The Downward Spiral
In a previous post, I mentioned I had to finish the last chat on another platform, because of a bunch of wonky bugs I was having to deal with in Mac OS 10.4, many of them involving text. Some of you screamed for details, so we'll go through the evening which led me to sit down and write A Community of Quality.
At this point, it's not just that interview, or the ones I'm working on right now. If I didn't have access to a Linux or Windows machine right now, it would be difficult for me to do much for the site, let alone my other stuff.Today we'll follow the downward spiral that made me give up and finish it on another computer -- the whole deal -- warts and caveats and all. Now, I'm well aware my experience isn't everyone's experience, but I'm also well aware that what led to my issue is real, as the movies and such will show.
If you've read the site for awhile, you can probably guess that I go through keyboards like a Hilton goes through contraceptives; my words per minute bounces around depending on the amount of coffee in my system, but it's up there. Even when it's not my text, I'm often having to work with quite a bit, because the interviews I do are known for being chewable, and have a decent amount of formatting and markup.
This can be a problem for Mac OS X, because um, text is slow in Mac OS X. I'm not bashing it for this, because it's slow for a reason -- a lot takes place to get every glyph onto the screen. People can get confused here about where the slowdowns are, but lets just say it isn't because the text is anti-aliased.I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of Carbon apps were originally using older APIs and didn't get the pretty text for free, and hey WindowsXP has actually had better text quality than Mac OS X. The differences are more about how the text gets laid out onto the screen before its brushed smooth, as the text system in Mac OS X gives developers a ton of things for free that you don't have on other platforms, and the algorithms to make it all smooth are just a bonus.
Still, any way you slice it, the standard Cocoa NSTextView is not optimized for working with a large set of text, let alone editing it. This is a known thing, and its why the guys over at TextMate are doing some of what they're doing, and anyone making a Cocoa text editor has to deal with it. Carbon apps weren't any better, and were generally worse.
I remember estimating I could type 3-4 times faster than the first native versions of Golive or Dreamweaver could keep up with), but this was less a construct of the technology as much as optimization, as Bare Bones's BBEdit is Carbon, yet is hands down the fastest text editor on the market for the Mac.
Like I said, I'm not bashing OS X for its drawing speed, but it has had a direct and adverse effect on the things I do, as when you are trying to add links and formatting to say, 10-20,000+ words, it can get really annoying to be hanging out waiting for your what you typed to show up or for what you're displacing to re-wrap.
When it came to 10.4, I was eagerly awaiting the improvements to some of the internals, like the easing of kernel congestion and the improvements in drawing speed. Out of everything else that was in it, it's easily what I was looking forward to the most because it would have the most dramatic effect on everything I do across the board.
Quartz 2D Extreme (Gag) had been shown to developers as coming in 10.4, which would move the drawing off to the GPU, meaning drawing text to the screen would not only be faster, but CPU cycles would be freed up for other things. When you have 7,000 mail messages in a folder you're trying to scroll in a table, you care about this sort of thing, because the system has to draw every subject/to/date line before it can display it, then scroll it. I was pumped, because this would make my system much more usable, as performance is one of the more important factors in usability.
Apple ended up shipping Tiger with Quartz 2D Extreme (Gag) turned off, because it just wasn't ready for prime time (buggy) and because a lot of current apps will need some tooling for it to be a win, but I was still pumped because I knew Apple had been pouring a ton of work into this area of Quartz. Q2DE notwithstanding we were still in for some major drawing improvements, even if it was still being done on the CPU, as well as things like the System being smart about what it needs to redraw.
After installing 10.4, I wasn't disappointed, as while it may not be OS9 speeds, and not fast enough so that I never notice the computer not keeping up, but drawing was improved dramatically for me while typing in Cocoa apps.
Text was faster in every single app I used, and it was glorious.
Like I said, unless you're trying to edit some typos or some formatting in a 10,000+ word post within MarsEdit or Ecto, or trying to open a huge chunk of source in Xcode, you may not care so much about this, but it was an absolute godsend to me and easily my favorite thing about 10.4.
Unfortunately, I started noticing a problem: Text in Tiger has a tendency to go wonky for me, which was disturbing because fundamentals like text are like foundations: If they have problems, you need to be worried about the stuff above them. As an example of this wonkiness, we'll look at top in the Terminal.app of Mac OS X.
Whenever I launch terminal, it comes up with my standard sized window I've set it at, and when I run top it'll look like this:
It looks just as you'd expect it to look, but if I want to see more, I'll hit the green 'Maximize' button, and things immediately go wonky:
If I hit the green thingy to minimize it back to its original size, the text stays just as wonky:
Basically, it's all over the place. The only way to get the text to display correctly again is to kill top, clear the window and run it again. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but I'm often running top on different machines, or programs that display things in a similar way, and having to constantly stop and start throughout the day really slows me down.
Of course, this is just a tip of the downward spiral that made me not be able to get anything done on my Mac, and to further delve we need a quick bit of context for the rest of the situation.
I'd scattered throughout my posts that my PowerBook's hard drive had started making that lovely intermittent clacking noise, which was its way of saying it was going to start eating my data sooner rather than later. After a really bad experience, I'm entirely paranoid about this noise now, so I'd been running off a Firewire hard drive for several days, which didn't stop the drive from clacking but let me know whatever I was working on at the time would be safe.
I'm mentioning this because my drive dying was a little exasperating, as it wasn't being worked that hard, and the computer was kept as cool as I could keep it (AC, fan blowing on it), and it came when a lot of other stuff was building up in my head. A lot of my friends have Macs, sometimes because they know I like Macs, which means they ask me lots of stuff when something goes wonky.
Whenever one has to be sent in, my brain keeps a little running tally in the back of it remembering what the model was and what broke, as while it's not scientific, when 5 out of the 6 people I know with an iBook need to have it sent in for gutting multiple times it lets me know there may be another problem with them. When you've just gotten gone talking to another friend whose iBook drive died 2 months after having it (and the logic board) replaced, and yours starts to die the next morning, it can wear on you.
The other thing you'll notice is the last interview was posted at 4 AM, which isn't unusual, and needs to be taken into account because it can certainly affect my mood and what I'm willing to deal with. In that case there was some time-sensitive stuff that was going to be disclosed, but it's generally the way DrunkenBlog stuff works: I'm fitting it in where I can, and sometimes that is late at night or very early in the morning, and in this case I needed to get it out ASAP.
So, I'd been working on that interview solid from 7pm till 4am, adding links and images and formatting and creating a little icon for the PDF book because it was special enough to deserve something special...
I gave an example of one of the weird things I was seeing regarding text above, but there are more:
- If I have a body of text I'm editing, I'll do something to cause all the text below the insertion point (where I'm typing) to start overlapping itself. It doesn't go away, the display is just completely messed up. This can be caused by hitting return, pasting in text, cutting text, deleting text, or just typing and having the line wrap.
- Same as above, except I'll get doubled lines instead of everything below the insertion point going crazy.
(2) is much more common than the first, but in both cases the data itself is just fine, its just the display is completely screwed up. It can only be fixed by selecting the text in its entirety, forcing it to redraw, minimizing to the Dock.app and then bringing it back up, or paging up and paging down to where you were again...
Basically, imagine copying a URL to the clipboard, then pasting it into your document, and having the text go wonky. It may not seem like a big deal, but you've just pasted in the URL but don't really know what the text is afterwards, or if there is really a return, so you have to stop and refresh the display before you continue. This is the first time I've written one of these while counting, and its already happened 33 times up to this point in the document.
Now, because the explanation above can be hard to grok without seeing it, and because it happens so frequently to me, I just stopped and made a few movies with Snapz Pro the other day while I was working in MarsEdit.
Scroll down for the movies, but if you don't have QuickTime 7, .mp4 versions are available if you click the .zip. MPlayer and QT show them fine, but they're a little blurry in VLC for OS X, perhaps because of the non-standard dimensions I didn't bother to fix.
Anyways, if you watch what I do below, and how the display changes, you'll see the problem, and it is only gets more annoying when I'm not just typing, but pasting things in and having to be careful about whitespace or formatting.
The first thing your mind will go to is perhaps its a problem with the application, but it wasn't. I was using MarsEdit while I was doing this, but MarsEdit isn't the culprit. I've seen this in XCode, SubEthaEdit, etc. The common denominator seems to be Cocoa apps.
The next thing your will probably wonder is whether it is something wrong with my System -- an isolated bug due to my hardware -- and nope. Let me put it this way, it was Evan over at AdiumX who pointed me towards it not just being me, and some of the authors of the apps I've mentioned it over the last few days have seen it. A somewhat-common denominator seems to be Powerbooks, but it isn't that large of a sample pool, so who knows.
It's a real live bug, and a maddening one, and it's basically in Apple's court because there's little more that can be done from the outside. Normally when you hit a bug like this, you'll need to stop and create a 'proof', which is basically boiling down the problem into a test case so it can be reproduced.
That way, an engineer in a cubicle somewhere can reproduce it while watching what is going on, and then hopefully find the problem, and then hopefully fix it. This type of bug just doesn't work that way.
I know its frequency often increases the longer one has been editing, and the larger the amount of text is. I know Apple has been told about it, but it isn't as though developers who even report the bug can see what is going on with it, as their bug system gives very little information to anyone not actually inside Apple beyond whether it is closed or open.
I've tried to look into a little bit to have a better idea of what's going on, and basically just found more weirdness. I was able to find examples of:
- A programmer is seeing eerily similar behavior in Tiger with his app involving
scrollPointwithin NSTextViews. - The developer of Ulysses had an extremely similar problem back in 2004, which he received an amusing amount of help on.
- Someone else encountered something similar also, but he was able to solve part of the problem while working on his app, and it may have possibly involved sharing data between different TextViews, but he's seeing similar things with other Cocoa text apps like TextEdit.app (I.E., think of an app where you have your data in one window, then click preview, which loads and renders it via WebKit).
Normally when I'm this annoyed by something my impulse is to start digging, but I only spent a little bit of time looking into this that night. I'd been working on the chat in my free time for two days, and was going to be pulling an all-nighter, and needed to be working on that because there was a timing issue with getting it out.
Since this is showing up across so many apps, my gut says this is just weirdness introduced by the massive overhauls in Core Graphics Apple was trying to get into Tiger, much of which focused on the System being smarter about what was dirty on the screen and really needed to be updated. The fact that people were seeing this in 10.4 and reporting it back in March, and that Q2DE was pulled, didn't bode well for it being an easy problem to fix. I dutifully sent feedback to it awhile ago anyways, but never heard back from that black hole.
Now, obviously not everyone is seeing this, as if it was happening to someone who mattered it would have been by now, come hell or high water. All I know it's real, and I know a bunch who have seen it, and that something in the way I work triggers this bug like crazy. I was fed up for that night, and done working with text in any Cocoa app until I was pasting it into MarsEdit to post.
I've upgraded Microsoft Office 2004, which comes with Word, because I have a friend who works at Microsoft and can get stuff fairly cheap through their employee store. OfficeX did me fine, but $50 is as good a time to upgrade as any. I don't work a lot in it, but I have to have it to view some protected .doc's and Excel files I get in the way it came, as well as comments, etc.
I generally try to avoid typing up anything in Word that requires any formatting -- especially html -- but this bug had worn me down and I was willing to brave Word deciding everything I typed should be a bulleted list. Unfortunately, on launch I got this...
The above occurred right after it said it was trying to optimize the font menu, which (I believe) is where it combs through the fonts so it can cache previews for its WYSIWYG menu when you are selecting a font.
I was actually a little freaked at this point, because when my hard drive gave a few clacks the first thing I did was stop working, run DiskWarrior, then backup what I was working on and then booted from something safe. Still, you never know, perhaps something had gotten corrupted, and perhaps it was a font.
So I killed Word, and yanked the font, and then got...
I was really worried by this point. I swallowed my aversion to Cocoa text editors and fired up SubEthaEdit, then started to click 'Ok' several times while marking down the names of the fonts that might be screwed up. After clicking 'Ok' 20 times, I realized it was just going through the list alphabetically.
My best guess was that something wonky must have happened with one of Mac OS X's caches -- which do seem to trip over themselves every once in awhile -- and since I knew there was a font cache it was time to shut everything I was working on, go delete them, and reboot.
No dice, and at this point I was just being taunted. I could have stopped and rebooted from my alternate backup, and then deleted the fonts and copied fresh ones from my CD backup over, but I wasn't really interested. I didn't think it would work, and I had been spending way too much time on this stuff. We were reaching the wee hours of the morning and I had to have this chat out.
Of course, Word isn't the only Carbon text editor out there, so I fired up GoLive and pasted in the entirety of the chat, which promptly caused it to quit fast. I was actually impressed, as I'm unused to Golive being fast at anything. I wasn't going to even try with Dreamweaver. That still left Bare Bones, and their super-fast BBEdit.
BBEdit wasn't really an option in my head, because while I used to own an older version, and I love the software, I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $200 to be able to edit text properly. However, I'd played with their free TextWrangler and liked it, and if there ended up being some kind of weirdness with it, perhaps BBEdit had a demo on their site or something...
I'd been wrestling with the dreaded DNS/DHCP bugginess in Mac OS X in 10.4, but this was completely new. Normally I can try the address a few times and it'll get through, but this was saying there was no connection... I'd yet to see anything like the error message nor this diagnostic tool, but it was either click or beat my head on the desk.
This was so weird, it was basically saying it could see the router but couldn't get onto the internets, and I was so frustrated at this point that if my connection had actually gone down I'd have known $deity was trying to tell me this chat was not supposed to be.so I was off to check the router and make sure nothing had gone insane.
A quick jaunt to the room with the router showed that the connection should be up, but just to be sure I went to my lovely 533 MHz Linux box (Named Peep) and checked, and yes it was up, but for some reason the OS X machine wasn't able to see out. At this point I could have tried messing with the connection settings and such, but I was done.
Obviously the chat got out that morning, but it's because I copied everything I needed over to the PC and ended up editing it there and posted it online via the web interface. There could well have been other things I could have tried or done, but at this point I didn't even care anymore.
If someone had asked me right then if I was going to dump the Mac I'd probably have said probably wasn't going to be getting my PowerBook fixed anytime soon.
Since then, I dug into the network problem and found out its just my turn to fry, and my networking is just wonky. This could well be just my turn, because when all these people had problems with DNS and such in Panther, I got along swimmingly, because that's how bugs work.
When it comes to my Office 2004 font problems, I was able to find that I wasn't the only one experiencing this, and after a bunch more surfing was able to find a workaround that said booting into safe mode might work, and it did! For awhile, at least. Every week and a half or so I have to do it again, as the problem comes back.
When I have to edit or write text longer than a few paragraphs on Tiger, I now use TextWrangler, and then throw it into MarsEdit for posting to the site. I'm not even really blaming Apple for Office 2004's problems, but it sure didn't add to the evening.
Now, of course my experience isn't indicative of everyones, but it was mine, and while this was a complete user experience clusterfuck brought about by a bunch of bugs converging at an extremely inconvenient time, the bugs mentioned (and not) are no less real.
Posted by drunkenbatmanAugust 04, 2005, at 10:01 AM
Comments (67)
Posted by: Zetetic at August 4, 2005 10:22 AM
Out of interest, when are you prepared to reinstall?
Posted by: Ankalon at August 4, 2005 10:22 AM
Are you going to do the band thing for every post? And what's your WPM? You finally admitting having a very high speed--though you never denied it--explains a lot, including the length of your rants compared almost anyone else.
Posted by: drunkenbatman at August 4, 2005 10:28 AM
Out of interest, when are you prepared to reinstall?
Pretty much when the system seems to be fubar'd enough that I've reached the point of diminishing returns by trying to figure it out. I've reinstalled 10.4 three times already, I reinstalled 10.3 twice over the course of its life with me. If I have to reinstall 10.4 again from scratch, I'll probably go luddite and 10.3.
Are you going to do the band thing for every post?
Who says I haven't throughout a bunch of posts previously, but people didn't catch it because they didn't know the groups/tracks? :)
Posted by: Chris Perardi at August 4, 2005 10:38 AM
I would have used the song name "Help Me I Am In Hell" off of the Broken album at some point, considering the content of the article.
Posted by: 1234 get your booty on the floor at August 4, 2005 10:39 AM
LOL the first two aren't Reznor. They're COOLIO.
http://www.cooliofan.com/
Some of those screenshots say 4 AM this morning... Crazy drunker.
Posted by: slawkenbergius at August 4, 2005 10:40 AM
I had a gander at my own 'top', but perhaps due to an alternate font (Arial Narrow 12.0 pt., anti-aliasing on) I got a normally formatted table. I did have a problem transitioning from 10.2 to 10.3, when nearly all of my fonts that I had brought over from Windows in the long-long-ago refused to display properly in Suitcase. Fortunately, this seems to have been solved in 10.4. It caused me some distress at the time, because I was working on a graphics project, and the customer suddenly had a hell of lot fewer choices when it came to fonts. Never upgrade anything with a work in progress...
Posted by: Rosyna at August 4, 2005 10:45 AM
Well, I'd suggest that you just turn off WYSIWYG font menus in word, but it still tries to "Optimize Font Menus". Not surprising since, in the first version of Word 2004, the font menu (in the menu bar) didn't even *work*.
So your weird double line text happens only in cocoa apps, right? (I've seen it in Xcode every so often when editing code).
As for the slowdown, when it happens, is ATSServer using a large (grater than 3%) amount of CPU? If so, do you happen to have a Classic System Folder selected in the Classic Preference pane?
Posted by: Rory at August 4, 2005 10:47 AM
I occasionally get weirdness editing text in XCode but it's reasonably rare thankfully. Same kind of thing you described with lines of text just not updating as they should.
I use TextWrangler a lot and love it very dearly. One day when I'm rich I'll have to buy BBEdit to say thanks.
Posted by: Rosyna at August 4, 2005 10:47 AM
Ack, greater, I'm not an idiot...
Posted by: Hey Chrissy at August 4, 2005 10:52 AM
Posted by: PXLated at August 4, 2005 10:57 AM
Would it be possible to get an executive summary for your posts? I just don't have the time.
-----
The general gist I got from the part I read is that you are a special use case and these problems won't affect the 99.9% of users that don't type really fast or write bibles.
:-)
Posted by: Hey Chrissy at August 4, 2005 10:58 AM
I tried to do a heart but it didn't work. :( Reznor is so cool, and thanks for the movies, it made the problem much clearer. I've been blessed to not have the text problems, but I had to not use DHCP to have my Comcast connection work reliably.
Posted by: steve at August 4, 2005 11:17 AM
If it happens on one machine and not on another machine, then it's a problem with the installation. If the installation was identical on both machines, then both machines would have the problem or not.
You mentioned a dying hard drive... that may be repeatedly corrupting your installation, leading you to repeatedly install it and thinking that there's some dark lurking bugs underneath.
I've never seen anything like what you're describing, and attempted to trigger the bugs based on what you've said above... no luck, everything works fine. (lucky!)
Oh yeah... and get a IBM Model M if you type so much. :)
Posted by: anon at August 4, 2005 11:24 AM
I think it's going a bit far to over-generalize your problems. My iBook is running 10.4 with no apparent problems and one of my major uses for it is editing a 100k word document in Office 2004. It's wrong for me to generalize based on *my* experiences, but I suspect folks writing long documents are hardly a tiny population -- so if they're all screaming like stuck pigs, Apple will notice.
Given that MS Word has, since v1.0, been unable to predictably handle formatting when you copy and paste across paragraph boundaries and yet, somehow, MS struggles on and Word is a dominant product, Apple has a low bar to hurdle...
Posted by: Ed Gordon at August 4, 2005 11:25 AM
I can't even type gibberish fast enought to duplicate your problem. How about any of the X11 or command-line text editors? Using them in x11.app would remove them from a lot of the problems you are seeing in Terminal. But I have no clue about their speed when it comes to absolutely sick levels of output like your own.
Posted by: Oliver at August 4, 2005 11:27 AM
I just bought a 2nd hand powerbook with Tiger installed this weekend. I brought it home and plugged in the ethernet cable. I have a cable modem and need to use DHCP with address provided by the server. Well I expected it to just work, because it did with my old iMac and my dad's winXP laptop. But alas, it wouldn't obtain a correct IP address and I kept getting the not conected page in Safari.
To cut a long story short, I unplugged my cable modem and then tried again, and this time it did work. Still, it's a bit strange considering the XP lappie didn't experience the same trouble.
I have since upgraded the powerbook's hard drive and downgraded to Panther (i can't afford Tiger, not after buying a pbook), and haven't had any more conenction issues.
Posted by: at August 4, 2005 11:27 AM
That's brutal. I know Apple will bring Tiger up to snuff, but I am waiting till 10.4.3 at least.
Posted by: hypnosquad at August 4, 2005 11:31 AM
BBEdit is a $59 upgrade from older versions and there was a 20% off sale just a week and a half ago. Even if you transferred your old license away, you could upgrade from TextWrangler for $129.
Posted by: Twist at August 4, 2005 11:50 AM
I have seen the doubled up text in a few places as well but I have seen it here and there in just about every version of Mac OS X or at least every version I have really used regularly so 10.2+ for sure. And yes it is normally in cocoa apps. I used to be a big fan of using MacJournal to keep my written projects organized and it seemed to happen after working on stuff for a few hours. I have seen it in other apps as well though, but not BBEdit which I use more than any other text editor these days.
I have been having some weird text display issues in other places as well that I think are caused by either ShpaeShifter or corrupt fonts but it may just be general wonkiness. Sometimes when I click Desktop icons the text labels get all weird. Almost looks like there are two labels stacked on top of each other and one of them is styled as outline and the other is styled as shadowed. Basically ugly. Also window bar titles sometime get very messed up or just vanish completely. It varies from application launch to application launch and sometimes even from one new window to the next. Happens in iChat a lot and with new Finder windows but no apps seems to be immune.
Posted by: Jason Terhorst at August 4, 2005 11:52 AM
What's funny is, other than QuickTime 7, my computer has been working wonderfully with 10.4. Is there any reason to believe that it may be a hardware issue causing some issues.... or the video card drivers? For a long time, the ATI cards in G5s everywhere were garbage, but since the software has been updated, the problems aren't as common. (the problems had to do with scrolling, redrawing the contents of windows, etc.) See if there might be an updated firmware, video drivers, etc for your machine. Sorry if you've already tried this, but it seems like people sometimes forget about that other stuff.
I just wish Apple would fix QuickTime 7 - the crashes, the slowness, etc. Ever since they added the Cocoa stuff, it's been kind of difficult to use.
Posted by: Jesse at August 4, 2005 11:53 AM
Yeesh, that's almost exactly the kind of thing I'm constantly running into in the Lotus Domino Designer beta I use at work, and that's hardly flattering company for Apple.
Posted by: Ben at August 4, 2005 11:54 AM
Red Bats With Teeth?
Posted by: tragek at August 4, 2005 11:58 AM
The fragile got me hooked. It was the first album I heard. Loved it. Though, it seems pretty interesting mixing in NIN and Coolio....
Posted by: Christoffer L at August 4, 2005 12:23 PM
This is not the standard "OS X having trouble with installing on top of an existing install"-thang?
I got bitten trying to "upgrade" rather than "archive-install" when going 10.2->10.3, and even with "archive-install" from 10.3 -> 10.4 my iBook has its odd moments.
My powerbook, on the other hand, that only breathed 10.3 for the short time when it got preinstalled, works flawlessly with 10.4.
I hate to say it, but there is probably something from it's pre-10.4 days that stayed and messed up your OS.
By the way, you could check what happens if you go and create a fresh account... is the text-editing wonky there as well?
Posted by: Warren at August 4, 2005 12:59 PM
I've only experienced the text-editing problem while editing Applescript, where it shows up quite quickly. Uncompiled applescript initially shows up as mauve monospace, but when compiled will only update to its syntax-highlighted Verdana after a selection/scroll. And my Tiger install was a fresh install.
Posted by: Fred at August 4, 2005 01:38 PM
You know what's funny?
An article about instability in OS 10.4 that repeatedly crashes Safari on OS 10.4.2
I had to fire up Camino just to read your article.
Posted by: Nabil at August 4, 2005 01:47 PM
Christoffer actually brings up a good question. I've not hit any of the bugs you refer to, but I do clean installs every time. It would be interesting to add that as a variable to keep track of in all this.
It still needs to be fixed, but it might help them track down what needs to be fixed.
Posted by: Mark Hilstad at August 4, 2005 01:57 PM
I encounter the repeated lines issue VERY frequently when editing LaTeX source (which is plain text) in iTeXMac, which I'm pretty sure is a Cocoa app. The problem existed in Panther and it is still there now that I've switched to Tiger (using a wipe install, not an upgrade install). In my experience the issue seems to be indpendent of typing speed, for what that's worth.
Posted by: Anthony at August 4, 2005 02:15 PM
anon:
Bugs like this would have been fixed already if they were easy to reproduce.
Posted by: Mike at August 4, 2005 02:17 PM
Maybe the gods just favor me, and by typing this very text I will cause them to laught at me and curse my computer, but so far 10.4.x has been stable and rock-solid for me, through about three months now of heavy development-level usage.
The only explaination I have for this luck is that I did do a clean install when I put Tiger on.
Posted by: mark at August 4, 2005 02:25 PM
Have you tried TextMate or OmniOutliner to see if the problems occur there ? (They don't for me.) This isn't advocacy, just that these are two Cocoa apps that (I believe) use cutom text views. FWIW, I've only seen this craziness in two apps (Mail and TextEdit, both of which I avoid).
Posted by: Chris Cambron at August 4, 2005 02:48 PM
I have had intermittent problems with Panther whereby I had to cycle my cable modem and request a new DHCP lease for no apparent reason. XP on the same network stayed up.
Posted by: Anthony at August 4, 2005 03:09 PM
I've had problems with Safari, where popup blocking turns on despite the fact that I've disabled. I wouldn't care if my uni's wireless network didn't use web authentication. A popup window that refreshes keeps you connected. If popup blocking silently turns on, you don't get that window.
Posted by: Jason Deraleau at August 4, 2005 03:38 PM
I would think hitting Ctrl+L should fix your top display issues. I tried to recreate the problem on my machine but uh.... ya, I don't get the top wonkiness. Perhaps because I clean installed?
Posted by: drunkenbatman at August 4, 2005 03:42 PM
Guys -- PLEASE -- Check the top of the post, and the comments. I've always clean installed, and never done an upgrade install, just because I would hate to have that type of doubt around.
*trundles back to his cave*
Posted by: David Emery at August 4, 2005 04:05 PM
Funnily enough, even though I'm really happy with 10.4, I've been hit by both the text bug and the word bug.
For me, quite frequently when editing in SubEthaEdit when I delete a line nothing actually happens until a force a refresh, which I normally do using select all, which is fairly harmless. I had put it down to a SubEthaEdit bug, but it sounds like the same problem you had.
With word, I had exactly the same problem, but fixed it by pruning my fonts down a bit - I had loads of fonts I did use, and after I got rid of them the problem disappeared. Not sure if it was a corrupted font (although FontBook thought they were all ok), or just the sheer number of them, but the problem hasn't come back since.
Posted by: cch at August 4, 2005 04:39 PM
> as the test system in Mac OS X gives developers a ton of things for free
shouldn't that be 'text' in 'test'?
Posted by: cch at August 4, 2005 04:43 PM
> but it has had a direct and adverse [slurp?] on the things I do
db, maybe you could setup a typos@drunkenblog.com so people don't mar the commentspace with corrections?
Posted by: Pontus at August 4, 2005 05:27 PM
I know that text bug well; I stumble on it every other day I use Xcode. It happens on my PowerMac, and it used to happen on my eMac, so it certainly isn't restricted to PowerBooks.
I always thought it was just another of Xcode's numerous text bugs, but now I know the problem goes deeper than that.
Posted by: Linden at August 4, 2005 06:11 PM
I have noticed the wonky text issue here and there throughout the years, on all the OS X systems that I can remember. Granted, I'm hardly ever home to use my darling 400Mhz Ti anymore to see if it also happens in 10.4, but I know I've noticed it on 10.2 and 10.3.
I have a curious way of reading things which involves selecting it while I read it. (This pisses people who are reading over my shoulder off to no end) I don't know why I do it, but I'm 99% sure that its because you can scroll pages that way, and until now, mac mice didn't have a scroll wheel. Also, it helps me keep my place.
While doing this, sometimes everything would redraw wrong, and give me the funky dissapearing or doubled lines of text issue. I would guess that you're spot on with the screen updates thing, but I think that this has been a problem longer than just 10.4.
Posted by: Other_Matt at August 4, 2005 06:13 PM
So let me get this straight, you have a wonky hard disk drive, and you're surprised that the system is acting a little odd? As a professional tech support person, I won't take any of your problems seriously until you get that fixed.
Other than that, I'd say it was $DEITY punishing you for not using the one true editor, vi. ;-)
Posted by: at August 4, 2005 06:19 PM
So far I've been lucky against this particular bug, but not to worry there are plenty of 10.4 text bugs to go around. Eclipse users patiently await the forthcoming 10.4.3 fix of constantly deteriorating performance in fetching fonts by family which has made the ide virutally useless on 10.4.
Posted by: Matt at August 4, 2005 07:41 PM
I have the wonky doubled/non-updating text bug in Xcode quite regularly, too. On Powerbook, no less!
Posted by: Skorp at August 4, 2005 07:44 PM
The doubling of text happens all the time in Mail for me: I reply (with their stuff included), then delete big chunks (to reply at issue) by mouse-selecting and delete-keying. The bottom two or so lines get doubled.
A few days ago, I started having fun with the net: I need to reset my cable modem every morning upon waking from sleep. Otherwise, no connection, Mail hangs (while trying to connect to an IMAP acct), and the Network Diag thingy just scans and scans and hangs (force quit it is, mofo!)
This latter thing is starting to be rather annoying, so if anyone has some fix suggestions (or a ref), that'd be cool. I just clean installed, and thus my enthusiasm for doing it again...
Posted by: Ben Reubenstein at August 4, 2005 08:12 PM
"If you've read the site for awhile, you can probably guess that I go through keyboards like a Hilton goes through contraceptives..."
enough said.
Posted by: Squozen at August 4, 2005 09:14 PM
I can't reproduce the top bug on my system (using Monaco 10pt without anti-aliasing).
Posted by: Squozen at August 4, 2005 09:15 PM
Followup, which I forgot to add:
I do have a bug of my own though... if I start editing a text file with nano, then maximise the terminal window, things go south.
Posted by: ian at August 4, 2005 09:29 PM
Another comment buried at the end, too late.
But.
The terminal text bug is not reproducible here.
I have seen the text doubling up, but only in Safari textareas, when copying/pasting.
No problems with MS Word, here.
----
But even these Tiger issues pale in comparison to the headaches I've experienced with both Linux and Windows.
I mean, it's not even worth comparing.
Tiger is like getting a tiny splinter in paradise from rubbing your foot against the exotic wood floors the wrong way. Using Windows or Linux is throwing myself onto hot coals.
Posted by: todd at August 4, 2005 11:50 PM
> I have a curious way of reading things which involves selecting it while I read it.
Holy crap, I didn't realize I was doing that until I read this. I mean I knew I did it, I just didn't know it had receded into my subconscious and now I just automatically do it.
Posted by: Martey at August 5, 2005 12:30 AM
If someone had asked me right then if I was going to dump the Mac I'd probably have said probably wasn't going to be getting my PowerBook fixed anytime soon.This was a bit confusing to read; the first couple of times I parsed it, I got really confused. It literally took me several seconds to realize that you'd let out an "I'd", and you were not going to make a permanent switch to Linux or anything like that.
Posted by: Anthony at August 5, 2005 12:32 AM
> Using Windows or Linux is throwing myself onto hot coals.
Come on now. Let's not exagerate.
I've experienced problems on all three that could easily be likened to "throwing myself onto hot coals". Unless you define "serious problem" to exclude MacOS problems, none of them look particularly good.
Posted by: Eddie Hargreaves at August 5, 2005 12:46 AM
You are not alone. I had the weird 'You are not connected to the Internet' message a couple of times after upgrading to Tiger. sigh
Posted by: Raj at August 5, 2005 01:21 AM
If you create another account on the same machine and login and edit the file do you see the same behaviour (ie is it related to your login or is it the machine) ?
Posted by: Ajay K. at August 5, 2005 01:34 AM
How about a site redesign? It's starting to look stale.
Posted by: mw at August 5, 2005 03:07 AM
Reading yout column I was instantly able to reproduce the first text bug (kind of). Copying large amounts of text into SubEthaEdit to have something to play with and entering new lines of text somewhere in between the old text, pressing "Enter" did not always have the desired effect. While the cursor goes down one line as it should, the text below does not - itīs just not updated. So the line below the cursor is suddenly missing. Clicking out of the app and back into it refreshes the textīs drawing and the line reappears while the text below gets pushed down one line. Using the up/down-arrows to move the displayed window btw does not update the text drawing.
It seems as if this bug only appears if the text has got a decent length - maybe longer then many peopleīs writing habits normally allow. But itīs definitely there (iBook G3, 10.4.2, fresh install). Although I have to admit, that Iīm far too lazy to find out which the sweet spot in length is for the text to go wonky.
Posted by: Patrick Lemmens at August 5, 2005 03:55 AM
DB,
Can't reproduce any of your symptoms. Run Applejack (http://applejack.sourceforge.net/) to see if that finds any problems with your harddrive. Good luck.
Posted by: Jens Alfke at August 5, 2005 09:55 AM
Hm, I haven't seen those particular problems (which isn't to say they don't exist.) I do a lot of coding in Xcode, but I try not to let my files get too huge, since they get hard to navigate.
If you start to get weird behavior with fonts, like the wrong glyphs showing up or the spacing getting wonky, the best thing to do is to clear your ATS [Apple Type Service] cache:
1. Quit every app but Terminal. Or better yet, log out completely and ssh in from another machine.
2. cd /Library/Caches
3. sudo mv com.apple.ATS com.apple.ATS.old
4. Now restart.
5. Later on, either delete the com.apple.ATS.old directory, or optionally file a bug report with Apple and keep the directory around in case they want you to send them a copy.
I ran into this a lot during Tiger development, but my fonts have been pretty reliable since it shipped. Of course YMMV...
(BTW thanks for the link to TextMate. I'm about to give it a try -- the text-folding is a feature I've wanted forever.)
Posted by: John Evans at August 5, 2005 12:46 PM
Hi, its funny how you make clear you do a clean install and no one seems to read that part. :)
I have a powerbook and a g5 iMac, same exact text issues, all clean 10.4.2 installs with nothing ontop like APE. I also have a good freind with the SAME issues, mostly I notice it in Subetha because I use that as my main text editor, but I see it in mail and other apps too, i find it esp happens with formatted text, i.e coloured or bold, but that must just be me as there is no real differnce between black std. text and red bold right?!
Also I have a bug I havnt seent anyone complain about, which thankfully is less frequent since 10.4.2 I alt+tab to a differnt app, grab some text, move back and now I have no text input. i.e. if i type into any area in that app that accepts text nothing happens. I CAN use keyboard shortcuts in the app however and the mouse works a fix is to alt+tab away and come back via at+tab. That one drives me nuts. Again seen on TWO of my machines, AGAIN BOTH CLEAN 10.4.2 installs, again across differnt applications....
All in all i find Tiger to just be beyond what I would call quality control in general, for example, the new finder dialogues like the file copy box, if somthing is on screen like that my whole system becomes unresponsive, like that box is a lot fo work to draw or somthing. On a 1.8ghz g5 thats a bit rediculous i find, and the list goes on and on and on. And dont even start about the usability issues with things like spotlight.
Here is to hoping Mr Jobs has the same issues we do, then it will get fixed....
Posted by: cchd at August 6, 2005 11:35 PM
I haven't seen either of these problems on my 887Mhz Powerbook that has been upgraded (no clean installs for me!) from Jaguar to Panther and now Tiger. I guess I use the Powerbook for at least three hours every day for a variety of tasks (Web, Mail, news, Python programming) so it's not like I mightn't see these sort of issues. I can't even reproduce the "top" formatting problems.
One potential difference is that I don't have Classic installed as I don't need any classic apps.
Posted by: Sander Niemeijer at August 7, 2005 05:37 AM
I was bugged by the 'corrupted font problem' in Office 2004 too. Fortunately I was able to fix it. From what I remember (mind that it was some time ago that I fixed it and my memory isn't that good) it had to do with some additional fonts that I had installed. Even though Office 2004 is complaining about nearly each and every font file it encounters, the fonts are probably just ok. If you remove all your 3rd party fonts out of the Fonts folders Office will hopefully stop complaining. I believe that the cause of the problems were some fonts that had additional files (postscript versions next to truetype version or something like that) installed.
Posted by: Peter da Silva at August 8, 2005 11:19 AM
That terminal bug looks like a serendipitously unrelated kind of problem, because it's a classic wonky-termcap type of fuckup, and given the way Terminal works I'd be utterly astounded if it's actually using NSText internally - I've written terminal emulators and any kind of native structured text support has always been far more trouble than its worth.
I'm on Panther (and staying there, damnit) so I can't test this, but could you do an "stty -a" before and after the resize?
As for the other text problems, I've found that over time OSX has gotten increasingly susceptible to horrible misbehaviour when you have old fonts that aren't quite as up-to-date as they should be. In particular, on Panther I ended up putting my Classic folder in a DMG that I only mount when I'm running classic, lest something wake up and see the old Classic fonts and freak out.
Posted by: nick at August 8, 2005 02:11 PM
top did that to me in 10.3 when resizing terminal windows.
I've seen the text problem in Mail, BBEdit, TextEdit, Word, etc. Pretty much any text editor on 10.4. I also do not have a PowerBook, it happens for me on a G5 tower.
Posted by: Wil at August 11, 2005 07:56 AM
I get that top bug all the time. Really annoying. I actually have reduced my total fonts a lot since the early days of X because of too many issues. There's a great sign for an OS, when the user gradually learns to do less and less with it so as not to break anything... wait. That sounds scarily like Windows.
Posted by: shadow at August 21, 2005 06:48 PM
Here are some fairly reliable instructions to reproduce the text bug, at least on my mac mini:
1 - Copy all the text on this page to the clipbloard (command a, command c)
2 - Fire up SubEthaEdit (or maybe something equivalent)
3 - Paste the text ten times
4 - Scroll to the middle of the document, find yourself one nice big paragraph, and start typing gibberish in the middle of it. After a couple of lines worth of hitting keys, it should start overlapping some text.
Good luck sending this one down the black hole!
And, for the record, i've been using Tiger for a while now, and I don't have major issues with it. My mini stays on for weeks at a time and it runs just peachy. Still, bugs are there, and I especially hate them UI inconsistencies...
Posted by: sean at October 5, 2005 11:47 PM
The corrupt font stuff with Word has been an ongoing problem for me ever since I upgraded my G5 from Panther to Tiger.
I spent three months talking to the Microsoft support people at least twice a week while they told me to this or that. Nothing worked. I finally told them they could shove their Word up their you-know-whats and I either use Appleworks or Text Edit to open Word files.
The Office CD is now a $150 coaster on my desk.
Posted by: purpanther at January 25, 2006 03:45 PM
Office 2004 Corrupt Font problem .. it's not just with Tiger. It's some wierd issue with Office. I have several labs that delete the local account and copy over a fresh template every reboot. Sometimes they are "corrupt" and sometimes they are fine. The problem does not exist with the build because that's clean. It's not hardware specific because it happens the same over different machines and models. It happens even if the local user has NO fonts in the library and has to copy the System fonts over.
Further, if the fonts were truly corrupted then other things (like the OS) would not perform properly. There are 5 font folders and if one is bad the app usually grabs the /Library or /System/Library
BTW - This MS Font issue is really a pain in my life.
Nice job with the NIN theme throughout.