Mavericks- please wait

On the 23rd of October Apple stunned the world with the announcement that Mavericks (their latest OS) was to be free.
This fuelled a rush to download and install and I bet you are thinking seriously about doing same but I would advise you wait and approach the upgrade with caution.

So why am I being such a poop to this otherwise wonderful party? Why am I turning down the music and pouring soda water into that well spiked punch? For starters there is the sheer size of the download, a whopping 5GB, that will bring most household Internet connections to its knees. Second, and most importantly, there is the question of your third party applications. There have already been reports of printers not working, scanners going south and applications refusing to work – like Gmail that no longer works in Apple Mail.

I myself (I fell on Mavericks sword so I could write this article) experienced few but troubling issues. The good news is my printer (about 15 years old) works just fine, FileMaker Pro ( 3 upgrades behind) works with a little wrinkle and even my copy of VMware works as per normal. Office 2011 (and I am told 2008) work fine as does iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, Acrobat Reader and my Solitaire game. But Textpander had issues, Carbon Copy cloner refused to launch but all of these were both free to download and/or easy to fix.

The huge issue, the elephant that trampled all over my nerves was 1Password.

Just one of the most important applications I have!

The one that holds all my passwords, credit card numbers, important notes and codes. That one! The very one that needed to work first time, no issue. It was a bit like a new pair of pants shredding my wallet when I put them on for the first time.
I discovered, when trying to log into the bank, that 1password was not firing up with the new Safari. Looking at their website I found that while 1password 3.8 worked with Mavericks the newer 3.9 (my version) did not. Huffy and somewhat miffed and I purchased version 4 that was- it was claimed- fully Mavericks ready. Now to say that the upgrade process was confusing would be something of an understatement. But upgrade it I did only to lose every single password, credit card and note. It was blank, dead and gone. Everything was waste apart from, curiously, my logon for Dan Murphy’s???
To say that I was upset would be another one of those under statements I mentioned earlier. Fortunately I had backups but restoring something like 1password from a backup isn’t as straight forward as you might imagine and there were a number of false starts and swearing before I had all my data back wrapped up in the wrapper that is 1password version 4.

So my advise, particularly if you use 1password 3.9 is wait or have the upgrade done by a professional on hand. If you don’t have anything like 1password at the very least look at all your major applications and see what upgrades might be needed.