If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with my iOS5 installation difficulties. Two days into the process, and I’ve still not been able to update either my iPad (first generation) or iPhone 4. This is—by far—the most frustrated I’ve been with any Apple upgrade, ever…and that covers a lot of history!

Simply as a means of venting, and perhaps to save someone else from going through what I’ve gone through (though note that I haven’t yet solved the problem), here’s what I’ve gone through to try to upgrade my iPhone and iPad.

Update: On my 48th attempt, my iPhone 4 successfully updated to iOS5. Now, on to the iPad…

First, some background…

The Mac which “owns” my iDevices (iPhone 4, iPad 1, and a fifth-generation iPod touch) is a 2011 iMac (3.4GHz Core i7 with 16GB of RAM) running Mac OS X 10.6.8. It has two external displays connected via the Thunderbolt ports (using MiniDisplayPort adapters), as well as some other USB accessories (printer, card reader) plugged into a USB hub. My iPhone connector is typically plugged into this hub, too.

My iPhone 4 is 100% stock, has never been jailbroken, and was purchased on the iPhone 4′s release date last year. My iPad is a 32GB/3G model, bought new on the original release date. It hasn’t ever been jailbroken, but it is used as a development machine at Many Tricks, and as such, is used to run beta releases of iOSes. It is presently running the last beta of iOS5.

After hearing that iOS5 had been released, I thought I’d start the upgrade with my iPhone, figuring it’d be easier than the already-beta-running iPad. Turns out that was a bad assumption. I connected my iPhone and was greeted with the ‘upgrade available’ message in iTunes. I agreed that yes, I wanted the upgrade, then waited for it to download and install.

The first step in the install is a backup, and it’s a rather lengthy one—it took about 10 minutes, I’d guess, on my machine. Once that was done, iTunes expanded the installation package, and then, just as the progress box said “Restoring,” iTunes gave me this…

Not very good news, and not much helpful information there. Ever the optimist, I decided to try the whole process again (unplugged iPhone, connected again, backed up), only to get the same result. I then found this knowledge base article describing general errors and how to resolve them.

The article lists five things to check (latest version of iTunes, up-to-date OS X, disconnect other USB devices, check security settings, and restart the computer), and I did all five. I unplugged every USB device except the iPhone, which I plugged directly into the back of the computer. I restarted. I even reinstalled iTunes 10.5, and redownloaded the iOS5 package, in case either of them were corrupted.

As far as security settings, I run a fairly open network behind my router, but thought I might as well loosen it up as much as possible. So I set my router’s permissions to maximum openness:

That’s about as open as I could possibly make it…and still I got the same result. I tried a bunch of additional times, sometimes letting iTunes do the whole “back it up first” routine, and other times, using Option-clicks on Upgrade (and Restore) to point to the downloaded iOS5 upgrade package. I also emptied caches, changed the iPod connection cable, swapped USB ports on the iMac, restarted again, stuck pins in an Android voodoo doll, and crossed my fingers and toes. All results were the same—abject failures. The results of my efforts for the day were something like 37 iPhone installer crash logs. Sigh.

One time, though, I got a slightly different result. That one time, the upgrade actually started, with a progress dialog on the phone and in iTunes. However, somewhere near the end, I got the same “internal error” message as before, and (oh no!) iTunes left my phone in an unusable (bricked) state:

Sigh. At this point, I gave up. After trying a few more restores to iOS5 (no go), and various combinations of the Home and Power keys, I was done. I Option-clicked the Restore button, and selected the last iOS4 release (4.3.5) for my restoration. Suprisingly, this installed perfectly, and (many many hours later), my phone was restored and functional again.

For a change of pace, I tried upgrading my iPad, using the iOS5 bundle that I downloaded from Apple’s servers. Unfortunately, I got a very similar error message:

This time, though, there was an error number, which led me to this more-detailed knowledge base article. Unfortunately, the entry for error 3002 is less than helpful:

If you experience this error while updating an iPod touch (2nd generation) or iPhone 3G, please use the standard update or restore process in iTunes (click Update or Restore).

Not much help, given I wasn’t updating either of those iDevices. So I gave up on the iPad and just left it running the iOS5 beta, not wanting to risk two bricked devices in one day.

After sleeping off my anger, I decided to try the iPhone again this morning. As I might have expected (were I not eternally optimistic), the results were the same: it wound up bricked again, forcing another restore (which, again, went perfectly) to iOS4.

Below are some closing bits from some of the install error logs; you can see various errors, nothing really consistent, and nothing really useful.

2011-10-13 13:49:42.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: ASR progress: Sending payload
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:14113]: received kAMDeviceDetached action, device 0x1dd57a40
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: : operation 13 progress 46
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: ASR progress: Broken pipe
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: : operation 13 progress 100
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: ASR progress: Finished
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: recv(40, 4) failed: connection closed
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: unable to read message size: -1
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: unable to read message from device
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: AMRAuthInstallDeletePersonalizedBundle
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:2667f]: : Restore failed (result = 9)
2011-10-13 13:49:43.000 iTunes[12610:28647]: iTunes: Restore error 9
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASR RESTORE PROGRESS: 92%
ASR RESTORE PROGRESS: 94%
ASR RESTORE PROGRESS: 96%
ASR RESTORE PROGRESS: 98%
ASR: asr: Image failed signature verification
ASR: asr: Failed to read the stream: Authentication error
ASR: __decompressChunk: backing store read at offset 779353072 length 54796 failed with error 80
ASR: __decompressChunk() error: 80
ASR: __decompressChunk: backing store read at offset 779288576 length 64496 failed with error 80
ASR: __decompressChunk() error: 80
ASR STATUS: fail
AppleUSBDeviceMux::sessionUpcall socket is closed, session 0x83617e18 (12345<-lo0->49164 12345<-usb->11289)
ASR: Could not restore - Authentication error
ASR STATUS: fail
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011-10-13 13:02:54.000 iTunes[12610:1cb37]: AMRAuthInstallDeletePersonalizedBundle
2011-10-13 13:02:55.000 iTunes[12610:1cb37]: : Restore failed (result = 14)
2011-10-13 13:02:55.000 iTunes[12610:1e447]: iTunes: Restore error 14
2011-10-13 13:03:14.000 iTunes[12610:207]: device connected (isDFU = 0)
2011-10-13 13:03:14.000 iTunes[12610:207]: device software does not support nonce generation
2011-10-13 13:03:14.000 iTunes[12610:207]: device software does not support nonce generation
2011-10-13 13:03:14.000 iTunes[12610:207]: iTunes: SCEP 2
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011-10-12 16:21:28.000 iTunes[343:207]: restore library built Sep 2 2011 at 02:05:52
2011-10-12 16:21:28.000 iTunes[343:207]: iTunes: iTunes 10.5
2011-10-12 16:21:28.000 iTunes[343:207]: iTunes: Current software version: 8L1
2011-10-12 16:21:28.000 iTunes[343:207]: iTunes: Software payload version: 9A334 (option key)
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e28b]: iTunes: Specifying Update boot image
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e28b]: *** UUID C6909A85-D335-4455-AA6C-7439506B179A ***
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e28b]: requested restore behavior: Update
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e28b]: amai: _AMAuthInstallBundleCopyBuildIdentityForVariant: variant "Update" isn't published for this device in build manifest
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e28b]: failed to personalize the restore bundle: Entry not found
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e28b]: AMRAuthInstallDeletePersonalizedBundle
2011-10-12 16:21:39.000 iTunes[343:1e193]: iTunes: Restore error 3002
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2011-10-12 13:51:40.000 iTunes[196:207]: restore library built Sep 2 2011 at 02:05:52
2011-10-12 13:51:40.000 iTunes[196:207]: iTunes: iTunes 10.5
2011-10-12 13:51:40.000 iTunes[196:207]: iTunes: Current software version: 8L1
2011-10-12 13:51:40.000 iTunes[196:207]: iTunes: Software payload version: 9A334 (option key)
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1a007]: iTunes: Specifying Update boot image
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1a007]: *** UUID 16AFB217-3D7F-4393-99CE-D2186ABA22E7 ***
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1a007]: requested restore behavior: Update
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1a007]: amai: _AMAuthInstallBundleCopyBuildIdentityForVariant: variant "Update" isn't published for this device in build manifest
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1a007]: failed to personalize the restore bundle: Entry not found
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1a007]: AMRAuthInstallDeletePersonalizedBundle
2011-10-12 13:51:49.000 iTunes[196:1be2b]: iTunes: Restore error 3002

Unfortunately, that’s where the story ends. My iPhone is still running iOS4, and at this point, I’m thinking I may have to try installing the update on another Mac, and then hope I’m able to restore the backup after connecting it back to the iMac. Beyond that, though, I’m all of out ideas.

When Steve Jobs demoed Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, one of the new features included in the revised Desktop is a semi-transparent menu bar. It’s clearly visible in the streaming video of the keynote, and in many of the screenshots on Apple’s Leopard pages.

Now, I’m all for fancy effects, at least where it makes sense and might actually help the user. But in this case, I don’t think it makes sense—look at many of Apple’s own screenshots, and you’ll see that certain entries in the menu bar are quite hard to read, owing to the bad mix of black text, a semi-transparent background, and a dark background image. Instead of being useful, it seems to me that—based on what’s been shown, at least—the semi-transparent menu bar will do nothing but annoy me when I try to find a menu item against a non-cooperative background image. Of course, I won’t know for sure until October when Leopard ships and I can test (and discuss) how well it does or doesn’t work.

Read my Macworld blog entry, This enhancement is not so transparent, for the rest of the story…

The recently-released OS X 10.4.7 update included a not-announced Dashboard widget update feature which silently checks to make sure that your widgets are valid. I agreed with the need for such a feature, but wrote about how I think Apple could have implemented things a bit better.

After a particularly infuriating search effort for the Curious George soundtrack at the iTunes Music Store, I wrote this editorial about the store’s messed up search functions. Oddly enough, the very day we ran the editorial, Apple updated the store’s search functions, and the new functionality addressed every single issue I had raised. Talk about bad timing!

Last week, for the first time since installing iLife ’06, I had an excuse to use the newest version of iDVD. In general, I love it. But someone at Apple made one seemingly insanely poor decision involving the “burn progress” screen:

That’s the screen that appears when you start the encode (if not yet done) and burn of a final DVD. In prior versions of iDVD, this area was a separate tab within the main iDVD interface. Now it’s been attached to a drop-down sheet, as seen above. Within that sheet is a progress bar and a ticker that counts off how many items have been processed.

So far so good, though a progress dialog in a sheet is a somewhat unique concept. But the other change that came with this new sheet is incredibly unwelcomed–you can no longer hide iDVD in any traditional manner. If you try Comamnd-H with iDVD in the foreground, it just beeps at you. If you switch it to the background and then do “Hide Others” from some other app, everything except iDVD hides, and you’ll hear the beep again. I even tried AppleScripting it, with no success.

OK, fine, I thought, I’ll just minimize it to the Dock. Nope. That doesn’t work either. Argh!

Since the sheet is dynamic, my screensaver won’t kick in if it’s visible. So it seems you’re just plain stuck with the iDVD box onscreen, which is an amazingly poor decision on Apple’s part. I finally managed to at least make it non-visible by using Backdrop, a utility that lets you drop a desktop picture (or solid color) down as a layer. So I ran Backdrop, set it to display a nice picture, then switched Backdrop in front of iDVD. iDVD was now hiding behind Backdrop, and since Backdrop takes up the whole screen, I couldn’t accidentally activate iDVD by clicking its window. I could still switch to it with Command-Tab, or by clicking its icon in the Dock, of course. But at least it was out of sight, allowing me to more easily work on other things while it rendered away in the background.

Why oh why can’t we just have Command-H work again, as it did before?!

So let’s assume you’re a big, powerful, corporation, generally viewed as “customer centric” with very cool and useful products. Sometimes, though, you have the occasional ‘what we’re they thinking?’ moment with a product. Let’s further assume your name is, oh, I don’t know, how about…Apple? Here’s yet another of those moments they seem to have with some regularity:

That, in case you’re not familiar with it, is the button in iPhoto toolbar that lets you publish a selection of images to your .Mac homepage. Click it, and a wizard comes up that helps you select the theme, layout options, and other features for your photo page. You then click Publish, and presto, your images are published on your .Mac homepage, complete with a very nice slideshow feature. Presto, bango, simple!

So what’s the problem? Well, that button (and the wizard it launched) has simply vanished in iPhoto6. There’s no discussion about it in the manual, nor in Help, nor in the Read Me, nor in the Knowledge Base. It has simply disappeared into the ether.

Instead of using the handy wizard, you’re now supposed to send all your images through iWeb, which will then force you to create an actual site, just to contain what should be a simple slideshow page. Yech. There is a workaround, which I’ll write up in detail for macosxhints next week. (Short version: export and resize to 800×600, upload the folder to your iDisk, then use the .Mac homepage to create the photo page.) But the workaround is a far cry from the ease of use of the old wizard.

Now personally, I never used this feature, as I don’t use .Mac for my photo pages. However, after recommending the iLife upgrade to my mother, I definitely got an earful about this “new and improved” iPhoto when she found her single most used feature missing in action! Since I feel responsible for the problem she now faces, it’s the least I can do to try to help spread the word about this, and hope Apple can see fit to return a basic feature to the application.

I’ll probably be writing about why this is a Really Bad Thing on macworld.com next week, but I wanted to get something up about it now, while it was fresh on my mind. Of course, based on Apple’s treatment of the discussion I linked to above, I don’t have a positive feeling about the chances of this feature’s return…

Perhaps, though, if enough people make enough noise about it, they can bring back what was a powerful and easy-to-use feature.

Given my background with it, and its role in leading to an unexpected but welcomed career change, I’m clearly a fan of OS X. But sometimes, I really question the quality assurance (QA) testing that goes into the OS and its associated applications. Consider the following glitch I ran into yesterday with Address Book.

Now granted, I don’t run Address Book directly all that often–I usually just use it via Mail and the other programs to which its connected. But yesterday, I was trying to do something with my nearly my full contact list when I ran into a problem (not fatal to the task, but highly annoying). Here’s the problem: Address Book fails to save the scroll thumb location when unselecting entries from the Names list–but only when you’re unselecting entries from anywhere other than the first or last screenful of the list.

That actually sounds quite confusing, so I thought I’d demonstrate with a short movie. Click the image at left for a small version (182×174, 188KB) of the problem demonstration, or you can view the full-size version (364×548, 976KB) if you prefer. The clip first shows how unselects should work, by positioning the thumb at the top and the bottom of the list of names. It then shows what happens when the thumb is elsewhere.

To recreate the problem on your Mac, just follow these simple steps:

1. Launch Address Book, click on any entry in the Names column, then hit Command-A to select all the names.
2. Move the scroll thumb somewhere towards the middle of the list.
3. Hold down Command and click any one name. Watch the scroll thumb leap back to the top of the list.
4. Repeat ad infinitum.

As I noted, this isn’t a fatal bug–it just makes it much tougher to deselect a number of names after selecting all. The bug also doesn’t occur if you’re simply selecting names from the middle of the list; it’s only when you’re deselecting (though it doesn’t have to be from a Select All).

The bigger question is why do we see these types of glitches in many OS X programs? I probably launch Address Book about once a month, and yet it took only one relatively simple task to reveal a fairly obvious problem–how come a QA team didn’t spot it long before the program ever left the development lab?

Tonight, while doing some testing for the ever-growing discussion about my Macworld Spotlight writeup, I stumbled across yet another ‘feature’ of Spotlight that I just don’t get. I’m think I remember reading this somewhere in the hazy past, but it slipped my mind when I wrote the long article for Macworld. But after playing around some more, this new ‘feature’ has jumped well up on my list of Spotlight annoyances.

So just what is this ‘feature’ that bothers me so? It’s this:

Spotlight will, by design, not find exactly what you asked it to find.

At this point, you might be saying ‘huh?,’ but let me explain by way of a simple demo.

I know that not everyone that visits here reads my stuff over on Macworld’s site, so I thought I’d put a quick note here, too. Over on Macworld today, you can read my latest opinion piece, A Dim View of Spotlight.

This piece is a follow-up to my original Shining the spotlight on Spotlight article, which (confusingly enough) appeared here on robservatory in May (I wrote it prior to the Macworld changeover). If you read the original, you can skip the whole “what I said back then” section in the new article, and just read through my latest thoughts on why Spotlight still isn’t quite everything it could be.

Executive Summary: I don’t like the way Spotlight works at all, but I still think it has great potential. Read the story for the specifics on why I feel that way!

One of the things I like the most about OS X 10.4 is Automator, Apple’s new tool to help automate routine tasks. There’s an amazing amount of power hiding beneath a relatively simple user interface. The fact that users can create their own Automator actions (not workflows, but the actual actions that show up in the Action column), as described in this hint published today, means that Automator can be easily extended by those with a bit of programming experience.

Considering both Actions and Workflows, there are already over 100 entries on Apple’s Automator Actions download page, which is quite cool. (This does, however, pale in comparison to the 1,289 Dashboard widgets currently available for download.) In any event, Automator is a good tool to have around, and I’ve already put it to use on a number of occasions.

There is, however, something that irks me about its interface. Consider the screenshot below of the Actions associated with the Finder Library entry (click it for the full-size version in a new window):

If you scan the list of Actions, you’ll find that they’re not in alphabetical order. Well, they’re sort of alphabetized. Look a bit closer, and you’ll see that the list is actually sorted by the relevance indicator, just like the search results in Mac Help. While this makes sense in Mac Help, as you’re searching for something that’s not definite, it makes no sense at all in this context. What is this list relevant to? The Finder Library entry? If that’s the case, then how come “Get Selected Finder Items” sits at the top of the list with 100% while “Filter Finder Items” (which sounds very similar) scores 0% and is sitting down near the bottom?

Within the relevance sort, the sort is then alphabetic, so with some practice, you can eventually find what you’re looking for. But Apple’s use of the seemingly-undefined relevance criteria makes the task much more difficult than it should be. Consider the iTunes Library entry; it has four levels of relevance, which means the alpha sort restarts four times—and one of those times is for one lousy item! It takes way too long to find a given entry in a list ordered in this manner, and there’s no reason for it at all that I can see.

You might think that using the Applications Library entry (the first one in the list) would solve the problem, since it selects all actions and displays them at once. But no, even in this situation, the relevance sort order is maintained! As a result, I never use this entry, as it’s really, really hard to find anything.

The solution seems simple to me: Apple, please sort the Automator actions by alpha, not relevance. If you’re going to insist on a sort by relevance, then at least give us the option to sort by alpha instead…