Category Archives: OS X

2021/10/30 · 09:46

Mac users, bundles, and OneDrive

In a recent spasm of optimism, I decided to start keeping, and sticking to, a budget.

(brief editorial interruption: yes, I know, I know. Just like my reaction when people say “yeah, I know, I should exercise but…” and I’m all like BUT EXERCISE IS THE GREATEST WHY WOULDN’T YOU JUST… that’s me with budgeting.)

I used to use Quicken back in the day, but in an attempt to avoid anything having to do with Intuit, I decided to find an alternate app and quickly settled on Banktivity after seeing it mentioned on Daring Fireball. I set it up to ingest my key banking and credit card accounts, let it gather some data, and started sketching out a budget. Life was good.

As I do with all my other important documents, I stored the Banktivity data in a folder in my personal OneDrive. OneDrive has been unfailingly reliable for me since before it was called Windows Live Mesh. I can’t remember any time when I ever lost data from it, and as Microsoft has added better support for version history and better sync robustness, there have been any number of times where a buggy app or stupidity on my part would have caused data loss if not for the ability to snatch a file back from the jaws of death.

Earlier this week, I upgraded my Mac mini to macOS Monterey. This seemed to go flawlessly and, as far as I could tell, all my OneDrive data was present.

This morning, I tried to open Banktivity. Instead of its normal behavior of opening the last-accessed file, I got a dialog asking me if I wanted to create a new file… never a good sign. Interestingly, the dialog didn’t offer to let me open a previous file (this appears to be a bug, btw). I used File > Open Recent, picked my Banktivity file, and saw… this.

*A blank budget? That’s worse than no budget at all*

On the plus side, Banktivity opened the file; on the minus side, it appeared to be empty. This was no bueno.

I verified that the file was present in my local OneDrive folder and tried opening it again, with the same result.

When that didn’t work, I reached out to Banktivity support. One of the things I appreciate about IGG, makers of the app, is that they have really good live chat-based support. Tim, my support rep, ran me through a couple of tests to see if we could figure out what might be wrong. In that process, I saw this horrifying sight:

Of course, the file shouldn’t be zero bytes.

“No worries,” I told Tim. “I’ve got a backup in OneDrive.” So I went to look in the OneDrive web client, where I saw this…

Uh oh. That’s not a great sign either… but at least now I knew what was going on.

See, when Apple introduced macOS way back when, the file system natively supported having two “forks” (what we’d now refer to as “streams”) in a file: the resource fork and the data fork. When they switched to the file system used in NeXTSTEP, that mutated into the concept of a file bundle. A file bundle looks like a file (it’s one icon on the desktop, its components are moved, copied, or deleted as a unit, etc), but it’s really a directory tree. (“Document package” is apparently the current preferred term for this mechanism but because I’m old-school, I’ll keep calling them “bundles.”)

As many macOS applications do, Banktivity uses a bundle instead of a flat file.

At some point, somehow, either macOS or OneDrive had lost the flag indicating that this directory should be a bundle. Since the OneDrive web viewer correctly shows the directory structure, my money is on the OneDrive sync mechanism having some kind of bad interaction with macOS Monterey.

The fix turned out to be pretty simple (but honestly I’m lucky it worked). In the OneDrive web client, I selected the folder and clicked “download.” Since OneDrive knew I was asking for multiple folders in a single download, it bundled them into a zip file, which I downloaded. When I extracted it, macOS recognized the bundle flag and displayed only a single document icon, which then opened properly in Banktivity.

I later confirmed with Banktivity that they don’t support using cloud file sync tools for live Banktivity documents, which is nice to know now. Thankfully I didn’t lose any data. Meanwhile, I’m following up on this issue with the OneDrive team to see if they know about it and/or have a fix for it.

(editor’s note: I wrote this post specifically to procrastinate updating my budget for the month. Time to get back to it…)

A brief rant about the Mac Lync client

I’m supposed to be working on my Ignite slides, but I just ran into something that has flipped my safeties.

I just don’t understand.

Sure, I know the Lync/Skype for Business team has a lot of irons in the fire, what with their new product line and all. And I get that the Mac install base is small relative to the other things they have to do. But there is no reason I can see for the Mac Lync client to be as buggy and underfeatured as it is. They’ve had years to improve it.

The Lync PG has proven they can do rapid engineering work, as evidenced by the excellent speed and quality of the Lync mobile apps for Android and iOS.

And they’ve proven they can build a robust client, as evidenced by the history of the Lync desktop client for Windows.

The Mac Office team, for their part, has shown that they can produce high-quality clients that reliably work with Microsoft’s services.

So why does the Mac Lync client make me want to start throwing things?

Today’s example: I am signed into Lync with my work account. I want to create a meeting in my personal Exchange calendar, invite attendees, and set it up as an online meeting. This is trivial using Windows Outlook and the Lync (and, now, SfB) client: create the invite, click the “Lync meeting” button, and boom.

On the Mac, however, this scenario doesn’t work– clicking the “Online Meeting” button produces an obnoxious dialog telling me that I must be signed in to the same account in Lync as I’m using in Outlook.

This is just the latest in the pecked-to-death-by-ducks experience of using the Lync client on a Mac. In honesty, the client is more stable and has more features than its predecessors; hell, it even supports the Conversation History folder now. But what I want is a robust client, with feature parity with Windows, that works to enable the same scenarios I can easily perform in Windows. That’s not too much to ask.

I don’t know (and, as an end user, don’t care) which team inside Microsoft owns this. And I don’t have an opinion on who should own it. All I want is a solid client experience.

(And while I am on a rant: damnit, the Windows Phone sync client for the Mac is a giant pile of fail. Microsoft has apparently abandoned it in place. Bug reports go into a black hole. Latest example: after months of prerelease availability, Apple released the Photos app and… surprise… the WP8 sync app doesn’t work with it.)

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Filed under FAIL, OS X, UC&C

2014/12/18 · 17:07

Microsoft sneaks out Mac Outlook update

Good news: Microsoft just issued an updated version of Outlook for Mac. (I guess that’s the official name, as opposed to the older Outlook 2011). The list of fixes is pretty nondescript: you can change calendar colors, add alt-text to images, and use custom AD RMS templates. I suspect most of the effort for this release was actually focused on the “Top crashes fixed” item in the KB article.

Bad news: you have to manually download it from the Office 365 portal. The AutoUpdate mechanism shipped with Office 2011 doesn’t yet know how to handle updates for Outlook for Mac. I suppose Microsoft could either update the Office 2011 AU mechanism or ship a new one as part of a future Outlook update; presumably the latter choice would actually deliver the Office 2015 update mechanism, since there’s undoubtedly going to be one.

The real news here is how quickly Microsoft released this update. While this is only one release, it’s an excellent sign that we got it quickly, and it makes me hopeful that we’ll see a steady stream of updates and fixes for the Mac Office apps in the future— with a cadence more akin to the Lync Mobile clients releases than the glacial pace of past Mac Office updates.

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Filed under OS X, UC&C

Tagged as Exchange, Office 365, Outlook

2014/11/19 · 06:35

Why the Outlook for Mac folder pane changes colors

I mentioned in my review of the new Outlook for Mac client that the background of the folder list seemed to randomly change colors:

It may also be a feature that there is a color gradient fill in the folder list. At first I thought the color was the same as the color of the category of my current calendar appointment, but after changing all the category colors, waiting for sync, and quitting and relaunching Outlook, the color didn’t change, so I’m not sure what Microsoft had in mind here, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn it off.

Thanks to the most excellent Bill Smith, long-time Mac Office MVP, now I know the answer:

You’re seeing translucency in the navigation pane. So long as you have a window or other white object behind Outlook you’ll see a whitish background, but arrange Outlook over your Desktop picture and you’ll see those colors peeking through it. Choose Outlook menu > Hide Others to quickly show Outlook over your Desktop.

Sure enough, that explains it. I use SatelliteEyes to update my desktop background, and as I move around (and thus get new satellite maps), or as change the Z order of other open windows, voilà color changes. I normally don’t mind window translucency, but I don’t care for the combination of OS X Yosemite and this effect. Looks like I’m stuck with it, though.

8 Comments

Filed under OS X, UC&C

Tagged as Mac OS X, Outlook