Today, I ran into a problem with my brand new MacBook Air which I bought only 4 weeks ago. Here is the story: (if you want to skip the technical details, go ahead to What the f*ck do you want to tell us? ;))

This morning I went to my holiday job like the last two weeks in order to finish my work for this holidays. But after 15 minutes, my Magic Mouse connected via Bluetooth got disconnected. Nothing unusual, I simply swapped the batteries. But as I was finished, my MacBook wouldn’t react to any input sent via the built-in keyboard and trackpad, nor the external keyboard attached to the cinema display acting as a hub.

I also noticed, that the Bluetooth menu bar icon was in the “Bluetooth offline” state¹, which was the strange. As suggested, I restarted my mac. At least I tried.

The mac did not even proceed to the gray screen showing the Apple logo. To make it even worse, non of the keyboards connected seemed to affect the boot process, I was unable to go into Single User Mode, Verbose Mode or the reset the PRAM². The only thing that worked was Safe Boot, unhappily the login mask didn’t respond to my input, so I couldn’t log in.

After I tried everything a few more times with different external keyboard setups I once was able to log in and set the boot parameter to verbose with the

$ sudo nvram boot-args=-v

command and while rebooting, I saw some error — all of them regarding kIOUSBHighSpeedSplitError, kIOReturnNotResponding or the following message:

The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.

What the f*ck do you want to tell us?

Ok, here is the point of this post:

I gave up on fixing the error by myself (and my colleagues at Boinx Software[^3], thanks for your help!) so I looked for an appointment at the Munich Apple Store. The next available date was next week, 5 workdays from now.

Srsly, WTF? How does Apple believe someone can easily wait 5 workdays only to have his problem be looked at? I mean, after this time that doesn’t mean that I can resume working, can I?

It’s a shame that Apple has no plan or service for emergency cases in which it’s clear the device has to be physically repaired. Not even to mention that it’s absolutely out of the question that a 4 week old device stops working and the only service provided is, that the Apple Store Employee sets up a Genius Bar appointment for me (thanks, I am somewhat able to click through apple.com by myself).

I am actually asking myself whether Apple really cares about people earning money with their Hard- and Software. (Of course I have backups, but switching my workflow to my other mac won’t be exactly a trivial point which can be done in 5 minutes)

Any similar experiences?

After upgrading, some Lion users reported a really disturbing problem with the built-in search system Spotlight: Only some of the files are being indexed.

Because my Mac also had this problem, I tried to resolve it and after a few hours googling about a solution I finally found a way to fix Spotlight.

First you should delete your current spotlight index.

Go to System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy. At this point you have to add your Hardrive to the provided list in order to prevent it from being indexed by Spotlight. It could be that a few Macs will start working correctly after excluding the hard drive again. If not you should go to terminal, and deleting the index manually. This can be done with:

$ sudo mdutil -E /

After entering your Password Spotlight will try to reindex your Hardrive. At this Point some more User will get a working Search back. The few People (including me) wich get a error like:

Error: unable to perform operation. (-1)
No index.

Now, perform

$ sudo rm -r /.Spotlight-V100

to delete the wonky Spotlight Index. Now restart your Mac and hope that it will be properly reindexed.

This guest post was written by Marcel Riedlinger¹, so all the flattr revenue for this post will go to him ;)

Without going into details how you should handle the new features (you can go thru them at the jQuery release note²) just 2 quick fixes for your current projects:

1. Use Units

One problem can exist if you you call your animation like this:

    $('selector').animate({ 'height': 100 });
    

Using this code snippet, the lags should be fixed:

    $('selector').animate({ 'height': '100px' });
    // or for a 'dynamic' height from a variable
    var number = 100;
    $('selector').animate({ 'height': number + 'px' });
    

2. Tweak opacity first

like you can see in this example³, the animation does not run as expected. However, this can be fixed by 1. commenting out the opacity part (which is not an option in most cases) or 2. by placing the opacity line on top of every block, like in this example⁴.

That’s it. In my case, both didn’t solve the problem completely (because I needed 2d transformations, which caused bugs whatever I did) so I switched completely to CSS3 Animations, which are widely available in Webkit, Mozilla and Opera (and maybe IE 9). I think I’ll soon have a post about that ;)