By Jason Snell

March 9, 2015 9:31 PM PT

Quick reactions to the “Spring Forward” Apple event

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

As an attendee, these Apple media events are peculiar. The waiting area beforehand is like a reunion of former colleagues and media pals, where you catch up and meet a few new faces and generally say “hello” to people you almost never see anywhere but at Apple events. The event itself is pretty much what you see on the video stream¹. Afterward we get to go to a hands-on area and play with the products, which can be incredibly productive, given that those products won’t reach the world’s hands for a few weeks.

After a few hours you emerge, blinking, into the California sun. And while your hands-on experience gives you something unique to go on, the rest of the Internet has been scouring Apple’s press releases and web pages and has learned five hundred little tidbits that went unmentioned in the keynote. You find yourself, an eyewitness, strangely behind the curve. Then you play catch-up.

I haven’t caught up yet. I recorded a podcast and am writing this story and when all that’s done, I’ll get caught up. But here, at least, are my first impressions of the “Spring Forward” event.

The adjectiveless MacBook

I feel like I covered a lot of the reasons for the new MacBook in this post from January, back when we were calling it “the new MacBook Air.” To summarize, this is not meant as a laptop for everyone, but it is meant to point the way to the future and create some differentiation between the MacBook Pro and the rest of the MacBook line. It’s priced higher than the MacBook Air, because it’s got a retina display! The MacBook Air suddenly looks like the bargain-bin Apple laptop. How things change.

I was really impressed with the build quality of the MacBook. This is most definitely the iPad of laptops—and while it won’t appeal to people who want a lot of ports on their laptops, it will appeal to people who love their iPads and want a thin, light laptop that’s got the same design sensibility.

As a user of the 11-inch MacBook Air, even I was impressed with how thin and light the MacBook felt. The construction is solid, and the new colors—look, it’s our old friends, gold and Space Gray—looked great in person. My wife commented tonight that the idea of a gold laptop sounded ridiculous, but the idea of a gold iPad or iPhone sounded ridiculous too, once. This is the same gold. It’s not garish. It’s just gold, instead of the old silver.

The new keyboard is going to take some getting used to. Apple’s proud of its butterfly switches and stainless steel thingies, but the truth is that this keyboard exists because Apple wanted to reduce key travel (the amount of downward movement available when you press a key) in order to make the device as thin as possible. There’s a whole lot less key travel, it’s true, but this doesn’t feel like a cheap keyboard. I’m not sure whether I like it—that’s going to take a lot more than a few minutes of typing in a demo area.

But using the keyboard for a few minutes did make me realize that my current typing style, honed over years using Apple’s current keyboard designs, includes a lot of force (and even a flourish after my fingertip initially strikes a key) in every stroke. With the MacBook keyboard, all I needed was to tap the key—no extra flourish or force—for the keystroke to register. It actually felt like a cross between typing on my MacBook Air’s keyboard and typing on an iPad screen. If I can unlearn my keystroke muscle memory, I might come to accept it. But it’s definitely going to take some adaptation.

The real highlight of trying the MacBook was the trackpad. When the first reports about a non-moving trackpad arrived, I wasn’t happy. I’ve never liked the tap-to-click gesture on trackpads, and always turn it off. But what’s been implemented in the MacBook trackpad is not remotely like tap-to-click or anything else you’ve ever experienced on a trackpad. In fact, it’s more like a magic trick—or an optical illusion.

The first time I clicked on the MacBook trackpad, I was just moving the cursor around to get my bearings and wasn’t thinking of the fact that I was using a new trackpad. I pressed, the trackpad clicked, and suddenly my train of thought screeched to a halt. Wait, I thought, wasn’t this thing supposed to have a new trackpad? It had felt like nothing had changed.

That’s just what Apple wants you to think. What had really happened was that the trackpad’s force sensors registered the force of my finger pushing on the trackpad and activated the Taptic Engine, which briefly vibrated the trackpad. The trackpad surface didn’t move down at all, but my brain combined my finger press and the vibration and interpreted it as if it had. It was a strange experience to be sure, but if I hadn’t known the trackpad was any different, I wouldn’t have suspected a thing.

Where you notice the difference is in apps that support the force-touch trackpad in interesting ways. Now that a click isn’t mechanical, the entire experience can be controlled by software—the Trackpad control panel lets you set how much force is necessary to register each click. QuickTime Player has been modified to allow you to increase fast-forward speed by pressing harder on the control, which has the effect of feeling that as you increase the pressure from your finger, you are clicking through different tabs on the trackpad. QuickTime Player is probably not the best place for this feature, but it will be interesting to see what other Mac developers come up with.

Apple’s new Force Click gesture—also known as clicking with more force—is an addition to the gestural toolbox of Mac laptop users. The Force Click isn’t a control-click, it’s a new thing that, at least for now, does things like bring up dictionary definitions in Safari and using Apple’s Data Detectors technology to bring up contextual information in other apps. A Force Click on a file in the Finder kicks off a Quick Look. Again, developers will have to figure out how to support this gesture, but it could bring an added dimension to trackpad-based interfaces².

The single USB-C port on the MacBook gave me flashbacks to the original MacBook Air, with its one USB port. But at least the original Air had a separate power connector! I have no idea if this is the death knell of the MagSafe connector or Thunderbolt or if the port configurations on this first-generation Retina MacBook will be re-thought when it’s updated in a year’s time. The single port certainly limits the laptop’s appeal to people who tend not to plug cables into their computer. (Or trip over their power cords.)

I don’t have a lot to say about the screen. It looked good. I’ve been using a Retina display every day for the last few months, and there was nothing about the MacBook’s screen that didn’t make me think that it wasn’t Yet Another Mac Retina Screen. Have I become so jaded about amazing high-resolution displays? I guess so.

The new MacBook is the spiritual successor to the original MacBook Air, and it once again shows that Apple is always striving to push product categories forward. Some users will welcome it today, while others will wait… a bit. But do you think it’s likely that most of the laptops we’ll buy in five years will look a lot like this? I think it probably is.

The Apple Watch, redux

Six months ago we met the Apple Watch. Six months is a long time—I left Macworld six months ago and started this site—and so it was worth Apple spending time re-introducing the Apple Watch to the world before it goes on sale next month. And there have definitely been some software refinements in the intervening time. But still, this is the Apple Watch we knew. Close observers will glean some new information, but the most interesting news of the day were battery life, the ship date (April 24), and the range of prices for the various models.

The details about battery life just reinforced the goal that Apple clearly set with itself back in September. During that event, the company didn’t discuss battery life other than to say that you’d charge the Apple Watch at night. The implication was day-long battery life, and Apple confirmed that today, rating the watch as 18 hours of life—based on 90 time checks, 90 notifications, 45 minutes of app use, and a 30-minute workout with music playback. One would hope that Apple chose those numbers based on how its own employees have been using the Apple Watch, and that it’s a realistic model. If the Apple Watch dies at 4 p.m. most days, it will be a major embarrassment for Apple.

While I can quibble with Tim Cook’s referring to the creation of the three Apple Watch product lines as “curation,” it’s good to know what we can get in each model line and what each line costs. Personally, I find myself torn between the $399 Sport with a $149 leather band as an add-on, or the $699 stainless steel model. I think I actually prefer the soft look of the anodized aluminum on the sport to the super-shiny stainless steel. But I’m also sure I’ll change my mind on this 20 times before I finally decide.

Miscellany

The HBO NOW announcement was big news, more for the TV industry than for the tech industry. HBO NOW has the potential to be a big deal, and it’s interesting to see Apple strike such a major exclusivity agreement—even if it’s just for a few months. Cord-cutters who want to get HBO NOW to watch “Game of Thrones”³ will need to get an Apple TV.

Speaking of the Apple TV, it really felt like we might be getting a new model, didn’t it? Instead, the old model got a price cut to a $69 price that we all should hope is of the everything-must-go variety. It’s smart to try to use the HBO deal and the existence of older, presumably low-cost hardware to spur sales of Apple TV. But I sure hope this is also a sign that a new Apple TV is waiting in the wings⁴.

I was impressed with the time taken to talk about ResearchKit. Cynical people on Twitter might just have kept pressing the feeder bar and hoping for more new products, but I think it fits well with Apple’s self image to discuss a way that its products can change the world beyond how they change individual lives. The scope of the announcement is broad; I’ve got a friend who’s an oncologist at UC San Francisco and I’m interested to hear his take on it, to get some sense of how people in the medical profession view stuff like this. But was it cool that Apple spent a few minutes in its big event to show off how iPhones can be used to aid in medical research? Sure it was. I hope Apple keeps throwing curveballs like ResearchKit into the rundown of its media events.

I get what they were trying to do with Christy Turlington’s appearance on stage. A lot of the ingredients were there: She’s got philanthropic endeavors, she went to Africa, she’s running marathons, there’s a tie-in to the Apple Watch… but the whole segment kind of fell flat. I was hoping Turlington was going to prove to be a perfect explanation of a use case for the Apple Watch as an athletic training assistant, but it never really seemed to come together. Instead, we discovered that she’s writing a blog on Apple.com (!) about her Apple Watch journey. A celebrity, writing a weekly blog on Apple’s web site. That’s an interesting wrinkle.

That’s all that my brain has managed to bubble out tonight. I’ll keep thinking and writing and be back throughout the week with more.

By Dan Moren

March 9, 2015 1:32 PM PT

One port, multiple devices

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

So if you, like me, aren’t thrilled about the idea of having only one port on a MacBook, Apple’s got good news. Well, good news for Apple, mainly. You can buy an adapter that acts as a hub, allowing you to simultaneously connect to power, traditional USB devices, and an external display. All for the low, low price of $79.

You do at least have your choice of HDMI or VGA, so I suppose that’s something.

I’m still not sure the 12-inch MacBook is for me, and I certainly don’t love the idea of having to shell out for one of these or a $19 adapter to use any of my existing USB devices. Also, unlike Thunderbolt¹, there’s no support for Gigabit Ethernet. For the moment, I think I’ll be holding on to my 11-inch MacBook Air.

[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

March 8, 2015 10:47 AM PT

Apple Event coverage: Monday, 10 PDT

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Just a reminder that I’ll be at the Apple event on Monday morning at 10 Pacific. That’s 1 p.m. Eastern and 1700 GMT.

Apple will be streaming the event live, of course. I’ll try to live tweet some comments—and will be joined remotely by Dan Moren—at the @sixcolorsevent Twitter account, embedded below for your convenience.

By Jason Snell

March 6, 2015 3:30 PM PT

Testing out the MLB.TV Mac app

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Spring is in the air and baseballs are being tossed around by highly paid professionals on grass fields all over Florida and Arizona. And so, naturally, a young fan’s mind turns to thoughts of streaming audio and video of baseball games on their various devices. Which prompts reader Craig Clavin to write:

@jsnell Find any http://t.co/uNfZuEq3hH HTML5 workaround? It has to exist if they have streaming on iOS, no? —really don't like Flash/Chrome

— Craig Clavin (@CraigClavin) March 6, 2015

Because I am not always a helpful person, I answered by telling Craig that while a non-Flash media stream obviously existed, I had no idea where you could get to it. Well, you know the parable: Give a man a fish and he’ll live for a day. Tell a man you have no idea where the fish are, and he’ll go off and find his own damned fish. Which is why, 17 minutes later, Craig reported back:

@jsnell Found that they have a (beta) OS X app. Not sure the player used to stream it though, looks a bit better too! http://t.co/pzktFsRioy

— Craig Clavin (@CraigClavin) March 6, 2015

So, full credit to Craig for finding something I didn’t know existed, namely a beta version of MLB.TV for Mac that doesn’t require Flash and runs as its own app rather than in a browser window. (Update:: My sources at MLB say this is very much a tech development project, so it’s unclear if it will ever be an officially supported platform… we’ll see. I love the idea of not running MLB.TV in a browser, though…)

I’ve been using it for the last couple of days, and it seems to work just fine. I’m unclear if it’ll offer all of the features of the web version—multiple-game views and the like. It doesn’t now, but it’s still Spring Training. But I’m excited by the existence of this app, because dislike of Flash aside, I hated using my web browser when I was streaming a game, because I would invariably open or close the wrong window and mess everything up¹. Now the baseball lives in its own little app. This is better.

The app’s feature list is still rudimentary. There’s a menu from which you can see all the current day’s games, and you can navigate from there to previous days. You can listen to audio of games if you prefer that to video. There’s an option to hide scores of games, in case you don’t want to be spoiled. And within the game, the app gives you access to MLB’s “Live DVR” feature, so you can back up and move around within the video of a game, even if it’s live. You can even opt to have the score of the game you’re watching appear in your Mac’s menu bar.

Now the fine print: This is for subscribers to MLB’s streaming package, which costs $130 per year for MLB Premium (which includes PC, mobile, and console apps) and $110 per year for PC-only access. And as always, you can’t watch games that are being played by your local teams².

So thanks very much to Craig for persevering, and for introducing me to an app that I’ll probably have on my screen for most of the next seven months. Play ball!

By Jason Snell

March 6, 2015 12:11 PM PT

Last updated July 27, 2020

Bad AppleScript: Shell scripting and Automator

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

I know a lot of people who write software for a living. Marco Arment is one of those people. He’s the developer of Overcast, but he’s also a podcaster—and since he likes to scratch his own itch, he’s used his developer skills to write tools that help him produce his podcast. Tools that non-developery people like me, who also produce podcasts, can potentially benefit from.

Unfortunately, developery people tend to like things like shell scripts and other stuff that lives on the command line. The stuff they build for regular humans has beautiful interfaces and is made with users in mind; the stuff they build for themselves is often quick and dirty and purpose-built for an audience that’s comfortable with the very technical.

I write and talk about technology for a living, but I consider opening Terminal to be a last resort. That’s where AppleScript and Automator come in.

Continue reading “Bad AppleScript: Shell scripting and Automator”…

By Dan Moren

March 5, 2015 9:34 AM PT

Wish List: Passbook for everything

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I’d consider myself an early adopter of Passbook. When the feature debuted back in iOS 6, I took every opportunity to find apps that supported it and try them out. It’s now been years since I had to print out a plane boarding pass or movie ticket.

But, to my dismay, my wallet is still full of cards. And it’s not just the credit and debit cards¹, but the occasionally used cards that I have to carry around with me. My health insurance cards, my library card, public transit cards for at least three cities. While I could swap cards in and out of my wallet only when I expect to use them, the annoyance factor of not having them and needing them keeps me toting a slightly beefy billfold.

Apple Pay’s a pretty good system when it comes to those payment cards, but it would be great if Apple allowed us to more easily digitize cards that use either a barcode–as my library card does–or an RFID chip of the sort in my transit cards.²

Not all of this responsibility is on Apple, of course; third parties can offer Passbook integration in their own apps, and some have already done so. AAA, for example, lets me add my ID card to Passbook via its app, meaning I don’t have to carry it around anymore. But there are plenty of places, such as my local library, that seem unlikely to develop their own apps; a system that let me scan barcodes from my library card or the key tag I use for my gym would save me a lot of trouble.³

Honestly, just the ability to scan barcodes or even simply take a picture of a card, much in the same way that Apple Pay can identify a card using the iPhone’s camera, would let me remove four or five cards from my wallet. A few states are already looking at providing ways to get your driver’s license on your phone, too.

At this point, I’m still a little wary of using my phone as a full-fledged replacement for my wallet. What if it runs out of juice? What if I drop it and the screen becomes unusable? These are the kind of things you don’t have to worry about with a conventional wallet. Then again, there are advantages, too: If my phone gets stolen, it’s a lot harder to pull my private information out of it than it is from my wallet.

Honestly, all I want is to get to the point where I can leave my house without my wallet for convenience–say, if I go for a run–or where I don’t have to freak out if I accidentally forget my wallet at home. We’re getting closer by the year, but we’re not quite there yet.

[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 Dan Moren

March 5, 2015 7:43 AM PT

Troubleshooting AutoFill woes

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Following up on last week’s Wish List item on contact management, reader Angus asked about AutoFill, and pointed out that if you have multiple email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and so on, there’s no explicit way to set a default.

That’s true, and it’s definitely annoying. For a long time, Safari on OS X insisted on automatically giving forms an email address that I rarely used. Under Yosemite it seems to have been better, but I decided to investigate and see if I could find a rhyme or reason to its madness.

My address card has seven email addresses in it, along with two phone numbers, two IM contacts, and two physical addresses. In each case, I made sure that the information I generally wanted filled was the first entry in each section.

I then tested it using a quick and dirty HTML form, to which I added some additional fields of my own: street address, city, ZIP code, and a state dropdown (you can download my test form here).

Interestingly, though it nailed my name, email address, street address, city, ZIP code, and even state, the one thing it didn’t correctly fill was my telephone number. Upon further investigation, I thought maybe it was because the HTML field in question was called “telephone” while my number was labeled as “mobile.” So I tried changing the HTML field name to “mobile”–no dice. Then, on a lark, I changed the label of the primary phone number in my contact record to “home” instead of “mobile.” Bingo! It happily supplied that phone number.

So I tested this theory by changing the label on my preferred email address from “home” to “other.” Sure enough, when I triggered AutoFill again, it didn’t put in my email address. With a little further testing, I determined that it didn’t matter where in the contact record I had the preferred email address, as long as it was labelled “home.”

Keep in mind this testing was limited, and involved a single simple form. It’s possible AutoFill does some more complicated automagic finagling behind the scenes depending on how a given site labels fields, but my informal testing suggests that if you want AutoFill to use a certain set of information, label those as “home.” Hopefully that helps tame some of AutoFill’s peculiarities.

All that said, it’d be great if Apple did provide a more explicit way to choose what information AutoFill uses, or at least allowed some sort of manner for quickly switching between different sets of information.

[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

March 4, 2015 8:19 AM PT

The stink of coins

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

We might be a little obsessed with the endless snowboarding iOS game Alto’s Adventure here at Six Colors world headquarters.

I’ve been playing it a lot, and enjoying it. During each downhill run, you pick up shiny gold coins that I always figured were just part of the game’s point system, as well as a nice nod to classic console games in the Italian Plumber genre.

One of the clever things about Alto’s Adventure is that at the end of every run, you can just tap a Try Again button¹ and make another run down the mountain. You have to remember to tap the Home button if you want to change characters, view your stats, adjust your settings, or visit the Workshop.

For the longest time, I didn’t know what the Workshop was. Early on in the game I tapped on it and discovered it was a way to upgrade some of your equipment by spending coins. I rolled my eyes and immediately tapped the Back button.

Here’s the thing: Alto’s Adventure does not trade in-app purchases for coins. The only way you can earn coins in Alto’s Adventure is by playing the game. There are no shortcuts where you can pay $4.99 to get the Wingsuit, or $9.99 for 20,000 extra coins.

That’s when I realized just how poisonous the current App Store environment is when it comes to games. I assumed that Alto’s Adventure—even though I had paid $2 for it—was going to try to extract more money out of me in order to have a better in-game experience. It took me quite a while to realize that I was only expected to use the coins I had been collecting in the game, and that this “in-app purchase” mechanic was meant to reward my long-term use of the game, not vacuum cash out of my wallet.

Honestly, I wonder if the developers of Alto’s Adventure wouldn’t be better off finding some other mechanic to use for in-game upgrades. When it comes to iOS games, offering a shopping area where you can pay for goods in coins offers no delight—it has come to represent nothing but a cash grab.