02 - apple imac lion os problems

The LION MESS I AM IN - JULY 2011

From a person who is trying to do work easilyand now cannot with the new OS Lion

Report by: John R. Knight

28th July 2011

with additional Material added 7th August 2011

This is a personal report from my ownfirst hand experience on my iMac with Lion.

We also have a MacBook Pro and this also failed ina BIG way whilst in China - see my later report

labelled Item 6

The good things are few!

1. Autosave could be good, as you need to save documents like Pages and Numbers regularly and there was a facility in Microsoft and not Apple. But I have to say it autosaves when rotating photos, before one has decided one wants to save it - That IS bad. I also think that all the autosaving is what’s slowing everything down. I don’t like how pages works now - see below.

2. The new diary - Great new look - Not found anything wrong with this so far3. The new calendars - Great new look, but see below - Functionality not at all helpful.

For me it’s slow and unworkable.4. The mail that has shown my unread emails after all this time and now the new mail

found them and had unread numbers next to those mailboxes. This is a two year old problem that mobileMe was unable to solve. Their chatline way of solving problems is unworkable.

5. The spelling suggestions like my iPhone 4 - Great IF you are looking at the screen. If not it’s a disaster.

The bad things - It’s a long list from only a few days using Lion.

1. On restoring all my documents when my machine came back from repair, the new machine wouldn’t authorise me to move my own documents. this also happened when I first purchased Apple. I had to get Apple Technical help to sort it out, which took 17 hours of not being able to use the iMac and then it froze overnight and I had to press the OFF button to get my iMac back. Apple need to sort this out. When you transfer documents into the HDD it should treat them as yours and give you relevant permissions. When restoring from Time Machine why did it lose all my permissions? It should have transferred them in. This is a really BIG negative in switching to apple. A a result of the latest problem I lost a whole day’s work. I doubt that this is fixed in Lion.

2. Autosave - It autosaves when rotating photos, before one has decided one wants to save it - That IS bad and there is now no save facility in the file menu

3. The finder window no longer tells us how many files/folders in each folder - That IS a nuisance when comparing folders on say Time Machine and the Main iMac, or copying files and folders over from another place - It was a very useful double check.

4. I liked the old window panes called SPACES, where I could easily drag stuff to a new window. With the new Mission Control, the windows are far too small to see, so not really practical.

5. Switching from one program to the other takes between 30 seconds to several minutes. I wanted to urgently print a compliments slip before going out one morning and after 20 minutes, Pages was still not open. It had opened when I returned an hour later, but that was too late, as I wanted to print it and take it with me.

6. My colleague tells me that his mail takes so long to open on Lion on his MacBook Pro that he can go make a cup of tea. At first he Force Quite it several times as the coloured wheel never stopped going round. This was unhelpful, so he now goes off and loses work time.

7. I am fed up, of looking at the coloured spinning wheel and forever waiting for things to happen. I am so frustrated at all the wasted time. This machine is slower than I remember windows 3 was!

8. If you have to attach a file to a mail, then it is frustratingly slow. It takes forever coming up with the folder view to view the files.

9. If you change to another programme to check something it takes several minutes on most occasions now.

10. It shows flagged mails from several years ago - I don't want to show them as flagged in today's mail window - this is a bad feature in my opinion. They were flagged then and not now. The idea of flagging is that one can see them in the folder they were filed in, when you take a look at that folder. Now they glare at you in the main window. WHY?

The LION MESS - JULY 2011From a person who is trying to do work easily and now cannot with the new OS Lion

Report by: John R. Knight28th July 2011

©JohnR.Knight July 2011

11. The email address suggestions in Mail under Lion take forever to show.12. Only a few, but some emails that I file keep popping back into the inbox again. I think

this is a sync problem with MobileMe which in my view was always flakey.13. The spam part of mail never learns after clicking that it's NOT spam. It continues to

put them in the spam box which is really irritating. There STILL isn't anywhere to add them as white emails to help it along. Microsoft had this feature in Outlook years ago! I have now given up on any spam folders and ticked to go in the inbox.

14. I have just wasted 5 minutes looking at the coloured wheel whilst trying to file a scanned PDF document. After 5 minutes I gave up and copied it to where I wanted and then went back and deleted the original. You can't get more frustrated than watching this messy way of having to work. I just tried a second scan and that dragged and dropped without any problem and no coloured spinning wheels after changing from mail. But the letters I just typed in on this bullet point emailed to Apple took a long time to appear on the screen.

15. Mail still occasionally leaves a DRAFT in the draft box even after the message appears in the SENT box. Before, it left them all in there! I find this TOTALLY frustrating and would have thought that this should have been fixed by now. It wastes a lot of time double checking that it was sent. When doing a lot of emails you can have several to check - It's time Apple did something about this poor functionality.

16. It has taken two attempts and several minutes just to copy my colleague in on the email, which was originally sent to apple. (This is now an expanded version). The coloured wheel just went on for ages while it came up with several alternatives to choose from. I believe that the autosave is slowing the normally quick functions down.

17. Spellcheck - I think the old way is probably best for me, as I do NOT look at the screen and at first I sent some odd things out since the new system had altered words to complete rubbish in the context of what I was trying to type. I am now NOT happy with this new functionality. The old way was better as you could be in control of each miss-spelling.

18. The other morning on my MacBook Pro it took ONE HOUR to delete three email accounts. That mail system was worse than the one on my desktop iMac.

19. Firefox and Address book also crash - It's ridiculous. How can they release such a terrible operating system?

20. I also don't think much thought has gone into Mission Control - Spaces was much better. Also, the icons on the top are not in window order. They are also far too small to see, even on my 24” iMac! The old spaces were in window order, the same as were allocated. Mission Control is all over the place. I would love to have Spaces back, as Mission Control is not useable in my opinion.

21. See printing problems section below - I am now unable to print my cards from hallmark Studio. There are also problems printing the PDF file of the same card. So, I am stuck. I have wasted several hours trying to print two birthday cards and two bank statements. this is totally unproductive.

22. Keynote & PowerPoint crashed as did Mail when opening an attachment. It seems not to cope anymore when opening attachments at the wrong time. Again, I think it may be at the same time as when it’s autosaving.

23. The new pages has lost the save as button - see report below. This creates more work and lost productivity.

24. The new address book is not very practical - see report below.




25. I lost a Skype business call as I couldn’t get to the window that was ringing - the Skype window, to open - all I got was a coloured spinning wheel. When I got to it, it had rung off. I called the person back. At one stage we needed to discuss an email that I had sent to them, but Mail wouldn’t open the email. That day, it was taking 5 minutes to do anything with any message, which is quite unacceptable. During this attempt, Skype lost our call as it was not responding. This has NEVER happened before Lion came along. The crash of the SKYPE business call is totally unacceptable as is the inability to open a message when I have a person on the phone. Has Lion been tested in a real life environment? I had to continue the call with my IPhone 4 which worked a treat and in video too! But, I still couldn’t open that email to discuss it even though I was not now on Skype on my iMac.

Summary

Everything takes far too long. Some useful features have been ditched and others not so useful and in fact cause confusion. The file count and the SPACES window panes were great, so why were they ditched? I am totally frustrated with this iMac and it takes several minutes do do what used to be blisteringly quick when I changed to Apple just over three years ago.

Conclusion

I was going to buy a Macbook Pro to take to China, but in view of all the hassle with my iMac and that it's now worse since Lion, I now may wait till I get there and buy a cheap windows Laptop.

I loved Apple, especially when we got struck by lightening three years ago in Spain. Apple replaced the machine under warranty and I restored from my Time Machine around 350 GB of data and Applications in about 1.5 hours. I was able to use my files before it came using the MacBookPro. I felt this was great as Microsoft had nothing like it.

But now, I cannot stand the sheer frustration of my productively now being 10% of what it used to be when I first changed to Apple just over three years ago.

We haven't time to twiddle our thumbs or go make a cup of tea, whilst the LION decides to open something or do something. All these things used to be instantaneous. Snow Leopard was slower than the OS that came with this iMac, but we put up with it.

All in all Lion is a disaster for us and we cannot work like this. I have a lot of work to do to get off to China and no time for all these problems. The loss of my machine the other week caused havoc along with all the file problems afterwards that meant I couldn't use the machine for another day. It was in repair for three days as well. So, I am trying to catch up with all the lost work. I cannot spend any more time on sorting this iMac out by rolling back to Snow Leopard.

Everything I do now takes 20 minutes instead of seconds. I switched to Apple three years ago as I was fed up of Microsoft. I am now so fed up of Apple I shall consider switching back.

I hate Lion and I am beginning to despair of Apple. I cannot afford all this lost productivity. I have got very little work done since installing Lion. I may still have to spend the time going back to Snow Leopard - All more wasted time!

I believe that Apple never look at the productivity side of things for a business and so this is why there is such a shortfall in Lion for business users like us. Apple need to take account of how businesses work. I ask again, has Lion been tested in a real life environment?

Final word: I USED TO BE so happy with Apple, but no longer.




Various Additional Reports

PRINTER (Lexmark)

The printer no longer prints Hallmark Cards or PDF Documents and always comes up with THIS message below to say there is a “Paper Size Mismatch”.

I have spent hours trying to print two birthday cards and some bank statements.

Again, a total mess and total loss of my productivity.

Both were simple two minute jobs before I upgraded to Lion.

Also, the Lexmark doesn’t work at all well with any Mac OS. I shall never buy a Lexmark again. Both my Brother printers worked straight away with full functionality. The Lexmark has limited functionality with Apple and also the apple Image Capture can’t work properly with my Lexmark Pinnacle pro 901.

With Lion printing on my Lexmark is now a worse nightmare.




PAGES

There is no longer a “Save As” and you have to Duplicate and save. This takes longer to do. Everything with Lion takes longer.

In the old days of punch rooms, at work, we measured keystrokes per hour. If we did this with Apple, we would cringe, as Lion has created so much extra work and lowered productivity.




The NEW Contact Address Book

It looks good but lacks the functionality of the old one and is not easy to use.

In the old one, you created a NEW contact and you could drag it into any group easily and that was it.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to get a new entry into a group with the new version - It’s totally ridiculous that someone in apple never thought this out.

My thoughts are that I want the old one back.

Then I suddenly found out that although the machine showed it was syncing on the top bar with the little wheel going round, I suddenly realised that , it had not synced - see screen save below, which says “Never Syncronized”.

Why is the sync wheel going round in that case if it’s not doing anything?I could have lost all my updates - They are supposed to be on MobileMe.Why didn’t it pick up the settings from Snow Leopard?




KEYNOTE & POWERPOINT

I opened a mail attachment which was PPS and that crashed both mail and PPS and then couldn't do anything with the whole iMac so turned it off and restarted it.

I then opened the attachment with Keynote instead of PPS and the message below appeared. I tried a number of times and the same message appeared.

I then opened Keynote on it's own and the introductory screen came up, quickly followed by the same message. Whatever happened that day keynote crashed.




MAIL - ADDRESS - CONTACT CARD OPTION

You have to try this several times for the card to open so you can click to look at the address book entry. Usually I want to edit the address book just to make a simple alteration. It’s not simple anymore with LION!

There should be a tab to go directly to the address book. That’s how it worked before. Then, it worked fantastically well and quite quickly!

This is yet another example of Apple slowing down productivity by having to click extra times. It sometimes take 5 minutes to get to see the address book!

This new functionality is hopeless for a user in a hurry.

Additional Problems with LION

28th July 2011

This appears all through the day now!

Apple may say that I have a lot of application running, but it’s strange how it never caused any problems in the old Leopard! Even with Adobe Creative Suite 4 running!!!

(Even the above sentence took a long time to appear on the screen as it started a save in the middle of it! Saves should be done in background mode.)


28th July 2011

Mail does NOT work well anymore since installing LION! Apple need to sort it out. All these were not-responding: -

MAILPAGESADRESS BOOK

I got fed up and went to make a cup of tea - that's how bad it was!

In my opinion, LION needs withdrawing as it's hopeless.


28th July 2011

Couldn’t open pages to add this screen shot …

It finally opened when I force quite Firefox which by then was also causing problems.LION doesn’t seem to work with very many applications!


28th July 2011

MAIL AGAIN

The new MAIL has a sort facility which I thought would be great.

It’s poor in actual fact, because when you sort by “TO” it does sort them, but only shows the “FROM”! What use is that?

It should show Tim Craddock and not John Knight. So, you cannot see and find the “TO” people!


28th July 2011

FIREFOX HAD TO BE FORCED QUIT

In between Pages was not responding. It then responded so I started typing and nothing went on the screen as it was saving and a save box popped up.

This is no good.

I have had to force quite Firefox to get other things done.


28th July 2011

The cause of all the trouble is this …

You used to be able to click the screen corner and grab a window - You can’t any more!

Even when you click “Log in to Xmarks” it still stays hidden.

This never happened before Lion.

So, Firefox is now not usable until I can solve the puzzle of how to get it into the middle of the screen. Eventually, I did this by closing the main tab.

I also think Firefox needs looking at as XMARKS causes no end of problems and I don't even know what it is!


28th July 2011

A quick look would seem to indicate that no folders have been lost, only files.

The new LION OS no longer puts numbers on the bottom of the folders so we cannot compare the copy with the original for EACH folder.

The loss of these numbers in LION is a catastrophe. Another LION disaster.

The left hand one is on the internal drive and the right hand one is on the external drive.

It’s unacceptable not to have the numbers shown anymore on each folder.

With those numbers I could easily have found the 18 lost files!

Copying MacBook Pro Documents to a HDD prior to moving to China

Sunday 7th August (NOON)

18 Items Lost - Not copied, but which ones?

02 - apple imac lion os problems

Documents

new mail

new window

new diary great new

new calendars great

new machine wouldnt

new os lionreport

new mission control

time machine