If June is for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), then May is for stories speculating about what will be announced at WWDC. My favorite genre of these stories is the iOS feature wish list, which Macworld has been publishing since… well, since before it was even called iOS.
Yes, this is going to be one of those stories, but with a twist. Rather than providing feature requests of the crowd-pleasing variety, instead I’m going to advocate for some nerdy features that won’t be used by more than a fraction of iPhone and iPad users. Despite that, they’re still important—at least to me.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Here’s a bit of numerology for you. Today marks 17 years, one month, and 29 days since Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001. That’s a strangely odd number—6,269 days—but it also happens to be the exact length of time between January 24, 1984 (the launch of the original Macintosh) and March 24, 2001.
In other words, today the Mac’s second operating system era, powered by Mac OS X (now macOS) has been in existence as long as the first era was.
Now, there are plenty of caveats: There was a Mac OS X public beta. The funeral for Mac OS 9 wasn’t held until 2002. Classic Mode continued to function within Mac OS X until it was removed in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Still, it’s a milestone. And it makes me wonder what comes next for the Mac. I doubt we will see a seismic transition to a new Mac OS—it’s more likely that we will see waves of change that gradually turn what we think of as the Mac into something different, influenced by the success of iOS.
Perhaps the time is right. Apple makes Mac chip transitions every dozen years or so, and another one may be on the way. All of this has happened before, and all of this will probably happen again.
He’s on the current episode of the Mac Admins podcast, hosted by Tom Bridge, Pepijn Bruienne, Diana Birsan, and Charles Edge, discussing a wide range of topics, including an effective defense of the Terminal.
He just announced that the next iteration of his CMD-D conference will be an automation boot camp in October in Atlanta, Georgia, designed for people who are new to macOS automation.
Sal deeply cares about the people who use Apple’s technology to get work done, and it shows in everything he says and does. Even though he’s not inside Apple anymore, I’m glad he’s still contributing to the community. (And wouldn’t it be nice if there was something, anything, about user automation at WWDC this year?)
The FBI has repeatedly provided grossly inflated statistics to Congress and the public about the extent of problems posed by encrypted cellphones, claiming investigators were locked out of nearly 7,800 devices connected to crimes last year when the correct number was much smaller, probably between 1,000 and 2,000, The Washington Post has learned.
Whoops.
This number was used as fuel for the debate over encrypting phones, even though the point is less about quantity of devices than about the inherent issues with providing a back door (or what proponents like to call “responsible” encryption, as though the creation of loopholes for decrypting the phones of private citizens can be considered “responsible”).
“The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,” the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. The bureau said the problem stemmed from the use of three distinct databases that led to repeated counting of phones. Tests of the methodology conducted in April 2016 failed to detect the flaw, according to people familiar with the work.
Oh, yeah, these are definitely the people you want to listen to about technology.
AgileBits’s popular password vault tool 1Password has been updated for the Mac, with a revamped UI, the ability to check and see if your passwords have been compromised in a security breach, Secure Enclave support on supported MacBook Pros, and the ability to drag-and-drop your credentials into apps as well as your browser.
It’s a big update, for sure, and the first paid update for the program in five years. While you can still buy a standalone license for $501, AgileBits is seriously pushing a $3/month subscription plan that also includes some exclusive features like secure backup (including the ability to retrieve deleted passwords for up to a year), free access to apps on a variety of platforms, secure syncing via 1Password’s online servers, multi-factor security support, and more. (If you’ve already got a 1Password membership, version 7 doesn’t cost you anything extra.) If you’re on the fence, you can try it for free for 30 days.
I’ve been using 1Password for years, and it’s hard to imagine setting up a Mac without it. Having a password manager is critical in this day and age when so much of our security lives by how good our passwords are.
Updated at 2:22PM ET to clarify subscription benefits.
An introductory price that will eventually go up to $65. ↩
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
What was already assumed is now official: The WWDC 2018 keynote will be Monday, June 4, at 10 a.m. Pacific. Media members (including yours truly) received their invitations this morning.
See you in San Jose in two weeks! (And if you won’t be there, I’ll be doing the usual writing-podcasting-liveblogging thing to bring the event to you.)
Castro, an attractive iOS podcast app with a really cool triage-based interface approach, has been updated to version three. Ryan Christoffel has the details at MacStories:
Castro 3 addresses nearly all of those “one missing feature” requests in a single release. Trim Silence is Castro’s take on Overcast’s Smart Speed; full chapter support is now present, as is a new Apple Watch app; the player screen has been fully redesigned; Mix to Mono improves stereo mixes that are hard to hear; and finally, there are excellent new per-podcast controls in a variety of areas.
Chapters and Trim Silence are huge steps forward; the app has also been repriced. Previously it was a paid app, but now it’s free with a subscription option that unlocks a bunch of the new features.
Rumor has it that iOS 12, due to be announced at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 4, will have a reduced scope as Apple tries to focus on improved security and reliability. Still, hope springs eternal — and for those of us who are dreaming of new iPhone features, this is prime hoping season. So, before my hopes get dashed, here’s a wish list of items I’d like to see when Apple announces the next version of iOS in a few weeks.
Apple as a company usually focuses on products: things that it builds that consumers will end up using. Smartphones, computers, tablets, and so on. While other tech companies sometimes put forth their moonshots–big, costly ideas intended to reshape the world, but which rarely do–Apple generally seems content to operate by pushing the envelope on the here and now.
But that doesn’t mean that the company hasn’t got larger ambitions: it just doesn’t talk about them. In many cases, that’s probably because those ideas haven’t yet reached the point of becoming discrete products that the company can create and ship. When you’re taking on a large idea, especially one in an entrenched industry, it can be tough to distill that big idea down to the atomic level of a product.
Just like the rumors, Dan and Moltz are conflicted over the iPhone SE2: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/14/iphone-se-2-not-finalized-macotakara/
Apple is being hit with a class action suit over the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/14/macbook-pro-keyboard-class-action-lawsuit/
Fans of The Expanse paid to have a flyover of Amazon to try to get the company to pick up the series: https://twitter.com/forlath/status/996394099266785280
Moltz picked up this clicky keyboard which he likes the feel of quite a bit: https://amazon.com/gp/product/B01ABUJ2KM/
It has Windows keys but you can get replacement key caps here: http://www.wasdkeyboards.com
And Karabiner is a great tool for remapping keys all you want: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
Google has lowered its prices for storage: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/14/17352836/google-one-google-drive-paid-storage-plans-cheaper
An interview with Jony Ive we couldn’t bear to read: https://www.hodinkee.com/magazine/jony-ive-apple
Apple has expanded its self-driving car fleet: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/14/apple-expands-self-driving-car-fleet/
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Ars Technica’s Sam Machkovech takes a deep dive into Microsoft’s launch of a new controller designed for gamers with disabilities:
The operative word is “adaptive.” XAC’s potential truly begins with its back-side strip. There, you’ll find a whopping 19 ports, all 3.5mm jacks. No, this isn’t a giant middle finger to the headphone-jack haters at Apple and Google. Rather, these ports see Microsoft connecting with, and loudly celebrating, what has long been an open secret in the world of gaming peripherals: the community of add-on devices designed for limited-mobility gamers.
Oversized buttons, finger switches, blowing tubes, foot pedals, and other specialized inputs have long been built for gamers who can’t hold onto or efficiently use average controllers (gamepads, keyboards, mice). Recent speeches from company heads like CEO Satya Nadella and Xbox chief Phil Spencer have paid lip service to “inclusivity” in computing and gaming, but this device, the XAC, aims to do the trick by connecting niche add-ons to standard Microsoft hardware.
This is both an impressive bit of hardware and a significant commitment from a company the size of Microsoft. Time, research, and money have all clearly been plowed into the development of this controller as part of the company’s overall strategy to make gaming more accessible.
Apple’s long touted accessibility as a big part of its platform, and it’s good to see the rest of the tech industry doing their part as well.
It’s been a long time coming, but having your Mac tell you that some of your apps will stop working brings some immediacy to the issue: If there’s a 32-bit Mac app you rely on to get work done, and it’s no longer being updated, on forthcoming versions of macOS it will only work with compromises, and ultimately it won’t work at all.
Don’t fear the death of your old software, my friends. Your current long-in-the-tooth favorites, and old friends you said goodbye to years ago, can live on and still be useful, thanks to the miraculous digital afterlife known as virtualization.
My feelings on the update are more mixed. Tweetbot has been my client of choice on the Mac for several years now, and I’ve grown attached to its way of doing things. Tweetbot 3 feels largely very similar but makes a number of smaller changes that are going to take some time getting used to.
For example, the client now shows buttons for replying, retweeting, liking, etc. on every single tweet, rather than simply the tweet that’s selected or that you mouse over. It feels more cluttered to me, though I can see the argument that the features are less hidden than before. Likewise, the retweet indicator for tweets has moved from the bottom to the top, which is a bit jarring.
I had hoped that an update to the Mac version of Tweetbot would add the same Stats view that has long been in the iOS client, but no dice here in version 3, to my disappointment. Furthermore, the Activity and Mentions views are now both sub-sections of the Notifications view, mimicking Twitter’s web interface, which makes them harder to access, and impossible to navigate via the keyboard.
Tweetbot 3 does improve the app’s column management: you can simply drag near the bottom of window to create a second column, or drag back to remove an existing column. It’s a handy feature, but as someone who uses columns only once every few months, it doesn’t do much for me. And though dark mode is attractive, I wish the title bar would change to a darker color as well.1
Of course, the big disappointment here belongs not to Tapbots, but to Twitter itself, which still keeps certain features to itself instead of sharing with third-party developers. Polls, group direct messages, and Twitter bookmarks are all absent here–though, if you ask me, that’s a fair trade for a simple chronological timeline that’s ad-free.
Despite it being 2018, I’m sure there will be some fuss that Tweetbot 3 is a brand new $10 purchase from the Mac App Store, regardless of whether or not you own a previous version of the app. I’m not one to begrudge developers their income, especially as Tweebot 2 was a free update from the original Tweetbot. Shelling out $10 every six years or so is more than reasonable to me.
Though I’m not sold on all of Tweetbot 3’s changes yet, I figure I’ll spend a while using the new app before I decide whether it’ll truly become my new Twitter client of choice.
I also miss the square icon. I’m going to be spending some extra time hunting in the Dock for the next week or so, I’m sure. ↩
[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.]
The story of Chinese phone maker ZTE, which last month was banned from using American components or operating in America for seven years, was already strange. Despite international sanctions, ZTE sold electronics to Iran and North Korea. That was bad, so ZTE was punished, and in a settlement ZTE agreed to pay $1.19 billion in fines and would reprimand ZTE staff and executives who participated in the sales and cancel their bonuses. But ZTE was allowed to continue to sell technology in the United States.
In yet another example that it’s always the cover-up that gets you, it turns out that ZTE didn’t actually reprimand employees or cancel their bonuses. So the U.S. Commerce Department restored the punishments that had been suspended in the settlement. Given the importance of Qualcomm processors and Google services to its phone business, this left ZTE on the brink of collapse.
You probably already know what happened next: the President of the United States tweeted that “too many jobs in China [would be] lost” if ZTE went under, and instructed the Commerce Department to “get it done” regarding getting ZTE back in business.
The overture appeared to be off-key for an administration that has been reliably strident on what it has called unfair Chinese trade practices. Mr. Trump’s concern in his tweet about Chinese jobs — which echoed Beijing’s talking point on the issue — also runs counter to his vows to restore American jobs lost to China.
“Given his pressure on Beijing on trade, I don’t understand his concern for Chinese jobs” in the tweet, said Adam Segal, a technology and security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. It “goes against the steady stream of security warnings about ZTE,” he added.
There’s a lot mixed up in this story—ongoing trade-war saber rattling between the U.S. and China, the invalidation by the President of the Iran nuclear deal that restores the sanctions that ZTE violated in selling technology to Iran, concerns over Chinese influence over technological and networking infrastructures that led to the rejection of the Broadcom-Qualcomm merger1, and even the posturing over the forthcoming summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Still, it’s quite a thing to wake up one morning and see a president who has repeatedly talked about a fear of American jobs being lost to China and was critical of the lifting of sanctions on Iran suddenly declare that Chinese jobs need to be saved at a company that not only ignored the sanctions on Iran, but violated its own settlement agreement in order to reward the employees who broke those sanctions.
Qualcomm’s stock was up on report that its trading partner might survive. ↩
Nintendo has announced the date for its re-release of its re-release of the NES, the NES Classic Edition. The console, which sold out immediately upon its debut in November 2016, will return to store shelves on June 29th, and Nintendo expects it – along with the SNES Classic Edition – to be available through the end of the year,
If you missed your chance to get one, you’ll have another, as promised. But I’m still hoping for an N64 Classic one of these days.
Six years ago I was in a Berlin hotel room when I wrote about the 20th anniversary of the first release of BBEdit, the program I still use most often to write most of my stuff. Now it’s somehow time for the 25th anniversary of the app—or, more accurately, the 25th anniversary of the first commercial release of BBEdit, version 2.5. (The previous year Rich Siegel released a free version, which was the anniversary I was celebrating back in 2012.)
I probably started using BBEdit at MacUser in the mid-1990s, thanks to the influence of a “prince of insufficient light”, Stephan Somogyi. I’ve been using it ever since. At this point that means I’ve been a user for 88 percent of BBEdit’s lifetime, which may still make me a new user.
I’ve probably written millions of words using it. I’ve sorted and pattern-matched thousands more. It made the transition from Classic Mac OS to OS X, from 68000 to PowerPC to Intel, and kept winning awards and finding loyal customers along the way. Just the other day I found a souvenir from the astounding 10th anniversary of BBEdit—now itself a collectors item! In fact, I wrote most of this post in BBEdit 2 on an emulator on my iMac Pro, all thanks to me unearthing that CD. And coincidentally, I spent a couple of hours yesterday doing some heavy lifting of large text files—sorting, collating, and running grep search-and-replace operations—so I was already appreciating the versatility of BBEdit when the anniversary was pointed out to me.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that BBEdit keeps going strong.
Plenty has already been said about the 20th anniversary of the iMac, the computer that played an instrumental role in bringing Apple back from the brink. But the legacy of the Bondi Blue iMac is still with us in many ways today–not just in the computer that shares its name, but in an overriding philosophy that Apple continues to exemplify across its product line.
If you wanted an indication of how Apple would be doing business in 2018, you could do worse than cast back two decades and look at the decisions that it made when it produced that first iMac. (A machine that itself took a page directly out of Apple’s own playbook for the original Macintosh back in 1984.) The line is anything but subtle.
Apple wins a patent for a round Watch face: https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/08/round-apple-watch-patent/
iOS 13 is rumored to have an iPad focus: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/04/ios-13-revamped-files-app/
The iMac turned 20: https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/05/the-original-imac-20-years-since-apple-changed-its-fate/
Apple discontinues AirPort: https://sixcolors.com/link/2018/04/its-official-apple-discontinues-airport/
M.G. Siegler’s thoughts on that: https://500ish.com/errorport-a5c0e8783d04
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