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Six Colors

Apple, technology, and other stuff

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July 9, 2021

We’re both sitting on a beach drinking a cold beverage this week. (But not the same beach.)

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Clockwise 406: Ostensibly on Vacation

Pokémon Go, our biggest tech gear ROI, the tech we take on vacation, and whether we’d rather have a time machine or a transporter.

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By Stephen Hackett

July 7, 2021 9:00 AM PT

The life cycle of Apple Watch backups

Apple Watch

I recently had to go back to my Series 5 Apple Watch after my Series 6 met an untimely end when I slid down a waterfall at a state park on family vacation. I was fine, but my watch’s glass face met an underwater rock, and uhhh… it did not survive.

When I got home, I grabbed my Series 5 off the shelf, knowing I didn’t have time to deal with having my Series 6 repaired and didn’t want to be without an Apple Watch, as I’ve recently begun using the watch in a major way after we spent some time apart.

Getting my old Series 5 back up and running was a real journey.

First, I had to unpair the shattered Series 6 from my iPhone. While its display was a loss, my watch was still functional enough for this process to take place. Unpairing is an important step when changing Apple Watches, as that is when a backup is made of the device.

Setting up an Apple Watch from scratch is a lot faster than most other Apple devices, but I was hoping to avoid that hassle. Here’s how Apple explains it:

When you unpair your Apple Watch from your iPhone, the watch is backed up completely to your iPhone to make sure that the latest data is saved. You can use the backed-up Apple Watch data on your iPhone if you ever need to restore your Apple Watch, or when you set up a new Apple Watch.

When you back up your iPhone to iCloud or your computer, your iPhone backup includes your Apple Watch data. This means that when you set up a new iPhone and restore it from backup, your latest Apple Watch data is also restored.

(That document also outlines what is backed up, which is an interesting read.)

Once the broken Watch was unpaired, I had to set up the Series 5 Watch as a new device so I could update watchOS to the same version as my Series 6. After that, I unpaired it and was able to apply the backup. Despite the hoop-jumping, the Series 5 is working just fine now.

One thing I noticed is that several very old Apple Watch backups were present on my iPhone. Turns out, they are pretty easy to get rid of, if you know where to look. In the Settings app, go to the iPhone Storage page, then select Watch.1 On that screen, you can review and remove old backups that are no longer needed.

These backups are just a couple hundred kilobytes in size, so leaving them around surely isn’t hurting anything. There’s a Remove All Backups button at the bottom of that screen, but there were so many listed that I didn’t see it at first, so I started removing them one by one. I got tired of the Settings app kicking me back out to the iPhone Storage page each time I deleted one. Once the Settings app crashed after a few were removed, I just gave up and deleted them all.

It will only annoy me once a year, unless I smash another Apple Watch. I can’t make any promises there, apparently.

  1. Once the iPhone Storage page actually loads. It has to be the slowest screen in any of Apple’s operating systems. I’d love to know why it takes so long, even on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. ↩

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

by Jason Snell

July 6, 2021 9:29 AM PT

A future for extending Apple Mail?

David Sparks finds a glimmer of hope for the future of Apple Mail in Apple’s new MailKit plug-in interface for the Mac:

There is already a rich ecosystem of Apple Mail plugins, but I’ve become increasingly leery about using and recommending them during recent years. My concern was that Apple could, at any point, pull the plug on Apple Mail plugins.

A few years ago, I talked to an Apple engineer at WWDC who explained that mail plugins, historically at least, represented a security vulnerability, and Apple is very much interested in removing any security holes. The good news is that the announcement of MailKit means Apple is not pulling the plug on plugins but instead found a safe way for them to continue while keeping the platform secure.

Sometimes it’s the little things. I desperately want Apple to do more with Mail, but adding a modern plug-in interface (that, dare I say it, might one day even show up on iOS?) gives me some hope that if Apple isn’t interested in extending Mail, maybe plug-in developers can do the job in a way that’s secure, stable, and built for the future.

By Jason Snell

July 6, 2021 9:00 AM PT

You’re not backing up enough

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

I know you’ve heard it a million times before, so many times that you skim past it when you read it. And you’ll probably do it again this time, but I’ve got to try. I’m looking out for your best interests here.

However much you’re backing up your Mac, you’re probably not backing it up enough.

Last week my friend Antony lost nearly a week of productivity to a dead drive in his iMac. Fortunately, he was able to recover every one of his files thanks to various backup strategies.

Similar to my Drobo crash of early 2020, Antony’s use of Time Machine and Backblaze allowed him to get up and running with a minimum of pain. It’s an important point that doesn’t get enough attention: you aren’t backing up enough.

Time Machine comes on every Mac, and all it needs is a big disk to back up to. (It says automatic backups are off because I’m using TimeMachineEditor to schedule them.)

Start with Time Machine. Apple builds it into every Mac, and thanks to the arrival of APFS and changes in macOS Big Sur, it’s a lot less painful to use than it used to be. Buy a drive that’s bigger than your Mac’s hard drive and attach it to your Mac regularly. If you use a desktop, you can get a big SSD and tape it to the back of your display, where you’ll never have to look at it. If you use a laptop, either you’ll need to get into the habit of plugging a backup drive in, attach the backup drive to another Mac on your network, or tape the backup drive to the back of your laptop. Hopefully not the last one. Since my Mac mini server is on my network at all times, my iMac and my wife’s MacBook Air both back up over the network to the Mac mini server via Time Machine.

Time Machine backups are great for retrieving a file you didn’t mean to delete or reverting an unfortunate app update you immediately regretted approving. They’re great for wiping a computer and starting fresh or for restoring a dead computer. The problem is that Time Machine backups are located in your house, which means that if something bad happens to not just your Mac but your whole house, you’re out of luck. Also, depending on how big your backup drive is, your ability to retrieve older files may fade away quickly as Time Machine frees up space for new backups.

Backblaze is backing up my entire server (8TB!) to the cloud.

The solution to all this is to pay for an online backup service. After years of using CrashPlan, I switched to Backblaze a couple of years ago, and it’s gone well. For the most part, Backblaze backs up my data silently, and I never notice it. But when my drive died last year, I was able to download individual files from the backup immediately and have them ship me a USB hard drive of my enormous data set so that I could restore it. If my local backup wasn’t available—for example, in the case of a natural disaster—all my data would still have been safe in Backblaze.

Consider, too, that you might have a bunch of cloud storage space that you’re not using. I store almost all of my current working files in Dropbox, where they’re backed up and versioned. This means that if I save a file and then my computer explodes a minute later, it’s all safe in the cloud. Cloud storage is a nice refuge.

ARQ Backup uses extra cloud space and also manages periodic local backups of all my server files.

But if you’re like me, you may also have an enormous amount of cloud storage space that you’re not using. I had a bunch of Dropbox space and even more OneDrive space because I pay for Office 365. So I bought a copy of ARQ Backup and used it to back up my most important files to my cloud storage space that I’m already paying for and not using. I’m also using ARQ to back up my RAID to two large hard drives when I connect them to the server, which I do every week or two.

Carbon Copy Cloner backs up regularly to an external drive on the back of my iMac.

Finally, I keep a drive plugged into my iMac and my Mac mini server that makes a daily duplicate of the entire drive. Because you can never have enough backups—especially ones you can boot from on a different Mac in a pinch. For this task, you can take your pick of two wonderful apps: Shirt Pocket Software’s SuperDuper and Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner. My server backs up its small internal SSD to a small SSD connected via USB every day using SuperDuper. My iMac backs up to a larger SSD tucked into its VESA mount every day using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Extreme? Yes. But even when I was backing up using Time Machine and Backblaze alone, I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t be sure that all my files would be available in case of an emergency. You probably don’t need to use all of these techniques—but however many methods you’re using today, I urge you to consider layering in an additional one! You might never need it—but it only takes one bad day to wipe out years of work.

By Dan Moren for Macworld

July 6, 2021 6:30 AM PT

3 apps Apple should have updated

As much fun as it is to see Apple roll out updates to its major platforms every summer, it’s always a slightly bittersweet experience. Even though there are new features and shiny things galore to pore over, there seems to be some software that is left shivering in the cold rain, their faces plastered against the window while newer features are showered with love and adulation.

Of course, Apple’s platforms are so expansive these days that the company can’t possibly update each and every app on a yearly basis. But even so, there are a few that seem to perpetually languish, year over year, to the point that one wonders if Apple forgot about them, while others get updates of dubious necessity. More frustratingly, some of those very apps are ones that users rely on day in and day out. Apps that may not be exciting, but are definitely necessary.

As we continue to comb through the fallout from this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, it’s worth taking a look at some of the apps that Apple didn’t make substantial changes to and which could maybe use a little bit of care and attention of their own.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Upgrade 360: Big Minimizers

Presenting Upgrade 360, a new program designed to improve your podcast listening experience by letting you choose the level of podcast quality you wish to receive. Perhaps you want to hear us talk about the podcast bubble without any audio artifacts! Maybe you’d like our discussion of the macOS Public Beta to be delivered at a shockingly low bit rate! It’s the same old Upgrade, but delivered in a few new ways—plus the usual way, we should be clear it’s also just being delivered the usual way.

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by Jason Snell

July 4, 2021 2:18 PM PT

Gurman: Apple thinks about decentralized work

In the second edition of Mark German’s excellent Bloomberg newsletter, he details that Apple is actively exploring new ways of work that don’t circle around Cupertino:

Just a few years after completing the multibillion-dollar Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California, Apple Inc. is ramping up efforts to decentralize out of Silicon Valley. I’m told that executives at the highest levels of the company recognize that hiring and retaining talent will be one of the biggest challenges to its future success, and reducing its reliance on the Valley is a key step in mitigating that issue.

Apple has traditionally operated on the principle that ambitious technologists yearn for a place in Silicon Valley where they can put their mark on the next iProduct. The company’s top brass for years fought against decentralization. But that thinking has changed for several reasons based on what I’ve heard from Apple employees.

Spreading outside of Silicon Valley is smart. The question is, will the company embrace remote work and geographically dispersed workgroups as some of its competitors have, or will it just set up groups for in-person work in different cities?

By Dan Moren

July 2, 2021 1:45 PM PT

Migrating 2FA codes from Authy to Apple’s system

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

One of the features I’m most excited about in Apple’s latest platform updates is the ability to save two-factor authentication codes into my iCloud Keychain. That means (hopefully) no more having to jump to a separate app—or even a separate device!—just to get one of those good old six-digit codes.

To date, I’ve relied upon Authy, an excellent app that not only makes it easy to store all those disparate account credentials, but also syncs them between devices as well as letting you back them up and easily restore them when you move to a new device. In fact, Authy made it so easy that whenever I could enable 2FA, I did. As a result, I have more than 30 accounts with two-factor codes.

So what I was not looking forward to was migrating all those codes from Authy to Apple’s new password system, a process that promised to be mind-numbing in the extreme, since I figured I would have to essentially log into each account, disable two-factor authentication, and then re-enable it. To boot, since Apple’s new platforms are in beta, it seemed like I should probably make sure Authy continues to work, just in case something goes wrong, which means doing the setup process twice.

Nice as it would be if Apple’s new system could simply import all your codes from Authy—or other apps like Google Authenticator—it doesn’t seem as though that’s an option for that at present, which isn’t entirely surprising given the security issues involved. (There is an import password option for Apple’s new system, but it’s mainly aimed at other browsers or password managers.)

Safari Passwords
The new password manager in the Safari Technology Preview

However, I found a couple of things that helped me speed up the process, shifting it from mind-numbing to purely tedious. First, Apple’s recently released Safari Technology Preview for Big Sur includes the new password manager, so you don’t have to upgrade to the macOS Monterey beta to get it. (Or deal with the iOS/iPadOS versions, which are a little more cumbersome.)

Second, I found a tip that lets you easily display all of your time-based one-time password (TOTP) setup keys from Authy using the Authy Desktop app for Mac and Google Chrome.

The end result was that I spent about an hour laboriously copying each setup code into the appropriate password entry in the Safari Technology Preview’s Password section and—just to be on the safe side—logging in to each website to make sure it worked. The biggest challenge was often figuring out which code went with which sites, since I often relied on Authy’s helpful icons rather than labelling them clearly.

But now I’ve got pretty much all of my accounts set up in Apple’s new system. Some websites are better than others about letting you autofill the verification codes, but most are pretty seamless already. (If the site worked with codes that were texted to you via SMS, then it ought to work with TOTP codes pretty seamlessly as well.)

The only downside is that it doesn’t work in the standard version of Safari on Big Sur, but in that case I’m no worse off than I was before: I can still refer to either Authy or Apple’s beta software to retrieve a code.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

July 2, 2021

A week of public betas: Safari, Shortcuts, Focus, and more.

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by Jason Snell

July 1, 2021 5:07 PM PT

Stephen Hackett’s Apple hardware wall calendar

Stephen Hackett, Six Colors contributor and collector of vintage Apple Hardware, has launched a Kickstarter for a 2022 wall calendar featuring his original photography of items from his large collection. The days of the year are marked with key dates from Apple history.

Hackett = Quality. I bought one immediately, and I suspect many Six Colors readers will be in the market for one too.

By Jason Snell for Macworld

July 1, 2021 2:02 PM PT

The M1, macOS Monterey and the next Mac power shift

More than ever, the Mac is Apple’s power tool. Today’s Macs running Apple silicon can use the complete library of macOS apps, and apps from iOS via Catalyst or unmodified directly from the App Store. And then there’s everything that’s under the hood, from app scripting to Unix-based tools of all sorts.

But with the move to Apple silicon and Apple’s announcement in June that Shortcuts is coming to the Mac as a part of a multi-year automation transition, things are changing. While the Mac isn’t going to stop being a power tool, the next few years will change its nature in some fundamental ways.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

By Jason Snell

July 1, 2021 10:00 AM PT

First Look: macOS Monterey Public Beta

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

macOS Monterey

If there’s a theme of Apple’s operating-system releases in 2021, it’s platform unification. This development is most significant for macOS, which tended to lag behind iOS in the 2010s, missing out on some or all of the year’s exciting innovations.

Apple has spent the last few years getting the base technology of iOS and macOS back in sync, removing 32-bit software, adding Mac Catalyst and support for iOS apps on Apple silicon, and introducing new cross-platform development technology via SwiftUI. And with macOS Monterey, you can see the fruits of all that labor: The big new features of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are also the big new features of macOS Monterey.

The Mac is also getting a boost with older iOS features finally being brought to the other side, most notably Shortcuts, the iOS automation tool that is the first sign of a renaissance of user automation on macOS.

The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac. Apple wants its platforms to share features, but it also recognizes that each serves a different (albeit overlapping) audience.

With the release of the first public beta versions of macOS Monterey (as well as iOS and iPadOS 15), everyone now has the opportunity to give these new operating systems a try. As always, be warned that they’re not ready for release for a reason, and you should never install beta operating systems on devices that you depend on to do your job day-to-day. For those with patience, consider this a preview of what your Mac might look like this fall. For those without patience, well, let’s take a look at Apple’s work in progress that will be taking shape this summer.

Continue reading “First Look: macOS Monterey Public Beta”…

by Jason Snell

July 1, 2021 9:06 AM PT

Warzel: ‘This is the awful voice inside my head’

In the aftermath of Apple employees pushing back on return-to-office policies and negative reactions to that (and again and likewise), Charlie Warzel wrote at length about why companies need to listen to the concerns of their employees in his Galaxy Brain newsletter:

Every manager/executive… who is good at their job and works at a company with employees who aren’t broadly miserable employs a similar strategy: they listen to their employees. They listen and they do it regularly. I don’t mean sending out end of year feedback forms and having HR compile long reports nobody reads — I mean they actively seek their employees out and, humbly, listen. They listen not to confirm their priors, but to gain some new understanding. They do this, in part, because they give a shit about their employees, but also because it’s good business. It turns out that your employees — the ones doing the day to day labor of making the business run — are quite good at sending signals about the real status of the company’s culture. You just have to be willing to listen.

The issue of how a company should structure its workspaces and work policies post-COVID is incredibly complex. There’s no single right answer because every company and every job is different. It’s true that most Apple employees took their jobs with the knowledge that they’d be required to be present in Cupertino (even if that didn’t necessarily make sense, even at the time, for many groups). But surely the last year has changed things, at least somewhat?

More broadly, is Apple’s corporate culture1 the secret to its success, and should it never change?2 Are some aspects of it more important than others? If Apple changes its culture in any way, does it risk not being the company that made it so successful?

The truth is, no memo could ever truly change Apple’s culture. That’s not how corporate culture works. Corporate culture (for good and ill) is an invisible force built into the structure of a company. It exerts its power even when all the individuals in the company agree that changing the culture is appropriate. It takes real effort, and commitment, and time to change corporate culture.

At this point, if Apple’s work culture changes, it’ll be because circumstances force it to. Apple will have star employees who insist on being remote, so the company will make exceptions for them. It will try to hire talent and fail because of its insistence on everyone being in Cupertino, and that failure will lead to a readjustment of policies. The existing policies, when compared to those from other tech companies that have embraced remote work, will likely lead to a brain drain within Apple—and those in charge of hiring and recruitment will realize they need to counteract those effects by offering jobs that don’t require spending three-ish days a week in Cupertino.

But unless the world reverts back to a pre-2020 state as if nothing happened, Apple’s culture will probably have to change, regardless. And the pain of that change will be magnified by the fact that Apple’s executives seem so resistant to it. Maybe they should listen—really listen—to what their current employees are trying to tell them.

  1. Apple is so concerned with company culture that it has an entire group, Apple University, designed to codify and reinforce it. ↩
  2. An argument for change and flexibility: Steve Jobs’s last advice to Tim Cook was “never ask what he would do. Just do what’s right.” ↩

By Dan Moren

June 30, 2021 3:00 PM PT

The Back Page: Welcome back to Apple Park, where everything is still totally normal

Here at Apple, we are delighted that America’s excellent progress in combatting COVID-19 means that we will this fall be able to welcome our employees back to Apple Park in person.

Face-to-face collaboration has always been key to Apple innovation and creativity, and that’s one significant reason why we created Apple Park in the first place, despite what you might have heard from other, less reputable sources.

As a result, we are encouraging our employees to prepare for a return to the office starting in September, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Also Saturdays, half days on Sundays, Blursdays, and some holidays. We’re sure you’re as excited as we are to reconnect with old friends and co-workers, catch up on podcasts during your lengthy commute, and generally sit at a desk for hours that you would have once been forced to spend at home, able to share more time and experiences with your loved ones. We’re saving you from that, just as we do by not offering daycare, so you can leave your home at home.

Of course, we’ve accomplished a lot while separated these past eighteen months. We’ve introduced new products, we’ve held two virtual developer conferences, and Craig has very nearly finished construction of a ziggurat made almost entirely out of dry macaroni.

But through all of that, something has been missing: your smiling faces. Joyful. Happy. Like the old Finder icon. Because you are happy. You are smiling. Yes? Right? Aren’t you? There you go. Good. Now just hold that expression. I’ll tell you when you can stop.

We realize that not all of our employees are ready to make the transition back to the office, which is why we’ll make the process as easy as possible. Because at Apple, we’re not about rigidly adhering to a dogmatic approach set out by a former leader more than two decades ago—we’re about adaptability. Flexibility. So to ease back our employees, we’ve created something we call a hybrid workspace. In simple terms, we’ve built replicas of each and every one of your work-from-home spaces right within Apple Park to make you feel right, well, at home. (It’s not like we spent all that money on that virtual house set to show off smart home tech, right?)

And for those who still worry about adjusting to life back at work, we’re going the extra mile. By deploying one of our elite Human Resources teams to enter your home at night (thanks, HomeKit smart keys!) while you sleep (tracked via your Apple Watch, naturally), tranquilize you, and transport you to your replica office, so that you wake up refreshed and ready to work a full eighty-hour week from the comfort of your own “home.” This is how much the health and wellness of our employees means to us.

Most of all, it’s important that we remember why returning to in-person work is so important to Apple. It’s not just because you cannot replicate over WebEx those serendipitous moments that spark pure unbridled creativity. Nor because we want to foster a sense of community between all our employees that makes our products stronger. It’s not even to appease the dread god Glog-Raggopth, long may they reign, by stocking the larder that is Apple Park with fresh souls for their consumption.

It’s because we spent five billion dollars building this gigantic donut of a campus, and it wasn’t so Phil and Eddy could race laps through the office in their Ferraris.

You’re welcome.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

by Dan Moren

June 30, 2021 11:28 AM PT

iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 hit Public Beta

After a couple of developer betas, iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are now available as part of Apple’s Beta Software Program, alongside beta versions of tvOS 15 and watchOS 8. A macOS Monterey beta is listed as “Coming soon.”

Federico Viticci at MacStories has, as always, a good look at the next version of Apple’s mobile operating systems:

Let me cut to the chase: I don’t think iOS and iPadOS 15 are massive updates like iOS and iPadOS 13 or 14 were. There are dozens of interesting new features in both updates, but none of them feels “obvious” to demonstrate to average users like, say, dark mode and iPad multiwindow in iOS and iPadOS 13 or Home Screen widgets in last year’s iOS 14. And, for the most part, I think that’s fine. The wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented every year, and the pandemic happened for everyone – Apple engineers included.

Over at Tom’s Guide, our old Macworld colleague Philip Michaels has similar thoughts:

iOS 15 poses a challenge that recent iPhone software updates haven’t had to face. Those recent iOS updates were pretty easy to sum up. Sure, each update contained its fair share of new features and enhancements to existing capabilities, but it was usually easy to pinpoint the biggest changes and summarize them in a couple bullet points.

Try doing that with iOS 15, and you’ll soon spiral into madness.

The Verge’s Chaim Gartenberg concurs:

iOS 15 and iPad 15 are kicking off their public betas today, and after a few weeks with the developer betas of the new software, Apple’s OS updates feel like more of a grab bag of new features than ever before.

A major rethinking of either platform, this year’s updates are not. The two updates were clearly born in 2020’s norm-shattering pandemic. The feature list at WWDC and on Apple’s website wears last year’s remote-first influences firmly, from the heavy emphasis on FaceTime features to a better system for corralling notifications into “work” and “personal” buckets.

There are at least two months before Apple releases these updates, and while that time will probably largely be spent squashing bugs, there’s always the possibility of changes and tweaks along the way. Of course, you can always find out for yourself—though, as usual, we recommend being careful about what devices you install this software on: it is, after all, a beta.

Clockwise 405: Phone Calls Are Gross

How we handle email, the potential of Shortcuts on the Mac, our latest tech delights, and whether we prefer our social media to be fed to us by the algorithm.

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By Dan Moren

June 29, 2021 8:26 AM PT

Big Mail may not be my next email client, but it’s aiming at the future

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Old habits are hard to break, and when it comes to my very online life, there's no habit older than email.

I've had an email address since roughly 1994, and over the quarter-century since, I've used everything from command line programs1 to webmail to native apps for reading, sending, and organizing my mail. But since around 2001, my mail client—Apple's built-in Mail app—hasn't changed.

Also, Apple Mail, well, it hasn't changed.

That's one big reason I was so eager to check out Big Mail, an app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad which aims to use AI and machine learning to improve the email experience. Because, believe me, the email experience could stand to be improved.

Notifications

Unfortunately, after the better part of a week of using Big Mail—even making a game attempt by replacing Mail in the dock on all my devices—my general conclusion is that while its full of good intentions, it's hampered by an (admittedly somewhat Apple-like) insistence that it knows how to make your email work better. In sum: I don't think it's quite ready to be my email replacement yet, but what it's doing ought to push the needle for mail apps everywhere.

  1. pine: it ain't elm, friend. ↩

Continue reading “Big Mail may not be my next email client, but it’s aiming at the future”…

by Jason Snell

June 28, 2021 4:53 PM PT

Shortcuts shaping up on the Mac

Running a shortcut via the command line on macOS Monterey.

Last week, Dr. Drang wrote an excellent post summing up where Shortcuts on the Mac fits in with all of the Mac’s existing automation frameworks:

Two years ago, shortly before WWDC 2019, Guilherme Rambo told us that Shortcuts was coming to the Mac as a Marzipan app. I wrote a post about the levels of automation on the Mac and how a Marzipan Shortcuts would add a new level. I was concerned with whether Shortcuts would carry on the tradition of allowing communication between the Mac’s different levels. Since Shortcuts didn’t come with Catalina—or with Big Sur, for that matter—I haven’t had to revisit that post. But with WWDC 2021 and the official announcement of Shortcuts coming to Monterey, it time for an update.

The post comes with some helpful visuals about how all the layers in macOS interact.

When I started imagining Shortcuts coming to the Mac, I steeled myself for disappointment—namely that Apple would ship a version of Shortcuts that didn’t do much more than talk to Catalyst apps and iOS apps running natively on Apple silicon.

That didn’t happen. What happened is much better.

Running a Perl script inside a Shortcut on macOS Monterey.

Shortcuts in macOS Monterey lets you run AppleScripts and shell scripts. It comes with its own shortcuts command-line utility that lets you list, run, and open shortcuts. And now in developer beta 2, which was released Monday, is the “Shortcuts Events” process, which lets AppleScript scripts run shortcuts, including passing and receiving input.

A script that passes BBEdit text to a shortcut.

Add this to the fact that I could get some complex shortcuts running on the Mac with no modification, and things are looking good. I know it’s just the beginning of a longer transition, but macOS Monterey is shaping up to be a great release for anyone who wants to use automation to make Mac tasks easier.

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