By Dan Moren

February 8, 2021 9:13 AM PT

Automate This: Revisiting Home automations

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

On last week’s episode of the Six Colors Podcast (available to members of this fine website), I mentioned to Jason that my alarm clock was starting to shuffle off this mortal coil, so I’d replaced it with a high-tech equivalent: a Shortcut automation. At 7:00 am, the iPhone would start playing the local radio station via AirPlay to the IKEA Symfonisk speaker in the bedroom.

But I ran into one problem: even though there’s a Set Volume action in Shortcuts, it seems to relate specifically to the iPhone‘s volume, not the speaker to which you may be outputting audio.¹ So at one point, when I had to unplug the speaker and plug it back in, it forgot the low volume I’d set it at, meaning we were in for a literal rude awakening the following morning when it started blaring the news very loudly. Likewise, any time that I then used the speaker for something else and raised the volume, I would have to remember to lower it again.

On the podcast, Jason mentioned that it might be possible to make it a Home automation, rather than a Personal (or Shortcut) automation.² At the time, I regret to say I may have dismissed this idea, as I didn’t think it was possible, but my interest was piqued and I took a closer look. And yes, it turns out that AirPlay-compatible speakers are considered HomeKit devices, which means that you can indeed create Home automations that use them.

Better yet, the audio automation also allow you to explicitly set the volume for that speaker when an automation triggers, though the interface is a little opaque since it relies on your visually figuring out the speaker volume using a slider; providing a percentage, or say, a feedback sound to let you calibrate would definitely be handy.

My initial thought was that since the Home automation provides an “Adjust Volume Only” action, I could set it to lower the volume one minute before my main shortcut automation triggered, but I immediately realized that was a ridiculous idea: this did everything my Shortcut automation did and more, so it made far more sense to replace it with the Home automation altogether.

To be honest, I’ve predominantly used Home automations for controlling our house’s lights at certain times, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would work for speakers as well. When Home automations launched they were very limited—and there are still restrictions in terms of, say, which sensors it supports for triggering automations—but there were more options than I gave it credit for. Just another reason that HomeKit is becoming a more significant player in the smart home market.

[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 Jason Snell

February 5, 2021 10:53 AM PT

The mortality of software

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

On one level, the impending death of Call Recorder, a utility I’ve relied on for more than a decade, shouldn’t actually be a big deal. As useful and easy as it was, it’s not as if there aren’t alternatives.

In fact, if I’m being honest, Call Recorder hasn’t been my primary audio-recording tool for years. That distinction goes to Audio Hijack, which works with any app (not just Skype). But I have kept Call Recorder running for every Skype call I make, sometimes as my primary recorder, more often as a backup.

There’s a broader issue here, though. We rely on tools, and we build whole workflows around those tools. Remove the core tool from the bricolage of software, hardware, and mental calculation that forms a computer workflow, and you might end up never noticing—or the whole thing might collapse like a wobbly Jenga tower.

For most people, in most cases, change comes at a high cost. It’s human nature to want to maintain a comfortable status quo once you’ve managed to find one. Choosing to swap out or modify a portion of your status quo rather than just stick with inertia is a big step. The potential benefit can’t be marginally better than what you’re doing now, it needs to be appreciably better, or that change will never happen.

When I switched from editing podcasts in GarageBand to Logic Pro, it meant throwing away all the shortcuts and tricks and habits I’d built up over years in order to make the editing process as quick as possible. The Logic learning curve was high, and I knew that in the short term I was going to be paying a large price in terms of productivity, but the potential for far greater productivity on the other side finally forced me to make the move. And on the third attempt to break away, I finally did it.

Choosing change is tough, but sometimes you don’t choose, and there’s no obvious benefit at the end of the process. If one of your key tools is discontinued, or becomes incompatible with the next version of your operating system or the new hardware you just bought, you’re going to be forced to move eventually. Call Recorder users can keep using it for now, but as soon as they buy a Mac that’s running Apple silicon, the jig is up. Change is coming, inevitably.

It’s an opportunity

Since change is inevitable, you might as well look at the bright side. Once one of your assumptions is invalidated, it’s an opportunity to revisit everything and make changes that might have previously been unthinkable. When I was at Macworld, I tried to use our shift from print to the Web to shake people out of using Microsoft Word as the writing tool of choice. (I was only partially successful, alas.)

My use of Skype for podcasting was waning already, but the impending departure of Call Recorder suggests that any remaining resistance to abandoning Skype may be about to fade away. Skype’s great advantage was that it was free and ubiquitous; these days everyone has Zoom and I have a paid Zoom account. There are also web-based services that solve the entire “use special software to record your voice locally” problem; Zencastr is currently free during the pandemic, I used Cast for one of my podcasts for several years with good results, and SquadCast has a lot of adherents. (All of these services require Chrome or Firefox and don’t work with Safari.)

I also need to use this opportunity to remind myself that I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I have a very specific dream set of features I’d like to see in a voice-over-IP tool: cross-platform support including mobile and automatic local recordings saved to cloud storage are the big ones. But if no tool offers that (and none do, so far as I can tell), I need to be open to any workflow that results in an understandable conversation with a high-quality and editable recorded result. If that leads me to weird places like a Discord recording bot or a weird VOIP app I’ve never heard of, so be it. I wouldn’t have chosen this moment to revisit all of this, but the moment is here regardless.

By the way, here’s a tip if you’re wondering what you’ll use to record calls when Skype Call Recorder dies. The Podcast Guest Guide by my friend Antony Johnston has the answers, but if you’re using a Mac, you already have the software required to record your voice: QuickTime Player will do it. For more complicated Mac recording set-ups, I again recommend Audio Hijack, but it’s not necessary if you’re just recording your own voice on a podcast.

The fate of the future

Every time an app I rely on exposes its mortality, I realize that all the software I rely on is made by people. And some of it is made by a very small group of people, or even largely a single person. And it gives me pause, because whether that person decides to stop development or retires or is hit by the proverbial bus, the result is the same: That tool is probably going to fade away.

A lot of the software I rely on is a couple of decades old. And while those apps have supported the livelihoods of a bunch of talented independent developers, it can’t last forever. When James Thomson decides to move to the Canary Islands and play at the beach all day, what will become of PCalc? When Rich Siegel hangs up his shingle at Bare Bones Software, will BBEdit retire as well? Apps can last as abandonware for a while, but as the 32-bit Mac app apocalypse taught us, incompatibility comes for every abandoned app eventually.

Of course, Indie software isn’t alone in these risks—it’s just concentrated a bit more. Larger businesses often change direction, lay off staff, or even declare bankruptcy.

Nothing lasts forever. That’s the truth whether we like it or not—so we might as well be optimistic about it. As the saying goes, when one door closes, another opens.

By Jason Snell

February 3, 2021 10:39 AM PT

Hands on with Big Sur beta 11.3

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

On Tuesday, Apple released its first developer beta of the next macOS cycle: Big Sur version 11.3. (I’m still getting used to typing “11” after all these years.)

First, the warning: This beta is rough. Like, so rough that I’m reverting to macOS 11.2 on my MacBook Air as I write this story. You know the kind of beta that’s safe enough to install and use despite the warnings? Well, this isn’t that kind of beta.

It was so rough, in fact, that I couldn’t test some of the exciting new features, like support for stereo-paired HomePods as a default output device at long last.

Reminders has gotten a nice tweak, allowing you to sort lists via priority, due date, the date they were entered, or even by title. You can perform sorts in either ascending or descending order, and if you don’t like sorting, you can rearrange items by dragging them around.

I can confirm that iOS apps running on the Mac do launch at larger sizes when available, which is nice, and the confusing “Touch Alternatives” menu item on iOS apps—which was intended to give Mac users ways to navigate more touch-focused iOS apps—has been relocated to a preference pane, with the ability to turn off individual features instead of the old all-or-nothing approach.

Safari picks up a few new features in this beta, including the ability to reorder the contents of the new start page design introduced in 11.0. There are apparently also some new extension types and support for the Web Speech API, but I couldn’t test those.

Other new features in the betas include a new Made For You Library shortcut in the Music app that unearths personal mixes and other personalized playlists, a redesigned News+ tab in the News app to highlight News+ newspapers and magazines, and support for Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 controllers.

So, in short: Big Sur development continues, at least for the moment. At some point, Apple’s attention will undoubtedly turn to building out whatever is going to be shown off in June at WWDC as the next major update to the Mac. (Will it be 12.0? 11.5?) But in the meantime, there’s at least one major milestone left in the life of Big Sur on the way.

By Jason Snell

February 2, 2021 5:07 PM PT

Bad AppleScript: Fake RSS, real newsletter

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

The big benefit of this site’s move to WordPress was the ability to post our members-only articles to the site. The result has been an influx of new members, for which we are very grateful.

However, this change led me to decide that I wanted to change what I had been doing with our members-only newsletter. And that led me down a rabbit hole that led to a very large AppleScript script, which will come as no surprise to some of you.

Previously, we’d write four or five original pieces and mail them out to subscribers as a part of a monthly newsletter. Once the WordPress site was up and running, the newsletter no longer needed to be the (only) vehicle by which subscribers received their members-only content. If you like reading on the web, you can read them there. If you like reading them in RSS, you can read them there. And of course, there’s a newsletter, too.

I also wanted to spread those pieces out across the month and post one every week. And with that, I wanted to change the newsletter from a monthly schedule to a weekly one. On a weekly basis, members could get a members-only article—as well as the other articles we posted every week. It would make the newsletter a good fit for people who prefer to read stuff in email—and those who didn’t, didn’t need to read it anymore since all the members-only stuff was on the website.

So it’s decided, then. Time to make a weekly newsletter. But I didn’t want to spend time building a newsletter every week. I wanted it to happen automatically.

This was the rabbit hole. And what plunged me down that hole was my discovery that MailChimp, the email provider I’ve used for Six Colors since the beginning, supported RSS-generated newsletters.

Now by default, these newsletters were disappointing. Automated blog-to-newsletter systems just want to dump all your blog posts into a newsletter template and send it out. I wanted control over the order and design of the newsletter, with like posts grouped together.

This desire to have it just the way I wanted it is also why I spent months building my own WordPress theme for Six Colors, overriding dozens of default behaviors along the way. I want it the way I want it! Is that so wrong?

Most great user automation projects are the result of a “Bad Idea” moment. “I could do it this way—oh, that’s a bad idea. But…”

Here was my bad idea: Just because MailChimp’s RSS system didn’t work the way I wanted it to didn’t mean I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted it to. I could set MailChimp to automatically mail out an email on Friday evenings to all Six Colors subscribers, based on an RSS feed.

And then I could write a script that would generate an RSS feed with a single entry, containing exactly the newsletter I wanted to send.

Yep, that happened.

Continue reading “Bad AppleScript: Fake RSS, real newsletter”…

By Jason Snell

February 1, 2021 1:15 PM PT

Apple rolls out Big Sur 11.2, unmasks new iOS betas

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

On Monday Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.2, featuring improvements to Bluetooth reliability, some assorted bug fixes, and a bunch of stealth feature changes, like closing the hole in the wall that allowed Apple software to bypass macOS security limits.

Apple also began its next software-update cycle Monday, with the release of the first developer betas of iOS 14.5. New features include a more compact “type to Siri” interface, support for Xbox Series and PS5 controllers, sortable Reminders lists, worldwide dual-SIM 5G support, and a horizontal boot screen (!) for iPadOS.

Perhaps most intriguing, however, is a feature enabled by iOS 14.5 and watchOS 7.4 which will allow you to unlock your iPhone when wearing a mask by having a password-protected and unlocked Apple Watch in proximity to the iPhone. This is quite similar to the existing feature that lets Apple Watch unlock Macs that are nearby.

I just tried this feature and it worked flawlessly, unlocking my iPhone while wearing a mask, with an accompanying tap on my wrist to indicate that the Apple Watch had done the job. It’s my understanding that some authentications on iOS will still require a password or Face ID, such as Apple Pay and buying apps. But if you just want to check your shopping list while wearing a mask at the grocery store, things are looking good.

Keep in mind that these are currently only developer betas; eventually subscribers to Apple’s Public Beta stream will get them, and then in a few weeks they’ll appear for everyone through the normal software-update mechanism.

By Dan Moren

February 1, 2021 7:52 AM PT

iCloud Keychain comes to Chrome, but sadly only on Windows

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

As I wrote just this week in Macworld, Apple has used a number of strategies to encourage users to switch to its products, among them, the “ice water in hell” approach of adapting some of its own software to rival platforms. That’s at least part of the reasoning behind Apple’s iCloud Keychain extension for Chrome, which extends the password manager feature from its own ecosystem to Chrome users on Windows.

But not, interestingly, to Chrome users on the Mac, even though the extension can be installed in that version of Google’s browser. However, according to the text on the extension’s page, it appears to be designed to specifically work with iCloud for Windows, so it doesn’t actually do anything on the Mac beyond providing a broken interface.

That’s a bit of a disappointment for me: I end up using Chrome a decent amount for sites that Safari doesn’t support well or at all—for example, Roll 20, the virtual tabletop system that we use to record our Total Party Kill podcast over at The Incomparable.

Switching between browsers can often be a frustrating experience when it comes to passwords, since it either means a time-consuming process of looking up credentials or relying on multiple password managers, which itself adds overhead in time and energy. These days, I save the passwords for the sites I use in Chrome most frequently in Google’s own password-saving feature, and rely on 1Password for most of the rest, but it would certainly be a lot easier if Chrome on the Mac had access to an iCloud Keychain extension as well.

Something tells me this isn’t going to change any time soon—neither Apple nor Google have much incentive to make Chrome and iCloud Keychain play well together on the Mac—but as always, when big tech companies are at odds, it’s generally the users, caught in the middle, that end up losing.

[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 Jason Snell

January 29, 2021 9:00 AM PT

Apple in 2020: The Six Colors report card

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.

This is the sixth year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category. I received 55 replies, with the average results as shown below:

Since I used largely the same survey as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion on all but one question compared to previous years. The net changes between 2019 and 2020 surveys is displayed below:

Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and commentary from the panelists.

Continue reading “Apple in 2020: The Six Colors report card”…