picomac

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised by an unannounced tweak to a feature, especially if that feature is on your list of "software annoyances that must be silently endured." By their nature, these small changes don't always make themselves immediately obvious. For example, I'd been using El Capitan for months before I noticed that anything was different about the Finder sidebar.

The OS X Finder is a fertile ground for complaints — I won't catalogue mine — but its insistence that windows should have sidebars was near the top of my list. They occupied screen real estate and offered little functionality that interested me. Furthermore, when a window suddenly gained a sidebar, its dimensions wouldn't change, pushing columns out of view or even truncating filenames. Hiding the sidebar involved a lavish animation, but even worse, a predictably unpredictable change in window size: the outside bounds of the window would shrink, but the content area wouldn't stay the same.

I tried to work around this in several ways, including some abortive attempts at Keyboard Maestro scripts. A combination of the Hide sidebar menu command with zooming the window went nowhere, mostly because the Zoom command was equally confused about what proper dimensions for a Finder window should be. (After years of failing at this where the Classic Mac OS had succeeded before, Yosemite finally gave up on the concept of zooming, assigning the green window widget as a fullscreen toggle instead.) In the end, all I managed to do was to simplify the keyboard shortcut from ⌥⌘T to ⌃T.

So, imagine my delight when I hit my custom ⌃T shortcut in El Capitan and — whoosh! — the sidebar flew out of the way nice and quickly. And wait, what's this? The window dimensions remain the same! A genuine grin broke across my face when I realized what had happened. I kept toggling back and forth, like a child discovering the joy of a new toy. Yes, I probably have years ahead of Finder sidebars showing up where I don't expect, but when they do, they'll be hidden easily.

Making this change was not a priority fix, by Apple's standards — it's about as far from a crasher as you can get. But somebody on the Finder team must have run into the same obstacles I did, and wanted to make using their software a little more joyful. In a demanding product release cycle, it found its way in, and it's made a difference.

In January, I walked into my local Apple Store to buy a new Apple TV. I knew for sure that I was going to be leaving the store with one, but not having played with it at all, I asked an employee at the front of the store to direct me to a demo unit. I snatched up the Siri remote and she left to help another customer.

The main thing I wanted to do before making my purchase was to search the App Store, a task that's still impossible unless you're sitting in front of an Apple TV. (Unfortunately many of the apps I hoped to find weren't there, and still aren't. I'm looking at you, Big Ten Network.) Part of this was also a test of "typing" with the trackpad and letter line, another part of the tvOS experience that I'd heard complaints about, but hadn't experienced myself. Two letters into pecking out "Fox Sports", another Apple store employee approached me.

He opened with, "Dude, I'm gonna blow your mind."

I looked across at him and, with an inkling of where this was going, asked, "Siri?"

"Yeah, man!"

I handed over the remote, simultaneously explaining that I was certain that you couldn't enter text in the search field with Siri, but have at it, man, dude.

"What are you looking for?"

"Fox Sports."

"Siri, show me the Fox Sports app." After a couple seconds, Siri proffered a completely unrelated game that had been installed.

I got the remote back, enthusiastic Apple employee shrugged, I bought my Apple TV, and you still can't enter text with Siri. But that is slated to change in tvOS 9.2. As soon as I heard about the feature, I imagined how it would work: push and hold for universal search, or push once to toggle dictation. Unless something changes between beta and final release, I'll be wrong — dictation entry will also require push and hold.

My prediction wasn't fanciful; I'd noticed a gap in the Apple TV interface. Of all the buttons on the Siri remote, one of them does essentially nothing if you push it once, and it's the namesake button. It's an odd choice, and one I hope the tvOS team reconsiders. tvOS is a close cousin of iOS, and interface parallelism between the two is a major benefit. Two contextually determined button actions for talking into the Siri remote seems complex, until you realize that's the behavior on iOS: push and hold the home button to command Siri, or tap the onscreen microphone button to begin dictation (and then tap again to finish).

As critical observers of Apple, we hate to see them miss low-hanging fruit. On the other hand, any dictation on the Apple TV will be one of several welcome improvements as the platform and operating system mature. Oh, and tvOS 9.2 also brings the App Store into the realm of universal Siri search. My friend at the Apple Store will finally get to blow some minds.

I've been pondering what's being billed as the heavyweight bout of the century: "FBI vs. Apple", even though at this point, no legal case by that name exists. But there is the court order to extract the likely useless, definitely encrypted contents of an iPhone 5c using some extremely dangerous custom firmware, which totally doesn't exist yet. The law compels you, Apple, to do this thing! Unless it's unreasonably burdensome.

There are the security arguments. The privacy arguments. Concerned, savvy users of technology cite these immediately and rush to Apple's side. These points will be part of the legal dispute ("all the way to the Supreme Court!" the sideline zealots cry prematurely), but I don't believe they will be what sways the outcome. No, it is far simpler than that. The government has brazenly asked Apple to do something unreasonable.

"Just build us a custom firmware that will let us perform a very specific type of brute force attack. How hard could it be?" How hard could it be? Certainly such an undertaking would involve dozens of people across multiple teams within Apple. They would all be asked to drop their normal work and go from zero to crunch mode on a project none of them believe in. What's more, the project certainly would violate a host of company policies and would have to be suitably shielded from the rest of the organization. Then there'd be the testing phase — because the goal is to deploy the rushed horrid thing on an irreplaceable single unit which could be destroyed if it goes wrong. We're already talking a months-long, multi-million dollar project.

Even if this were the most saintly project on the planet, Apple would have every right to contend its imposition upon them. Even if the raw costs of staff time were compensated for, the risk of fallout — a delayed iPhone 7? employees resigning? bad press and lost sales? — would be too great for anyone, even the richest corporation in the world, to readily assume. They would have to be insane to do something so patently, wildly, unreasonably burdensome.

Tim Cook's Apple will do no such thing. He has staked his career on the integrity of his employees and the safety of his customers. It's a large, brave bet, but it's one that is entirely reasonable.

For nearly as long as I've used a Mac, I moved my windows manually. In the days of low-res screens and perfectly rectangular window borders, this was usually a pixel-perfect art, getting several windows to peacefully coexist, tiling or stacking. More recently I realized that most of my productive tasks on the Mac had become two-window affairs. Single-window use, using full-screen mode in Lion and later, was never much of a consideration for me. It wasted space and time, as the transitions in and out were frustratingly slow on my hardware. Better to only waste time, fiddling to get the ideal side-by-side setup.

Apple also realized the utility of an in-between solution, as split screen functionality debuted in El Capitan. I was excited to try it out, thinking maybe it was exactly what I'd been looking for. One problem was that in the meantime, I'd found Moom by Many Tricks. Moom lets you precisely move and resize windows in just about any way imaginable. (My customized setup uses a handful of keyboard shortcuts. These fit into a much larger automation and key-combination scheme, which is another topic entirely.) Just a couple keystrokes can get my windows all prepped and ready to work, but they remain discrete windows. The main difference in El Cap's split view is the draggable boundary between windows.

I'd love to resize two windows simultaneously, but the other hangups of split view aren't worth it. First, getting into split view is far more troublesome than a keyboard shortcut. It's not even discoverable — I had to google to figure out that a long-click on the zoom button (a highly nonstandard gesture) was the means of invoking it. Invoking split view seems like the perfect place to leverage Siri, and even a reason to include it on the Mac. Saying "Put Safari and Mail into split view" is faster than anyone could get there with the mouse.

Then there is the question of app support, which is a far greater plague for split view on iOS, but no small problem on the Mac. TextWrangler, my text editor of choice, and it's big brother BBEdit don't do split view, for example. And resizing in and of itself is an oddity, wherein one side of the split behaves normally while the other temporarily becomes illegibly smudged and stretched. Moom's grid-based sizing is far more elegant, even if I have to repeat the action twice. As much as split view seemed designed for me, without improvement it will remain a curiosity and inconvenience just like full screen mode. In the meantime, Moom will continue to do the heavy lifting for my windows.

My iPhone 6 is almost exactly one year old. If you think that February is an odd, off-cycle time for an Apple enthusiast to buy a phone, you're right. One night I went to bed with a functioning iPhone 5s and the next morning I woke up with one that demanded re-activation and couldn't find any cell signals. A trip to the Apple store confirmed my diagnosis that it was in a permanent vegetative state. I emptied my wallet and got an unlocked iPhone 6 and an Apple leather case.

The case is also turning one year old, and its material is showing that age. Leather with this amount of wear is usually in its prime — not overly stiff as when brand new, and not creased and crumbling from overuse. The back of my case has gained a very smooth, but not slippery texture, and the embossed Apple logo has been reduced to just a shadow.

The texture and pliancy of the leather down the side edges of the case is another matter. It too has thinned noticeably, but has taken on a scaly, bubbly texture. Unfortunately, this texture blends right into the locations of the power and volume buttons. When brand new, the leather covering them was clearly raised and easy to locate in the hand, and only slightly difficult to find through a front pants pocket. It was a difference, not an inconvenience — not even a minor one like Dr. Drang observed recently in discussing the merits of waking his leather-clad iPhone 6s with the home button vs. the power button. But now it's to the point where I sometimes go to great lengths to avoid button-hunting: letting the phone automatically sleep, or using control center to adjust volume.

The fact is, I'm just realizing that this case is nearing the end of its life. While it would be ideal for the case and phone lifespan to be equal, it need not be so. This case has served admirably, including taking the brunt of a corner drop onto concrete last summer. The question I most likely need to answer now is: which replacement case is right for me? When examining my current case closely just now, I briefly removed the phone from it. I pressed the side buttons and they clicked! I had forgotten that kind of tactile response from the hardware was even possible. It's tempting to go back to a naked iPhone — as I did for everything before the super-slick 6. But I only have to look once at the scarred leather to know that's a bad idea. I'll gladly accept worn over broken.

This was not supposed to be today's topic. But another wave of fail-to-launch bugs has hit anyone with the misfortune to have downloaded applications from the Mac App Store.

I got off easy this time. When I went to make recordings yesterday, I turned to Piezo, my lightweight audio app of choice. (Rogue Amoeba, its creator, has recently made a public exit from continuing to sell Piezo on the Mac App Store — as Federico Viticci pointed out, hardly news, and not the issue at hand either.) Prior to launch, a dreaded dialog box appeared: in order to use the app, I had to authenticate with my Apple ID to appease the Mac App Store.

This. Should. Not. Happen. Ever.

I understand that the MAS is a store — and like any store, it has to prevent people from pilfering its goods. But the DRM scheme that quietly went into place at the store's inception is just misguided. Any given Mac should have to be authenticated to the store once in its lifetime — that's necessary. After that, there should be no phoning home, no expired certificates, and if that's not industry standard, that shouldn't matter to Apple. They need to set an acceptable standard for their store.

Apple's vision of the future of computing is one in which apps are easily obtained from a central source. We know this is true because they've called their iOS hardware "the future of computing" and it's the only means of distribution on iOS. So anyone who's truly forward-thinking would be getting all their apps there. And someone who did, it seems, could wake up to a computer with no launchable apps, a computer devoid of functionality, a computer worse than the past.

The Mac App Store's certificate woes are different from the "Error 53" that recently rendered some iPhones unusable — literally bricked. But Error 53 was a (poor) response to a significant user-authorized if not user-performed action: replacement of the home button and Touch ID hardware. Those devices rightly interpreted their internal state as one in which a security feature had been tampered with. And anyone who's had their iPhone disassembled and reassembled can infer that might cause some failure. What did Mac App Store users do that would lead them to believe that all their apps would die yesterday? Nothing. They just let time pass. They just dared to use their Macs in the way Apple envisioned.

There are only two paths from here, and the road taken must be chosen by WWDC. In 10.12, either faith in the Mac App Store has to be restored — for ordinary users, power users, and developers alike — or the whole thing has to be shut down, condemned. A physical store in this condition wouldn't be allowed to stand. If Apple has any pride in the Mac and its future, they won't allow it either.

A few years ago, I was in the middle of grad school and about to embark on the biggest writing project I've ever done: my dissertation. I knew I was in for a lot of typing, so on my next visit to my parents' house, I went into the basement and uncovered a dusty box: the Apple Extended Keyboard II my family bought with our first Mac.

After years of typing exclusively on PowerBook and MacBook keyboards, getting used to the monster travel of the AEK II's buckling spring switches was an adjustment, but it felt great. The problem was that it was utterly un-portable, so it lived full-time on my desk at home — and I was doing at least half of my writing at campus libraries and in coffee shops. And when the dissertation and my degree were done, I packed up my apartment and the clicky keyboard went back into its box.

Last fall, Apple caught me unawares and I surprised myself by buying the first desktop Mac of my very own, a 4K iMac. Planning out my new, immobile home workstation, I thought the AEK II would finally have a proper, permanent home. But the iMac of course came with a keyboard, and right in the name it purported to be, well, Magic.

I was skeptical because I'd tried the much-maligned keyboard on the 12" MacBook — and found it utterly unusable. Its miniscule key travel puts it in the uncanny valley of typing: am I supposed to tap or press? Mentally counting repeat keystrokes, which you probably do more than you realize — think tabbing, deleting, and arrowing — was impossible in my in-store trial.

I expected nearly the same of the Magic keyboard, and was pleasantly surprised at the feel of its keys. They aren't clicky in the traditional sense; I think the best word to describe their action is "snappy". The travel is tactile and sharp, and the slim profile fits modern ergonomic sensibilities, unlike the giant, wrist-bending lip of the Extended II.

The transition wasn't perfectly seamless. Early on, I accidentally registered some software under a misspelling of my name. But since, my accuracy is back at normal levels, even with the new mixed-size arrows. They've presented me little trouble for typing or casual gaming (I played Undertale with them and never cursed the keyboard for HP lost). They don't, however, give a cue for the edge of the keyboard, which based on its design should be nestled firmly against a Magic Trackpad 2. Instead, I have to maintain a decidedly un-magical gap between the two, but it's a small price to pay for a great typing experience.

The Magic gap.

And every time I use a Mac laptop, I wish its built-in keyboard were Magic. While it seems a shoo-in for the Pros, hopefully it can squeeze into a rev'd MacBook too, because this isn't a compromise. I'm a convert: the Magic Keyboard is a great modern keyboard.

Blogging is just impossible — for me anyway.

Not because writing is impossible, or for lack of things to say. The issue for me has always been consistency. Blogs were places where I would write two or three thousand words at a stretch…and then nothing for months or even years.

Podcasting, on the other hand, has been different. I began Simple Beep, an Apple history podcast, with my friend Brian over a year ago and we've delivered episodes just about every two weeks since. It's not only given me confidence in my consistency, but talking about old Apple has given me an itch to talk about today's Apple. That's where this project begins.

Last fall, friends and acquaintances were gearing up for the ultimate challenge in consistent writing: NaNoWriMo. A quick survey of my time constraints and energy level was enough to know that it wasn't possible for me, then. Perhaps, I thought, I could do something smaller? NaNo aims for 50,000 words — I'd need to look at least an order of magnitude smaller. And I hadn't dreamt up any plot ideas, but I had plenty of comments on tech and Apple, and if they were too long for a tweet…well, they'd just vanish. There were the two halves of what I wanted to create: Pico. Mac.

Picomac is your daily bite of Apple. 300 to 500 words. Read or listen.

Picomac is not a news source — it couldn't possibly be in such a tiny package. For Apple news, there are plenty of great shows, like ATP and Connected, and blogs, like MacStories and Six Colors. You probably already follow some of these, and I plan to rely on that to cut to the chase and keep concise. If a couple hundred words seems too limiting, consider this: the best training in concision I ever received was in a science fiction literature course in college. We read a novel per week and had to write an essay on each one: maximum 350 words; anything longer failed. Explaining the story in any way, shape, or form put you in an inescapable hole. The goal was pure analysis, because the audience was our class: people who all knew the story! We shared common ground — that's seriously the linguistic term for it — that let us say things that might not make sense otherwise.

Another goal is for Picomac to be as convenient and accessible as possible, so every installment will have matching (although not necessarily identical!) text and audio. I want to plan and craft my words, but leave behind the bad vibes of my blog failures: so much text sent silently into the ether. This is admittedly something I've never seen — let alone tried — before, and I welcome your honest feedback on the format. I do hope you enjoy it. New installments will be posted Monday through Thursday, starting with number 1, which is out right now!