Google Drive is a failure.
Google Drive was released yesterday, and I clicked the button on the website letting Google know I was interested in their product. I received an email late last night informing me that my Google Drive was ready. This morning, on a lark really, I went to the Google Drive website and clicked on the download link for the sync application to add to my work iMac. I downloaded the DMG fie without a problem and opened it up. I copied the Google Drive app to my Applications folder, like you are supposed to with Macintosh, and then I sat back and marveled at it. Google Drive, finally.
I’ve been a loyal Dropbox customer for years and back in January I sprang for the $100 a year expansion of my Dropbox up to 50GB. Everything I use connects to my Dropbox via the Dropbox API and just for the record, I am totally in-love with Dropbox. There is no reason for me to leave them as a customer. But even if you are loyal, it doesn’t mean you can’t explore. I have a professional account with Box.com through my work, and we arranged that after drop.io was consumed by the wraiths at Facebook. I have a personal Box.net account with 50GB but I don’t use it because Box only allows sync with paid accounts, so it’s not worth my while. Google Drive was just along these lines, just another option to look into.
So I started Google Drive on my iMac and I was asked to authenticate, something I expected. Then nothing. I started the app again and nothing. I opened up the Console app and here is what I found:
4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e2ba80 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking
4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e37440 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking
4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e332f0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking
4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e32600 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking
4/25/12 7:17:45 AM [0x0–0x221c21a].com.google.GoogleDrive[22481] 2012–04–25 07:17:45.119 Google Drive Icon Helper[22488:903] Inject result: 0
So, it’s broken. This isn’t the first time a new app was built that failed horribly on my iMac. If anyone cares, and perhaps if anyone from Google is reading, this is a standard 2009–2010 iMac running Mac OSX 10.6.8. The only thing different about this particular Mac is that the account has it’s home on an AFP-connected OD-domain’ed Apple xServer. A network home. This causes headaches for Adobe Acrobat Reader so it’s probably the reason why Google Drive collapses on startup.
Since I can’t run the application, and since it wasn’t designed elegantly to take into account those people who have network-based computers like mine – unlike Box.com’s sync app or Dropboxes sync app, I can only state that Google Drive is not ready for prime time. Google Drive is not ready to compete in the marketplace and Google has to go back to the drawing board and try again.
And here for the past few days, since I've been too busy to click and read anything in depth, I've been operating under the assumption that Google Drive is their new app that controls their driverless automobiles. Ahahahahaha….
It also fails in the same way on a standard 10.6 MacOS with a home directory on the same machine (not on a server). No thanks google, I'll stick with dropbox until they announce a fix for this annoying error.
worked great out of the box …
I've had it fail, as well, on MBPro, 10.7.4. Beyond the failure you describe, it screws with the formats of non Gdocs formats, even when you tell it NOT to convert to gdocs formats. So far, I'm really hating it, compare to SugarSync, which I also just started using. I tried Dropbox, but DP screwed with my Aliases and I could have lost tons of data if I hadn't had everything locally backed up. They should give you a large red warning that you can't engage in standard alias-making/moving practice with DB files. So far, Sugarsync is the winner for me, since I can just choose which folders and files to back up instead of dragging everything to a special folder. Also, they have live chat tech support and a more feature-rich GUI for both the desktop and the web apps.
I came across your blog because I was having the same problem. Only, I had it working at first, and it worked great for about a week. Now it hangs and does the same thing. Only it's doing it in both Snow Leopard and Lion on my computer (I have two different boot partitions). I reported it on Google Support forum, but no response from Google. So frustrating!