By Dan Moren

January 31, 2018 1:45 PM PT

The Back Page: 6 Hardware Features

Much ado has been made of the features that Apple isn’t shipping along with the HomePod. There’s no support for stereo pairing, no multiroom audio, and no AirPlay 2, even though all were touted as major features of the device. But that’s fine—it’s no big deal, really. After all, there are plenty of other features that might come to the HomePod at a later date. As with the Apple Watch, the HomePod is the kind of device that Apple can enhance over time, adding new features and capabilities as they see fit.

But in order to really upgrade what the HomePod can do, eventually Apple is going to have to take the leap and update the HomePod’s hardware.

And that’s great, because I’ve got a few ideas.

Retina display: It’s inevitable. Pretty much every Apple product already has one, so why not the HomePod? How else are you going to see the latest cavalcade of angry tweets from across the room? You going to have Siri just read them to you? What even is an Apple product without a screen? What is this, the HomePod Shuffle?

Face ID: One complaint with the HomePod is that it doesn’t know how to identify different users. Good thing Apple’s already solved this problem. Face ID! Apple can embed its True Depth camera into the top of the HomePod. Then, whenever you want to ask it about what’s on your calendar or to send a text message to your mom, you can just go stare down at the top of it. It’ll even be able to learn your “yelling face” over time.

Heart rate sensor: You know how when you’re working out you want faster tempo music? Well, stands to reason the HomePod could figure this out automatically. Like, if I jump on my exercise bike in the living room, the HomePod can automatically play music that complements my current fitness level, whether it be “Flight of the Bumblebee” or the theme from “Rocky” or, I dunno, something by Sarah MacLachlan. Look, don’t judge. Sometimes I like to take it slow.

MagSafe connector: All-out dance parties can be dangerous. Lamps get broken, things get knocked off shelves, occasionally plaster shakes loose from the ceiling. To be fair, these are things I have learned from ‘80s movies, not personal experience, but I don’t think they’d lie to me. Anyway, seeing as how you’re paying $350 for this very fancy speaker, the least Apple can do is make sure that you don’t trip over the power cord and send the thing flying.

Headphone jack: Look, sometimes you don’t want the “highest-fidelity” sound. Sometimes you just want to listen quietly to yourself. What’s the deal leaving out the headphone jack, Apple? People want to be able to plug in their very expensive (or very cheap) third-party headphones.

USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 support: I…don’t really know why, but my understanding is people get very upset when it’s not there?

These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head, and while I’m not saying Apple needs to do all of these, I think I’ve made it pretty clear that without them, the first version of the HomePod is destined to be an epic flop.

[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 31, 2018 1:43 PM PT

Applications Folder: Cool Cat Saves the Weather

When I got my home weather station back in 2004, its Mac compatibility came in the form of a PC serial-to-USB adapter and the Davis WeatherLink app, a Java-based app that was years behind the PC version. It worked, more or less, but it was unreliable and had some sort of memory leak—at one point I had to write an AppleScript that would just quit and re-launch the app every few hours. I kept looking for alternatives, most of which were incredibly obscure unix scripts that were not remotely intended to run on the Mac.

Then in 2009 I found WeatherCat by Trixology, which has been my weather station app ever since. As you might expect from such a niche app, its interface is a little… homespun. But it’s got a lot of power and flexibility.

I’ve integrated it with my smart home tech by using its trigger system, which lets you fire off events when specific changes in the weather occur. Back when I used to have a colored smart bulb outside my front door (I don’t anymore), I had the light turn blue when it got below freezing. Since the weather station’s console resides in my bedroom, I can use Weathercat to detect when the humidity in my bedroom goes over a certain percentage, at which point it fires off a script that triggers an event on the IFTTT website that turns on a dehumidifier in that room.

The best thing about WeatherCat is that it not only comes with HTML templates, so you can view the current weather status in any web browser, but that it has a complete template language so you can customize it to your heart’s content. I stacked some functionality on top of that by having it output PHP code, so I could write smart templates that dynamically change based on weather conditions. I also use the flexible web templates WeatherCat generates to create a very simple text file that feeds a tool (BitBar) that displays the current temperature in my Mac’s menu bar.

I’ll be honest: my weather page design was created in the early 2000s and is hopelessly out of date. One of these days I will try to design a new, modern version, but for now it suffices. At some point I read up about JavaScript-based charting tools and created a bunch of charts for my page, though I’m still using WeatherCat’s (ugly, but functional) charts for a lot of data. I am not comfortable enough with the existing tools to figure out a way to more beautifully present the data coming from my weather station, but you never know. One of these days I might figure out a way to display pretty data.

Finally, many apps these days will let you point their weather data source at a personal weather station on the Weather Underground network. WeatherCat supports Weather Underground, so I’m able to call up the temperature in my backyard and display it on my iPhone and Apple Watch, via the Carrot Weather app.

WeatherCat may not be particularly beautiful, but it has served me well for nearly a decade. I’ve got the historical weather data archive to prove it.

By Dan Moren

January 31, 2018 1:41 PM PT

A Thing We Like: 7 Wonders Duel

It’s hard to find good board games for two people. When my girlfriend and I are traveling, it’s nice to be able to throw a small game into our bag, just in case we have some downtime. I’ve found a handful over the years, but one of my favorites remains 7 Wonders Duel.

The original 7 Wonders has long been one of my favorite games, but its two-player mode was lackluster, to say the least. It was a cumbersome adaptation of a game that really is at its best with at least 3 players, as evidenced by the complicated rule changes imposed for just two players. Clearly the designers of the game agreed, because they ended up producing Duel as a version of the game that’s designed specifically for two players.

As in the full version of the game, Duel sees you each take control of a wonder of the ancient world as you attempt to build the best combination of military, scientific, and commercial advancements. However, the tweaking of mechanics for the two-player set up manages to both retain the feel of the full game while making it more manageable for two people. For example, instead of dealing out hands of cards and passing them back and forth, each round sees you constructing a pyramid-like tableau of options from which players can choose. Even better, some cards are face-up and some cards are face-down, making it a tactical decision whether you go for that one card you need before your opponent snakes it, or risk your strategy by choosing from the unknown.

There are slight changes in the way that military and science improvements work too, with the former becoming more of a see-saw that can tilt back and forth between the two players from moment to moment, and the latter providing potentially substantial game-changing effects that range from immediate advantages (like making building certain types of cards cheaper) to game-end bonuses (such as conferring extra points). As with the original, there are many strategies that can lead to a win, providing a lot of replayability.

If there’s a downside to Duel it’s that though it comes in a small box, it does have a decent number of pieces, which makes it less ideal to travel with. Even if you can shrink it down to a few Ziploc bags or smaller containers, you still run the risk of losing some of the pieces. (The cards, it’s worth noting, are smaller than normal-size playing cards, which definitely helps make things more compact) And while there is an iOS version of the full game, I don’t believe it currently includes the Duel variant.

Players of the original 7 Wonders will find Duel pretty quick to pick up, as it relies on most of the same mechanics with slight adjustments. New players should also find it a little less daunting than the full game, which can sometimes require a bit of a learning curve.

All in all, though, if you’re looking for a solid two-player game with a mix of tactics and strategy, you can’t go much amiss with 7 Wonders Duel.

[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 Stephen Hackett

January 31, 2018 1:40 PM PT

The Hackett File: Living with Multiple Macs

For a long time, I used a notebook as my only computer. Through a string of MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, I would carry my entire digital life around in my backpack, then dock it at my desk to an external display, keyboard, mouse, hard drives and more.

That changed when I bought my 5K iMac about a year and a half ago, when I built out my studio and office space. I wanted an iMac to have more screen real estate and power for editing, but the biggest upside was that work suddenly had a place. Sitting down at this door I chopped into a desk, in front of a 27-inch Retina display tells my brain It’s time to work.

For the times I need to record podcasts on the road or elect to work from the couch or my favorite coffee shop, I have an Early 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s a middle of the road model, but it more than meets my portable needs. It even has a keyboard that works and ports and stuff.

(AHEM.)

Using more than one Mac is a lot easier than it used to be. Even in the iDisk days, file syncing between computers was hit or miss, and often very slow. Files were often duplicated and mis-synced.

Then the miracle of Dropbox happened, blessing us all with reliable file syncing that worked cross-platform. I remember first setting it up in college on my 15-inch PowerBook and being blown away at how quickly files showed up on the Blue and White PowerMac G3 I kept running under the desk in my dorm room.

Dropbox is still critically important to how I work. Outside of my iTunes and Photos.app libraries, almost everything in my home directory is in Dropbox.

I’m in a whole bunch of shared folders for the various podcasts and projects I am a part of, and with the iOS app, it means I have access to much of what’s on my computer anywhere my iPhone can connect to the Internet.

Apple’s services have come a long way from the iDisk days of .Mac and MobileMe. iCloud can sync your Desktop and Documents, but I’ve avoided those features after hearing horror stories from some users.

Much of what iCloud excels at is behind the scenes, shuttling data back and forth between Apple’s various apps like Calendar, Notes, Reminders, Safari, Keychain Items and more.

This ever-present, all-knowing nature of iCloud means it’s powerful, but we often don’t notice its features until they break down. I don’t ever think about my Contacts database until I need a phone number I entered on my Mac that hasn’t found its way to my iPhone yet.

Thankfully, those hiccups have become less and less frequent over time as Apple has continued to improve iCloud and its various tentacles into the company’s operating systems.

Between Dropbox for my files and iCloud for just about everything else, I can move between my iMac Pro and MacBook Pro with relative ease, knowing my important data is present on both machines. Thanks to Dropbox selective sync and Photos’ ability to just download thumbnails, I can fine-tune what I need on my notebook, keeping in mind its smaller SSD.

I think Apple could take iCloud farther, equipping it to keep Macs running in sync in even more ways. The possibilities that come to mind are nearly endless.

tvOS 11 can keep home screens in sync across multiple Apple TVs, so why can’t I enable that for something like my Mac’s Dock or login items? Mail syncs smart mailboxes across Macs via iCloud, so why do I have to set up Finder favorites separately on each computer I use?

I can imagine a world where Handoff is broader than whatever app happens to be in the foreground. What if, when I logged into my MacBook Pro, iCloud had all the open apps, browser tabs and Finder windows from my iMac Pro ready for me? True session syncing could make picking up my notebook and walking out the door far more appealing than it is now.

These are things Dropbox will never be able to do, as iCloud is baked-in at the operating system level. However, Apple’s service lacks all but the most basic controls and settings. For the most part, a user can only turn something off then back on again to troubleshoot it.

Dropbox, on the other hand, offers numerous settings and a far more robust file recovery system on their website. If iCloud eats a bunch of your calendar data, you’re more or less stuck unless you can dumpster dive with Time Machine.

Apple has been unwilling to put a lot of user options into its iCloud preferences, and I understand why. How can it just work if a user has a bunch of toggles they can flip around? Apple wants iCloud to be seamless and invisible, quietly delivering data to your apps and devices in the background.

I firmly believe is that if Apple continues to expand what iCloud can do, especially on the Mac, it will need to cede some ground on this point. Right now, the “Optimize Mac Storage” option under iCloud Drive is about as complex as it gets:

For iCloud to grow in scope, it will need to grow in complexity. That’s not a bad thing, and I hope it doesn’t hold Apple back when thinking about how our devices can be made smarter and better by Internet services.

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

By Jason Snell

January 31, 2018 1:38 PM PT

New year, new stuff

I’m not one of those people who does New Year’s resolutions. I do see the change in the calendar as an opportunity for a little bit of reflection, but more in the sense that every once in a while it’s worth stopping and thinking about what you’re doing. It’s a reminder that time is passing and that might be worth some consideration, but in the end it’s arbitrary—the Earth goes around the Sun every 365 days and at some point someone decided that roughly midwinter was the right time to flip the calendar over to a new year. (Yeah, I said midwinter, southern hemisphere people—the person who made that decision was almost certainly someone in the northern hemisphere, don’t you agree?)

Fortunately, the turn of the year is a natural time to reflect because there’s also generally an extended holiday around then. This year I didn’t travel anywhere over the winter break, but in many ways that was better—I was able to work a lighter schedule (my boss, who is me, is a real jerk about giving me time off!) and otherwise relax and reflect.

Anyway, late last year Dan and I were talking about this newsletter and where we wanted to take it in 2018. And we decided we wanted to change it up a little bit! So this issue has a couple of new features in it that we made up and we think might be fun to try out this year, Applications Folder and A Thing We Like. We’ll see! If they don’t work out, we’ll find something else to write, but it’s nice to have a new theme to riff on from time to time. Feel free to drop me a line at jsnell@sixcolors.com with what you like and what you don’t, as usual.

The revolution of the Earth around the Sun is also an opportunity to reflect about the larger world around us, which is the motivation in creating the Apple Report Card every year. I just posted the most recent edition, in which I report on the opinions of 50 people who closely watch Apple and get a general sense of how they think it’s going, in terms of Apple’s platforms and other areas of interest. I don’t think the results of the poll are surprising—in fact, I think they are never going to be surprising, because the people in the survey have been talking about all the issues covered in the survey for the previous year. But it is, I think, a valuable summary of the current mood of the room, if you will—where the pundits and developers and writers and podcasters think Apple is right now.

Now that it’s been going for a couple of years, it’s also a tool to measure trends. What products, platforms, or other items are trending up? Which ones are trending down? One of the more lowly rated areas in the poll—HomeKit—has risen in estimation every single year. It’s still not graded highly, but I think it says something that people’s view of Apple’s Home Automation/Internet of Things strategy keeps improving.

Do I think Apple looks at something like this survey and reacts to it? I do not. But again, I do think that I am asking people who create the “vibe” around Apple criticism and commentary throughout the year, and it’s the trends in opinion that end up potentially influencing Apple.

Does Apple listen to external criticism? Let me tell you, it absolutely does. Apple seems like it’s a black box that is entirely non-reactive to most of the things written about it, but let me assure you, the people at Apple are paying attention.

Does Apple act directly on external criticism? Not usually. Anyone who writes or speaks about Apple on a regular basis thinking that they’re going to make a difference on their own is probably fooling themselves. But I do know that external criticism (or praise) is often used as ammunition by individuals within Apple as ammunition when they’re arguing for a particular course of action.

I’ll grant you, “I provide the raw material for people within Apple to use while debating in meetings” is not as exciting a concept as “Apple quakes in fear when I criticize them,” but it’s much more accurate. Unless you’re Walt Mossberg, and he retired.

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you like the stories in this issue. Let us know if you don’t. Thanks for supporting the site.