Friday, May 20, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Restoring Contacts From a Time Machine Backup

Miles Wolbe:

Open Contacts.app then “Enter Time Machine” from menu bar icon to restore (H/T). Note that the “Browse Other Backup Disks…” option accessed by Option-clicking the Time Machine menu bar icon really means “Browse Other Backup Disks for the current device”.

This didn’t work for me. It just showed an empty Contacts window, and none of the Time Machine buttons responded, so I had to force quit. Fortunately, he lists 4 other methods. It seems like to really do it right you need to erase all the contacts in iCloud first:

No consideration is given here to iCloud Contacts sync (though thermo2’s 20-step procedure is reproduced below without prejudice). Back up, back up, back up and understand what you are doing.

Disk Utility Can Only Check Backup Disks in Recovery

Howard Oakley:

The most serious problem with Disk Utility remains its manifest inability to run First Aid on some volumes and containers, in particular Time Machine backup stores. This problem persists, although currently it now seems confined to APFS backup volumes.

[…]

If you need to run First Aid on an APFS Time Machine backup disk, the only methods available are to use Disk Utility or apfs_fsck in Recovery Mode. This is a serious failure, particularly as the message given to users is to “back up the data on this volume”, which is wholly inappropriate for a backup volume, and gives the false impression that failure is imminent.

[…]

Less serious, but more confusing, is a sporadic bug which displays bizarre results after a disk has been erased, or partitioned into two or more containers.

I run into this last issue a lot. Sometimes partitioning fails for no apparent reason. Other times, Disk Utility says it succeeded but displays a completely different partition structure than what it had been asked to create.

Previously:

New Receipt Validation Sample Code

Apple (via Thomas Zoechling):

The following example code illustrates how to retrieve an identifier in macOS for validating an App Store receipt. Use the data returned to by the copy_mac_address function to validate the App Store receipt.

In the following Swift code, the io_service function uses IOKit to retrieve network interfaces as an optional IOKit object. The copy_mac_address function looks up an appropriate network interface and returns the hardware address from the IOKit object as optional CFData.

Apple’s sample code for this had been broken at least since Catalina. I still think there should just be an API for validating and parsing receipts, instead of encouraging developers to either reinvent the wheel or incorporate open source code of questionable quality.

Previously:

Weathergraph 1.0.97

I recently started using Weathergraph. I’ve been happy with Snowflake Weather on my iPhone, but less so on my Apple Watch. Weathergraph has a great watch app and complication, and it’s even better with the new icon theme and precipitation probability display that were added in the 1.0.96 update. For some reason—maybe the location-based updates—it does not seem to be subject to the watchOS 8.5 bug that prevents my other complications from updating automatically. And, unlike Apple’s complication, it can show the last cached forecast when there’s no network connection.

The basic design feels like an evolution of Weather Line and Weather Strip, but I think Weathergraph shows the information better. The display is very configurable, so I can choose to show wind speed but not wind direction, humidity but not the dew point, and the UV index but not the atmospheric pressure. Unfortunately, the rain percentage is shown as a light blue area with no scale or label, so it’s not clear what the percentage is except in relative terms. I like how you can choose the zoom level and how it can be different for the phone, the watch app, and the watch complication.

The main drawback is that it only supports a single location, which cannot be set manually, so you can’t use it to plan travel. So right now I’m using Weathergraph in combination with Snowflake.

Weathergraph Pro—which includes Foreca, Dark Sky, and realtime forecasts—is $3.99/month, $19.99/year, or $49.99 for a lifetime license. Below are some screenshots comparing it with other weather apps that I have installed.

Weathergraph

weathergraph-iphone-1 weathergraph-iphone-2 weathergraph-watch-complication weathergraph-watch-app-1 weathergraph-watch-app-2

Apple

apple-iphone apple-watch-complication apple-watch-app-1 apple-watch-app-2 apple-watch-app-3

Snowflake Weather

snowflake-iphone snowflake-watch-complication snowflake-watch-app-1 snowflake-watch-app-2

Weather Strip

weatherstrip-iphone

CARROT Weather

carrot-iphone carrot-watch-complication carrot-watch-app

Previously:

Thursday, May 19, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Indirect Struct Properties in Swift

Sean Heber:

Surprised that Swift has “indirect” for enum cases but not for structs. Seems like a weird omission.

Here’s a property wrapper that lets you use “indirect” properties in a struct for those times when you really want to because “reasons.”

It uses an enum wrapper, which is more efficient than an object.

Apple Accessibility Feature Preview

Shelly Brisbin:

For the second year running, Apple has offered a preview of updated accessibility features coming to its platforms later this year. The announcements come just ahead of Thursday’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which goes by #GAAD online.

Apple:

Apple is introducing Door Detection, a cutting-edge navigation feature for users who are blind or low vision. Door Detection can help users locate a door upon arriving at a new destination, understand how far they are from it, and describe door attributes — including if it is open or closed, and when it’s closed, whether it can be opened by pushing, turning a knob, or pulling a handle. Door Detection can also read signs and symbols around the door, like the room number at an office, or the presence of an accessible entrance symbol. This new feature combines the power of LiDAR, camera, and on-device machine learning, and will be available on iPhone and iPad models with the LiDAR Scanner.

[…]

With Apple Watch Mirroring, users can control Apple Watch using iPhone’s assistive features like Voice Control and Switch Control, and use inputs including voice commands, sound actions, head tracking, or external Made for iPhone switches as alternatives to tapping the Apple Watch display. Apple Watch Mirroring uses hardware and software integration, including advances built on AirPlay, to help ensure users who rely on these mobility features can benefit from unique Apple Watch apps like Blood Oxygen, Heart Rate, Mindfulness, and more.

[…]

Live Captions in FaceTime attribute auto-transcribed dialogue to call participants, so group video calls become even more convenient for users with hearing disabilities. When Live Captions are used for calls on Mac, users have the option to type a response and have it spoken aloud in real time to others who are part of the conversation.

Update (2022-05-20): John Siracusa:

This use of accessibility features to rearrange icons on an iPhone is arguably easier than the “normal” way.

Apple Introduces Professional IT Training

Apple:

As companies expand their use of technology, employees are demanding to use iPhone, iPad, and Mac at work, resulting in an increased need for IT professionals skilled in supporting and managing Apple products.

To help meet this growing demand, Apple today launched updated professional training and certifications for IT support and management. The training has been completely redesigned and moved to an online, self-paced format. Users can demonstrate their competency with two new exams and earn certification from Apple.

[…]

Two new Apple Professional Training courses — Apple Device Support, and Apple Deployment and Management — are available today on training.apple.com. The courses are sequential, and build on skills and concepts as the user progresses. At the completion of each course, new certification exams are available to demonstrate competence achieved at each level with corresponding digital badges from Apple. Each exam costs $149, and certification can be displayed on resumes, online profiles, and job boards, enabling users to stand out in job searches — and employers to find qualified candidates.

Tom Bridge (tweet):

In addition to the new exams, Apple’s announced a program working with the Mac Admins Foundation to make sure that those who can’t afford to take this exam, or whose employers won’t pay, can still get certified. The Mac Admins Foundation is a brand new 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to support the people who manage Apple products, starting with the Mac Admins Slack, and moving onward to making conferences more approachable for people just starting out in this industry.

Should You Continue Using HFS+?

Howard Oakley:

The most compelling argument for retaining HFS+ is on rotating hard disks, because APFS can result in severe fragmentation, most importantly in the file system metadata, so causing degraded performance; as SSDs don’t suffer those performance penalties, this could be a good reason for continuing to use HFS+ on hard disks, while switching SSDs to APFS.

That argument may hold good for storage which is in active use, such as boot disks and those containing working files, but appears less compelling in more static use, to contain relatively stable archives or backups in which there is limited turnover of files or data. Although objectively assessing the effects of fragmentation is fraught with difficulty, one basic question is whether there is any difference in performance between the file systems to begin with.

I updated my spinning hard drives to APFS when that became necessary in order to make bootable clones. The other main benefit is that APFS snaphots on the destination are a great way to fit multiple backups onto the same drive. Previously, I used multiple partitions, which is much less space-efficient.

The hidden downside is that, for reasons I don’t understand, most of my APFS backup drives take an unpredictable amount of time to mount. With HFS+ it consistently took a few seconds. With APFS, sometimes it takes a few seconds, but other times it takes 5 minutes or even an hour before I can access the drive’s contents. A few of my APFS backups do have multiple partitions. They mount in a random order. If I’m lucky, the one I need mounts first, and in that case the backup is almost always done before the other partitions have even mounted.

Sometimes, the APFS volume never auto-mounts, but it does show up in Disk Utility where—after it takes 10 minutes to launch—I can manually tell it to mount.

Other times, the APFS volume does auto-mount, using the password stored in the keychain, but it shows a password prompt, anyway. Sometimes, despite trying to dismiss this dialog, it stays on-screen the entire time I’m using the drive. I try to drag it mostly off-screen so that it doesn’t block my other windows.

Sometimes, generally after a kernel panic, APFS volumes don’t even show up in Disk Utility after a restart. I have to power cycle the enclosures. (Ironically, most of the kernel panics that I’ve been getting with my M1 Pro MacBook Pro seem to be related to HFS.)

Previously:

Wednesday, May 18, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Weak Self: Closure Rules of Thumb

Christian Tietze:

In Swift, you can weak-ify references to self in escaping closures, and then you need to deal with the case that the reference is gone when the block is called.

Last month, Benoit Pasquier and Chris Downie presented different takes on the problem. That discussion was excellent. It prompted me to take some more time to revisit this problem systematically, and I took away a couple of notes for future-me.

The three popular options as Chris listed them are these:

  1. Do not capture strong reference
  2. Override self with strong reference
  3. Bind strongSelf

As always, either way has its pitfalls.

[…]

[When overriding self, you] can forget weakifying inner closures and accidentally create a retain cycle again!

I think we still see this discussed because nobody has a great solution. There are some common patterns, but they are verbose and still easy to get wrong.

I tend to upgrade self at the top of the closure. For common cases like notifications and timers, I have the caller handle this and pass the strong reference into the closure if it’s not nil.

Previously:

Amazon to Support ePub

Jason Snell:

For years, Amazon has used the Mobipocket format (.mobi) rather than the ePub format for Kindle books. Recently it developed its own format, KF8 (and now KFX), and has been using that instead. Everyone else uses ePub. Publishers sell books direct as ePubs, but are forced to include .mobi versions for compatibility reasons.

But this is changing. Amazon announced that later this year, its email and drag-and-drop send tools will accept ePub format files. Amazon will then convert those files to KF8 and deliver them to Kindles, but at least the user won’t have to do the job themselves.

Update (2022-05-19): Tom Nardi (via Hacker News):

Native support for EPUB would make using the Kindle a lot less of a hassle for many folks, but alas, it was not to be. It wasn’t long before the original post was updated to clarify that Amazon had simply added support for EPUB to their Send to Kindle service. Granted this is still an improvement, as it represents a relatively low-effort way to get the open format files on your personal device; but in sending the files through the service they would be converted to Amazon’s KF8/AZW3 format, the result of which may not always be what you expected. At the same time the Send to Kindledocumentation noted that support for AZW and MOBI files would be removed later on this year, as the older formats weren’t compatible with all the features of the latest Kindle models.

If you think this is a lot of unnecessary confusion just to get plain-text files to display on the world’s most popular ereader, you aren’t alone. Users shouldn’t have to wade through an alphabet soup of oddball file formats when there’s already an accepted industry standard in EPUB. But given that it’s the reality when using one of Amazon’s readers, this seems a good a time as any for a brief rundown of the different ebook formats, and a look at how we got into this mess in the first place.

Time Machine Evolution and APFS

Howard Oakley:

You don’t have to prepare an APFS volume, as Time Machine will do that for you, but I prefer to make one ready using Disk Utility.

[…]

Time Machine will then prepare its backup volume by making another APFS volume using the case-sensitive option and designating it as a Backup volume.

Howard Oakley:

To distinguish between what are effectively two different systems, I’m going to refer to Time Machine backing up to APFS as TMA, and when backing up to HFS+ as TMH.

[…]

From its release, TMH has been dependent on features of the HFS+ file system to create its Finder illusion. Every hour the backup service examined the record of changes made to the file system since the last backup was made, using its FSEvents database. It worked out what had changed and needed to be copied into the backup. During the backup phase itself, it only copied across those files which had been created or changed since the last backup was made.

[…]

Apple later introduced what it called Mobile Time Machine, intended for laptops which could be away from their normal backup destination for some time. In around 10,000 lines of code, Mac OS X came to create something like a primitive snapshot, but on HFS+.

When Apple released the first version of APFS on Mac OS X in High Sierra, its new snapshot feature was incorporated into TMH. They were initially used instead of the FSEvents database to determine what should be backed up.

[…]

Catalina introduced a more complicated scheme to replace snapshots as the normal means for determining what to back up. This was presumably because computing a snapshot delta proved slow, and the introduction of the Volume Group, with specialist types of APFS volume for which snapshot deltas would be inappropriate or impossible.

[…]

TMA interestingly reverses the design of TMH in High Sierra: instead of using snapshots to determine what needs to be backed up before creating a backup using traditional hard links, most of the time TMA determines what’s changed using the traditional method with FSEvents, then creates its backup as a snapshot on the backup volume. The latter is essential, as without directory hard links, there’s no way of using the TMH method to make backups to an APFS volume.

Howard Oakley:

Once again, the changes required to enable Time Machine backups to be made to APFS volumes appear to have required modifications in the file system. Before macOS 11.0, we’ve always thought of snapshots as being straightforward copies of the metadata for a specific volume, something essentially generated by making a copy of those file system metadata. If that was what Time Machine relied on in Big Sur, then it could only back up whole volumes.

Instead, when backing up to an APFS volume, Time Machine now creates snapshots of individual folders when necessary, a feature which hasn’t yet been made available through the command tool tmutil. Not only that, but during the process of making a backup, Time Machine copies snapshots between volumes and seems able to assemble a backup snapshot from its file system metadata and constituent items, including changed blocks within a file.

Howard Oakley

Early versions of Time Machine started making backups when they were run by launchd scheduling (rather than cron), exactly every hour. When Apple introduced its new scheduling system with DAS (Duet Activity Scheduler) and CTS-XPC (Centralized Task Scheduling), Time Machine backups were among the first to take advantage of it. Since then, instead of backups being made at exactly hourly intervals, they’re more flexible in timing, accommodating to environmental conditions such as thermal pressure and power state.

Howard Oakley:

One feature which appears to have been lost in the new Time Machine backups to APFS volumes is the ability to check the integrity of their contents, which now appears confined to backups made to HFS+ volumes.

Howard Oakley:

There’s a clear advantage to this new scheme in that it functions not just with whole files, but with changed blocks within files. Just as a snapshot references the data blocks which make up each file, so a snapshot-based backup can back up individual blocks which have changed, which can be significantly more efficient in the storage space required.

This new scheme not only retains hourly snapshots on the source volume, which are still kept for up to 24 hours, but provides its backups in the form of snapshots on the backup volume, where the file system data are stored in addition to the snapshot itself.

The final piece of magic used by Time Machine backups to APFS volumes is that its snapshots can be made not only for whole volumes, but for individual folders within a volume. If you want to back up just your Home Documents folder, Time Machine will do that, rather than having to back up your complete Data volume.

Howard Oakley:

Creating the backup begins in earnest with a local snapshot, which is termed the stable snapshot. This appears to be a whole-volume snapshot, which is then mounted at a path based on /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/[machine]/[datestamp]/[volume name]. The stable snapshot made in the last backup is located and mounted as the reference snapshot, at a similar path, but with a different datestamp, of course. TMA locates the “volume store”, into which the backed up files and other items will be copied. This should be at a path like /Volumes/[backup volname]/[datestamp].previous/.

[…]

TMA states the possible strategies which it could use to work out what is to be backed up[…]

[…]

Currently, with Big Sur only backing up Data and unroled general-purpose volumes, those are the four possibilities. The full list of what’s possible in Catalina includes:

  • full first backups
  • deep scans
  • FSEvents
  • snapshot diffing
  • consistency scans
  • cached events.

Howard Oakley:

Now that I’ve worked through the steps involved in an automatic Time Machine backup to APFS local storage (TMA), this article draws that out into a chart, and compares that against the processes used when backing up to HFS+ in Catalina (TMH).

Howard Oakley:

The backup store has a distinctive volume structure, consisting of hidden Spotlight indexes, any mounted backup snapshots listed by their datestamp, a property list containing details of all the backups in that store, and an optional property list giving information about any inheritance of those backups.

Backup snapshots themselves contain the eventdb constructed during their original backup process, a checkpoint file, a property list containing all the exclusions which applied to TMA backups when that backup was made, and the backup itself listed by volume name.

[…]

TMA backups provide good access to the user through the Time Machine app and the Finder. However, their ability to manipulate backups is severely limited. As these rely on snapshots, individual files can’t be removed from them, a feature restricted to TMH. Whole backups, complete with their snapshots, can be removed, though. That isn’t supported by the Time Machine app, but can be performed directly in the Finder.

Howard Oakley:

One day we’ll look back and remember fondly when it was possible to clone any Mac volume to an identical copy. Sadly, since the introduction of APFS in High Sierra, that has now stopped working for those volumes formatted using the new file system. Try making a clone of an APFS volume now and you may not even notice what’s missing from the copy: snapshots.

Howard Oakley:

Periodically, backup snapshots are indexed by Spotlight for the volume’s Spotlight-V100 indexes. This may require background mounting and unmounting of those snapshots, and often results in the spinning Time Machine icon being displayed against that volume in the Finder.

Howard Oakley:

Attention now needs to be devoted to addressing the problems identified here with changing source and destination volumes. It isn’t acceptable to have to start completely fresh backups whenever a disk needs to be changed, and Apple needs to document the processes required to inherit source and destination disks, without driving users to experiment with tmutil.

For all its ingenuity and sophisticated engineering, of the three backup utilities which I use, Time Machine is by far the most complex, and the only one which makes changes like these so difficult.

Howard Oakley:

This confirms that TMA is as efficient as possible in both the copying and storage of APFS sparse files and clones. This is far superior to TMH, which would of course have had to copy across almost 15 GB extra data, and required a total of 15 GB space in the backups for these three files. With sparse files and clones being relatively common in APFS volumes, the efficiency of TMA can make a big difference to the time taken to make backups, and use of storage space on the backup volume.

Howard Oakley:

This article is a summary of the current benefits and limitations of TMA as its stands in macOS 11.2.3, at the end of which is a list of those detailed accounts. These should help you make a more informed decision as to whether to use TMA.

Howard Oakley:

One significant exclusion which has been added in Big Sur is the hidden and locked folder on each volume containing its local version database; this is to work around the bug which plagued TMH in Catalina when trying to back up large and complex version databases.

Howard Oakley:

This article looks at configuring and using TMA’s backup storage on a shared disk over a network – in this case, a shared APFS volume on another Mac running Big Sur.

Howard Oakley:

Being more complex and dependent on other systems, making Time Machine backups to shared storage on your network is more prone to fail. As I’ve spent much of the day sorting one such failure out, I thought it might be useful to discuss what went wrong and what went wronger.

Howard Oakley:

A quick check on one of my working folders, just a part of my extended Home folder, found almost 1600 clone files totalling over 10 GB in size. If I were still backing up to HFS+, every one of those files would have to be saved in full into my backup, and in every subsequent backup it would have to be present either in the form of a complete copy (if it had changed), a hard link, or one to a directory above it. Instead, my APFS backup just contains a directory entry for the clone.

Howard Oakley:

With Time Machine it’s so tempting just to let it back up your entire Data volume, and be done with it. This article explains how you can do better than that, and exclude items from that backup which would merely waste space.

Howard Oakley:

In just over a month’s time, Time Machine will turn fourteen, making it one of the longest-lasting and externally almost unchanged features in macOS. As I’ve been trawling back through my archives preparing a talk for MacSysAdmins about Time Machine, I though you might enjoy a stroll down memory lane, and return to autumn 2007 for a few moments.

Howard Oakley:

I have been honoured this year to be invited to present at MacSysAdmin Online 2021, talking about Time Machine.

You can watch my presentation and download my slides from here, where you’ll also find plenty of even better presentations.

Howard Oakley:

It’s that time of year when many of us are planning our upgrades, either to Big Sur or Monterey. One vital consideration is how to migrate our backups: this article looks at what you need to do for existing Time Machine backups, whether stored locally on an external disk, or on your network.

Howard Oakley:

If you’re going to use SMB as recommended by Apple, the most robust way seems to be disable AFP on all NAS which support SMB. It may sometimes help if you’re not connected to the NAS in the Finder, before you start setting that up as your TM backup destination.

Howard Oakley:

Earlier this month, I provided a presentation for the MacSysAdmins virtual conference. Now that’s done and dusted, I’m pleased to provide a copy of my slides in high quality PDF, together with my script, available from here: timemachinemacsysadmins

Howard Oakley:

If you’re intending to back up from Time Machine to network storage such as a NAS or another Mac, the above figures can be used to provide an estimate of how long those backups are likely to take. First, connect to a share on the server, and copy to it a single large file, such as the 10 GB test file used here. Measure the total time for that to transfer, and take two-thirds (0.67) of that transfer rate as the likely overall rate to be delivered by Time Machine. Then use that with your expected average hourly backup to calculate how long that is likely to take.

[…]

Time Machine settings you should consider for improving performance include:

  • exclude items containing many small files, such as Xcode;
  • back up very large files such as VMs separately;
  • use default automatic hourly backups, rather than backing up less frequently;
  • back up to APFS, which works at a block rather than file level, and backs up clones and sparse files much more efficiently.

[…]

If you should encounter poor performance when making backups, use T2M2’s Check Speed feature to identify which items are causing most slowing.

Howard Oakley:

After four years in which it had offered frustratingly limited support for the new features of APFS, Disk Utility is now complete: this version has excellent support for snapshots, no matter which app created them.

Howard Oakley:

However, we know that snapshots are strictly read-only, and the only user experiences that I can discover confirm my suspicion that all fsck_apfs does when it finds an error in a snapshot is to throw its hands in the air, report an opaque error code, and not even attempt a repair.

For a backup snapshot, that’s fatal. All you can then do is delete the whole snapshot, knocking a hole in your backups which can never be replaced. Disk Utility’s typical response only rubs salt into the wound by telling the user to make a backup of the affected disk. As it’s currently impossible to copy backup snapshots to another disk, a single error on that storage compromises all your backups stored there: every single one of them, and there’s absolutely nothing that macOS offers to help that.

Howard Oakley:

Snapshots are one of the huge advances in APFS, but like other features, they can cause more problems than they’re worth. This article explains how they can go wrong, and what you can do to manage them so they don’t swallow all the free space on your storage.

[…]

Third-party backup products which incorporate snapshot features, like Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), are more flexible and you can set custom snapshot retention policies for individual volumes. These operate independently, so CCC can’t change Time Machine’s policy, neither can Time Machine delete CCC’s snapshots automatically.

[…]

In most cases, apps should provide settings in their Preferences which let you store their temporary files on a volume which isn’t backed up, so avoiding them swelling the size of hourly snapshots.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-20): Howard Oakley:

Time Machine manages its backups actively to ensure that, whenever possible, they remain well within the disk space available to the backup volume. It does this by a process of ‘thinning’ older backups to recover the space that they occupy. If the backup volume is inside a container which completely fills that disk, then Time Machine will normally fill the volume, thus the container, thus the whole disk. Simply adding another non-backup volume to the same container will put the two volumes into competition for the same free disk space, and will eventually result in your use of the non-backup volume being determined by Time Machine’s thinning of its backups.

One way to avoid that competition from occurring is to reserve space on the backup disk for your non-backup storage. There are two ways to do that: you can set a reserve size on a volume in the same container as the backup volume, or you can put your non-backup volume into a separate container. Neither of those is mentioned in Apple’s guide.

[…]

However, you can only set reserve and quota sizes when you create the volume. Even diskutil can’t change them once that volume has been created. The only way that I know to make such a change is to create a new volume with the desired sizes set, then move the contents of the original volume across to it.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Bike 1.0

Jesse Grosjean (tweet, Hacker News):

Bike is a macOS (11 and later) native outliner. Bike has good performance on big outlines. Bike uses open file formats and is scriptable too. Use Bike to record and process your ideas.

[…]

Outliners are powerful but constraining. Text editors are freeing but weak on structure. Bike is good at both.

[…]

Bike uses open file formats. The .bike file format is HTML–you can view it in your web browser. Bike also supports .opml and .txt.

It really is fast. I love the open formats. What’s cool is that it doesn’t just export to OPML and plain text; you can directly edit and save files in those formats, too, and convert between them. I used it to convert some of my big OmniOutliner files to plain text, for easier access on my iPhone and within BBEdit. I can edit a file in both BBEdit and Bike at the same time, and each app recognizes changes from the other. The plain text format just uses tabs and newlines for structure (no leading - or * to mark items), so it works great with lots of tools. Bike supports multiple levels of hoisting/focusing. It’s $29.99 direct and $2.99/month or $19.99/year in the Mac App Store.

See also: How does Bike relate to TaskPaper?.

Previously:

Opt-Out App Store Subscription Increases

Apple (via Mark Gurman, MacRumors):

Currently, when an auto-renewable subscription price is increased, subscribers must opt in before the price increase is applied. The subscription doesn’t renew at the next billing period for subscribers who didn’t opt in to the new price. This has led to some services being unintentionally interrupted for users and they must take steps to resubscribe within the app, from Settings on iPhone and iPad, or in the App Store on Mac.

With this update, under certain specific conditions and with advance user notice, developers may also offer an auto-renewable subscription price increase, without the user needing to take action and without interrupting the service. The specific conditions for this feature are that the price increase doesn’t occur more than once per year, doesn’t exceed US$5 and 50% of the subscription price, or US$50 and 50% for an annual subscription price, and is permissible by local law. In these situations, Apple always notifies users of an increase in advance, including via email, push notification, and a message within the app.

Mitchell Clark:

Reading that literally, it means that both conditions would have to be true to require an opt-in. But the example scenario seems so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe that’s what Apple intends.

[…]

It’s worth noting that you could easily turn Apple’s logic on its head: if users were missing those renewal opt-in notices, wouldn’t they also miss these new price change warnings? But it does sound like they’ll be relatively in your face.

[…]

There is an easy fix to this: let users pick whether or not they want the auto-renewing price increases instead of deciding for them. In my mind, that’d just be a toggle in the App Store settings that says something like “Always ask for opt-in if price increases,” and turning it on would make it like this change never happened.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-19): Benjamin Mayo:

In the short term, those same competition forces mean that Apple will have to pull back on some of the customer-friendly In-App Purchase policies to align with the market, to keep publishers onboard.

[…]

The vast majority of subscriptions in the world do not work that way. In-App Purchase was a stark outlier. It stood in contrast to even Apple’s own subscriptions like iCloud or Apple One; they increase their price freely with notification, but without consent.

PasswordWallet 4.8.13 for Mac

Selznick Scientific Software:

  • The Toolbars now look correct in mac OS Big Sur.
  • Ready for Apple Silicon! (M1)
  • Improved Bonjour support for discovering other PasswordWallets on your local network.
  • Fixed an issue with the Entry Editor when in “separate-window mode” and PasswordWallet closes on a timeout.

The iOS version has also been updated to version 4.8.22. My understanding is that the updates were held up for almost 6 months due to an Apple security bug.

Previously:

Xcode 13.4

Apple:

Xcode 13.4 includes SDKs for iOS 15.5, iPadOS 15.5, tvOS 15.4, watchOS 8.5, and macOS Monterey 12.3. The Xcode 13.4 release supports on-device debugging for iOS 15.5, iPadOS 15.5, tvOS 15.4, watchOS 8.5, and later. Xcode 13.4 requires a Mac running macOS Monterey 12.3 or later.

[…]

The async version of addTeardownBlock method in XCTestCase is now available.

Closures that are guaranteed to run on the main actor are now permitted to reference local variables from their enclosing scopes that are also running on the main actor.

Previously:

Monday, May 16, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Apple Platform Security Guide (May 2022)

Apple (PDF):

Unless otherwise noted, this documentation covers the following operating system versions: iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4, macOS 12.3, tvOS 15.4, and watchOS 8.5.

Apple:

Topics added:

Apple:

In macOS 12.0.1 or later, every new macOS installation also installs a paired version of recoveryOS into the corresponding APFS volume group. This design is familiar to users of Intel-based Mac computers, but on a Mac with Apple silicon, it provides additional security and compatibility guarantees. Because every macOS installation now has a dedicated paired recoveryOS, this helps ensure that only that dedicated paired recoveryOS can perform security-downgrading operations. This helps protect installations of newer versions of macOS from tampering initiated from older versions of macOS, and vice versa.

[…]

To boot into a paired recoveryOS for any macOS installation, that installation needs to be selected as the default, which is done using Startup Disk in System Preferences or by starting any recoveryOS and holding Option while selecting a volume.

Howard Oakley:

Don’t be put off by its title: Apple Platform Security Guide is mandatory reading for all advanced Mac Users, and the only way we get to learn about important details of macOS, iCloud, and much else.

[…]

Indeed, several of us have experienced problems trying to get a downgraded copy of macOS on an external disk to load third-party kexts. Could this be the result of our not setting that boot volume group as “the default”?

[…]

What the Guide says currently is incorrect at the least. If M1 Recovery Mode really does have two different ways of selecting the boot volume group to be used next, their differences need to be explained properly and not left to inference and guesswork. Users, who are hardly likely to pore over the Guide or study bputil’s man page, need clear explanation of how they should start their M1 Macs from an external boot disk, how its local Recovery system is paired to it, and how to use Startup Security Utility effectively.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-19): Nick Heer:

Max Zinkus tweeted a thread of notable new sections and updates, like this one[…] This is part of a broader question about whether Apple could switch any iMessage discussion to Messages for Business Chat, which has looser security and privacy standards than peer-to-peer iMessage.

iMessage itself retains a misleading description of its security architecture[…]

Studio Display Firmware 15.5

Juli Clover:

According to Apple’s release notes, the firmware refines camera tuning, offering improved noise reduction, contrast, and framing. We tested out the firmware update when it was in beta, and there is a clear difference in camera quality, mostly as it pertains to the way the framing works.

In addition to better framing, colors are not quite as pale, the contrast has been improved, and the overall look is more vibrant. Skin tones are also better than before, and there is less de-noising for more clarity, but ultimately Studio Display owners should not expect dramatic changes.

The first few comments talk about how the camera on the 24-inch iMac—a whole computer that’s thinner and costs less than the Studio Display—is better.

I don’t understand why the update requires macOS 12.4.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-17): Matt J Fuller:

I ran the macOS update + #AppleStudioDisplay Firmware Update 15.5 today (took 45 min). My office has no windows so lighting did not change. I used PhotoBooth w/full-screen Screen Shots to compare. I see improvements. Before: image is more washed out. After: blacks are improved.

Gus Mueller:

Studio Display got into a loop of “updating please don’t unplug” and a warning symbol with the URL “http://support.apple.com/display/restore”. It cycled between the two about 6-8 times before I just powered off the Mac and disconnected the display.

I rebooted the Mac with another display connected, waited a little bit, and reconnected the Studio Display. It tried the update again and it went through successfully this time.

Not being able to trust future display firmware updates, or my display in general, is a bummer.

macOS 12.4

Juli Clover:

Universal Control is no longer in beta. It is now an official feature that Apple has deemed issue-free, and the beta labeling has been removed. Universal Control was introduced in March and it allows you to use a single mouse/trackpad and keyboard across multiple Macs and iPads.

For the Studio Display, macOS Monterey 12.4 adds support for the 15.5 firmware, which is designed to improve the webcam quality.

There’s also an update for the Podcasts app, with Apple adding a setting that limits the number of episodes stored on a Mac and automatically deletes older ones.

See also: Apple’s enterprise and security release notes.

You can download the installer here.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-16): Wojciech Reguła:

My 6 vulnerabilities patched today in macOS 12.4. Let me tell you something more about them[…]

CVE-2022-26694 (Contacts) led to impersonation of com.apple.private.tcc.manager entitlement that allows full control over the TCC. ☠️ Also I got keychain-access-groups for apple and apple account Keychain groups.

Update (2022-05-17): See also: Howard Oakley.

iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5

Juli Clover:

Compared to prior iOS 15 updates, iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5 are smaller in scale. There are updates to the Apple Cash card in the Wallet app and a new setting that lets Podcasts users limit the number of episodes stored on their devices.

There’s a long list of security fixes.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-17): Joe Cieplinski:

What’s with 15.5 having 15.4’s release notes?

Update (2022-05-19): Juli Clover:

The new updates aren’t as feature rich as the prior updates and focus primarily on under-the-hood changes, but there are still a few minor tweaks, which we’ve outlined below.

Friday, May 13, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Music Unitasker

Riccardo Mori:

Listening to music with an iPod shuffle is still (and can still be) a fun experience. You can create the digital equivalent of a mixtape, load it on your shuffle, clip the shuffle to your shirt/jeans/jacket, and then you can go out and listen to music without even having to touch the device, unless you need to change volume or skip a track. It’s basically a hands-free device that disappears on you. If Apple made a new iPod shuffle with Bluetooth, the invisibility factor would be even higher, since you wouldn’t even have the earphones’ cable around you to remind you that you are wearing an iPod. It would still be a nice device for commuting, or jogging, or during a workout.

Sure, you might say that these uses are now taken over by the Apple Watch or other smartwatches, but for an Apple Watch you’ll pay a minimum of $199 up to more than $1,000. An iPod shuffle would be a $50 device. If you’re a casual user who just wants to have some music while out and about, jogging, etc., and don’t use a smartwatch, a little wearable device like the iPod shuffle could still be your cup of tea. But maybe wanting from today’s Apple a fun, inexpensive, wearable, colourful device is asking too much. Here, have an AirTag instead.

Tyler Hall:

With all the shit in the world in the last few years, listening to music has become even more of a refuge and safe space for me than it ever was before.

But, for me at least, the incredible technological convergence of every single use-case into a deck of cards-sized pocket super-computer means that when I do want to only listen to music - there are a million beeps, boops, and badges fighting for my attention.

An underappreciated feature of the iPod (because it wasn’t a feature you could market during its heyday) was that it was only an iPod. Not also a mobile phone and internet communicator.

He bought a Sony NW-A105 Walkman running Android.

For all the amazing interactions touch screens have given us, until I clicked to the next track without taking this Walkman out of my pocket, I had forgotten how nice it is to control my music by touch - and not by voice or by first waking my phone from sleep and tapping a button I can’t feel.

Previously:

iCloud Drive Folder Sharing Risks Data Loss

Adam Engst:

Today’s target is the discovery that when collaborators in an iCloud Drive shared folder delete files or folders, those items are destroyed instantaneously, not put in the Trash or added to iCloud Drive’s Recently Deleted folder. They’re just gone, with no option for recovery. If that’s not bad enough—and it is—Apple has recently tweaked its already weak documentation in a way that further conceals this dangerous implementation.

Previously:

Sideloading via AltStore

Jared Newman:

AltStore has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times since its launch in 2019, and the service has more than 300,000 monthly active users.

[…]

As Apple faces more political pressure to let users install apps from outside the App Store, AltStore is preparing for its biggest updates yet. Users will soon be able to discover new apps to sideload directly through AltStore, so they don’t have to wade through questionable download sites.

[…]

The goal, Testut says, is to turn AltStore into a haven for independent apps that clash with Apple’s App Store policies.

[…]

To enable sideloading, users must install a companion app called AltServer on a Mac or Windows PC. This program then logs users in with their Apple ID, prepares their account for development, and signs the AltStore app so that it looks like the user created it. AltServer then uses the iTunes sync protocol to send AltStore to the user’s iPhone or iPad.

[…]

As for the kind of apps that AltStore plans to curate, Testut points to UTM, an app for running virtualized versions of other operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, on an iPhone or iPad. […] “You would think that allowing high performance apps would be to Apple’s benefit as they keep making more and more powerful iPads, but the state of (allowed) iPad software has been stagnant,” says UTM’s developer, who goes by the pseudonym Osy.

As previously discussed, there are Apple-imposed limits to the number of apps that can be installed, and apps must be refreshed weekly by AltServer in order to keep working.

See also: Matt Birchler.

Previously:

On App Store Pricing Inflexibility

Jeff Johnson:

If I made StopTheMadness universal and gave the iOS version to previous Mac customers for free, even to the customers who only paid $4.99 three years prior, I’d be passing up a huge amount of money — money I desperately needed at the time just to stay afloat.

The App Store unfortunately doesn’t support paid upgrades. Nonetheless, in my own mind, I treated StopTheMadness on iOS as a kind of paid upgrade: if you already purchased the Mac version, and you wanted the new iOS version, you had to pay extra.

[…]

If I charge $9.99 for the universal app, or even more than $9.99 to reflect the added value of cross-platform support, then I scare away potential buyers of the iOS version. On the other hand, if I charge $7.99 for the universal app, I may be losing a lot of revenue. Despite the wild claims of people who are ignorant of the software business, little indie developers like me can’t “make it up in volume” with lower prices, because the hardest part of selling for an indie developer is making potential customers aware of the existence of your app. Lowering your price doesn’t magically make customers appear.

I think the inflexibility of pricing upgrades and different versions of the same app is holding back the products that are available. It seems like the App Store is designed for apps where the software is really a window for selling content or a service. If the app itself is the product, and the goal is to tailor it to each platform and to build deep features over time, the paid-upfront universal model is a bad fit. Subscriptions help in some ways, but they don’t account for the facts that customers don’t want to pay for platforms they aren’t using and that developing for more platforms is more expensive. It takes a lot more than a clicking checkbox.

Previously:

Thursday, May 12, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough

Benjamin Mayo:

Apple’s services tick the boxes, and they mostly do what they promise. However, nothing comes close to the quality of experience I expect to have from things branded with the Apple logo. When I am using these apps, I am not filled with confidence that striving for greatness was a top priority. Far too often, meeting revenue goals and business objectives seem more important to their creation.

They are built to a passing grade, but nothing more. Basic features found in services from rival companies are either lacking altogether in Apple’s apps, or implemented half-heartedly and performance is sluggish. Browsing in Music and TV is painful, with an over-reliance on the infinite scroll. New content is just tacked on the bottom of already long lists. Meanwhile, the navigation bars are blank when they could include simple shortcut buttons and filters to help users navigate and explore. Moreover, these apps feature too many loading states and too much waiting around. They are akin to janky web apps, rather than richly-compelling responsive experiences.

The services apps are all frustrating to use. In may ways, they feel worse than Web apps. I cannot believe how Apple has let them regress so much. I miss iTunes from 15 years ago. Looking through movies in the TV app the other day: there is no way to see a sorted list of titles. There’s no way to search my list of purchases, nor even to jump-scroll by letter. There is no way to mark a movie on my iPhone so that I can easily find it again on my Apple TV. I guess I could start playing it for a few seconds to make it appear in Up Next? But I don’t want to download it onto my phone, and the sideways scrolling Up Next list is hard to work with and also includes the things that I’m currently watching. Why does it scroll sideways? I guess so that the rest of the screen can be used to promote Apple TV+ content.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-13): Craig Grannell:

  • Going into Albums view in Photos on iPhone and dragging up to prompt photos to actually upload
  • Regularly force-quitting bird in Activity Monitor to get iCloud docs to sync
  • Restarting Music to get streaming to play

Becky Hansmeyer:

There is downloaded, on-device video content in the TV app on my kids’ iPads that they literally cannot access without an internet connection. I have to tether their iPads to my phone in the car to get their library to appear. Otherwise it just shows an empty state.

Mike Rockwell:

I maintain an old Mac Mini that runs El Capitan and an even older iMac that runs Snow Leopard. iTunes is so much better on those older machines than the current state of the TV app, Apple Music, and Apple Podcasts.

My current pet peeve is the Podcast app’s lack of OPML export or import. What a terrible, user-hostile omission.

@MainActor Not Guaranteed

Ole Begemann:

@MainActor is a Swift annotation to coerce a function to always run on the main thread and to enable the compiler to verify this. How does this work? In this article, I’m going to reimplement @MainActor in a slightly simplified form for illustration purposes, mainly to show how little “magic” there is to it. The code of the real implementation in the Swift standard library is available in the Swift repository.

[…]

@MainActor already uses the unofficial ability for an actor to provide a custom executor, and we’re going to do the same for our reimplementation. A serial executor that runs its job on the main dispatch queue is implemented as follows.

[…]

John McCall’s draft proposal for custom executors is worth reading, particularly the philosophy section.

Rob Jonson (tweet):

For good measure – I mark the task as @MainActor.

My expectation was the following

  1. in doWork(), it would return off the main thread after Background().go()
  2. @MainActor annotation would ensure that calling self.mainDate would happen on the main thread – or there would be a compiler error
  3. @MainActor annotation would ensure that calling self.storedDate would happen on the main thread – or there would be a compiler error

#2 and #3 are false.

[…]

Bizarrely – If include a print statement in my task, then everything does run on the main thread!!!

Ole Begemann:

If you’re writing Swift concurrency code, add these compiler flags:

-Xfrontend -warn-concurrency -Xfrontend -enable-actor-data-race-checks

(in Xcode: Other Swift Flags)

Warnings in Swift 5.5 identify unsafe constructs, will become errors in Swift 6.

Rob Jonson:

Moving the exact same code out of the NSViewController and into a separate class (that inherits from nothing) causes the expected compiler warnings to kick in.

It seems that my model is ‘Sendable’ – so now the compiler can do magic.

This feels like an important limitation that should be in BIG BOLD LETTERS in the documentation…

See also: @MainActor ignored by the compiler.

Update (2022-05-13): See also: Frank Illenberger.

Extended Verification Certificates

Troy Hunt (via Nick Heer):

Ah, now we know the cert has been issued to DigiCert Inc. in the US. So, all good right? No, because who are they? I mean, all we know is that the cert has been issued to an entity with that name, we don’t know if they are a certificate authority or a company that certifies how many fingers you have on your hand (digits - get it?). This is what Ian Carroll demonstrated a few years back when he got an EV cert for Stripe Inc. Perfectly legit cert issued to a perfectly legit entity, just not the one everyone thought it was.

[…]

Amazon doesn’t have an EV cert, inevitably because they’re smart enough to realise it wouldn’t do them any good if they did! But you see the problem: if DigiCert wants to make the case that you should inspect a cert by drilling down 2 clicks (not one) before trusting the site, that clearly flies in the face of how the web actually works. Same with eBay. Same with Alibaba. Same with the little shop I buy my coffee from. Don’t “look beyond the lock” because if you do, you’re not going to be buying anything online any more.

[…]

Let’s keep humouring DigiCert: how do you look “beyond the lock” on mobile? You know, those devices that are now massively dominant in the mobile shopping space? The ones that account for about three quarters of all e-commerce sales? Try it on Safari on iOS. Can you figure out how to inspect a site’s certificate? You won’t, because you can’t.

Proposed EU Digital Markets and Services Acts

James Vincent (Hacker News):

Early Saturday morning, after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.

[…]

Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users. Users should also be offered a recommender system “not based on profiling.”

[…]

Hosting services and online platforms will have to explain clearly why they have removed illegal content as well as give users the ability to appeal such takedowns. The DSA itself does not define what content is illegal, though, and leaves this up to individual countries.

Thomas Claburn (Hacker News):

In short, when the DMA takes effect in 2024, it appears that Apple will be required to allow browser competition on iOS devices.

Hartley Charlton:

Apple will be forced to allow users to utilize third-party app stores and payment systems, as well as make iMessage interoperable with other messaging services, by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), according to a newly published document from the European Commission.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

From the start, we knew the App Store was a symbiotic environment designed to create value-add for Apple devices by giving devs great tools to make apps to entice customers to Apple, whilst also ensuring to deny devs any ability to ever remotely threaten Apple’s position of power

It was an incredibly-delicate, calculated ‘truce’ that relied on Apple not overstepping into abuse. Apple, through greed, was unable to maintain status quo. Instead of reform, set in motion to burn it all down + spent 3 years illustrating to devs just how small & worthless we are

The idea that governments would ever step in and ‘save’ the platform from Apple’s nannying, abuse, was a pipe dream few of us back in ’08 thought would happen in a million years. Yet somehow, bit by bit, Apple pushed far enough across that line to bring us to where we are today

Jesper:

I’ve never understood why people have been so bewitched about the positive potential outcomes. Purely by making the operating system, defining the APIs, bundling its own software, manufacturing its own hardware, tying the operating system to its hardware and vice versa and selling even more of its own software, Apple has plenty of opportunity to set good examples and draw people to the combined value proposition. Why the hell does it need any more control than that?

[…]

iOS and the App Store has not been a truce. It has been a destructive, abusive, lopsided, mistrustful relationship; a relationship that has allowed access to a platform advantageous enough to make you close your eyes and think of multi-touch. It has been an insult to history, an exercise in attempting to redefine away the fundamental facts of the market and of their existing user base and developer ecosystem in a puff of malevolent marketing.

Foo Yun Chee (via Hacker News):

Apple faces a possible hefty fine and may have to open its mobile payment system to competitors after EU antitrust regulators charged the iPhone maker with restricting rivals’ access to its technology used for mobile wallets.

Previously:

Wednesday, May 11, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Microsoft’s Adaptive Accessories

Mitchell Clark:

Microsoft has announced a lineup of adaptive accessories which are meant to augment or replace the regular keyboards and mice that people with disabilities could struggle to use. The lineup consists of three different devices: the Adaptive Mouse, Adaptive Buttons, and the Adaptive Hub. The mouse and buttons are made to support 3D-printed accessories so you can customize them to work the way you want them to.

[…]

Microsoft says that its adaptive accessories will be launching in the fall, though there isn’t yet info on how much the devices will cost yet.

AirPlay Bugs

Nick Heer:

Here are the two ways I most frequently use AirPlay through my Apple TV:

  1. I want to listen to music on my living room speakers, so I play albums — local and streamed from Apple Music — from my iPhone or my Mac.

  2. I want to watch a movie I previously ripped from disc or a TV show I have in my library, so I will AirPlay from QuickTime on my Mac.

Both of these features are acknowledged on Apple’s AirPlay marketing webpage, but neither works as expected.

[…]

I have filed bug reports against all of these behaviours. It is this last one where I received the biggest surprise: Apple closed it with the explanation that it “works as currently designed”.

USB-C Hubs Breaking Ethernet Networks

algalgal:

I recently learned that some USB-C hubs, with power pass through and an Ethernet port, seem to destabilize a wired network when they are connected to ethernet and to power but not to a computer. They do this by flooding the network with bad traffic (or maybe PAUSE frames).

[…]

It sounds unlikely but it seems like a longstanding issue if you look for it.

This carefully researched 2018 reddit post does the best job documenting the issue in depth, manifesting on a TOTO USB-C hub. This blog post describes the same issue with Aukey and Flyland hubs. This 2020 forum post describes the issue with an Orbi router. More recently, this 2021 forum post describes it in a Dell monitor’s embedded USB-C hub

I believe I’m seeing it myself. My new Anker PowerExpand 8-in-1’s Ethernet port lights up with a lot of “phantom” network activity even when there’s no computer attached. Then later, a computer and other devices plugged into the same network switch as that USB-C hub will lose wired connectivity. Restarting the switch resolves the problem. But the problem is also solved by never leaving the hub USB-C powered and connected without a computer!

Via Kyle Howells:

I’ve had this problem with 3 different ethernet adapters. If I leave the ethernet USB hub plugged into the ethernet switch it will break the switch sending any network traffic at all unless I unplug it & reboot the switch.

KittensInc:

The interesting thing is that the hub doesn’t seem to be anything explicitly wrong here.

[…]

USB is a bit flaky, and sometimes the connection burps and drops out for a fraction of a second. You don’t really want to lose any data, so you just add a small buffer on the adapter so you can resume when the connection comes back.

But doing that is expensive, and you still run the risk of the buffer filling up. Turns out Ethernet supports a “pause” command which tells the switch to halt sending new data for a bit!

[…]

Besides, it’s completely harmless.

Well, until someone doesn’t really read the Ethernet specs when designing switches. Turns out some switches will honor the pause command, and then forward it to all other device. A blatant violation of the spec, but nobody notices because the pause thing was specified in 1997 and most people forgot about it because it turned out to be pretty useless. And of course the devices they forward it to are honoring the pause commands, so they stop sending data altogether.

Problems With Promotion-Oriented Cultures

Zach Lloyd (via Hacker News):

If you’re an engineer at Google or Facebook, you’re likely focused on one career question: when am I going to make it to the next level?

Getting to the next level unlocks a lot – more money, more responsibility, more respect, a feeling of progress – and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well.

[…]

The main problem with promotion-oriented culture is that it’s very hard to align promotion-criteria with business objectives, and so engineers end up doing a lot of work that doesn’t necessarily most benefit the product, users, or business – or even potentially their own growth.

[…]

Our [Google Sheets] engineers cared about the product and wanted to polish it. But they also wanted to be promoted. And so we would deprioritize product polish for projects that looked better to a promotion committee.

xoofoog:

But the root cause isn’t that people want to get promoted. It’s that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for “solving hard problems” not for solving USEFUL problems.

Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an existing system was somehow on par with building a new system (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something perfectly good). The googler would say “well those useful problems are too easy to merit a promotion.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-19): See also: Hacker News.

Tuesday, May 10, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

iPod touch Discontinued

Apple (MacRumors, Hacker News, Slashdot):

Since its introduction over 20 years ago, iPod has captivated users all over the world who love the ability to take their music with them on the go. Today, the experience of taking one’s music library out into the world has been integrated across Apple’s product line — from iPhone and Apple Watch to iPad and Mac — along with access to more than 90 million songs and over 30,000 playlists available via Apple Music.

“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impacted more than just the music industry — it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

John Gruber:

It’s been under-remarked-upon how good the Apple Newsroom site has been. Back in the Jobs era, Apple would post things to the “Hot News” page of apple.com and when it was no longer hot or news, it would just disappear. Newsroom posts feel permanent. Apple’s post today contains a nice gallery of the best and most beloved iPod models: the 2001 original, the 2004 Mini, the 2006 Nano (which really propelled the lineup into what we then thought was the stratosphere of popularity), the 2007 Touch, the 2012 seventh generation Nano, and the Shuffle.

Dr. Drang:

End of an era at Apple. I believe this is the first time an exec has failed to refer to music as “part of Apple’s DNA.”

John Voorhees:

The way Apple handles discontinued products is interesting.

Most quietly disappear as replacements are announced. When there’s not a replacement things get interesting…

HomePod - ended with a statement to @panzer

iPod touch - a press release that never says it’s discontinued

Simone Manganelli:

The discontinuation of the iPod touch shows just how myopic Apple has become.

Apple could easily continue making it by taking an iPhone SE and removing the cell capabilities. There’s still plenty of people who’d use it.

But it just doesn’t want to sell anything low-priced.

Ross Boucher:

Imagine if, instead of cancelling the iPod touch, Apple released a new iPod touch that was cheaper than an SE and completely unlocked. It could open up so many possibilities.

For comparison, iPod touch started at $199. Of the remaining products, iPad starts at $329, and iPhone SE starts at $429. (Apple notes that Apple Watch SE starts at $279, but it is much less capable than iPod touch; it does not mention the $199 Apple Watch Series 3, which most people agree should not be purchased.)

It’s a shame that iPod touch languished so much at the end of its life. Once a peer, which was actually superior as a music player, it stopped getting the modern iPhone features and hardware. Nor did Apple make it aggressively cheaper, where it might have found a niche as a sort of Raspberry Pi for iOS. Alas, Apple’s vision for iOS has never included tinkerers.

Nick Heer:

For what it is worth, I think the true iPod era ended in either 2014, when the Classic was discontinued, or 2017 when the last Nano and Shuffle were made. But this was the last pocket-friendly Apple device you could buy that was not dependent on monthly fees. Pour one out for the last of the iPods.

Previously:

Update (2022-05-11): Francisco Tolmasky:

The iPod was discontinued over a decade years ago, I don’t know why anyone is making a big deal about it today. If they came out with a Mac mini with no WiFi and called it “the new iPod,” it would be as much of an iPod as the cellular-less iPhone they’ve been selling for 10 years

I tend to agree that iPod touch was not a true iPod. Removing the physical controls made it a more versatile device but worse for playing music. I also think that the Music app, while fancier looking, is more difficult to navigate than the old iPods or the iPod app.

Steven Sinofsky:

I will be switching back to this now that Apple as simply abandoned customers.

Jim Allchin (in 2003):

Apple is just so far ahead. How can we get the IHVs to create something that is competitive with the iPOD? I looked at the DELL system and that is not close either.

Douglas Hill:

The discontinuation of the iPod touch is the discontinuation of one-handed computing for most people. I don’t know of anything else that size on the market anymore.

Joe Rossignol:

Just one day after Apple announced it is discontinuing the iPod touch, which remains available “while supplies last,” the portable music player is now listed as “sold out” in some configurations on Apple’s online store in the United States.

Phantom AirTag Alerts

Dalvin Brown (via Joanna Stern):

Apple iPhone Users Got Alerts About Strangers’ AirTags. The Trackers Were Never Found. The company alerts users when an unknown AirTag is ‘near you.’ When those people don’t appear to be in the path of any rogue tracker, confusion and concern follow.

Josh Centers:

Apple wisely designed the Find My system so your iPhone alerts you if it determines that you’re traveling with an unknown AirTag. But unfortunately, you’re also alerted even if you’re knowingly traveling with an AirTag owned by a friend or relative. I regularly use my wife’s car, which means borrowing her keys, taking her attached AirTag with me, and getting AirTag alerts.

[…]

Once you get the “AirTag Found Moving With You” alert, tap the notification to see the AirTag in the Find My app, and then tap Pause Safety Alerts to stop receiving alerts for that particular AirTag.

But you can only pause it for the rest of the day.

I run into a similar issue where my iPhone always alerts me that I’m leaving my iPad behind. There’s an option to turn that off, but a day—or sometimes only hours—later it warns me again.

Previously:

Tony Fadell and “Build”

Nilay Patel:

Tony’s written a new book called Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, which, I’ll be honest, is total bait for Decoder. It’s one part memoir, one part tech industry gossip, and one part org charts and decision-making. Seriously, this book has a lengthy section with actual diagrams of org charts to illustrate how company cultures change as things get bigger.

Tony Fadell (via Jason Snell):

Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built.

If part of the story didn’t work, then part of the product wasn’t going to work, either, and would need to be changed.

ACM Still Unsatisfied With Apple’s Dating Apps Rules

Joe Rossignol:

In a statement obtained by journalist Nando Kasteleijn, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) said that while Apple eliminating its requirement for Dutch dating apps to create a separate app binary in order to accept alternative payments was an improvement, the company has yet to fully comply with Dutch and European regulations. The statement did not outline the specific conditions that Apple has yet to comply with.

They could have at least picked a decimal number at random.

Previously:

Monday, May 9, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Apple Support Community Forums

Howard Oakley:

After a brief exchange with a Level 10 expert [in the Apple Support Community Forums], they were told that they could delete a large snapshot on their Mac’s Fusion Drive ‘to free up space’. The snapshot in question was clearly the Signed and Sealed System Volume (SSV) from which their Mac was currently booted.

[…]

Recently, I’ve heard of other disturbing problems occurring on those same forums. One concerns recommending solutions which involve turning SIP off, and similar essential manoeuvres. Much as we all dislike doing that, there are times when you can’t solve a problem with SIP turned on, and that’s an intentional security feature. However, it’s apparently well known that if you post a solution there explaining how to do that, your response will be removed. It seems that, as a matter of unwritten policy, that’s not allowed.

[…]

Getting sage support for Macs is becoming increasingly difficult. Other places offer forums, in which a mixture of the excellent and absurd abound in equal measure. Telling them apart is just as hard whether they flaunt hundreds of thousands of points, many awarded for attending Communities meet ups (25 points) or someone liking your User Tips (10 points), or just give the air of knowing what they’re talking about. That Level 10 expert might have earned most of those points from their deep knowledge of Mail or Photos, and be completely unaware of huge swathes of macOS.

Forums have always been somewhat hit-or-miss, hilariously bad advice mixed in with really insightful stuff that you wouldn’t get from an official source. From my perspective, what has been getting worse lately is that it’s harder to find solutions via general Web searches. I keep running into outdated advice and pages that are filler/SEO content that doesn’t answer the question, even incorrectly.

Previously:

Google Docs “And” Loop

Bryan Menegus (via Dave Mark):

And. And. And. And. And.

For whatever reason that specific string of words seems to be enough to permanently brick a Google Docs page. Noted Google’s support pages mere hours ago, the poster who seemingly discovered this unusual bug is quick to point out that the series of five conjunctions, separated by periods, is case-sensitive (at least if the goal is to cause the document in question to become unusable.)

Engadget was able to confirm the issue on a 16-inch 2019 MacBook Pro running Monteray 12.3.1 and Google Chrome 100.0.4896.127… and we were summarily greeted by the “Something went wrong” popover as well as its loathsome cousin “Unable to load file.” Reloading the page as prompted results in the same popovers. In effect, a death loop.

What a strange bug. It sounds like you can’t even access the document enough to revert the last edit. I wonder whether you can download it or if your data is totally inaccessible?

Previously:

The Information Rejected From App Store Over Pricing

Jessica Lessin:

Um. Anyone had an Apple App Store update rejected because Apple didnt like their pricing strategy? I cannot believe this just happened to @theinformation! Trying to fix but lets say this takes Apple’s power over the entire tech ecosystem to a new level.

For context, nothing tricky about pricing. Our standard app pricing with monthly and annual at a discount to monthly. Apple asks “Please explain what factors led you to choose this pricing.” Really Apple????

The price of hundreds of dollars per year is high compared with most apps but not compared with other professional publications. And the publication is well known and longstanding—obviously not a scam.

The role of the App Store should be to make it clear to customers what the price is, say on an annual basis, to prevent confusion due to different billing intervals. I don’t like Apple deciding whether a pricing strategy is appropriate, nor the policy of asking about your product roadmap before they allow you to offer a subscription.

Nick:

Yes this is exactly what I faced in 2018, with our education app Mathew.

Apple has recently shifted from human policing & enforcement to an algorithmic approach internally.

A softwares assessment that’s telling teams to investigate your app. Wish their was transparent here.

Getstic_ky:

Yes happened to our devs’ previous app multiple times, including on the very same day Tim Cook was telling US Congress ‘developers choose their own prices’.

Previously:

Alternative Android App Stores

Marine Nozerand (via Dave Verwer):

All in all, alternative app stores can be classified into different categories:

  • Device-specific app stores: like the Samsung Galaxy Store or the Huawei App Gallery
  • Country or culture-specific stores: AppToko is for Indonesians, Cafe Bazaar for a Persian speaking audience
  • Content-specific stores: Aurora Store is a tracking free app store, QuooApp is an app store dedicated to comics and games, TapTap is a game only app store, WhiteApp is an app store aimed at developers and allowing them to purchase apps or rights on some apps

[…]

Consumer spending is growing on third-party Android stores, their overall revenue is closing the gap with the Play Store.

Saturday, May 7, 2022 [Tweets] [Favorites]

JXA’s Parenthesis Paradox

Dr. Drang:

Because the name of the process is what we want to return, name has to go last in the chain of calls, and it’s the one that gets the parentheses. We’re applying the whose filter to the processes, so it has to go after processes. The properties we’re filtering on (just visible in this case) are set up as a JavaScript object that’s passed as an argument to whose.

Suppose we had two criteria for our filter? Let’s say we want all the visible processes that start with the letter M (which will return just Mail and Messages). In AppleScript, it’s easy to add an extra clause:

tell application "System Events" to get the name of every process ¬
    whose visible is true and name begins with "M"

In JXA, the syntax gets nasty:

Application('System Events').processes.whose(
    {visible: true, name: {_beginsWith: "M"}}).name();

JavaScript is nicer for basic programming and data manipulation, but Apple event stuff is much nicer in AppleScript.

Update (2022-05-10): See also: JavaScript vs. AppleScript.

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