My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide knows how challenging it can be to prove compliance to a third-party auditor—they just went through it themselves. They learned firsthand something their customers had been telling them for a while: that they couldn’t have gotten their SOC certification without using their own product.
Kolide is an endpoint security solution for Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Kolide gives IT admins a single dashboard, through which you can prove that your fleet has the security measures in place that auditors care about.
Being a member of Six Colors means you get access to members-only posts, the Six Colors Podcast, and a whole lot more. For a few years we’ve also offered a community for members in Slack. Unfortunately, while we love Slack, it’s not really a product made for communities like ours. It doesn’t offer the tools we need to continue running our membership plans and building a solid, growing community.
So this week we turned on the lights at the new Six Colors Discord. If you’d like to join, you can click this link or visit the Six Colors member center and find the link there. You’ll need to log in to Discord (or create an Discord account if you don’t have one).
Inflation runs rampant. Threats of recession loom. And on Thursday Apple strolled right in, whistling a happy tune, turning in yet another record set of financial results. The company set a fiscal third-quarter revenue record, with $83 billion in receipts, up 2 percent from last year.
But look deeper, and you’ll see that this was an unusual quarter for Apple. The company was battered by a “cocktail of headwinds,” to quote Apple CFO Luca Maestri using a metaphor that wasn’t just mixed, but shaken and stirred. Mac sales were down, wearables took a beating, and even the seemingly invincible Services line showed some softness.
And yet, it was a pretty good quarter, considering. I realize that the word “considering” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but it’s true. Wall Street seemed relieved that Apple turned in a good, if not great, quarter. Here’s what jumped out at me in the numbers (and in the post-game phone call Apple’s executives traditionally do with financial analysts).
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri are talking to analysts after revealing Apple’s quarterly financial results. Here’s an ongoing transcript.
Apple’s fiscal results are out. The company generated $83B in revenue. Compared to the year-ago quarter, Mac sales were down 10%, iPad sales down 2%, iPhone up 3%, Services up 13%, and Wearables down 8%.
The Apple Store Time Machine is a project by Michael Steeber, who has been a go-to writer on Apple’s retail stores for many years. It’s a free Mac app called Shop Different, built with Unity, that lets you walk through four different Apple Stores as if you were in a video game. Steeber writes:
The Apple Store Time Machine is a celebration of the places and products that have shaped our lives for more than twenty years. This interactive experience recreates memorable moments in Apple history with painstaking detail and historical accuracy.
The stores are meticulous re-creations of the stores as they actually looked: The first Apple Store in Tysons Corner, Virginia in May 2001; the first “mini” store in Palo Alto in October 2004; the Apple Fifth Avenue store in New York in May 2006; and the Infinite Loop campus store in September 2015.
Steeber’s project brought up memories of my own. I covered the Palo Alto mini store opening for Macworld!
Steve Jobs (right) and Ron Johnson discuss the mini store concept before unveiling it.
How accurate is it? I’ll let you decide for yourself – below is an image of the Time Machine and an actual photo from October 14, 2004—the day the store opened.
For those who don’t know, the “mini” store was a concept that let Apple get into very small spaces in shopping centers. Before the “mini” store was created, there were real estate markets Apple couldn’t crack. As momentum around Apple and Apple’s retail operations grew, that ceased to be a problem and the “mini” store faded away.
Steeber’s simulacrum (left) and Jobs and Johnson.
If you’ve got happy classic Apple Store memories, it’s worth downloading Steeber’s app and immersing yourself. Just remember that you can’t actually pick up that iSight box and check yourself out.
We fear change. When I first saw that the Music app in iOS 16 had done away with its old controls for adjusting volume and scrubbing, I was confused and upset. It’s human nature. But now that I’ve used them a little more… I think I approve.
Here’s what it’s been like forever: both the volume and runtime of a track in Music are represented by a horizontal line, with a little dot on the line representing the current status. As your track plays, the little dot in the runtime area slowly progresses from the far left side to the far right. Likewise, the dot at the left side of the volume slider means your volume is all the way down, and on the right side it means it’s all the way up.
In iOS 16, the dots are banished. Instead, there’s just a line with a part of it that’s a different level of opacity. The big problem here is that the dots were very visible, letting you read the current status of the app pretty easily. I’ve got some concerns about the legibility of the two lines in iOS 16, though at least as of the latest beta, the contrast seems to be enough to make status clear.
The real advance, though, is in how you control volume or scrub through a track. Previously, you needed to put your finger down on the dot itself, and then slide the dot back and forth. If you missed the dot, you failed. In iOS 16, the entire area of the bar is swipeable. You just put your finger down, anywhere, and slide it back and forth.
Want to scrub forward? Pop down your finger and swipe right. It doesn’t matter where your finger falls, as long as it’s on the scrub line. The same thing goes for volume: put your finger anywhere on the line and swipe to the right to make it louder, or to the left to make it quieter. As you scrub, the line gets larger, making it easier to see what you’re doing as you swipe.
Yes, this is the eradication of a little bit of skeuomorphism from the iOS interface. Someone out there is up in arms about it and is filing a strongly worded Feedback item to Apple even now. But I’m inclined to view this as an enhancement to the user experience. You shouldn’t have to aim your finger to land precisely on a little circle in order to change the volume. A touch in the general vicinity and a swipe should be enough. And once we stop looking for that circle and just swipe with abandon, I think we’ll all be better off.
For those who didn’t hear the news, Jason is a regular panelist on TWiT’s MacBreak Weekly now. This week we discussed the Newton cameo in “For All Mankind,” Rene Ritchie going to YouTube (which is why Jason is now on MacBreak Weekly!), patents, and the M2 MacBook Air.
Dan had a baby so we discuss tech advice for new parents and our favorite toys. But we also dig into invasive network video cameras, the ruination of Instagram, and if VR is ever going to be a thing.
Time zones. I hate them. But without them, I’d be waking up with the sunrise at 10 a.m. or 3 p.m. or some other outlandish times. I do, however, enjoy collaborating with people in different times zones and putting my stuff out there to be read by anyone, anywhere, regardless of time zone.
Fortunately, our devices can be faithful helpers when it comes to dealing with time zones. I use my calendar app of choice, Fantastical to convert many of my events to the right time zones. However, I’ve struggled to communicate times to others in places like this website and in Slack and Discord.
One app that can help is Elsewhen from The Lovely Developers, a fun group that sprung out of the Relay FM Discord. Elsewhen lets you quickly set a date and time and then translate it — either into a bunch of human-readable time zones, or into Discord’s time-code format.
I love the Discord feature, which lets me say that Apple’s quarterly results will be available <t:1659040203:f> and have the result — July 28, 2022 at 1:30 PM Pacific — be displayed to everyone in their local time. For communicating out of Discord, the Time List view in Elsewhen lets you pop things on the clipboard:
🇺🇸 – 1:30 PM Pacific
🇺🇸 – 3:30 PM Central
🇺🇸 – 4:30 PM Eastern
🇬🇧 – 9:30 PM BST
🇪🇺 – 10:30 PM CET
It’s a small utility (and I’d love for the Lovely Developers to make it more customizable), but it’s great to be able to quickly communicates times in Discord and elsewhere and make sure that everyone’s on the same page. Elsewhen is available for free on the App Store.
One of my favorite Safari extensions is Noir, which applies a dark stylesheet to websites that don’t get satisfactorily dark when in Dark Mode. The $3 app, which is available for macOS and iOS, just got a big update.
Noir now offers a library of dark themes you can import, and if that’s not enough, you can create your own (and share them with your friends). Yes, you can configure different themes for different sites. iPhone and iPad users can now fully customize keyboard shortcuts, including a bunch of optional shortcuts.
I use Safari a lot on my iPad in the evening with Dark Mode enabled, and while I wish every website would properly implement a dark mode, Noir is the next best thing. (And yes, it will also let you override sites that offer “dark modes” that are either bad or stubbornly not dark.)
In my previous column I wrote about the disappointment over the current state of tvOS and the lack of any significant forward movement with the platform. Now I want to focus on one area where I think Apple could substantially revamp and improve the Apple TV interface: a new home screen that unifies the existing home screen and the Apple TV app.
Revising and unifying navigation on tvOS has gone from being sorely needed to being absolutely critical to the platform. Even Amazon, which has had a pretty bad home screen experience for Fire TV users, just heavily refreshed its home screen.
(I wrote most of this this piece just before Amazon announced its revamp… and here it is basically doing what I what I had outlined. You’d think it would be frustrating, but it’s strangely validating. I wish Apple would follow Amazon down this path.)
Over the years, the demands we place on computers connected to our TV have shifted. Here’s what we need today:
The ability to resume the last item watched.
A collection of other items that are in progress, including shows that have new episodes, or media that was partially played on other devices.
A collection of recently used apps or services, including favorite apps that do not directly integrate with Apple’s connected experience, as well as any subscribed Apple TV Channels.
A collection of personalized recommendations based on subscriptions and watch history.
The ability to access watch history.
The ability to view purchased or rented Movies and TV from your library.
The ability to browse live programming, and personalized notifications about live programming.
Quick access to settings.
I know, it seems like I’m asking a lot. But that’s the whole point of the home screen: It needs to be the home where you can do everything you need to do, or get to the place where you can do it quickly. Splitting up these functions between the app-based home screen and the TV app isn’t solving problems for anyone. I know that the current bifurcated approach is familiar, and change is hard, but switching between a content screen (the TV app) and a bunch of app-based silos (the traditional home screen) doesn’t make sense.
The TV app itself presents a lot of information, but very little of it it is tailored to the person holding the remote, so there’s row after row of stuff that isn’t relevant to your interests, or even your subscriptions. Even if you brave the swamps of self-promotional material, and channels for apps that you already have subscriptions for, to finally get to the personalized content you’ll see that it’s not all that personal, or all that relevant. You liked Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Well here’s Star Wars shows and movies instead of any Star Trek recommendations. You want more like Obi Wan (I don’t, but you do you), well then… here’s The Orville, for some reason?
The functions and contents of any new home screen should also not be set in stone. They should be able to adapt over time as needs change and evolve. The current TV app changes what it shows you frequently, but it’s largely unchanged since its introduction.
Even Apple recognizes this. That’s why it will sometimes turn a row that could all be tiles for different shows or films into a triptych of images for the same thing. The building blocks of design certainly haven’t evolved beyond “grid of three things with some more things hanging off screen right.” It’s time to break out of the tiled-thumbnail list rut.
But let’s start with small steps. Maybe Apple can make a new set of grids that’s a little more relevant and prevents toggling between apps and content. Once that’s done, maybe Apple can start to play catch-up with Amazon on live TV and sports.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Jason and Julia answer your letters. So many questions! We discuss live TV on Apple channels, merger mania, niche streaming, valuable hot-dog streaming rights, “it’s just an eight-hour movie”, and tactical release times.
In this special Summer of Fun episode, Jason and Myke welcome three special guests to discuss how development, accessibility, and widgets have been affected by Apple’s latest operating-system cycle.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.
Here’s Kolide’s secret sauce: It communicates security detection and compliance issues to users via Slack messages, reaching them directly and providing them with the information they need to help make their organization more secure. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance.
I’ve wanted Touch ID on my Mac for a long time. Here at Six Colors, we’ve wished for it since the earliest days of this site. But when it arrived, it was a strictly laptop-only affair.
…Which is good, because the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID costs $149 (a little less if you buy it used). But hey, I said money was no object. I wanted the sweet, sweet power of Touch ID on the tip of my finger.
Which, great, money exchanged for goods. A couple of days later, I had the keyboard. So now what? I don’t really want two keyboards on my desk. Taking another cue from Myke, I decided to attach some velcro tape on the keyboard and the bottom of my desk, positioning the keyboard so that the Touch ID sensor was at the very front of the underside of my desk.
It’s… fine? The biggest issue I’ve had with it is the accidental press of keys when I’m reaching for the Touch ID button. To solve that problem, I installed the free Karabiner-Elements, a powerful utility that lets you map keys on your Mac keyboards to almost anything.
Karabiner lets you re-map—or in this case, map out—keystrokes.
I feel bad about using Karabiner to make a keyboard less productive, but that’s what I did: I re-mapped the keyboard’s keys to a useless function1, so that mistyped keys will have no effect.
Still, I don’t love the idea of having this enormous keyboard velcroed to the bottom of my desk just so I can have access to a Tiny Touch ID button. This brings me to a potential future project: separating the Touch ID button from the rest of the keyboard.
I’m about ready to do this. The one thing that’s lacking is a case to put it in when I’m done. Tian built one himself, and I might look into getting one 3-D printed based on his design. Until then, it’s just a big keyboard velcroed to the underside of my desk.
Thanks to reader Allen F., who suggested the hilarious concept of “mouse button 32” as the target for all my errant keystrokes. ↩
We live in a wonderful era for Apple laptops. The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros provide desktop power and stunning HDR displays. The new M2 MacBook Air has now joined the family, with a similar striking design and the Air’s trademark smaller size and weight.
After a dark period where Apple struggled with flawed laptop keyboards, a painful transition to USB-C, and an increasingly frustrating relationship with Intel, things haven’t looked this bright in quite some time. That’s why, as Apple looks on proudly at the new line of laptops that it has fashioned over the past couple of years, I have only one request: More, please.
