By Greg Pak
As a user of Apple’s soon-to-be-discontinued MobileMe service, I’ve gotten a number of emails over the last few months encouraging me to upgrade to Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and switch to iCloud, the service that’s replacing MobileMe. Yesterday I finally bit the bullet.
Unfortunately, the upgrade process broke two of my most-used programs and gobbled up several hours of troubleshooting time. In hopes of helping others avoid the same problems, here’s what I learned:
How to prevent Lion from eating Final Draft
If you are a Final Draft user, DEACTIVATE your computer’s Final Draft program before upgrading to Lion. (Go to the “Help” menu and select “Deactivate”). Your Final Draft license gives you the right to activate two computers to use the program; when you deactivate online in this way, the Final Draft servers keep track and will let you reactivate after you upgrade. If you do NOT deactivate, the upgrade to Lion will wipe out your computer’s record of Final Draft activation and you’ll have to call the Final Draft service number and type through multiple menus to reactivate manually. (That’s what I just finished doing.)
Also, before you upgrade to Lion, go to www.finaldraft.com/install and download the free 8.0.3 upgrade. Previous versions of Final Draft are not compatible with Lion; you’ll need this version to run the program.
Lion may kill your email by changing your SpamSieve filter
After I upgraded to Lion, my Mail program apparently would not receive any emails. At first I thought it was just my me.com address. But it was all of my email addresses. I eventually figured out that the Lion upgrade had reset the SpamSieve filter to move ALL incoming emails to the Spam folder. I rescued the missing emails from the Spam folder and disabled the filter.
Mail may not recognize your me.com email password
I’m now receiving me.com mail on my desktop and iPhone, but not on my laptop. For some reason, my laptop’s Mail program constantly gives me the error message that my password is incorrect. I’ve changed the password — no dice. I still haven’t figured this one out. I’m considering deleting my me.com account in that installation of Mail and recreating it, but that seems a bit extreme. If you have any ideas, feel free to ping me on Twitter.
UPDATE: Just solved the last problem! After some searching, I found this thread that suggested changing “Authentication” under the “Advanced” tab for the account from “Password” to “Apple Token.” Success!