Upgrade day: iOS 4.0 (with iTunes 9.2), WordPress 3.0

For reasons best known to my shrink (maybe I wasn’t exposed to enough risk as a child?), I decided to tackle two major upgrades yesterday. Of course iOS 4.0 was released yesterday, so I had to get multi-tasking working; but WordPress 3.0 was also released last Thursday and I figured it was time to check that out. In the process of doing the iOS upgrade, there was also an incidental iTunes upgrade. Of the three, guess which one was the most problematic?

WordPress 3.0 went absolutely smoothly in manual install mode. I haven’t been able to use auto updates because my FTP user does not have the WordPress directory as its home directory, but manual installs have generally worked well for me. I reviewed the sample wp_config.php file, updated a few parameters that had been added in the recent past, then copied all the other files over. A db upgrade later and everything was up and running. The downer of WP 3.0 is that most of the features are available through new theme capabilities, and the author of my theme appears to have left WP theme development in favor of the preacher’s life. Best of luck, Armen, and if you ever revive the Excel theme let me know. In the meantime, it looks like I have to learn how to hack themes to take advantage of flexible menus and some of the other new features.

Now iOS and iTunes 9.2 is another story. I hadn’t remembered to do the 9.2 update over the weekend, so I was prompted partway into the iOS 4.0 installation. I had to step back and do that install first, then restart iTunes. And of course, somehow, iTunes lost my music directory location again (I keep all my iTunes files on a NAS since I have much more music than will fit on my MacBook Pro’s HD). I don’t know why it decided that I had my library back in the default location, but it did, and it spent a half hour rebuilding my library file only to lose all the file locations. I had to change the location and rebuild again, and only then was I able to do the sync. In spite of the multiple rebuilds, iTunes was still confused about the location of some files, and it took another restart of iTunes to fix the problem.

By comparison the iOS 4.0 upgrade was a piece of cake. Everything about the phone seems snappier now. Multitasking and folders work as advertised; I like the new iBooks reader (though it’s much slower on initial start than the Kindle App or Classics); and it was a kick to see a photo of my daughter (my normal wallpaper) behind all the home screen icons.

But there was one big glitch. For some reason, name server resolution stopped working through my VPN. The VPN was working, and I was able to find my Exchange server and other resources by IP address, but there were definitely some frustrating moments this morning as I tried to get everything working. I really hope that that was a transient glitch, or this new OS is not going to work out too well for me.