Developer Justin Williams has a frightening story about how someone got into his PayPal account and withdrew a couple hundred bucks, even though he had two-factor authentication enabled:
I instantly called AT&T’s customer service line to explain what is happening. I give them my name, my phone number, and my security passcode (this is key). The man on the phone reads through the notes and explains that yes, someone has been dialing the AT&T call center all day trying to get into my phone but was repeatedly rejected because they didn’t know my passcode, until someone broke protocol and didn’t require the passcode.
Once the intruder found someone who didn’t require my AT&T security passcode the intruder had the AT&T call center rep switch my number from my iPhone’s SIM card / IMEI to his/her burner phone.
Security systems are only as strong as the people enforcing them. Two-factor authentication adds a lot more security, but if someone can compromise your phone and receive texts, then the game’s over. Authentication apps like Authy, Google Authenticator, and 1Password offer more security, but I’m sure even they could be hacked. Training customer service reps on social engineering is critical.
Okay, sure, technically the desktop never left. But over the last decade, we’ve increasingly focused on mobile devices: tablets, smartphones, even laptop computers, which make up the bulk of Apple’s–and probably other PC makers–sales.
But this year, one message you could have easily taken away from Apple’s WWDC keynote is that there’s still plenty of love for not just the Mac platform, but the desktop computer specifically. Having just purchased a new iMac of my own, I can personally vouch for it: sometimes, there’s no replacement for a desktop.
Ken Segall recounts the story of the Intel Inside stickers: http://kensegall.com/2017/06/steve-jobs-and-the-missing-intel-inside-sticker/
The Loop has the video of the guy who asked Steve Jobs why Macs don’t have the Intel Inside sticker: http://www.loopinsight.com/2017/07/06/steve-jobs-and-the-missing-intel-inside-sticker/
They still make the STOP Theft stickers if you’re interested: https://www.stoptheft.com
Hope you don’t use Touch ID: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/07/03/kuo-iphone-2017-touch-id
Dan has a new iMac: https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/07/meet-the-new-imac-definitely-not-the-same-as-the-old-imac/
He also has an Echo Show, as does Jason Snell: https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/07/first-days-with-amazon-echo-show/
Our thanks to Shutterstock (http://shutterstock.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode. Whether you’re making ads or brochures, you need high quality images to attract and keep customers. Go to Shutterstock.com/Rebound and get started today with a 20% discount.
And our thanks to Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com/therebound). Get exceptional customer experience at any scale on the Couchbase engagement database. Always on, always fast. To find out more, go to Couchbase.com/TheRebound.
Owing to its embrace of the format back in 2005, Apple owns the most prominent position in the podcast market. Between iTunes on macOS and Windows and the Podcasts app on iOS, Apple owns the most popular podcast players in existence. And Apple Podcasts is by far the largest and most comprehensive—some would say definitive—directory for podcasts in the world.
That position gives Apple power and influence in the podcast world, even if you don’t use Apple’s apps to listen to your favorite podcasts. And with iOS 11, Apple’s making changes to the way podcasts organize and describe themselves that should make it easier to choose which podcast episodes to listen to, while giving podcasters more insight into just how people listen to podcasts.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
After six years I decided it was time to upgrade the ol’ iMac. My previous workhorse was a mid-2011 21.5-inch model, albeit with some special modifications: a 256GB SSD (as well as a 1TB hard drive), a built-to-order 2.8 GHz Core i7 processor, and 24GB of RAM. All of those improvements meant that it was still a plenty capable machine in 2017, but it had started to become a bit sluggish when doing heavy-lifting tasks, and there was the matter of an annoying persistent line of dead pixels on the display.
Over the years I’ve gotten so used to the blue line of pixels on my iMac that I don’t even see it. Today it decided to start turning red. pic.twitter.com/avcspFVfpa
So, with the announcement last month of the latest iMac revisions, my upgrade plans fell into place. I have no doubt I could have eked out another year or two from the old iMac, but the new models were enough of a revision to merit upgrading (Retina displays, Thunderbolt 3, much better discrete graphics, and so on) and happened to fall right into a perfect timing window for me.
I opted for a built-to-order 27-inch 5K Retina iMac, with a 4.2GHz Core i7, 512GB solid-state drive, and Magic Trackpad 2. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s the top of the line-model with the best processor currently available in a desktop Mac. (At least until the iMac Pro shows up later this year.) I chose to stick with the standard 8GB of RAM…but only so I could save some money by getting 16GB of additional RAM from OWC, bringing me to the same quantity I had in my previous machine—albeit with much better quality memory.1
Now that I’ve spent several days with the new iMac, I’ve begun collecting my thoughts. Most importantly that I’m super glad I made this leap, since it’s already starting to pay dividends. But there are definitely a few things that have stood out to me in the past several days.
Retina display
This is, hard as it might be to believe, my first Retina Mac. I’m a MacBook Air user and have been since 2011, so the new MacBook and the Retina MacBook Pro have never really been on my radar. I also have a Mac mini, but it’s hooked up to my HDTV, so it’s hardly a true Retina experience.
Between the high-resolution and the improved colors, the 27-inch’s 5K screen is absolutely gorgeous. This is, of course, old news for everybody who’s been using a Retina Mac for the last five years, but it is difficult to overstate just how sharp and crisp text looks on this screen. I’m sure not getting any younger, and I’d started to feel on my old iMac that my eyes were perhaps going a bit—so far, the 5K iMac has made the reading experience vastly more pleasant—and as someone who deals with text a lot, it’s a welcome improvement. (It’s still a bit of an adjustment, especially when I open up what I’m used to being a huge image, like an iPhone screenshot, that actually looks…just kind of reasonably sized on this display.)
As far as the size goes, I was a little worried that jumping from the 21.5-inch to the 27-inch might simply feel too large. Less than a week in and I haven’t felt that once. Part of it is because that curved backing on more recent iMacs actually does make it feel surprisingly small. I’ve also long had a 27-inch Cinema Display that I’ve hooked my MacBook Air up to, so this isn’t my first time on a larger screen. Mostly it just feels “not cramped” to me, and I have a pretty hard time imagining going back.
Performance
Writing certainly isn’t the most performance-intensive task, but these days my job also involves producing a lot of podcasts, and shuttling around big audio files definitely requires a bit more horsepower. So far I’ve only edited one podcast on the new iMac, but the result was still striking: I had this week’s episode of Clockwise published less than 40 minutes after it wrapped up.2 Tasks that often took a lot of time: transcoding, syncing audio files, even just copying files into GarageBand, took noticeably less time. I may have audibly gasped when I saved a large AIFF in Fission, an action that I often avoided on my old iMac because it involved sitting around and watching a progress bar. The dialog with the progress bar didn’t even appear.
At the end of the day, performance improvements for me aren’t so much about making what I’m actively doing faster as making me spend less time waiting for the computer to finish what it’s doing. This new iMac has already made me more productive by speeding up tasks where I used to end up walking away from my desk to go get a drink while it did its thing.
Sundries
There are a few other small things here and there that I’m liking or getting used to on this new machine. As I mentioned ahead of getting the new iMac, one of the features I was most looking forward to was having AirDrop. I take a lot of screenshots and often send them to my Macs for uploading or sending along with pieces I wrote. On my old iMac, which didn’t have the right hardware for AirDrop, I ended up using the excellent Printopia to “print” those images into Acorn for editing, but the workflow had begun to feel a bit more cumbersome since I’d gotten spoiled by using AirDrop on my MacBook Air.3
Perhaps the most difficult thing to get used to so far has been the Magic Keyboard. I liked the old Apple Wireless Keyboard; it had a nice key feel, could be surprisingly quiet, and was easy to navigate without looking. All of those things have changed on the Magic Keyboard. The keys have less travel, which has changed the feel of typing.4 It’s also louder and clickier than the old keyboard, which makes it a little harder to type discreetly when one is, say, recording a podcast. Finally, the rearranged key layouts—full-size keys on the F-keys and left/right cursors—has taken some acclimation for my touch-typing. I used to orient my right hand by finding those half-height cursors and I used to be able to more routinely hit the top two rows on the keyboard because I could locate the smaller F-keys. No doubt I will adjust eventually, but for now, I feel just a bit slower. I do appreciate that both it and the Magic Trackpad 2 are rechargeable via a Lightning cable, though their initial charges are still holding out.
As for the Magic Trackpad 2, I appreciate the increase in real estate and it’s a very attractive device, but I’m still getting used to the faux-clicking. I’ve turned off Force Click for the moment, because I still haven’t heard any really great reasons for leaving it on, and because I found the second-level of clicking kind of distracting. I may eventually switch to Silent Clicking[^silentrunning], since the haptics still provide the illusion of a click sound. Also, I use tap-to-click a lot, so I’m used to the whole not-clicking thing. [^eaitsuckers]
Conclusion
Granted, I’ve used this computer for less than a week, and much of that time was a long weekend, so I really haven’t had a chance to put it through its paces yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles longer podcasts and somewhat more challenging tasks like an upcoming session for Total Party Kill. Heck, maybe I’ll finally try out some Mac games that I’ve been putting off. All in all, though, I expect this iMac to take me through the next six years—or more—no problem.5
The 27-inch, unlike the 21.5-inch, actually still lets you easily upgrade the RAM without voiding your warranty, which is one of the reasons I chose it. Otherwise it meant paying Apple through the nose to max out my RAM at the time of purchase. ↩
To be fair, it was an episode that didn’t require a lot of editing. ↩
More than a few folks scoffed when I mentioned this feature, pointing out that AirDrop has never worked for them reliably. I don’t know what sacrifice I made correctly, but I’ve had very solid luck with AirDrop between iOS devices and Macs for years. So far it works great on the iMac. ↩
I swear it’s also resulted in me hitting subsequent keys too quickly, thus generating more typos. But maybe that’s in my head. ↩
Well, that is, unless I get tempted by the Space Gray iMac Pro. ↩
[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.]
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
“Alexa, tell me about the baby deer.”
So I got an Amazon Echo Show last week—this is the Amazon Echo model with the screen on the front. If you’ve seen the pictures, it looks like a weird ’80s TV set, but a lot of that has to do with a lack of scale in many photos—it’s quite small, though definitely boxy and strange.
I am going to need to live with the Echo Show for a while to really get a sense of how having a screen affects the Echo experience. It’s clear that what’s in the product today is simply not good enough, but Amazon has shown with the previous Echo that it could constantly add new features and improve the service and software, so I’m at least somewhat optimistic.
I can see the promise of having that screen in my kitchen, because like kitchen TV sets of yore, it can provide video right where you’re working. The Echo Show can stream some live video and play back YouTube clips. I’m not really interested in playing an episode of “The Americans” from Amazon Prime Video while I’m cooking, but given all the apps Amazon has available for its Fire TV platform, I have to wonder if there will be a way for me to get access to other features (like Netflix, or MLB.TV) over time.
For years now I’ve had some repurposed music players that I’ve used as dumb screens around my house to display the current time and the temperature in my backyard, courtesy of my home weather station. They’re getting old and outmoded and I like the idea of using the Echo Show as a place to display similar information so it’s available at a glance.
Unfortunately, right now the Echo Show’s main screen isn’t particularly customizable beyond the background wallpaper image. At its best, it shows me the current time and weather for my town. At its worst, it’s a billboard for garbage news headlines and videos I don’t care about.
Update: In a previous version of this story, I said there was “nothing I could do to stop the flow of stuff I don’t want onto that screen.” This isn’t entirely true, but the state of affairs is maddening. Despite Amazon requiring you to set almost every setting for any Echo device from the Alexa mobile app, the Echo Show does contain a hidden Settings screen that you can bring up either by swiping down from the top of the screen (turns out there’s a menu hidden up there—don’t swipe over the camera lens, though, or you’ll smudge it) or by asking Alexa to show you the settings. On this screen, some of the settings from the Alexa app are available, while others aren’t, and other settings are available only on the device. What a mess.
Among the settings options is a Home Card Preferences sub-menu, that lets you change whether the data cards on the home screen rotate a single time or continuously, and let you turn off Notifications (alerts from skills and other Alexa services), Upcoming Events (from your calendar), Drop In (displaying who’s available for a slightly creepy video peek right now among your Drop In contacts), and Trending Topics (wacky stories and videos!).
Unfortunately, that’s it – and if you turn everything off, you’ll still see a rotating collection of hints about ways you can use the Echo by uttering various phrases. So you can turn off the viral news and video spam, and your own calendar, but the level of control is extremely limited—if you can find it at all.
Otherwise, your best option is to put the device in Do Not Disturb mode, where only a clock shows. But I don’t really want that—there’s information I do want to display on this device, it’s just not what Amazon wants to offer me. If I could configure the Echo Show to just show the time and my current temperature and weather forecast, I’d be much happier. It would be even better if I could choose widgets to put into the rotation and provide actual information of value. Maybe that will come in time?
What I don’t want in my kitchen is spam. And right now, that’s what the Echo Show is doing—it’s spamming my eyes when I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to give it a little bit of time for Amazon to get its act together, but it’s embarrassing that this product shipped with this feature as the default. It’s like buying a TV set or car stereo that can’t be taken out of showroom demo mode.
If you’re an Echo fan who is considering an Echo Show, steer clear for now. The fact that there is a setting (albeit hidden on the device) is reason for hope that things will get better. But the customizability of the home screen needs a lot of work.
Before there was Thunderbolt there was FireWire, the high-speed alternative to onboard USB on Macs. Over at Ars Technica, Richard C. Moss tells the tale of its rise and fall.
My favorite bit, though, is about why Sony (which deserves the credit for popularizing the standard, before Apple jumped on board) refused to name it FireWire and called it “i.LINK” instead:
“The official reason was that the Japanese are afraid of fire,” Teener said. “They’ve had lots of flames, lots of burned down houses.”
That seemed too lame. One day he took some friends at Sony out after work to get drunk and learn the real reason, which turned out to be rooted in the value of the name…. “They compared FireWire to Sony and it was, ‘Oh, yeah, FireWire is cool!’ Sony: boring.”
What killed FireWire? Moss suggests that it was Steve Jobs agreeing to increase the licensing fee for FireWire, driving Intel away from putting it on chipsets and into the arms of USB 2.0. The rest is history—and so is FireWire.
Worth a revisit, given recent discussions and Twitter rants based on the latest generation of iPad Pro models, is this piece by Fraser Speirs from 2015:
If you have certain very specifically-defined workflows, and a work environment where you can guarantee yourself a chair and desk, you can probably get your work done on a MacBook Pro. For the rest of the world, there’s iPad.
As Fraser notes at the end of the piece, its original title was “If journalists reviewed Macs like iPads.”
My thanks to Couchbase for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
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Good morning, and welcome to this important presentation. My name is Karen Redaakted–before you ask, it’s Dutch–and I’m the head of Product Security here at Apple. I’m here today to talk to you about a subject that’s near and dear to the hearts of all of us. Do you know what that is?
No. No you don’t. Because nobody has told you. And nobody has told you because the topic itself is a secret. After all, we wouldn’t want news of our secret briefings to get out into public–that would be terribly embarrassing.
But now that the hermetically sealed doors have been closed and we’ve activated the jamming field that we used to exclusively reserve for press liveblogging our events–not that I am confirming or denying that we ever used it–we can tell you exactly what we’re here to discuss today.
Secrecy.
We’ve all got secrets. For example, most of you probably don’t know that Karl will eat any leftover cake in the breakroom refrigerator. Or that Janet plays Overwatch on her work iMac when nobody’s around. You probably wouldn’t want those secrets out in the press, right? Right, Karl? Of course not. Well, how much worse would you feel if it turned out that Karl was the iMac Pro. Or that Janet was that iOS 11 feature that turns your selfies into cartoon characters? You’d feel pretty bad, wouldn’t you?
So, we’re launching some new security initiatives to triple down on secrecy. Yes, triple–we’re not playing blackjack here, people.
Firstly, from now on, all unreleased products, both hardware and software, will be referred to exclusively by codename. And yes I know that we already have codenames for products, but here’s what we’re doing differently: each employee will be issued unique codenames for each individual product. That way, should a codename be leaked to the press, we will know exactly who did it.
You might be wondering how this will affect meetings. Good question. We will be issuing a specialized Siri-enabled iOS app to all employees. Simply put in your AirPods and launch the app at the beginning of any meeting, and it will automatically look up mentions of other employees’ codenames and instantaneously translate them; Siri will then speak the appropriate codename directly into your ears.
So if your code name for the Mac Pro is “Cardamom Clock” and you’re in a meeting with Karl Cakeeater–he’s of German descent, I believe–and he uses his Mac Pro codename “German Forest”, which is totally randomly generated, then you will hear Siri say “Cardamom Clock.”
That’s one precaution. The second precaution we are taking today is to replace all of your social networks with our new Apple-designed social network service, Friends. No longer will you need to go to sites like Facebook and Twitter to keep up with what “other people” are doing. Instead, you can view these specially curated feeds of what your co-workers think about the latest meme, political news, or cute puppy. That way, if you accidentally post something that violates our secrecy protocol, the only people who see it will be other Apple employees.
But even more importantly, the other posts in your timeline don’t come from actual Apple employees–we’ve used machine learning to mimic real social media posts. Each timeline is custom-generated for you. We are confident you’ll never even notice the difference.
Finally, the third leg of our privacy stool–which will soon be replacing all chairs throughout Apple Park–is perhaps the most drastic, but also the most effective. We will be raising an immense dome around the campus which will be both transparent and impermeable. You’ll barely even notice it’s there, at least as long as you don’t try to leave. But we’re not monsters: we will of course be issuing temporary permits for you to visit your families at least twice a week via our new telepresence robots. Those robots will be equipped with the same special iOS app to make sure there are no unauthorized leaks–anytime it detects you are saying a codename or any other confidential information, it will bleep out those words. We’re confident that, over time, this will simply become ingrained behavior.
So there you have it: our plan to improve secrecy at Apple so that we are second to none in this department. I appreciate all of your attention to this important matter, and need to, naturally, impress upon you the complete confidentiality of this very meeting. To ensure which, I will just need you all to look into this device and–bright white flash
[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 Dock has been a staple of Apple products since before Mac OS X first debuted back in 2001. (It appeared in the Public Beta that was released in 2000 and, of course, was derived from the NextSTEP and OpenStep OSes that it drew from.) It’s evolved over the years, but in the end has remained more or less true to that initial concept: a place to keep your frequently used applications, folders, and files. Since then, it’s migrated to iOS to become a fixture on the iPhone and iPad as well—there’s even a Dock on the Apple Watch. (Sorry, Apple TV!)
So, with that in mind, here’s how I use the Dock on my Macs.
Orientation: Yep, I’m a bottom-of-the-screen Dock guy. Back in the day, one of the first things I used to do when setting up a new Mac was install TinkerTool and use a secret preference to pin the Dock to the bottom right, mainly because I liked having the Trash always in the bottom right corner of the screen. But alas, as of Yosemite, Apple killed off this hidden feature, which means I’ve ended up in the bottom middle. You and your vertical-Dock-loving compatriots can leave me alone.
Auto-hide: Nope. With the exception of when I need to temporarily view something in a larger window on my MacBook Air, my Dock is always displayed.
Magnification: Are you kidding? No. God no.
Minimize Effect: Scale. Naturally. Though the number of times I need to put a window in the dock is…well, almost never.
Apps: Okay, here we go, the meat of this. From left to right.
Finder. Duh.
Mail. Email is far from dead; it’s still the first thing I need to check every day. So Mail earns that first spot and, frankly, is pretty much always running on my Mac.
Safari. Let’s be honest: a browser is the one app you pretty much can’t avoid using. I’m writing this in Safari right now. So of course it takes the number two spot.
Messages. If I’m not sending emails, Messages is probably the next most frequent app I use to talk to friends, family, and colleagues. I have ongoing threads with several of my podcast co-hosts, a few of my cousins, my girlfriend—and, heck, even my mom uses iMessage now.
iTunes. Look, I don’t like it anymore than you do, but it’s still the way I listen to music on my Mac, look things up in the iTunes and App Stores, and even occasionally interface with iOS devices. (Though to be honest, all of those things are less frequent occurrences than they used to be.)
Calendar. Scheduling has become a necessity for me. Somewhere younger-me rolls his eyes about “being bound to other people’s conception of time, man” but younger-me also only had to show up before the dining hall stopped serving breakfast. So, yeah. Calendar’s earned its place.
Tweetbot. I’m not going to lie: Twitter’s become a challenge over the last year or so. But it’s still a major way that I talk to friends and colleagues, keep up with the news, and—more recently—try to get word out about my book. Tweetbot has been my client of choice for a long time, though I have to admit being tempted by the resurrected Twitterrific for Mac.
BBEdit. It remains the tool I use for doing the vast majority of my non-fiction writing on the Mac, as well as a veritable Swiss Army Knife of dealing with text. Terminal. I still like getting my hands dirty in the command line, and I use it just enough that it merits a place on my Dock. Sometimes there’s just no better way to get something done.
Slack. While Twitter’s been on the ebb, I’ve found Slack on the rise. It’s kind of like Twitter, except I only get to talk to a small group of people who I know I like. It’s become an app that I have open pretty much all the time, so of course it’s earned a place in the Dock
App Store. The Mac App Store has hardly been lavished with a lot of love and attention over the past few years, but it’s still important enough that I want to have quick access to it—especially for app and system updates.
Folders: I only have two folders in my Dock, but they’re both ones that I use pretty frequently—however, I have specific settings that I like for each of them.
Applications. Generally I launch apps that aren’t on the Dock via Spotlight, but it’s still occasionally handy to have a quick list of all my applications, especially when Spotlight misbehaves, as it does from time to time. It also makes it easy to drag stuff into my Applications folder without having to dig through a Finder window. Displayed as a Folder, sorted by Name, content viewed as a List.
Downloads. It’s a catch-all folder that I probably let amass way too much crud, but as such, I often want to take stuff in or out of it, so having it always at my fingertips is crucial. Displayed as a Folder, sorted by Date Added, content viewed as a Grid.
Trash. Naturally. Where else are you going to put it?
That’s it for my Macs’ Dock—and yes, before you ask, both my iMac and MacBook Pro have pretty much the same line-up on them. What can I say, I like consistency. My Mac mini server has a slightly different assortment of things since I usually need to do different tasks there. And, of course, there are the Docks on my iOS devices—but that’s a story for another issue.
[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.]
Subscriber Rob writes, “What do we have to look forward to in the next few years as tech savvy baseball fans?”
There’s no doubt that the entertainment business in general, and sports in particular, will be dramatically altered by technological progress. I’m not a sports analyst by any means, but I’m a lifelong sports fan who also spends a lot of time thinking about tech stuff. So let me take a stab at it. Keep in mind, these are just a few broad ideas. I reserve the right to change my mind later.
The problem with the in-stadium experience is that sports are almost always going to be better experienced on television, where you get the very best angles, close up, with instant super-slow-motion replay. I attend a half-dozen baseball and college football games every year, and it’s clear that attending a game in person is still an entertainment experience—but it’s not the same experience as watching on TV, and so stadium experiences will need to continue to grow and change and innovate in order to provide something that’s worth your time. Ordering food and drinks from your seats via app is a start, as is providing free access to video replays on your mobile device when in the stadium. I wonder if augmented-reality tech could make watching a game live a bit more like watching it on TV, if you could call up stats and see replays in your field of vision while also watching the sport live. But at some point, doesn’t that just become watching TV? Why pay for a luxury box so you can watch the game on the TV set in the box, when you can just do that at home?
Sometimes, though, I wonder if the future of live sport is going to be a dramatic split between the people willing to pay huge amounts of money for an ultimate luxury experience, and the people who pay relatively little in exchange for providing a studio audience for the televised experience. My college football team, the California Golden Bears, make more money from their conference’s television deal than they can possibly make from selling tickets to people like me who want to see the game live. As a result, the games are increasingly scheduled in TV-friendly—and spectator-unfriendly—time slots. If that trend continues, they’re going to need to scramble to ensure that their lucrative television product isn’t being contested in front of an empty stadium. It’s a tough one.
Recently Major League Baseball has experimented with an all-you-can-eat monthly or season pass at various venues; for a flat price you and a guest can come to as many games as you want during the season. I think innovation like this, built on the back of the premise that everyone has a smartphone, will continue. Buy a subscription to the home team, come to a certain number of games a year, and maybe even watch as you’re dynamically assigned a seat in the stadium based on what’s available. Maybe you get a better seat if you pre-order dinner?
But of course, the in-home experience is where things could really change. High frame rates, higher definition pictures, and virtual-reality broadcasts can all make the sport more immersive. I’m hoping that viewers might one day be able to select what sort of stats and annotations they want to see on screen, or even pick their audio source of choice. I’ll crank up the sabermetrics, thank you very much.
But the truth is, the biggest way technology may impact sports is in how it’s played. We are just now discovering facts about sports we have been playing for more than a century, all due to computer tech that allows every movement of player and ball on a field to be recognized, logged, and analyzed. From baseball to soccer to basketball, our conception of what makes a good player is changing. And the players themselves are using video and statistical analysis to improve themselves, advanced medical techniques and appliances to train more intelligently or heal faster… we’re truly in the middle of a revolution in how sports are played and how athletes train.
Despite all this, though, the fact remains: sport remains an entertainment business only so long as it remains entertaining. The moment it isn’t fun anymore, the jig is up. It’s up to the sports leagues to figure out how to navigate our changing entertainment landscape and remain part of our entertainment budgets. The more that technology can connect me to my teams and make me care, the more likely they are to succeed.
Outside of recording and editing podcasts, my next-biggest chunk of time at work is spent on administration. Generally, this involves a lot of email, PDFs and spreadsheets. These tasks can be done on an iPad, but I’ve always found myself more comfortable completing them on a Mac.
Perhaps I’ve never taken the time to adjust my workflows to better fit the limitations present on iOS, but I find myself feeling constrained in ways that I don’t on macOS.
Take the task of creating a PDF from an email and uploading it to Freshbooks, the web-based accounting tool we use at Relay FM. On the Mac, I can select Export as PDF… from the file menu, save the PDF to my Desktop, tab over to Safari and upload it.
(As macOS supports creating your own custom keyboard shortcuts, I don’t even have to manually pull down the File menu to start the task, which is an added bonus.)
On iOS, this task is more clumsy. While some clients like Airmail make it easier to create PDFs from emails, the built-in app takes several steps:
Tap the Reply button, because Mail.app hates the Share Sheet.
Select Print.
On the Printer Options screen pinch and expand the Preview or press on it with 3D touch. A PDF preview window is then spawned.
Tap the Share button at the bottom of that window. to save the PDF someplace like Dropbox or iCloud.
After all of that, I can switch to Safari and upload the file from the Document Picker to the web. Most document providers require Internet access, which is another thing to consider.
This example is simple, but it’s something I do numerous times a week. I’d love to be able to use Mail.app and have an easier way to create PDFs from messages, but so far, iOS 11 doesn’t make turning an email message into a PDF any easier.
However, once a PDF has been made, iOS 11 promises to make this sort of task faster and easier with Files.app. It allows for local file storage, so my files don’t have to make a round trip to a Dropbox server and back.
This particular workflow should be a little better in iOS 11, but not remarkably different. However, the new multitasking, drag and drop and the aforementioned Files app should make this sort of cross-app work faster and easier.
Currently, so much work is reliant on Document Providers, a corner of iOS 10 that demotes non-iCloud services in what is already a pretty painful bit of UI. With Files, dragging documents to an email draft or a Note will be complete in mere seconds. Uploading a bunch of photos to a CMS will be much faster, as will importing resources into something like iWork. The new iPad Pros will allow three apps at once, allowing me to have a spreadsheet, Safari and a checklist all just within reach.
The days of hunting through Split View for the app I need are coming to a close, but I’m not sure that will be enough.
I don’t know if iOS 11 will change enough about the iPad to let me move a lot of my non-audio work to it, but I’m excited about trying it again. I’m ready to be impressed.
[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]
Since you last heard from us, we went to San Jose for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. It was a good time. Almost everyone I know professionally was there, making it feel a bit like a high-school reunion. The weather was warm (in contrast to San Francisco), and while I had to get a hotel room for a couple of nights because San Jose is so much farther away from my home than San Francisco is, that meant I spent even more time in town, which meant it was a better event. I hope Apple keeps WWDC in San Jose for years to come.
It really is a strange feeling to wander around several square blocks and constantly hear voices you usually only hear on podcasts, or see faces you’ve come to know from Twitter avatars. And as a writer and podcaster, I’m high profile enough that people recognize me, which is just bananas. A guy got out of a car while I was walking down a street and shouted my name and got a selfie with me, which has never happened before in my life and will never happen again. Dan Moren and David Sparks were with me, which made me mortified but also gave me witnesses. Later on the same walk, someone approached David to talk about how much he loved Mac Power Users, and at least one other time I saw Dan get approached, too. It’s that kind of place. Turn around and you will bump into someone you worked with, know, or hear on a podcast.
What I’m saying is, if you haven’t ever gone to a WWDC—and why would you, if you’re not a developer?—you might actually want to put it on your “I’d like to do this sometime” list. WWDC week has transformed into what Macworld Expo was many years ago—the single event where everyone who is involved with Apple stuff—Apple employees, media, you name it—is in one place for an extended period of time. It’s the Apple equivalent of San Diego Comic-Con… but you don’t need a ticket to the big show to experience it. Other conferences—AltConf and Layers—run alongside WWDC, and I would be shocked if others don’t spring up in the years to come. As a social occasion for our community, it really can’t be beat.
If you can’t go, at least there’s good news on that front: Increasingly, the must-see events of WWDC week are available, sometimes live, sometimes on demand within hours of them happening. Some WWDC sessions are livestreamed and they’re almost all available for playback after the fact. John Gruber’s The Talk Show interview with Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi is up in both audio and video form, and the audio of the event streamed live. Accidental Tech Podcast streamed live. My podcast with Myke Hurley, Upgrade, streamed live. And of course, a zillion podcasts were posted in the ensuing hours and days of the event. Apple even set up a podcast booth for developers to record podcasts on site.
Coming out of the week, there were really two big stories. First, the new hardware—most immediately, the new iPad Pros, which were released the following week. I’m writing this story in my backyard on the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro. This thing is great… and it will be even greater once iOS 11 arrives, since it offers dramatically improved multitasking features for iPads. The iOS 11 story, as well as the macOS High Sierra story, are the other big thing. New operating systems take all summer to coalesce, as we learn new tidbits about how they work and work on extended projects to cover all the new features. That work started last week, and continues through September.
It’s how I spend my kids’ summer vacation every year, more or less. I’ve been writing about Apple operating systems from under the same redwood tree I’m sitting under right now since my review of OS X 10.1 for Macworld. The big difference is, this year I’m writing on an iPad Pro, not a Mac.
Ten years ago this week, the public first got its hands on the iPhone and began a revolution that has forever changed the way we use technology. We’ve gone from a society where a computer was something you had to sit down at a desk to use to one where it’s in your pocket all the time. We’ve ushered in an era of apps, selfies, emoji, and the answer to every question at our fingertips.
So, with all that under its belt, where the heck does the iPhone go next?
The iOS 11 public beta has started: https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
MacRumors says Apple has acquired German firm SensoMotoric Instruments: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/26/apple-acquires-sensomotoric-instruments/
On the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, John Markoff interviews those who worked on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDRdWFdsoQ
Echo Show might be a little creepy: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/meet-amazons-new-echo-show-alexa-is-watching
The Super Nintendo Classic arrives in September: https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/06/super-nintendo-classic-arrives-in-september/
Our thanks to Shutterstock (http://shutterstock.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode. Whether you’re making ads or brochures, you need high quality images to attract and keep customers. Go to Shutterstock.com/Rebound and get started today with a 20% discount.
Our thanks as well to Indochino (https://www.Indochino.com) where you’ll find the best made to measure shirts and suits at a great price. Use the promo code “REBOUND” and get any premium suit for just $379.
And our thanks to Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com/therebound). Get exceptional customer experience at any scale on the Couchbase engagement database. Always on, always fast. To find out more, go to Couchbase.com/TheRebound.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Every year we do the dance: Apple releases betas of the new versions of its operating systems and we go ahead and install them. Why, when we tell all the rest of you to be careful? Well, in part because we’re the kind of people who live to be on the bleeding edge, but also so we can write about the new versions of macOS and iOS and tell you what to expect. We do it for you, readers.
So I’ve been using the beta of iOS 11 for a couple weeks now on my 10.5-inch iPad. (I was going to wait until the public beta, I really was, but this machine simply cries out for iOS 11’s powerful features.) In that time, I’ve tried to spend a lot more time using my iPad than I used to, even if it’s still not my main computing device.
For me, iOS 11 makes that a lot more plausible than it used to be. Continuing in the tradition of iOS 9, which finally opened up the ability to have more than one app onscreen at the same time, iOS 11 has refined that into a system that is far more powerful, even if it’s not without its idiosyncrasies.
So, with the understanding that this is still a beta, and, of course, betas are subject not only to bugginess, but also to change and refinement, here are a few observations from my time using iOS 11.
