Category: Apple

Even though I am an unapologetic fanboy, Apple's WWDC keynote today—unlike in years past—left me unenthused. I saw nothing that had me screaming, "I need this now."

I'm glad, however, that this year they aren't adding another 200 features to OS X. I'm relieved to see them finally focusing on under the hood fixes and improvements. But El Capitan? Really? With the entire state of California to choose from, this is the best name they could come up with?

Whatever. After being plagued with problems big and small in OS X for the last several years, Apple could really use some Snow Leopard stability at this point, and I hope this release finally addresses that. I want to be able to tell people again, "it just works" and actually mean it.

As for iOS, I'm pretty nonchalant. Unlike OS X, there isn't really a whole lot I've found myself getting excited about during its the various iterations. It runs my phone. As long as it works, that's good enough for me. Unlike some people who are absolutely dependent upon their phones for their entire online existence, I'm still very old school, preferring to do all my serious work on my laptop. Maybe that explains it.

As for the Apple Watch and it's upcoming OS upgrade, all I can say is I've yet to find a single compelling reason to buy one. Perhaps a few years down the road I'll get one and find myself saying (like I have with other tech) "OH MY GOD, WHY DIDN'T I GET THIS YEARS AGO?!?"

We'll see.

Two words: customer service.

The other day Ben discovered that his MacBook display had been chipped at some point. He suspects one of this little darlings had jammed a pencil or other implement into it when he wasn't looking. Neither one of us thought this would be covered under AppleCare since it wasn't a manufacturing defect, and what is permissible display replacement under the program for iPhones/iPads is distinctly different for MacBooks. Nevertheless, yesterday we made a trip to the Genius Bar in hopes that one of the Genii would take pity upon him and somehow make it covered damage. If it wasn't covered, we were looking at a $400 repair, something that just wasn't in our budget. He tweeted:

It turns out he didn't need to flirt with the Genius. The chipping was classified as "pixel foreign material on display" and was covered under AppleCare. It was even ready a day earlier than promised.

This is why I will be an Apple Fanboy for life.

I got a new case for my MacBook.

Okay, I actually bought three: orange, black, and turquoise.

I like this style because the Apple logo is actually cut out. It's also got very grippy rubber feet on the bottom, something the MacBooks are not especially known for.

The orange practically glows in daylight.

You can find them (for all styles and sizes of MacBook) here. They ship from China so it takes a couple weeks for them to arrive, but it's well worth the wait.

A very thoughtful discussion of Apple's design philosophy that mirrors many of the reasons why I remain an unabashed fan of Apple—despite some of its recent missteps—can be found here. Worth the read.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I went back to the Yosemite Beta (or, more specifically) the Developer Preview. Apple released Gold Master Candidate 2 last Tuesday, followed up almost immediately with Candidate 3 two days later.

While the MacRumors 10.10 Forum remains abuzz with complaints about things that still aren't working properly, it seems from my very unscientific and non-professional viewpoint that most of them are of the "if you stand on your head and shake your right foot vigorously, your left hand starts turning purple" variety. Maybe I have a very generic setup and use very generic applications, but I haven't experienced any of the issues that people are recording. In the interest of full disclosure, there are still a few minor graphic inconsistencies, and I still haven't fully solved the Magic Mouse disconnection problem, but with Apple's next big event coming up on Thursday and its expected release of Yosemite to the public at that time, I would say it's damn close to being ready for Prime Time.

Others, of course, may disagree.

 

I don't know what I could add to this (emphasis mine)…

From Rusty Rants:

My first Apple product was an iPod Mini. I still vividly remember being hooked by the design and functionality of such a tiny, sexy device. My next Apple product was a Powerbook G4. Those two products started a long journey of buying and loving Apple products. iPhoto. iPhone. iPad. iWork. I bought them all, and I loved them all. One phrase always kept me coming back for more: "It just works". After coming from devices that always felt buggy and half-finished it really did feel just like that. Everything, well, just worked.

Fast forward to today, 2014. Zoom in to me. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro. In my pocket is the iPhone 6. Three metres away sits a Mac Mini. On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple's hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace. iPhoto is an unusable mess with the volume of photos I now have. Aperture has been discontinued and is badly lagging behind in terms of both performance and features. iTunes takes forever to launch, and is bloated mess of way too many features and functions. iCloud is still a mess that I wouldn't dream of storing my important data in. iOS 7 crashed so often that I became intimately familiar with the Apple logo that appeared every time it did. iOS 8 fixed the crashing, but introduced thousands of little paper cut like bugs. I used to install updates from Apple the second they came out, now I wait a few days to see if they are actually any good.

If you think this is just my experience, let's take a quick recap of the last few weeks of Apple news:

• iOS 8.0.1 was released, with bugs that prevented iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners from connecting to the cell network, and using Touch ID.
• Users trying to fix iOS bugs, reset the settings on their devices. This had the fun, unexpected consequence of wiping their iCloud documents, and syncing those deletions to all their other devices.
• Apple released HealthKit as part of iOS 8, only to pull it, and any apps that supported it due to bugs.
• Apple 'fixed' HealthKit as part of iOS 8.0.2, but my Twitter timeline is still full of people complaining about bugs. By all accounts, and going by the iOS 8.1 change log released today, it's nowhere near ready for prime time.

On the developer front recently:

• iTunes Connect is still amazingly buggy, and Apple managed to make it more so while developers were submitting their iOS 8 updates. I saw so many automated rejections, upload errors and bugs fill my timeline.
• Xcode still crashes for me, at least once or twice a day.
• Apple bought TestFlight, much to our delight, only to reveal that their answer to 'beta testing' is to let us distribute to 25 people that have administration rights over our apps. Do you want your beta testers to be able to change your app prices, descriptions, screenshots and to be able to pull apps from the store? Yeah me neither. The alternative is to submit your app for app review, before you're allowed to distribute it to beta testers. Really Apple? Did I mention that the review queue is currently 9 days long and growing? Thank Thor that HockeyApp still exists.
• Size classes, Apple's answer to 'how on earth are we going to deal with the new screen sizes' lack even the most basic functionality required to do that. The iPhone 6 Plus has it's own size class, in landscape, but in portrait orientation? Every single iPhone ever made is treated the same way. That's right, you can't lay out a different UI for the 3.5″ iPhone in portrait than you can for the 5.5″ monstrosity of a 6 Plus. How Apple missed this basic developer requirement is baffling to me.
• Swift, the language we were all amazed by in June, has turned out to be a bag of hurt for anyone that jumped into it headfirst. It's clear that it too wasn't ready for prime time. I would have happily waited another year or two, especially if Apple built some major apps using it first. As it is we're beta testing it for them, even after the 1.0 release.

Tim Cook keeps telling us that 'Only Apple' could do the amazing things it does. I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren't finished yet. Perhaps the world wouldn't let them, perhaps the expectations are now too high, but I'd kill for Snow iOS 8 and Snow Yosemite next year. I'm fairly confident I'm not alone in that feeling.

All that being said, at this point you'll still have to pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead, hands.

Call me a glutton for punishment.

After my initial foray into beta testing Yosemite and having too many issues with the mouse dropping its connection, I returned to Mavericks a couple weeks ago. Yeah, Mavericks was stable, but having seen the beautiful new future Apple was teasing us with, I reloaded the Yosemite Beta, ran the updates and have been using it since. I have to say that the latest release has cleared up most of the problems I was having. I say most because occasionally the bluetooth will still just say, "No, no, no…" and the mouse will disappear, but nowhere near as often as it had been happening previously. Also, the myriad other little bugs I had reported over the course of my testing seem to have been squashed up by the folks at Apple.

An endless source of amusement for me during all this has been the OS X 10.10 forum at MacRumors. Folks are falling into two camps: Yosemite is beautiful, and Yosemite is UGLY.

Personally, I think it's stunning—and it was the main reason I couldn't stay away. By comparison, Mavericks now looks old and dated to me.

The ones calling it ugly seem to have no good reason other than the user interface has changed from what it was. But it's not like Jony Ive took a steamroller, wholesale, to their beloved skeumorphism; there are still plenty of three-dimensional, real-world icons throughout the OS. And ironically, the same ones who are decrying the loss of dimensionality are the same ones who are bitching about the new translucency of certain windows. The ones I really like are the folks who say, "If this is Apple's view of the future I'm going to Windows!"

Buh-Bye. Don't let the door hit ya on the way out.

So much for my mouse problems disappearing. There are dangers to being an early adopter.

I considered myself lucky that I hadn't suffered any of the truly horrendous game over problems being reported by other Yosemite Beta testers in the MacRumors Forums, but the mouse issue I'd previously reported had become intolerable. It had reached the point that not only would it spontaneously disconnect, it was often taking two or three reboots to get it to reattach itself. Way too much trouble.

Time to abandon Yosemite in its current state and revert back to Mavericks.

The reversal process wasn't a walk in the park. Even though I'd dutifully backed up my Mavericks installation to Time Machine before I loaded the Beta, for some reason after wiping Yosemite and reinstalling Mavericks from scratch, Migration Assistant couldn't actually use the backup. "No valid volumes found."

Ugh.

Thankfully I'd used Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image of the entire Mavericks drive around the first of July and was able to successfully restore from that. As for data that's changed since then, I was able to manually transfer everything back from my latest Yosemite Time Machine backup.

I've learned my lesson. I can wait for the general release. October isn't that far away.

And so far, so good. A few little glitches here and there (all of which I've dutifully reported back to Apple) but overall Yosemite has been much more stable than I'd anticipated it would be.

The biggest problem I've encountered has been the spontaneous dropping of the connection to my Bluetooth mouse and the subsequent refusal to reconnect, requiring a complete reboot. I'm not a hundred percent sure this wasn't a problem with the mouse itself, because it the poor thing was four years old and this behavior had been happening occasionally under Mavericks, but to rule out the mouse itself we bought a new one and the problem has disappeared for the most part.

Other issues have been mostly graphics related: items not aligning properly, text overshooting other elements in windows or being cut off, inconsistencies in what is translucent versus what is not from application to application; things that don't prevent me from productively using the OS, but definitely need to be addressed before this is shipped.

In short, I'm still very impressed what Apple has done here.

After spending most of the afternoon attempting to download the installer, it finally completed without error.

I set up a separate partition on my hard drive and installed it.

Very pretty. "I love what you've done with the place."

After about an hour, I got bored. There isn't much I could do with it, because I only allotted a 60GB partition, and while I might've been able to reinstall all my applications, it definitely wouldn't hold all my data, and frankly I just couldn't deal with all that bother anyway.

I have too much on my internal drive to just split it down the middle and restore everything from Time Machine, so I decided to load it on an external drive.

That worked fine. It was impossibly slow, but I verified that everything worked.

After creating a complete backup of the existing internal Mavericks drive, I threw all caution to the wind and ignoring all published warnings, I then loaded Yosemite on the main drive.

So far, so good. The only issue I've run into is that the GUI interface of my VPN service didn't work. That's not a big deal, as I was able to set up a direct VPN connection in the OS.

These still make me laugh.

This is a very interesting rundown on what actually happens to the apps running on your iPhone. I learned a few things I didn't know.

I think iStat's being overly optimistic.

I want to like you. I want to use you. I really do. But I just don't understand you. Maybe it's because you're too easy, and after decades of manually sorting and renaming my photos into folders that are just so, I simply can't wrap my head around that simplicity.

Yeah, I get that that you're basically just one big database, and that anything I do inside you leaves my original images "on the outside" untouched. But if I want to use an altered photo from the database I have to export it, essentially creating a duplicate image. WTF? Other than from a safety standpoint of leaving all your original items untouched, what's the point? For me it's a bunch of extra steps that provides no benefit whatsoever.

I already have everything anal-retentively sorted and named inside [the admittedly huge steaming pile of shit that is] Adobe's Bridge, and all my editing is done either with Photoshop or a quick-n-dirty editor called Flare, so even your photo manipulation facilities leave me unmoved.  And even if I did use them, we're back to the whole having-to-export thing.

My workflow is basically when I snag a new image off the internet it first goes into a "Downloads" folder to later get renamed and shuttled off to its respective folder. Importing photos from my camera works basically the same way. In that case, I used to have folders by year, with individual dated subfolders for each "event" as you like to call them, where I'd put the images, but I blew away that system—which became too anal even for me—a while back and now just dump everything into yearly folders. I figure since everything is time stamped already,  I don't really need to break things down any further.

I suppose that if I'd started my photographic career off with you initially and had never been exposed to ThumbsPlus (that I curse on a daily basis for still not having a Mac version available) or Photoshop, we'd be having a marvelous love affair right now, but importing 80,000+ images (and no, that's not all porn!) after the fact and then basically recreating the folder structure I already have and use seems a huge waste of time.

I do understand a few of your benefits, most notably the ability to create virtual folders where disparate images can be grouped. I like being able to create a "Wallpaper" folder, and throw images from a dozen different albums into it. I find that useful. You're also great for making Photo Books. But other than that, I just don't see how you can fit into my workflow without doubling the number of steps I need to perform to get from Point A to Point B, and ain't nobody got time for that!

Stolen, but reflects my own feelings to the letter:

Okay, so iOS 7.0.6 happened – the short version is that Apple broke SSL. Oops. Oh well, it happens, apply the patch yadda yadda yadda.

What didn't happen was the corresponding OS X patch. At least not yet.

WHAT THE EVER LOVING F**K, APPLE??!?!! Did you seriously just use one of your platforms to drop an SSL 0day on your other platform? As I sit here on my mac I'm vulnerable to this and there's nothing I can do, because you couldn't release a patch for both platforms at the same time? You do know there's a bunch of live, working exploits for this out in the wild right now, right? Your advisory is entirely focussed on iOS so we know nothing of OS X yet (other than the fact that the exploits work) – could you tell us what in OS X is vulnerable? Is mail.app vulnerable? Should I be worried about malicious SSL/TLS mailservers? How about your update system itself – is that vulnerable?

Come the hell on, Apple. You just dropped an ugly 0day on us and then went home for the weekend – goto fail indeed.

FIX. YOUR. SHIT.

Soon.

Please?

Love and hugs as always,