2017 was a pretty great year for iOS. A whole lot of my wish-list items for iPhone and iPad got checked off. And yet, like a kid who got a bike under the tree and still immediately begins assembling a birthday wish list, it’s my job as a columnist to immediately ask Apple what it’s done for iOS lately. Ungrateful, I know, but life goes on: Here’s what I hope to see from Apple in the world of iOS in 2018.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
If you spend as much time in Slack as I do1, you get used to some of that app’s idiosyncrasies. In particular, typing a colon followed by an emoji name has become second nature to me, especially because it’s often much faster than hunting for the same emoji in iOS or macOS’s character palettes.2
More than once, then, I’ve found myself starting to use the same syntax to summon an emoji in Messages or Mail on my Mac, only to be frustrated when I accidentally send :smiley: instead of, you know, 😃.
That is, until I stumbled across Matthew Palmer’s Rocket, which fills a void that I’ve been dreaming of: Slack-style emoji throughout macOS. The basic version of the app, which is free, lives in the menu bar and simply pops up a palette whenever you type a trigger character–by default, the colon. You can then start typing the name of an emoji, using Tab to auto-complete it, or the cursor keys and return to select a different item from the list. It also means not having to take your fingers off the keyboard in order to type emoji.
There are a few customization options in the basic Rocket, including the color of the pop-up palette, the trigger key, and default skin tone, and you can also disable it in specific apps or on specific websites.
For $5, you can also unlock a variety of Pro features, including full emoji search, the ability to send GIFs and stickers, and custom shortcuts for emoji and GIFs.
On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with Rocket. One feature, however, that I wish it had was the ability to have distinct trigger characters for emoji and GIFs. By default Rocket is set up not to work in Slack, so as not to collide with Slack’s own emoji key, but I’d love it if I could use “\” or something in order to still use Rocket to insert GIFs.
Other than that, though, Rocket definitely earns itself ðŸ‘ðŸ‘.
I’ve got a ridiculous eighteen that I’m a registered member of, though many of those are largely inactive. ↩
That said, let’s be clear that Slack is way behind in the emoji game. Where’s my vampire? ↩
[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.]
It didn’t take long to realize that I had made a mistake. Even during the migration, I could hear the new iMac’s fan blowing, and once I was logged in, it was even louder… the Core i7-powered iMac on my desk seemed to ramp up its fan far more often than my older i5, and when it did, the noise was noticeably louder than before….
Even under load, this iMac Pro is silent. The fans seem to spin all the time, but Apple has the machine tuned in such a way that they don’t really ever speed up; the exhaust air just gets a little warmer. With my microphone less than a foot away, I don’t have any fan noise in my recordings. That’s a big win for me.
It is striking to use a computer that, when under extremely heavy loads, doesn’t rev up its fans like a jet engine.
Let me count the ways my latest MacBook Pro is not suitable for professional use, but before I do that, you should know that I’ve been buying and recommending Macs since 2001. I’ve spent a fortune on them. I love them, but I only like my latest MacBook Pro (a 2016 model with the Radeon Pro 460). I write this with a heavy heart and a malfunctioning keyboard. This is a story about unrequited hardware love.
This is a pretty solid summary of the sentiment against the most recent MacBook Pro redesigns.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced WPA3, a new standard of Wi-Fi security features for users and service providers. This is welcome news, given that a Wi-Fi exploit was uncovered late last year which affected all modern Wi-Fi networks using WPA or WPA2 security encryption, letting attackers eavesdrop on traffic between computers and wireless access points. The new WPA3 features will include “robust protection” when passwords are weak, and will also simplify security configurations for devices that have limited or no display interface.
Obviously good news in light of the problems with WPA2. There are some cool potential features in WPA3, including “individualized data encryption”, which in theory means that different devices on the same network will utilize different encryption schemes–so if somebody compromises a network, they don’t automatically get access to all the other traffic running through it.
Presumably existing devices will be able to reap the benefits of these improvements, but it’s unclear at present. The Wi-Fi Alliance is making some enhancements to WPA2, as well, which hopefully means better security for our many and varied Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
In one of CES’s stranger announcements, Nanoleaf has introduced what’s essentially a giant 12-sided die that controls your home. You just set the die down, and it’ll set your smart home gadgets to some predetermined configuration.
I love this product announcement. It is quintessentially CES. It’s kind of baffling, not actually shipping, and yet brilliant and cool in some ways. I think the general idea of using the positions of real-world objects to control devices has some merit, even though this one is kind of bananas.
The world is another step closer to a single unified wireless charging standard, with news that Powermat has joined the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), developers of Qi wireless charging. Powermat is best known for developing the PMA/Airfuel standard – the only major outstanding rival to the dominant Qi brand.
As the article suggests, Apple throwing its weight behind Qi pretty much put the nail in the coffin for PMA/Airfuel, but this is a serious plus for the adoption of wireless charging technology. At least until “real” wireless charging comes along.
Transmit iOS made about $35k in revenue in the last year, representing a minuscule fraction of our overall 2017 app revenue. That’s not enough to cover even a half-time developer working on the app. And the app needs full-time work — we’d love to be adding all of the new protocols we added in Transmit 5, as well as some dream features, but the low revenue would render that effort a guaranteed money-loser. Also, paid upgrades are still a matter of great debate and discomfort in the iOS universe, so the normally logical idea of a paid “Transmit 2 for iOS” would be unlikely to help. Finally, the new Files app in iOS 10 overlaps a lot of file-management functionality Transmit provides, and feels like a more natural place for that functionality. It all leads to one hecka murky situation.
This is a real bummer for me personally, because Transmit is a huge part of my iOS workflow. Whether it’s editing HTML files on my web server, uploading images to reference in Six Colors articles, or uploading podcasts to a content-delivery network, Transmit (and its integration with Workflow) is a tool I rely on. It’s also frustrating to see a professional-level tool fail to catch hold on iOS.
David Letterman has amassed an all-star roster of guests for his Netflix talk show series, titled My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. The 60-minute show will stream monthly with the first episode launching on Friday, Jan. 12 and the additional five episodes streaming, one a month, after that.
Letterman will kick off the series with a chat with Barack Obama, serving as the former president’s first talk show appearance since leaving office. Other guests set for Letterman’s series are George Clooney, Malala Yousafzai, Jay-Z, Tina Fey and Howard Stern.
Each episode will be centered around one person Letterman finds fascinating, with the two engaging in in-depth conversations both inside and outside a studio setting. The show will also feature field segments with Letterman embarking on trips related to the guest featured in each episode.
A monthly pace seems just about right for a retired talk-show host. I’m really looking forward to this.
Late last year, Apple announced that it would delay the promised release of its HomePod smart speaker to early 2018. It was a disappointment for those customers hoping to score one for the holiday season, but in an interview with Dutch site Bright.nl, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said Apple needed “more time to make it right.”
It’s our post-holiday TV show and games extravaganza!
Check out this cool “Caledonian Gambit” shirt: http://reboundcast.com/shirts
All the cool people are rage-quitting Twitter: https://medium.com/@monteiro/jack-dorseys-resignation-letter-to-twitter-b04e8a63b0a9
You’ve probably heard about the Apple battery thing already: https://www.kirkville.com/why-apple-is-replacing-the-battery-on-my-iphone-se/
We all like the show Travelers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5651844/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Black Mirror is pretty bleak but has some good episodes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Also good is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5788792/?ref_=nv_sr_1
And Halt and Catch Fire: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=nv_sr_1
The Sphero R2-D2 is terrific: https://store.sphero.com/products/r2-d2
Dan likes Battlegrounds: http://www.playbattlegrounds.com/main.pu
Someone please buy Moltz this Tempest arcade console: https://www.ebay.com/i/122848348541?chn=ps
Moltz said he had a Sinclair gaming system but that was wrong. It was the Fairchild: http://www.infobarrel.com/Video_Game_Systems_from_the_70s
Strategic Conquest was a great game: https://www.deltatao.com/stratcon/
Dan liked Bolo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(1987_video_game)
We liked Rescue!: http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=14030
Missions of the Reliant was very Star Trek game that had to get de-Star Trekked over copyright issues as I recall: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5042-missions-of-the-reliant
Netrek is another ancient Trek game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
Lex owes Jordan Mechner some money for Prince of Persia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia
Escape Velocity was yet another good game: https://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/ev/
Dan says Endless Sky is a good homage that runs on modern Macs: https://endless-sky.github.io
An Apple tech note about the Meltdown and Spectre bugs:
Apple released mitigations for Meltdown in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2. watchOS did not require mitigation. Our testing with public benchmarks has shown that the changes in the December 2017 updates resulted in no measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS … Apple will release an update for Safari on macOS and iOS in the coming days to mitigate [Spectre] exploit techniques. Our current testing indicates that the upcoming Safari mitigations will have no measurable impact on the Speedometer and ARES-6 tests and an impact of less than 2.5% on the JetStream benchmark.
In other words, Apple’s on it. From other sources, it sounds like Macs are less affected by the mitigations for Meltdown because of some specific hardware decisions Apple has made over the past few years.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Handoff is a nice feature that I use here and there to transfer data between my Mac and iOS devices, but it’s the exception that proves the rule: It’s not particularly easy to control a Mac commands from an iOS device. (It’s also frustratingly hard for my Mac to communicate with my iPhone about an event back at my desk.)
Yes, if I absolutely need to control my iMac Pro from my iPhone, I can launch a screen-sharing app (I use Edovia’s Screens), but pushing a cursor around a 27-inch iMac from an iPhone screen is ridiculous. What if you just want to pause iTunes on your Mac, or turn down the system volume, or send it a webpage from across town, or anything else you can think of?
Dan Sturm, co-host of the Defocused podcast, was frustrated about a lack of Mac remote control, too, and he decided to solve it. His solution is unusual and will undoubtedly make security-minded people aghast, but I’ve tried it and it really works—though I’ve modified it to make it a bit less terrifying, security-wise. (I should point out that there’s a less technical solution here, which is to use the Mac app Alfred and the Alfred Remote iOS app, though I believe it only works when both devices are on the same network.)
Here are the steps:
Create a folder in Dropbox.
I called mine Remote Scripts. Boring, I know.
Create an iOS workflow using the Workflow app.
Workflow is the tool we’ll use to trigger remote events on the Mac. You can have as many of these as you want, since each workflow can trigger a different event. I’ll show two examples, one of which is implemented as a share extension (so you can share a URL), the other of which runs from the Workflow widget in Notification Center.
For our first action, we’re going to create an Action Extension workflow that accepts URLs, gets the URL from the input, and writes a text file containing the URL itself to the special folder in Dropbox.
In the Save File block, you’ll need to authenticate with Dropbox and set the Destination Path to be the your folder in Dropbox, plus a filename starting with URL. I chose to append the Current Date (in RFC 2822 format) followed by the .txt extension, though that’s not strictly necessary.
Set up Hazel to process the files.
This approach uses Noodlesoft’s $32 Hazel Hazel utility, which can act on files and folders automatically when they appear on your Mac. In this case, Hazel will be processing a file added to the Remote Scripts folder in Dropbox, so you’ll need to add that folder to Hazel’s Folders list and then make a new rule.
Here’s that rule:
As for the shell script itself, it’s a simple one that takes the URL in the text file, turns it into a variable called name, and uses the open -e command to open it in the background.
file="$1"
read -d $'x04' name < "$file"
open -g $name
Once the script opens the URL, Hazel throws away the text file. That’s it.
Now if I’m on the Internet, I can browse to a webpage in Safari, tap the share icon, tap Run Workflow, and tap Open URL on Mac. A file will pop up in my Dropbox. Within a few seconds, the page opens in the background on my Mac, and the file disappears from my Dropbox.
Next task: Change Mac volume remotely
Dan’s next task was to figure out how to control his Mac’s volume remotely and quickly. Workflow allows you to create tappable buttons in the Workflow widget in Notification Center, which takes care of the “quickly” part. So how to set this up?
On the iPhone, I create a workflow that runs as a Today Widget called Mac volume. At the top of the workflow is a List item with five volume percentages: 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100. This is followed by a Choose from List item and then a Text item, which inserts the contents of the chosen item into a text file. As with the previous example, a Save File item saves the file to my special Dropbox folder—this time with the word Volume at the start of the filename.
In Hazel, I create a new rule that looks for Volume at the start of the filename and, like my other example, runs a shell script and moves the file to the trash.
In this case, the shell script is running a command to change my Mac’s volume to a specific percentage (which is filled in by the contents of the text file sent from my iPhone).
That osascript -e command lets me issue AppleScript commands from within a shell script, which is extremely convenient in this case because the Mac’s system volume is accessible directly from AppleScript.
With this all in place, I can flip down the Today view in Notification Center, tap the Mac Volume widget, and adjust my Mac’s volume from my iPhone.
(Obligatory security note: If someone else has access to this folder of your Dropbox, they can probably wreak havoc on your Mac. You should be aware of that going in. Then again, if someone has access to your Dropbox, you may have other troubles, too.)
Use your imagination (and shell commands)
Once you’ve done a few of these, you can see how you could set up triggers for any number of Mac events, so long as you can figure out the specific shell commands to execute and embed the variables in a text file via Workflow. (Google searches will teach you much.)
This is one of the wackier bits of automation I’ve ever attempted on my Mac and my iPhone, but it really does work!
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has a great write-up of John Williams’s score for The Last Jedi. Warning: the full piece does have spoilers to the plot of The Last Jedi, but it also touches upon Williams’s legacy for the earlier films:
This attention has come about not only because of the mythic weight that George Lucas’s space operas have acquired in the contemporary imagination; the music is also superbly crafted and rewards close analysis. Williams’s latest score is one the most compelling in his forty-year “Star Wars” career: Rian Johnson’s film complicates and enriches the familiar template, and Williams responds with intricate, ambiguous variations on his canon of themes.
I’ve only listened to The Last Jedi score a handful of times so far, so I’m still processing it. Like the film it accompanies, it is complex and vast–though I wish that it and its predecessor, The Force Awakens, would get much-deserved expanded releases, as with earlier installments in the franchise.1
If there’s one disappointment I have with the TLJ score, it’s that it doesn’t pick up some of the new themes that were developed in Williams’s music for TFA. Kylo Ren and Rey’s themes are both prominent (and they were among the best new motifs in TFA), but TLJ relies more on music from the original franchise–something that I was hoping for in TFA but this time took me a bit by surprise.
I’ve spent the last week with Apple’s new iMac Pro, and in most ways it’s just a faster Mac. It’s the first pro Mac desktop in over three years and the fastest Mac yet made, granted, but still entirely familiar. And yet in many ways—some noticeable, some entirely invisible—this new Mac is completely different from all past Mac models.
The iMac Pro may be an outlier today, but in the future we’ll probably look back on it as the start of a new era for the Mac, all because of the Apple-built T2 chip it carries inside. Here’s how the T2 makes this iMac Pro unlike all other Macs.
While there are sadly no new Star Wars space shooters in development (that we know about), that’s not for a lack of trying. In 2016, for example, the studio behind Rebel Galaxy put this video together for a pitch to EA to make exactly what we’re asking for.
BRB, launching a Kickstarter for someone to make a good Star Wars game.1
You say “Battlefront,” you get kicked out. Them’s the rules. ↩
You know you’re just aching to see what’s inside that fancy new iMac Pro. As always, the folks at iFixit were brave enough to carefully disassemble one and to document it for all of us. As you might expect, there’s bad news and good news.
The bad news is that the iMac Pro isn’t terribly upgradeable—at least, not compared to Macs of yore. The good news is that certain components, including the RAM and perhaps even the CPU, aren’t soldered into place, and you may even be able to swap out a few things yourself…provided you’re willing to crack the whole thing open in the first place.
Americans have never been more addicted to devices. Thanks to the mobile revolution initiated by the iPhone, the U.S. alone is home to 238 million mobile phones and 140 million tablets that are rarely shut down. And their numbers are growing, thanks to a perpetual upgrade cycle and demand for new features. For environmentalists, it’s a looming electronic nightmare in which America’s gadget obsession consumes increasingly higher volumes of the world’s limited resources.
Thankfully, the data shows that’s not happening. As Americans shift from big devices such as traditional tube televisions and personal computers to smaller mobile devices, electricity and resource consumption is declining rapidly. America’s gadget habit has never been greener.
An interesting perspective. It’s easy to miss or dismiss positive trends in a climate of one terrible news story after another. But here’s one, potentially.
Last week Apple said that it would lower the price of its battery-replacement program to $29, for anyone whose battery needed to be replaced—leaving a lot of people wondering if Apple would continue its policy of testing your battery first and refusing to replace it if it didn’t fail a diagnostic test. (I heard from a few people who were frustrated by this policy, since they felt they were seeing battery issues but Apple flatly refused to replace their batteries.)
In any event, MacRumors got confirmation from Apple that the company will replace your iPhone 6 or later battery if you ask, regardless of whether it passes or fails diagnostic tests. That’s good news.
Also good news, and the answer to another frequently-asked question: It seems that if you’ve recently paid $79 for a battery upgrade, you may want to request a partial refund from Apple. MacRumors reports that the company is refunding the $50 difference, at least to some people who ask.
