Tag Archives: Yosemite

Weekly output: AR in academia, Yosemite in VR, messaging apps, mobile-app nags, municipal broadband

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I haven’t traveled anywhere for work since the end of June, but tomorrow I depart for Berlin to cover the IFA trade show for my fifth year in a row. My passport has collected a lot more stamps since August 2012 and I know I won’t feel too lost when I emerge from a U-Bahn station, but the prospect of temporarily putting 4,000-plus miles between me and my family still leaves me with mixed emotions.

EdTech AR in academia post8/23/2016: Higher Ed’s Augmented-Reality Ambitions Highlight Infrastructure Requirements, EdTech

This short, technically-inclined piece allowed me to quiz an old Post colleague–Dan Pacheco, now a professor at Syracuse University’s journalism school–and follow up with a University of Maryland professor I met last winter.

8/25/2016: You can visit Yosemite National Park with Obama … in VR, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance look at this virtual-reality tour of Yosemite narrated by President Obama. Having myself immersed in a place I haven’t seen since 2001 filled me with an almost painful level of nostalgia, so I had no choice but to reference a certain Mad Men episode.

8/26/2016: Here’s why email is still the best messaging app, Yahoo Finance

Months after the idea landed in my head, I finally wrote this get-off-my-lawn post about the cognitive load of having too many messaging apps on my phone.

8/27/2016: Avoid downloading mobile apps with these iPhone tricks, USA Today

I spaced about marketing this Q&A item about getting mobile browsers to impersonate desktop browsers because the column went up on USAT’s site on Saturday, not the usual Sunday. Note to my editors: I’ll get into PR mode about it tomorrow morning, I promise.

8/27/2016: Municipal broadband, KGO

I talked to the San Francisco station’s Jason Middleton about the sorry state of broadband competition and the prospects of municipal broadband increasing our choices. Note to myself: The next time a radio host gets my last name wrong, correct that immediately instead of waiting for the right moment.

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“Damn you OS X autocorrect,” corporate-brands edition

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I know, I know: Making fun of autocorrect fails is not new. But the automatic spelling correction in OS X is something else, courtesy of its apparent inability to figure out that my starting a word with a capital letter suggests I might be typing a proper name–say, a reasonably well-known online brand’s name–and that a little more deference would therefore be in order.

OS X autocorrect preferenceYou can argue that autocorrecting “Glympse” to “Glimpse” is fair game. But what about the following replacements I’ve seen OS X make?

“Etsy” to “Easy”

“Roku” to “Rook”

“Waze” to “Was”

“Ooma” to “Roma”

Meanwhile, it took a long time for Apple’s desktop operating system to stop auto-correcting Dulles Airport’s “IAD” code to “iAd,” as in the advertisement-serving system in iOS.

People’s names are, of course, just as much fair game to OS X’s autocorrect. When I was live-tweeting the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality vote, OS X kept trying to change FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s last name to “Cleburne.” Perhaps it has an undocumented fetish for that Texas town of 29,377.

I have to ask: Isn’t this the sort of bossy intrusiveness that an earlier Apple justifiably mocked during Microsoft Word’s Clippy era? And then I must wonder: Why haven’t I shut off autocorrect already–in System Preferences’ Keyboard category, click “Text” and uncheck the “Correct spelling automatically” box–instead of whining about it yet again?

Things I would like Apple to fix in OS X (please?)

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There’s been a minor surplus of blog posts over the last month or so expressing concern about the state of Apple’s software quality. See, for example, this inventory of issues from my friend Glenn Fleishman, Craig Hockenberry’s open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, or the Marco Arment post that got spun completely out of proportion.

Apple logo on iMacI can’t speak to all of the faults people have mentioned; without an iPhone, for example, I don’t see many of the OS X-to-iOS problems folks have been griping about. And I can’t say that this period marks a low in Apple’s software quality: OS X Lion got on my nerves much more than Yosemite has. But look: Yosemite exhibits some baffling and annoying defects that I’d like to see fixed as much as anybody else. Here’s a short list:

AirDrop: This has accomplished the singular feat of making Bluetooth file transfer look elegant and reliable. Because one of my two Macs is a pre-2012 model, I have to tell the MacBook Air to “Search for an Older Mac” for that iMac to get a chance to show up at all. And the advertised ability of AirDrop to send files between OS X and iOS has so far been a bust–and, courtesy of Apple kneecapping Bluetooth in iOS, Bluetooth file transfer isn’t available as a fall-back option.

Mail’s time travel: A round of bug fixes have made Mail much less of a disaster, but the bizarre bug that causes Mail to jump back randomly by months, years or all the way to the oldest messages in a folder when I select it remains intact. Why, Mail, why must you feel compelled to remind me of what people wrote in 2011?

non-transparent volume overlaySemi-transparent toolbars and sidebars: Having Safari’s toolbar turn red when I scroll down a CNet story is one of the dumbest features I’ve seen out of Cupertino. I advised turning that off in my USA Today column but have since reluctantly turned it back on: I couldn’t stand how that change not only rendered the volume overlay opaque but added crude black borders at its rounded corners.

Arrogant autocorrect: The automatic spelling correction in Yosemite seems much more out of control than in prior OS X releases, especially when it interferes with my attempts to write proper names and other capitalized words that a sane autocorrect would know to leave alone.

Non-noteworthy Calendar events: I love how I can mouse over a date or time in an e-mail and have OS X offer to create a new event in the Calendar app based on that information. But at some point (maybe pre-Yosemite?), the events created that way lost an editable Notes field: That part of the event-info window is now locked to a “Show in Mail…” link that opens the message from which you created the event. I can work around this problem by editing the event in Google Calendar, but something tells me that’s Apple’s desired outcome.

Safari tabs with escape velocity: Every now and then, I find that I have somehow launched one of the tabs open in Safari into a new window. I don’t know what the exact sequence of clicks is (it’s not mentioned in Apple’s list of shortcuts) but I would like the browser to not do that.

I’m sure there are other Yosemite issues that have been bugging me, but I can’t think of them at the moment. Remind me in the comments?

Weekly output: 2014 tech policy in review, Mac scroll bars

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LAS VEGAS–Here I am for yet another CES. Sad fact: I’ve made the trip to Vegas for the show so many times that I lost count in an earlier post whining about being badgered by CES PR pitches.

Yahoo Tech 2014 in review12/30/2014: Tech Policy 2014: Mistakes Were Made, Yahoo Tech

I came up with the photo illustrating this column last of all: As I was about to file the thing and stick my editor with the job of finding some stock art, I thought that a photo of OS X’s Calendar app showing “2014” with the setting sun in the background might work just as well.

1/4/2015: How to bring back scroll bars on your Mac, USA Today

Not for the first time, I used my USAT Q&A to revise and extend remarks I’d first made here. Your reward for reading to the end of a column that might otherwise seem too familiar: a tip about an OS X feature that Apple doesn’t seem to have documented.

Mac settings changes you might miss going from Snow Leopard to Yosemite

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One of the major Christmas presents at my in-laws was a shiny new 13-inch MacBook Air that replaced a 2010-vintage MacBook–which meant that one of my major presents was getting apps, data and settings transferred from the old Mac to the new one, then completing the rest of the setup.

Old MacBook and new MacBookThe first hiccups came in OS X’s Migration Assistant: It estimated the data transfusion would take five-plus hours over the home WiFi. But neither machine saw the other over a faster Ethernet link (using a USB-to-Ethernet adapter on the Air), and an ad hoc, computer-to-computer WiFi network didn’t work until I resorted to the un-Mac-like workaround of turning on Internet sharing on the source laptop.

Then I realized the work Migration Assistant had left for me: configuring parts of OS X Mavericks (preloaded on the new MacBook) and Yosemite (promptly installed as a free update) that had no equivalent in the old MacBook’s Snow Leopard, then changing OS X settings that would confuse anybody used to that five-year-old operating system.

Atop the first category: the social-media integration Apple began adding to OS X in 2012’s Mountain Lion release. My in-laws aren’t on Twitter and don’t spend much time in Facebook–but that integration’s ability to share a photo to Facebook from the Finder does address a pain point I’d heard from them.

An Apple ID is far more important in Yosemite than in Snow Leopard, courtesy of so many updates running through the Mac App Store. So I had to verify that hitherto-dusty account worked and had current billing info, without which we couldn’t download the free Yosemite update.

Migration Assistant had siphoned over a few long-ignored PowerPC applications that OS X hasn’t been able to run since 2011’s disappointing Lion, so I had to delete those myself.

OS X Yosemite General system prefsI thought I was done at that point, and then I heard my father-in-law complaining about not being able to scroll. He had bumped into Apple’s foolish decision to make scroll bars invisible until you mouse over them or use a two-finger gesture to move up or down the page. I hadn’t thought to fix that setting (open System Preferences and click “General”) because I’d fixed it on my own Mac after maybe two hours with Lion. Oops.

The last round of settings to change were in the minds of Yosemite users who had been used to Snow Leopard. From that perspective, the Notifications icon at the top-right corner of the screen means nothing (and requires tweaking to avoid info pollution), while Launchpad’s rocketship Dock icon doesn’t exactly shout that you no longer need click around the Finder to run apps that aren’t already in the Dock.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time walking my wife’s folks through those angles, but I suspect I’ll be getting questions about the new computer for months to come. See also: “the gift that keeps on giving.”

Apple Mail malaise (update)

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There’s no program on my Mac that’s annoyed me more over the last year than Mail. Which is funny, because for years I held up that program as an example of Apple working to fix customers’ problems while Microsoft let Outlook Express decay.

Apple Mail about boxBut sometime during the development of OS X Mavericks, Mail went off the rails. It shipped with a bug that made syncing with a Gmail account awkward to implausible. Apple fixed that within weeks, but other problems lingered through many or all of its updates to Mavericks:

  • Searching for old messages was intolerably slow, to the point where it would be faster to grab my iPad, log into the relevant account and start the search… after first running up and down the stairs to find that tablet.
  • Switching back to Mail from other apps would leave the insertion point randomly shifted to a point months or years in the past–which, to be fair, is great for cheap nostalgia.
  • Some mailboxes would be shown sorted by subject instead of date, never mind that sorting by subject is a total waste of time unless a mail client can’t handle search (ahem).
  • More recently, Mail began forgetting the custom app passwords Google generates for mail clients and other apps that can’t process its two-step verification codes.

Apple’s updates fixed some of these issues before OS X Yosemite. I don’t think I’ve seen a mailbox randomly sorted by subject in months, and I haven’t had to open Keychain Access to copy a saved Google app password back into Mail since last month.

Yosemite, to judge from its performance on my MacBook Air, has also returned search in Mail to a state of good repair. I can only hope Apple keeps working on these other issues. Because between Web-mail’s issues with offline access and working with other apps and the lack of a compelling alternative client (understandable, given how many people rely on Web-mail or don’t spend as much time in a mail client as me), firing this app just doesn’t seem too practical.

And at least the prominent mentions of Mail in Apple’s product page for Yosemite suggests the company realizes it can’t leave this app in maintenance mode. If only I could say the same for iPhoto…