I've probably blogged an unflattering thing or two about Steve Jobs in the past, primarily because I was not a big fan of his politics or, perhaps more to the point, his philosophy about certain matters of the Apple business model didn't quite gel with me. Never the less, he was a brilliant man. And I drive a Ford pickup truck while he was a multi-billionaire so he must have been doing something right. I don't agree in a great many cases when a CEO is said to be a visionary, but Steve was the very definition of the term. I've been a loyal Apple customer for many years and it feels almost like I've lost a friend today. There are likely no other corporate leaders who's products I know and love that I feel that way about, no offense to them of course. This is, perhaps, the thing that sets Steve Jobs apart from all other giants of the tech (or any other) industry....he WAS Apple. You can't help but say a silent little "thank-you, Steve" every time you unbox a shiny new Apple device. I will continue to do so even though he is no longer with us in the corporeal sense. May God welcome you with open arms, Steve. And a heart felt thank-you to you. You will most certainly be missed.

After reading some encouraging articles about how to get ColdFusion 9 working on OS X Lion, I took the plunge yet again and ran through the upgrade last night (keeping the "clean install" in my back pocket as a last resort). The upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion went just fine. I reinstalled Java, Coldfusion 9, and the 9.01 update and ColdFusion runs perfectly. My only other show-stopping issue with Lion was disappearing cursors in Flash Player 10 inside of Flex applications. So, just for the hell of it, I installed the Flash Player 11 beta and the problem was solved. The only problem now is, there is no debugger version of FP 11 that I can find and I've still got a couple of strange (but workable) quirks with CS5 apps. I'd say this is a successful OS update, but some of it might have to do with the Lion 10.7.1 release, too.

Well, after using OS X Lion for about 2 [frustrating] weeks, I decided yesterday to downgrade (thank God for TimeMachine) back to Snow Leopard. There were just too many quirky problems and software compatibility issues, particularly surrounding my ColdFusion and Flash Builder installs (not to mention with the Flash Player itself). Today, I also downgraded my Safari 5.1 back to 5.05. Again, too many quirky problems with Flash Player (the debug version). I can't say it's unexpected.....version 1.0 of ANYTHING is generally going to be problematic, but I'm still disappointed. I've come to expect much better from Apple, but their new OS is a bit reminiscent of Vista in the Windows world. Great concepts and high aspirations but, for now, poorly executed. Perhaps their first couple of update releases will resolve some of the issues, but I will thoroughly test before taking the plunge again. My restoration went pretty well, but there were some issues that left me a bit nervous about the validity of the state of my system. Once I fixed Java, however, it's smooth sailing.