sowden’s groundbreaking 2001 A List Apart article.)

To compete with Microsoft, the new browser must offer what other browsers do not. The risk inherent in that proposition is a return to proprietary browser code. It is not yet clear to me whether Chrome will compete the wrong way—offering Chrome-only features based on Chrome-only code, thus prompting Microsoft to rethink its commitment to standards—or the right way.

Competing by offering features other browsers do not (easier downloads, streamlined user interface) or by consolidating other browsers’ best features (Opera’s Speed Dial, Firefox’s auto-complete) avoids this risk, as improvements—or at any rate, changes—to the browser’s user interface have no bearing on the display of existing web content.

Competing by supporting web standards ahead of the pack, although not entirely without risk, would also be a reasonable and exciting way to compete. When one browser supports a standard, it goads other browser makers into also supporting it. Because Safari, for instance, supports @font-face, Firefox is not far behind in supporting that CSS spec. @font-face raises font licensing problems, but we’ll discuss those another time. The risk that concerns us here is when a browser supports an emerging specification before it is finalized, thus, essentially, freezing the spec before it is ready. But that is the traditional dance between spec authors and browser makers.

For web standards and web content, we once again live in interesting times. Welcome, Chrome!

Tags: google, chrome, googlechrome, beta, software, browsers, standards, webbrowsers, webstandards, bugs, standards-compliant, alternatestyles, alternatecss

Filed under: A List Apart, Ajax, Applications, Browsers, Design, Google, Microsoft, bugs, chrome

It’s back, it’s improved, and it’s hungry for your data. It’s A List Apart’s second annual survey for people who make websites.

Last year nearly 33,000 of you took the survey, enabling us to begin figuring out what kinds of job titles, salaries, and work situations are common in our field.

This year’s survey corrects many of last year’s mistakes, with more detailed and numerous questions for freelance contractors and owners of (or partners in) small web businesses. There are also better international categories, and many other improvements recommended by those who took the survey last year.

Please take the survey and encourage your friends and colleagues who make websites to do likewise.

[Comments off. Pings on.]

Tags: survey, web design survey, webdesign, webdevelopment, professional, alistapart

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Filed under: A List Apart, Accessibility, Applications, Career, Community, Design, Diversity, Happy Cog™, Ideas, Standards, Survey, UX, User Experience, Web Design, Working, architecture, art direction, business, client services, content, development, experience, industry, work, writing

Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.

I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu levels is as simple as pointing to your files and folders. If the client changes the approved site structure after you’ve already created your page templates, no problem: just drag files and folders to their changed locations and CSS Menu Writer will update your navigation.

The program comes with four horizontal and four vertical menus, each in 12 different color schemes—96 menus to start—with unlimited sub-levels. You can easily create Doug-Bowman-style “sliding doors” effects, as well as doing all the obvious stuff you’d expect to be able to do, like changing menu width, height, margin, and padding; swapping backgrounds and images; and saving custom creations as new presets to reedit or share with colleagues. The program also integrates easily with Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor.

CSS Menu Writer costs $99.99, but if you buy before May 27, it’s just $74.99.

Tags: webdesign, tools, software, webassist, css

Filed under: Accessibility, Adobe, Applications, CSS, Code, Design, Tools, Web Design, WebAssist, architecture, client services, development, eric meyer, work

Issue No. 257 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is about the why and how of Ruby on Rails:

Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails

by Michael Slater

The “why” of Ruby on Rails comes down to productivity, says Michael Slater. Web applications that share three characteristics—they’re database-driven, they’re new, and they have needs not well met by a typical CMS—can be built much more quickly with Ruby on Rails than with PHP, .NET, or Java, once the investment required to learn Rails has been made. Does your web app fall within the RoR “sweet spot?”

Getting Started With Ruby on Rails

by Dan Benjamin

The “how” of Ruby on Rails: Hivelogic’s Dan Benjamin prepares non-Rails developers, designers, and other creative professionals for their first foray into Rails. Learn what Ruby on Rails is (and isn’t), and where it fits into the spectrum of web development and design. See through the myths surrounding this powerful young platform, and learn how to approach working with it.

Tags: alistapart, rubyonrails, webdesign, development, RoR, ruby

Filed under: Applications, Design, Ruby on Rails, development

WordPress 2.5, designed by Happy Cog and built by Automattic, has been released. Download and enjoy.

Tags: wordpress, wordpress2.5, 2.5, happycog, automattic, blogs, blogging, tools

Filed under: Applications, Blogs and Blogging, Design, Happy Cog™, Tools, automattic, business, client services, industry, wordpress, work

If “Our Broken Borders” should someday turn into a ratings loser for CNN’s Lou Dobbs, perhaps he can switch to “The Dwindling Productivity of the American Worker: Is Facebook Sapping Our National Vigor?”

Like comic books, rock and roll, heavy metal, gangsta rap, gaming, and MySpace, the web is no longer an easy card for parent-scaring pundits and politicians to play. But social networking sites AKA community-focused web applications AKA “web 2.0″ can still be blamed for a variety of social ills. That they are actually blameless doesn’t matter. The truth never matters in this game.

And since it’s easier to say “Facebook” than “the aggregate of new social networking sites and applications such as Flickr and Twitter,” there’s every chance that Facebook will take the whipping for the entire category.

That this will actually increase Facebook’s market value is known but won’t matter to the people who pretend to be outraged about “the Facebook generation” or “social not-working” or whatever the pundits end up calling the “crisis.”

The same thing happened when religious authorities tried to ban “Carnal Knowledge,” “The Exorcist,” “Hail Mary,” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.” In every case, people who otherwise wouldn’t have bought tickets for these films, showed up, lined up, and even bought popcorn.

At least “The Exorcist” was entertaining.

And of course, parental outrage and the PMRC have sold plenty of rap and metal.

If Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking apps get boosted by fake outrage, they’ll acquire more investors. And they’ll need them, since all these applications run at a loss, and all of them suffer from terrible scaling problems.

The scaling problems will grow worse as the apps become more popular; investors will buy smaller and smaller pieces of a less and less viable business concern; and when it pops, we’ll be back to the bird flu movie of the week.

So the planet warms and the Kenyans kill their neighbors and we tweet about nothing and hope the servers hold out.

Tags: socialnetworking, loudobbs, cnn, facebook, twitter, web2.0, applications, webapps

Filed under: Applications, Community, facebook, industry, social networking, twitter, work