picomac

So many new technologies and features were unveiled at WWDC that it seems absurd to complain about what was lacking. But Apple deliberately left one list of features short: the "intents" available to the SiriKit API. A major missing member of that list is the ability for Siri to control audio in third-party applications.

I think it's hasty to say "This is clearly a top potential use case! There's no reason it shouldn't have been present at launch! Why hailing a car over this?" I sincerely doubt that it comes down to spite, that Apple is competing with Spotify but not Uber. (And they may even be; recall that they recently made a significant investment in a Chinese ride-sharing company.) No, it comes down to the fact that an audio intent would be far more complex than any of the seven ones being implemented.

The introduction to SiriKit made it clear that applications have to provide "vocabulary" — terms that will be relevant to the command being issued.

For the ride-booking intent, how broad could that vocabulary be? An app only has to provide a few terms, like the applicable fare classes. Some audio apps would also have small vocabularies, like a list of subscribed podcasts. That would be sufficient for instructing Siri to play an episode from that finite list.

But what if I wanted to subscribe to a new podcast by voice? I think this may be where SiriKit, in its current form, hits a wall. Siri has access to a basic dictionary, but will need help from apps for non-standard words. For example, "Picomac" is not in its dictionary, and wouldn't be recognized. An app like Overcast could only offer a vocabulary lesson if it knew the word. It can't make a network query to find out about it, since Siri hasn't recognized much of anything yet that would allow even fuzzy matching. To be comprehensive, the app would have to take on the insane burden of keeping a local copy of the iTunes podcast directory. Otherwise, Siri's vocabulary skills are caught in a chicken-and-egg scenario.

Apple manages to handle Siri requests against a massive vocabulary with Apple Music, but that service has a privileged position. The logic for resolving speech against artists and songs in Apple Music can be baked directly into Apple's servers that handle Siri requests. I imagine that Spotify access via Alexa is in a similar situation, with Spotify providing Amazon a special feed of metadata for its entire catalog. Apple can't accept a firehose from every single developer. And given the competition with several would-be Siri audio apps, they don't want to broker individual deals either. The goal is probably a Siri audio intent open to all; there's just a serious scale problem that needs to be addressed first.

Yesterday was a milestone occasion in the Mac community as The Iconfactory celebrated their 20th anniversary. They've built an amazing retrospective site that covers the 13 billion(!) pixels they've pushed, from basic 32x32 bitmaps to gorgeous Retina art.

One of the highlights is a complete gallery of the winners of Pixelpalooza, their open icon design contest that ran from 1997 to 2004. They point out "how much icon design changed" over that time. It's true: at a glance you can see how the tools needed shifted from ResEdit to Photoshop to Illustrator. Early icon design was a pastime, possible with free software; the demands of the Aqua interface turned it into a business (which The Iconfactory excelled at!), requiring a not insignificant budget.

These changes more or less ended my use of custom icons on the Mac. Creating freeware icons became a luxury, and trying to distribute paid icons for personal use was a fool's errand — especially when the way to use them is still to copy and paste into an image well in the Get Info window! And from the user's point of view, forget reliably seeing your icons, given the OS X Finder's propensity to mess up the view settings for a window the second you look away from it.

The Iconfactory survived these changes with a pivot, although not a radical one. They sold their beautiful pixel art directly to companies who included them in their software as interface elements, and they partnered with developers to create apps ranging from design tools to iOS arcade games. They've diversified, and I feel more confident than ever that the factory will run for another 20 years.

For one thing, there's a new wave of customization coming in iOS 10: Messages sticker packs. The sample art used to demonstrate these at WWDC is on par with the complexity of early OS X icons. But in 2016, as opposed to 2001, the casual designer isn't priced out of creating that level of digital art. Powerful graphics tools like Acorn and Pixelmator, which is full-featured on both macOS and iOS, are available for $30 or less. Sell just a few dozen 99¢ sticker packs and you've made back your software investment. If there had been a centralized store for 32x32 pixel, 256-color icon packs on the classic Mac, I probably would have made a few bucks, and I certainly would have spent even more.

I hope that new features in iOS 10 and beyond bring back some of the simplicity and whimsy of digitally customizing our Apple devices. And if Apple gives us the means to support some independent, hobbyist artists along the way, that would be fantastic. That's where The Iconfactory started, after all.

It's always a good sign when another long-time Mac user offers a tip by starting "Did you know about…?" Last week, Phil Dokas asked me:

@dokas what the… 😮💥

As far as I knew, I'd never intentionally used this feature. But for some reason, as I opened up a TextWrangler window to try it out, the word "twiddle" sprung to mind and I became fairly certain what would happen when I pressed ⌃T. The letters flip-flopped. I selected an entire word and tried it again. I thought the entire word reversed, but then I realized that only the first and last character swapped places, and my brain was trying to make sense of the difference.

This is such a tiny feature that you may ask what value it possibly has. For basic typos like 'teh' instead of 'the', twiddling won't save much time over backspacing and retyping. But recently I created a comma-delimited list with spaces before the commas instead of after, and it looked a mess. I could've gone through and twiddled those characters in just a few seconds. Sure, a regular expression would also have done the trick, but that would have meant ferrying the text back and forth to an editor.

You see, ⌃T is a system-wide feature. It works basically everywhere: Pages, Terminal, open/save dialogs, even renaming a file in the Finder. I'm not sure when it first entered OS X, but there's evidence that it goes back to at least 2004, with precedents in BBEdit and — of course — emacs before that. (Sorry, vi purists.)

It's odd to learn that there are undiscoverable, two-button keyboard shortcuts lurking throughout the system. This is especially true if, like me, you love automation. I naturally assume that in most apps, control is a "free" key; command, shift-command, and option-command do all the heavy lifting. I even used Keyboard Maestro to assign a ⌃T shortcut for showing and hiding the sidebar of Finder windows. Since Keyboard Maestro intercepts keypresses early, that effectively blocks twiddling anywhere in the Finder. I should just go back to the default shortcut, ⌥⌘T. That will be a shift in muscle memory, as will learning to make ⌃T twiddling work for me. But I expect, now that I know of its existence, it will come in hnady.

Last and least in the Picomac WWDC roundup is tvOS. The youngest of Apple's OS platforms received the most modest of updates, delivered unconvincingly by Eddy Cue. Much had been preannounced on The Talk Show months ago, including the updated Remote companion app for iOS. Other features, like Dark Mode, are the kind you expect to find after an automatic update on a random Tuesday.

Steve Jobs remarked at WWDC 1997 that he thought it was nearly impossible for a tech company to maintain two platforms well. Fast forward 20 years, and it seems clear that as Apple tries to wrangle four platforms, tvOS is lagging the most. And it can't all be chalked up to youth: tvOS under that name is less than a year old, but the Apple TV as an iOS-based device will turn six this year. The much younger Watch had its false starts, but will securely assume third place in the hierarchy with version 3 and new hardware.

The Apple TV's biggest problem today is that it lives entirely on mantra. It was repeated again onstage: "The future of television is apps." It seems that Cue believes repetition and the power of positive thinking will make this true. To be fair, that's selling him short, as he personally and his team do a lot of legwork to bring partnerships and apps to the platform. But nobody needs to beg Fox Sports to build an app for iOS. The power dynamic is entirely different. As long as Apple has to spend concerted effort on one channel at a time, it's clear that they don't have the bargaining chips to revolutionize television wholesale, especially for cord cutters. (Single Sign-on, a newly introduced feature, certainly won't help them.) And automatic app downloads hope to kickstart the TV experience, but will likely just clutter it with apps better suited to your phone, where you downloaded them in the first place.

These latest announcements have confirmed Apple TV is essentially an iOS device that connects to your television and has some displays and features tailored for the couch experience. That's plenty for some. They're the ones who will enjoy the minor revisions to tvOS (note, not "tvOS 10"). But they should hope for the Apple TV's survival, not a revolution.

iOS has hit double digits. My biggest question going into WWDC was whether Apple would treat the number 10 (and the simultaneous removal of that number from macOS) as a milestone or just the next increment in a yearly series. The answer is that iOS 10 is a big release, but not a big departure in the way that iOS 7 was. iOS 10 is not Picomac-sized; Apple called it "the biggest ever" without hyperbole; the MacStories gang have already put together a 5,000+ word article just covering Monday's preview.

The keynote broke down ten hallmark features, leading with the nebulous feature of "user experience". I think Apple could have left it there if they weren't trying to play on the number ten. iOS 10 looks like a redefinition of what it means to be an iPhone user. Note that just now, and in the title, I didn't say "iOS" or "iOS devices". Every new feature and demo was presented in the context of the phone. Even more specifically, iOS appears to be designed for the iPhone 6s family and beyond, with tons of functionality accessed by 3D Touch. There appears to be no alternative for iPhone 6 or SE users. That would be a totally ordinary, forward-looking Apple move: the latest OS runs best on the latest flagship hardware, so upgrade early and often.

Except what of the iPads Pro? The most powerful iOS device available is only months old. iOS 10 will perform beautifully on that hardware, but possibly lacking major features like inline widgets and interaction with notifications. I had hoped that iOS 10 would give me clarity on whether to purchase a 9.7" or 12.9" iPad Pro this summer. Instead, it's made me question whether it's the time to buy at all, even though my 3rd generation iPad has now officially fallen off the back of the conveyor belt, as it doesn't support iOS 10. (Mine's actually still running iOS 7, just to keep it functional.)

I may have to beta test my purchase decisions with the iOS public beta program this summer. I can take the plunge for the first time and put the beta OS on my carry phone: an iPhone 6, which lacks 3D Touch. If I feel like I'm not getting the full package, it will confirm my decision to upgrade the phone this fall (a little less than two years in), but it may prolong my iPad limbo.

iOS 10 looks huge for the direction of the platform writ large: iPhones, iPads, (sorry, iPod Touches), and the four-headed system software monster. As long as the hardware keeps up, it makes the argument that saturation does not entail stagnation. After all, it's only the first double-digit iOS.

macOS is back, and it's spelled just like everyone predicted, with a lowercase m and no space. Gone in the new version, Sierra, is any mention of the numeral "ten", Roman, Arabic, or otherwise. The unified branding across four platforms seems to be more than just for aesthetics, as each is now free to borrow or contribute features to any of the others, while still plainly representing specific hardware.

Of course, the biggest feature borrowed in Sierra is Siri (which sets up several tongue twisters). I was filled with dread in the keynote when its first demo returned a result with extra Siri sass.

NO SIRI. BAD SIRI. DO NOT TELL ME MY "FILIN' IS STYLIN'".

But the examples on Apple's Sierra preview website are much more reserved, with standard "Here's what I found…" language. And the flexibility of queries looks genuinely impressive. One example, "Show the PDFs in my downloads folder", is a task that I can accomplish quickly enough with LaunchBar: ⌘-Space, right arrow, D-L, P-D-F. But if I had to do that with just Spotlight or the Finder, it would take me far longer than speaking the question aloud. Drill-down search is also brought over from tvOS, and it appears to have access to several types of extended attributes.

Siri doesn't just have different data to search on the Mac, but different ways of presenting it. Any Siri search query can be saved as a bespoke widget in Notification Center. Remember Safari Web Clips in Dashboard? Saved Siri results are more limited in terms of what they can contain, but integrate seamlessly into the beautiful new light vibrance UI of Notification Center. That visual refresh is present in iOS too, and I wonder if Siri widgets will appear there soon. (One of my frustrations with Siri on iOS is the tendency for returned information to evaporate, forcing you to search again or go digging in an app for the results.)

Apart from Siri, macOS Sierra is behaving as a member of the big happy Apple platform family through inter-OS continuity features. The shared clipboard has the potential to save many awkward trips through AirDrop or third-party utilities, and iCloud Drive now aims to be a serious sync solution. But I do worry that these features will make my data all too portable. I don't want every snippet of text I copy from a private conversation on my iPhone beamed to a Mac owned by my employer. If Apple values privacy as much as they say, there should be easy ways to manage these sharing features, and "easy" doesn't mean trying to constantly juggle multiple Apple IDs.

All in all, my first impression of Sierra is positive: it's the most mature member of a cohesive family of Apple operating systems. It offers room for Siri to grow in new ways and will make the Mac experience a key part of the Apple experience. Now we just have to get used to typing its name.

Yesterday Apple kicked off WWDC 2016 with a whirlwind tour of their four major platforms. They set the keynote to grueling pace and pushed a lot to the pre- and post-show, with major App Store announcements coming the week before and John Siracusa learning about the new Apple File System on the streets outside Bill Graham.

John Siracusa, at the moment he learned the new file system is coming. Historic moment. @ Bill… https://t.co/RqRlmR5ZD9

There will be tons to analyze throughout the entire summer, but I'll follow Apple's lead and dive in with my first impressions, starting with the Apple Watch.

This is a little cynical, but I for one am excited that Apple Watch version 1.0 looks like it's finally here. I wasn't so much down on the Apple Watch as a product but watches in general; I've never worn a watch, and presumed I never would from the time I started carrying my own cell phone. In the lead-up to the Apple Watch's original launch, I knew that it would have to stand out as an Apple device, not a timepiece, for me to ever consider it. Early (and more recent) reviews pointed out the platform's flaws, and I didn't expect that it would have anything to offer me until the release of a new generation of Watch hardware.

It really seemed like watchOS couldn't become a first-class platform without an injection of computing power. App launch times were more like floppy disk I/O than the way of the future. But if the keynote demos are to be believed, watchOS 3 will make the existing Watch hardware snappy. Its design will finally lift apps to first-class citizens with a new "Dock" interface, accessed by the side button. I understand that Apple made a wrong bet when it dedicated the lone hardware button to the Friends feature, and I'm glad to see they didn't double down. (No doubt both anecdotes and analytics showed just how seldom anyone ever pushed that button.) Equally, I'm mystified that massive performance increases — the difference between usability and uselessness — came about entirely through software.

Was there a magic breakthrough in the past year that allowed this? With the advancement of Swift, I suppose it's possible; but unless an unforseen architecture advance allowed watchOS 3 to happen, why wasn't it watchOS 1? The simple answer is "it wasn't ready", but then why launch the Apple Watch at all? I'm at the point where I'll now consider the Apple Watch, hesitantly, likely still waiting for new hardware. But if I saw the keynote demonstration at the Watch special event a year ago, I probably would have placed a preorder. As a general watch skeptic, I may well be the exception. And with some install base of Apple Watch users, the platform has a head start. With watchOS 3 and beyond, I look forward to it not just finding its feet, but running — or rolling — quickly into the future.

I'm as excited for WWDC as anyone else in the world of Apple. (In fact, next week Picomac will be on a Tuesday–Friday schedule, to fit in as much coverage of the Keynote and State of the Union as possible.) Everyone has their own wishlist for what they hope to be announced, from must-have, to would-be-nice, to almost-impossible. Steven Frank tweeted the things that fall in that last category for him:

WWDC pipe dreams: fix Finder, fix iTunes, fix App Store, stop iOSification of Mac OS, pro hardware with top-end specs and ports intact

Every. Single. Day.

I'm on board with most of that, but I think that improvements to the Finder in the last two versions of OS X haven't quite gotten their due. Sure, there hasn't been a solution for forgotten window position and view settings, annoyances that probably go unnoticed for average users and are fixed quickly with utilities like Moom for power users. And yes, the Finder's handling of network volumes that go offline is still abysmal, causing minute-long hangs and orphaned windows suddenly displaying the very Windows-y "Computer" location. (So yes, Apple, please a fix here: just show a spinner and a "Disconnect and close" button on windows from inaccessible servers, allowing the rest of the Mac to go on its way.)

On the other hand, Finder window toolbars and sidebars are better and less obtrusive than they've ever been. And unheralded features of the Finder save me time routinely. The batch rename command introduced in Yosemite is a power-user Finder feature at its best. Available in the File menu or contextual menu, it saves tons of typing or a trip to Automator to create an ad hoc renaming workflow. Sure, it has its limits, only allowing three types of renaming: replace text, add text, and sequential naming. Beyond that, more powerful tools like Name Mangler exist for those who need them.

Speaking of who needs these features, it's easy to forget that inside Infinite Loop, hundreds of Mac power users use the Finder all day, every day. There are tons of things to hope for or against for WWDC 2016, but all I hope is that Apple's own employees get what they need, and that they're kind enough to share it with the rest of us.

I want the Apple TV to be the best, if not the only, device connected to my television. Next week at WWDC, there will probably be some quick mention of tvOS, likely fourth in line behind Apple's other platforms. I'm not sure that Apple will convince anyone who hasn't already to develop a tvOS app. I'm also fairly certain that there won't be new Apple TV hardware that is more of a "home hub" device like the Amazon Echo. What's available to watch on Apple TV seems relatively fixed (unless the elusive, mythical TV content deal comes through). But that doesn't mean that I wouldn't welcome some new Apple TV hardware that made the basic viewing experience more comfortable.

Apple's latest hardware innovation that just has to make its way throughout the entire product line is the True Tone Display introduced on the 9.7" iPad Pro. I expect it to move to other iOS devices first and then to Macs. But why stop there? Despite its name, the "true tone" doesn't require special display technology; the magic is all in the light temperature sensors, which then dynamically drive color temperature. It's just f.lux or Night Shift based on environment rather than time.

A True Tone sensor in the Apple TV would set it apart from competitors — sure, you can watch Netflix on any box, but it's going to look best on a True Tone-enabled Apple TV. Barring that hardware change, I'd be happy for a tvOS update that supports Night Shift. This time of year it's the Stanley Cup playoffs, so I've been watching lots of pictures of bright, bluish-white ice late into the night. Constantly fiddling with my TV's settings or moving over to an awful Flash-based stream on a Mac just to save my eyes is a lousy tradeoff.

Another dynamic adjustment that would uniquely suit the Apple TV is responsiveness to ambient sound. (If Apple was feeling particularly punny, they could call it True Tone as well.) In my part of the world, the weather has been hot, so our air conditioner is constantly — and noisily — kicking on and off. Every time, another volume adjustment on the TV. It got to the point that I wished for a ""smart"" (several levels of air quotes there) thermostat that would control my TV volume.

dumb IoT device i would love: smart thermostat that connects to my TV and adjusts volume when the A/C turns on and off.

But that would be a complicated, error-prone system. What if the Apple TV could just monitor room noise? It would have to be smart enough to distinguish consistent background noise (like the air conditioner, the shower running upstairs, a lawnmower outside) from me yelling "ohhh!" as Steph Curry drains another three and crushes my soul a little more. It's absolutely solving a first world problem, but it would make the TV-watching experience simpler and more joyous — exactly what the Apple TV set out to do in the first place.

I've been trying to expand my use of Hazel since version 4 was released last month. I haven't come up with any revolutionary new rules, but I have come to appreciate some of the biggest time savings from rules I already had in place.

Since Hazel acts on files and folders, I think the common conception is that it does filing tasks for you: clearing off your desktop, sorting PDFs of utility bills, or getting truly obsessive about your pirated video collection. That's all very useful, but can be done with only the rename and move actions — just two of many available in Hazel. I've found that one of the most convenient, lesser-used Hazel actions is to open a file. Of course, you have to put some tight controls on what Hazel will open and when. (I've messed up the logic and had a rule run rampant, opening dozens of windows until I killed the Hazel helper process; pause the folder and preview your rules, kids.)

Here a couple of my use cases for auto-opening:

Some people like every file that lands in their Downloads folder to automatically open. I find that to be too obtrusive (and it's half a second away in LaunchBar: ⌘-Space, D L, ⌘-Right Arrow, Enter). But it's a good example of the limiting logic necessary for rules that open files. For every file, the Finder and Spotlight keep track of not only Date Created and Date Modified but Date Added — this is how your Downloads folder is sorted by default. Hazel itself keeps track of another parameter, Date Last Matched: when Hazel most recently took a peek at the file's metadata. A rule that triggers on "Date Added is after Date Last Matched" will perform an action just once when a file is added to a folder.

My rule that opens downloaded files actually doesn't use this logic, since it only matches very specific files: work that I've just submitted to an online system and I'm downloading a local archive copy of. That's triggered by my initials and a specific tag in the content of the file. But I need to do a visual check to make sure the file uploaded accurately. So, after Hazel does its typical filing, it opens the document.

You might have guessed that I use Hazel in the production of Picomac. I use it to strip out GarageBand's timestamp in the filename, move the file to a dedicated "episodes" folder, and then open it in VLC, where I can check the audio and add metadata.

The extra Date Added condition is a safeguard in case Hazel loses track of the true Date Last Checked.

For the first 20 or so updates, I did that all manually, and it was error-prone. Files wound up in the wrong folders, improperly named, or — the worst — accidentally opening in iTunes. Now the process is always accurate and I save almost a minute of busy work; that's Hazel, opening files and doing its job.