Today’s note arises from installing Lion updates to my video editor workstations, which should have taken 20 minutes, but ended up taking 4 hours.  Today I did not have typical problems just launching the App Store.  These are often fixed by a re-boot, trashing various preferences, etc.  However I did have two really annoying experiences I’ll share, with solutions.

First, I logged in to the App store using our admin account, and clicked the download button next to Lion.  I got a spinning icon in the title bar, but no actual activity.  In our environment this probably indicates a firewall issue; the App Store needs to communicate with the universe but is being blocked by our firewall, which is waiting for authentication from me.  The Store doesn’t always handle this gracefully, and I know better.  Behind a firewall, it’s best to authenticate first by hitting Google or somewhere that loads fast.  Anyway, I then tried to cancel the download by clicking the “x” icon next to the button.  This actually makes the Lion app disappear from the “Purchased” list, not the behavior I wanted. Hmmm, how do I get it back?  I tried quitting and restarting the app store, even rebooting, these activities don’t restore the app, but may help to goose the App store into behaving appropriately.    As it turns out, the button “hides” the app.  This is a fairly handy feature, but isn’t the obvious function of what looks like a “stop” (or delete) button.  To unhide it, one goes to the Store menu | View my account , where one will find a “View hidden purchases” gadget.  So that’s easy when you figure it out. Then hopefully the restarts and so forth will rejigger the system enough that the download will actually start, indicated by a progress bar.

On another client, I went to download Lion and I got the “You have updates for other accounts” alert appears.  The full text for the search engines is “You have updates for other accounts.  To update this application sign in with the account you used to purchase it”  God only knows what this is intended to mean.  You are logged in correctly, you log out and log back in, restart, authenticate, whatever, and get the same message, and no download appears to start. You probably don’t have any other account. It probably should say, “You have already downloaded this thing”.  In any case the fix is again simple.  The download already has occurred, and it lives in Applications:Install Mac OS X Lion.app.  When you launch that everything proceeds very nicely.