Apple Bug Friday XXX-XXXII

Friday, 2006-02-17; 23:39:00



OK, so today I have three insects to describe.

XXX: .mac synching. I'd been having trouble with .mac synching of my Mail accounts for a long time. Each time I would sync, it would say that all 5 of my Mac OS X Mail accounts would have to be modified. I'd always let them be changed, but it appeared as if nothing would ever change. I would go back and forth between my work and home computer, and it would always modify my accounts. That should never happen because that's exactly what's supposed to be solved with synching, but whatever.

The solution was to go to the .mac preference pane, go to the Advanced tab, click the "Reset Sync Data..." button, select only my mail account data to be reset, and then tell it to substitute the data on .mac with the data on my home computer.

The problem is, when resetting a particular type of sync data, it doesn't automatically cause a reset sync to happen on all other synced computers! This is bad form. In my situation, I have both my home and work computer to automatically synchronize every hour. So within an hour after I did a reset sync with my home computer, my work computer automatically synchronized with the new data on .mac, and repopulated it with bad data, making the problem come back again! Arg! I was having some annoying problems with my contacts not synchronizing either, and the same thing happened -- my .mac Address Book contacts are now re-poisoned, and my home computer keeps asking me if I want to modify 60 of my contacts with bad data. NO I DO NOT! Grr.

A reset sync on one computer used to trigger a reset sync on another computer when using iSync before Mac OS X Tiger. But now that .mac syncing is built-in to the operating system, it seems that this is no longer the case. Boo. Filed: 4450249.

[UPDATE: Weird. I infrequently sync a couple of other computers around the house, like my account on my dad's laptop when I'm logged in. Today I just used his laptop for a sec and when I initiated a sync, it notified me that there had been a reset sync on one of the other computers. So why doesn't it appear on my work or home Macs? I initiated a reset sync on both of them, and neither of them showed an alert about the reset sync from the other.]

XXXI: Related to the first problem, I've found another problem that I frequently encounter. When I was trying to reset the sync data, the Advanced tab in the .mac preference pane would frequently lock up and not do anything for a minute or two. I'm not talking about waiting a minute or two for the list of registered computers to finish loading, I'm talking about System Preferences hanging with the spinning beachball. I frequently got impatient and simply force quit System Preferences. Also annoying. Also filed in this bug report is the fact that the "Reset Sync Data..." button isn't enabled until AFTER the list of registered computers finishes loading. This is lame -- there's no reason why a user shouldn't be able to immediately initiate a reset sync and then be able to walk away from his Mac and let it login to .mac and sync at its leisure. Instead, it has to wait for his Mac to login to .mac and get the list of computers before initiating a reset sync. Filed: 4450253.

XXXII: Also about .mac synching: as of Mac OS X 10.4.4, the read and unread status of your RSS feeds in your Safari bookmarks should be synced. This is a lie. This feature simply does not work for me, even after a reset sync of my Safari bookmarks. What gives? Filed: 4450254.

You might also want to check out my immediate next entry, Enigmo 2 Bug Friday, for more insect-y goodness!


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