Over the last almost two month I’ve been staying crazy busy, at work (the day job), at my non-profit (the opera group), and dealing with problems in the various Apple betas from this summer. The biggest issue of the Apple betas has been my experience with Catalina. While Catalina itself hasn’t been a big user change, it has had numerous problems on my 2016 MBP with Touchbar.
As I mentioned during WWDC, I had lost my entire hard drive during the initial install and had to completely rebuild the machine. This isn’t a major issue by itself. Sometimes it’s nice to get rid of all the cruft and rebuild a machine, but the machine has been extremely unstable since. A few issues are the most troublesome:
1) iCloud Drive – as others have mentioned, Apple has had major issues with iCloud Drive during these betas. To me it has shown itself in two major ways. First, I’ve not been able to actually restore all my data from iCloud Drive. iCloud will start the download, and then get in what seems like a loop, uploading the same data, and never finishing. I have all my source code in iCloud Drive (and yes, also in GIT) so that I can go from one machine to the next and pick up where I was, when working on a program. The second issue is that when working in a file, especially in my source code, iCloud Drive seems to want to backup the file with the name “Name #.extension”. And then litters your drive with multiple copies of files. I have seen upwards of 6 versions of files. This can cause both xCode and Git to then add a bunch of files into my projects. Of course things get confused and I have to find which one is “current” so that I don’t back level my code.
2) Open from the internet issue – while working on my code across machines, xCode will see that I’ve updated code on my Mojave machine and since iCloud comes from the internet, it will be get confused saying my code that I am trying to open is from the internet, causing very long open times for some projects. While this is very very annoying, so far this hasn’t caused any data loss.
3) To wind down, I like to play World of Warcraft at times, but Apple’s new security model won’t let it run, since it doesn’t have a sign certificate in it. I’ve reached out to Blizzard multiple times to let them know, but so far no fix coming.
4) The splitting up of iTunes to multiple apps seems to be fine, BUT they’re have not yet implemented homesharing. This is a major show stopper for me, as I have a NAS full of my ripped music, tv shows, and movies. I cannot use homesharing to stream them to my MBP, and I am very worried that this will be a big issue for my Apple TV when Catalina goes GA. I’ve raise feedback/ bug report on this one. I hope others raise Cain about this one, as this is a major step backwards.
What are your experiences with Catalina? I’d love to hear how it is working out for you.