Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.
The reasons we’re appreciating Watch Duty right now are tragic, but how great is it that this app exists?
One of the consequences of switching to a laptop from a desktop is that my old method of cloning my disk daily has been thrown out of whack.
Previously, I kept a USB disk attached to my Mac Studio at all times. Once a day, Carbon Copy Cloner would launch and clone the disk. But now, if I attach that USB drive to the hub my MacBook Pro will be connected to, I get a bad bit of behavior: the disk mounts the moment my Mac is attached, and then if I want to unplug my Mac, it’ll yell at me for unmounting that disk improperly.
Fortunately, there’s a solution. It begins by telling my Mac to not automatically mount the USB disk when it attaches to my Mac. It’s a multi-step, Terminal-based process. It begins by using the command diskutil info "volume name", which will generate a lot of information about the disk—including its Volume UUID, a long string of characters.
Next, I need to edit the file /etc/fstab and add a line that specifically tells the system not to mount this particular drive, so I enter in sudo vifs and then add this line at the bottom of the file:
UUID=[long UUID of the disk] none apfs rw,noauto
This configuration line tells the system not to automount a disk with that UUID.
CCC offers to unmount the disk again when it’s done.
Carbon Copy Cloner handles the rest. It automatically mounts the disk when it’s time to run the clone job, and can be set to automatically dismount the disk when it’s done. So long as I don’t unplug my Mac during a clone task, the clones happen more or less invisibly in the background and I don’t need to make any effort to attach, mount, detach, or dismount the USB drive. (I believe you can get the same effect in the cloning utility SuperDuper! via its pre- and post-flight scripts.)
Apple preps a fix for news summaries that totally solves the problem (according to a news summary I read), Tim Cook tries to solve another problem in the worst way possible, and Dell just creates more problems for itself.
#Disclaimer
Apple has a sweet solution for fixing Apple Intelligence making things up. Turns out it involves more intelligence.
The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.
What if we had summaries, but they were long? These are the longest summaries Apple has ever shipped. And we think you’re going to love them.
As Jason notes, this might still be a problem because “Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong.” Not only wrong about details, sometimes wrong about things you could have gotten right with a coin flip.
Reality: Thing is 1.
Apple Intelligence: Thing is 0.
That is not only not helpful, that is counter-helpful. Which is to say potentially harmful. And that’s not the only thing!
Tim Trump
Just as last Friday’s column went to bed, Tim Cook’s PR team announced this.
Because you always announce something you’re completely proud of late on a Friday. Everyone knows that.
Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said.
For “unity” read “sucking up to a petty narcissist with a penchant for exacting revenge on those who don’t pay him sufficient homage”, as Cook has never donated to an inauguration before.
Look, there’s a first time for everything so maybe he’s just getting started. It just happens to be with the inauguration of America’s answer to Joffrey Baratheon, that’s all. It’s just coincidence.
Lest you think it’s just Tim Cook, however, it turns out that bowing down to the incoming administration is turning into a bit of a totally inexplicable fad! Couldn’t it have been high-waisted jeans or sideburns or something?
What a coincidental number! How did they ever come up with that? Ha-ha! They’re totally copying Apple again! Just incorrigible.
It is getting increasingly difficult to buy computers from a company not aiding and abetting the decline of democracy. Could this really be the year of Linux on the desktop? Maybe I should look at Elementary OS again.
Or maybe I should just use the same computer I used as a kid: a cardboard box with a monitor drawn on it and an overturned tray from a box of chocolates as the keyboard.
Yeah, that sounds sweet. You can’t even getFacebook on that.
Dell-irious
Hey, Dell. Samsung called. They want their slavish adherence to copying Apple back.
Yes, the company that got famous for razzing Apple and selling the blandest corporate designs aimed at the weird kinks of IT procurement managers announced this week it was renaming its computers. Gone are the names like “Inspiron” and “Latitude” that made you think of mid-sized ‘90s Chrysler sedans or equally mid-fashion slacks from American Eagle. Welcome instead the totally original Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max!
What?
As smartphones “naturally evolved” to look like iPhones and laptops “naturally evolved” to look like MacBooks, this is just the “natural evolution” of product names.
WHAT?!
Man, you Apple people. Just can’t see anything outside the Cupertino prism.
Sadly, Dell doesn’t seem to quite have the copy assignment down, as its product offering is further divided into Premium, Plus and Base, and…
The naming logic breaks down entirely for desktops. Just try to read the names Dell Pro Max Micro and Dell Pro Max Mini without having your brain self destruct.
Get yourself a Dell Pro Max Micro Premium running Windows 11 Pro for Workstations.
Is someone in PC branding getting paid by the word?
At a briefing around the rebranding in December, I asked CEO Michael Dell a simple question: “What does Dell gain by copying Apple?” Needless to say, he didn’t look pleased.
What, exactly, did he expect? “Ha-ha! No one will ever notice!” Seriously?
Even if we don’t need to suggest disbanding the company and giving the money back to the shareholders, can we at least disband these names?
“Mikey, there’s no easy way to say this but the organization wants to make a change. You can keep ‘Dell’ and ‘Dell Pro’ but we’re sending ‘Max’, ‘Micro’ and ‘Mini’ to HP for a player to be named later. I’m… sorry, Mikey.”
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
Apple’s issues with news summaries point out that sometimes the issue is not the LLMs themselves, but the implementation. [More Colors and Backstage subscribers also get 16 minutes of Old (OS X) Business.]
Will Carroll joins for a mega Sports Corner: Fubo meets Hulu to enable Venu, Netflix goes full force into live sports, how football dominates American TV, NFL announcers, and our TV picks!
If you hoped flipping the calendar over to a new year meant that we’d stop talking about AI, well, you better keep flipping for a while. Eventually we won’t be talking about it because AI will be in charge of everything.
As my colleague Jason Snell recently wrote, prepare for 2025 to be the year of Apple Intelligence all over again. As we wait for the last tranche of features announced by Apple last year, the company will no doubt be ramping up to talk about the features it plans to add this year.
All of this remains a contentious issue in tech. It seems as though nary a day goes by without some company or other announcing a new AI-powered lawnmower or weird keyboard. Right now the prevailing opinion in the tech industry seems to be that AI is the solution to every problem you encounter—and more than a few that you don’t.
While I think that’s far from true, there are places that AI—and, in particular, Apple Intelligence—could prove itself useful in our lives. For every Image Playground that has us wondering “who asked for this?” there’s a corollary of “why hasn’t AI solved this yet?”
Meta ditches third-party fact-checking, making unsightly TVs more attractive, the tyranny of always-on phone displays, and the robot vacuum of your nightmares.
After about a year of standing, I upgraded to a treadmill desk (and of course, I wrote about that for Macworld, too.) I used that setup for years. I reviewed expensive, Bluetooth-enabled treadmill desks. And then eventually, I found I was on phone and video calls all day long, and it was increasingly difficult to tread for any significant amount of time. I switched back to merely standing. And then, eventually, the pull of gravity reduced me back to sitting.
But now I’m back, baby. I took 23,000 steps yesterday, and I’ll likely exceed that number today.
One step at a time
A year or so ago, a local friend of mine named Anthony posted on Instagram about having lost 20 or so pounds while working with a (remote) trainer. I commented to congratulate him. Minutes later, at most, that trainer slid into my direct messages: Did I have belly fat I wanted to shed, too? Let’s set up a call.
Whoa there, trainer man. You don’t know me. I ignored the message and kept living my life. But this past November, when Anthony shared that he was down 90 pounds, I felt inspired. I wrote to that same trainer, and started working with him. I’ve been making steady progress.
I’d been averaging roughly 5000 steps per day. I work from home. When my trainer mentioned that I could accelerate my weight loss if I got more steps, I knew I didn’t have more time to dedicate to workouts than I was already doing. I don’t feel like I have time to inject outdoor walks into my day right now. But I remembered my treadmill desks. In fact, I still had my treadmill desk in storage.
So I dug it out and turned it on. Like me, it hadn’t aged too gracefully. So I freecycled the old treadmill and bought a walking pad from Amazon.
Walking the walk
Wow, have the prices on treadmills for treadmill desk usage come down. I owned a $700 one; I reviewed $1000+ ones for Macworld back in the day. Today, you can find treadmills for under-desk usage for less than $250, with some costing barely more than $100.
What makes a treadmill good for desk use? Typically, it won’t have the standard hand railings (since those wouldn’t fit under your desk). It will prioritize a quiet motor. And the maximum speed will top out far slower than a traditional treadmill. Wirecutter has recommendations that didn’t speak to me. I ended up going with a highly-rated Sperax Treadmill. It includes a remote that I never use, and I actually keep its foldable handrails up; my height and desk are each tall enough that the rails fit, and I like the controls there.
I set up the new treadmill and started walking while working. It was like riding a bicycle. Just, you know, without wheels.
One foot in front of the other
When you’re first starting out on a treadmill desk, walking 1.5 miles per hour or slower is the way to go. It takes some time to get used to seeing your screen while you’re moving, and typing while walking adds some complexity. But if you start slow and work your way up, you can get to comfortable casual paces — again, mine is currently between 2.4 and 2.6 miles per hour — without impacting your work at all.
I still shut off the treadmill while on Zooms. But on audio calls, no one hears a thing. I’ve even recorded multiple podcast episodes while treading and no one knew. I use the NS1 Noise Supressor plugin from Waves on my recordings, but Zoom’s built-in noise cancellation and even GarageBand and Logic’s freely included noise gates do a great job of stripping out the treadmill’s sound.
I did encounter a few technical hurdles with my latest treadmill desk setup. Some were related to my displays, and some were related to getting my ego-boosting step count credit. Let’s start with the latter.
Log those steps, Jason style.
I wear an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring. Neither is particularly good at tracking steps on a treadmill desk. If you tell the Apple Watch you’re doing an indoor walk, it’ll fare slightly better, but only barely: In my testing over a few days, it would record 20 to 30 percent of the distance I actually covered.
The problem is that unlike normal walking — or even traditional treadmill walking — treadmill desk walking doesn’t involve my arm movement. I’m typing and walking literally right now as I write these words; there’s not much for smart devices to glom onto to figure out how many steps I’m taking. But I wanted credit for my steps, dammit!
You can buy (much) pricier treadmills that offer different levels of Apple Health integration through their own third-party apps. You can buy third-party adapters to strap your Apple Watch to your ankle, where it can log your steps better. (But unless you’re very limber, said placement makes it rather difficult to check your notifications.)
Even your iPhone itself can count your steps — and I considered just dropping mine in my pocket to measure my treadmill walking. But I, you know, use my phone a lot, so that solution didn’t seem like the right one.
I went even lower tech: I bought a cheap, rechargeable pedometer that I stick in my pocket when I’m on the treadmill. When I stop the treadmill, I look at the pedometer and manually log those steps in the Health app. Or I used to, until I asked myself WWJD: What would Jason do?
I built a dead-simple Shortcut with three steps: Ask for numerical input, log those steps in Health, and then confirm with an on-screen message. I saved that Shortcut as an app on my iPhone, and now it takes mere seconds to look at the pedometer, log those steps, and move on with my day.
Prioritize Shortcuts over your collection of Apple Watches.
Except… when I first started this approach, I noticed that Health (and my third-party apps that connected to it) didn’t always reflect my increased step count. I’d manually logged 10,000 incremental steps, but the app was stuck on 2500.
The trick is understanding how Health prioritizes disparate data sources. Apple knows you have multiple devices that theoretically can measure your physical activity (your phone, watch, third-party fitness apps), and does some behind-the-scenes work to avoid double counting. And by default, Health trusts the Apple Watch to be the best source of intel for your movement. I get that instinct, but it’s wrong for treadmill deskers.
To tweak this, head over to the Health app, tap the Browse tab, and find Steps. Scroll down to the bottom and choose “Data Sources & Access.” The next screen may take a long moment to load. Once it does, scroll to Data Sources. If your phone is anything like mine — and you’ve owned or reset a few Apple Watches and iPhones in your day — you will likely see a lengthy list. Mine lists multiple entries for “Lex’s Apple Watch” and “Alexander’s Apple Watch” and numerous old iPhones. And in my case, Shortcuts was listed at the very bottom.
Tap Edit at the top right, and drag Shortcuts way up to the top of the list. Now steps entered via your new Shortcut will take priority.
Monitoring your health
There was one final tech aspect I had to handle for my personal setup. I use an M2 MacBook Air, which supports one external display. But I still wanted my seated setup to work for when I need a walking break. And my giant, 3-foot wide curved Dell monitor wouldn’t fit in my standing desk space. So I ordered a new monitor for my treadmill desk setup, and needed to figure out how to connect both to my MacBook Air at the same time.
It was time for me to learn about DisplayLink. In truth, I learned as little as possible. I installed DisplayLink on my Mac and ordered a DisplayLink adapter, the subtly named WAvLINK USB 3.0 to HDMI Adapter for Multiple DIsplays, 2k. You may need a different one if your monitor has a higher resolution, but this worked great for me. I now have the treadmill monitor connected via that adapter and an HDMI cable, and — as with my giant Dell monitor — it mirrors my laptop’s screen.
Once that was all set up, I encountered one final hiccup: Notification Center stopped working.
I’d get texts and reminders and other alerts, and they’d be in Notification Center on my Mac itself, but they’d never appear as banners on screen.
That’s because mirrored Macs with multiple displays default to expecting you’re presenting something — so they hide your alerts. Head to System Settings -> Notification Center and turn on “Allow notifications when mirroring or sharing the display.”
Do tread on me
I’m down 19.1 pounds since November. I’ve walked more than two miles while writing this piece for Six Colors.
I take seated breaks when I need to, but honestly they’re fewer and further between than you might guess.
The last time I used a treadmill desk, I took to eating more desserts and such because I could do so without gaining weight, thanks to the extra calories I was burning walking 10 to 20 extra miles per day. This time, at least so far, I’m not eating so much extra; I’m just burning more.
Now that I’ve figured out all the nuances covered here, everything’s pretty seamless; I walk up to my desk, and then I start walking. As bad for you as lots of sitting can be, lots of walking is pretty darn healthy. And the journey of a thousand healthier work days begins with a single step.
We are announcing the retirement of Script Debugger as a product.
January 2025 marks Script Debugger’s 30th anniversary. It’s been a very long run for a two-person effort. Script Debugger began as a Classic MacOS product, survived Apple’s near-death experience, transitioned to macOS X and migrated across 4 CPU processor types. We are so grateful for the support we’ve received over these years. This support allowed us to keep working on Script Debugger much longer than we ever imagined.
I’ve been a Script Debugger user for years. It has made building AppleScript scripts so much more by giving script developers access to debugging tools that the built-in Script Editor lacks. While I’m obviously disappointed in the end of the product, it’s been a remarkable 30-year run!
Also, if I’m being honest, I don’t use Script Debugger as much as I used to, because I don’t use AppleScript as much as I used to. It’s still unparalleled in the control it gives over Mac apps themselves, but I tend to use it as a bridging tool for places that Shortcuts and Keyboard Maestro can’t reach. For most general-purpose automation that doesn’t involve Mac apps, I’m using Python these days, not AppleScript. I graduated, I guess.
There are many great independent Mac apps out there that have been developed for decades by a single developer or a small team; I admit that I’ve been worried about the fate of those apps for a while now. Developers deserve to retire just like anyone else, but as happy as that moment can be for the people involved, I also selfishly dread the loss of another indie Mac app I’ve relied on for years.
The good news: Late Night Software will continue updating the app for six months and then will post past versions back to 5.0 on its website with serial numbers attached, so that people who rely on Script Debugger for older installations will be able to use it forever. Unfortunately, the next time a macOS update breaks something in Script Debugger, that’ll mark its end as an actively usable product.
The problem with Apple’s approach is that it’s summarizing a headline, which is itself a summary of an article written by a human being. As someone who has written and rewritten thousands of headlines, I can reveal that human headline writers are flawed, some headlines are just not very good, and that external forces can lead to very bad headlines becoming the standard.
Specifically, clickbait headlines are very bad, and an entire generation of headline writers has been trained to generate teaser headlines that purposefully withhold information in order to get that click. (Writing a push notification is not the same as writing a headline, but it’s at least similar.)
Not to get all Fred Jones on you, but: I was trained to write headlines that made you want to read more, but didn’t withhold information. The idea was to compete for your attention, not pose riddles that could only be decoded by reading the story in question.
The now-dead news app Artifact built a killer feature that rewrote clickbait headlines on demand. It used the complete content of the news story to write a new headline that was always better than the ones being served up by various news organizations. Yes, when given enough information and asked to generate a headline, it turns out that AI is pretty good at the job!
Still, as Mike Krieger of Artifact wrote about in a Medium post, the company also built in some layers of human validation:
When we rewrite a title given a user request, that new title is initially only visible to the user. If enough people request a rewrite of a given title, the rewritten title will be escalated for human review and if it looks good, we’ll promote it the new default title for all users.
One of the principles we use when applying AI to features inside Artifact is to be as transparent as possible. For both Summarize and the clickbait title rewriter, we’ve used consistent iconography (the star-like shape) to denote that there’s AI involvement.
It didn’t work out for Artifact, but there’s something here. Summarizing summaries isn’t working out for Apple, but more broadly I think there’s something to the idea of presenting AI-written headlines and summaries in order to provide utility to the user. As having an LLM running all the time on our devices becomes commonplace, I would love to see RSS readers (for example) that are capable of rewriting bad headlines and creating solid summaries. The key—as Artifact learned—is to build guardrails and always make it clear that the content is being generated by an LLM, not a human.
The BBC, following up on tworeports of Apple Intelligence summaries that transformed its own headlines into factually inaccurate text, got a public response from Apple:
Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.
The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.
Here’s what the BBC reports Apple’s statement is:
Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.
The statement uses the beta tag it has placed on Apple Intelligence features as a shield, while promising to add a warning label to AI-generated summaries in the future. It’s hard to accept “it’s in beta” as an excuse when the features have shipped in non-beta software releases that are heavily marketed to the public as selling points of Apple’s latest hardware. Adding a warning label also does not change the fact that Apple has released a feature that at its core consumes information and replaces it with misinformation at a troubling rate.
Apple is shipping these AI-based features rapidly, and marketing them heavily, because it fears that its competitors so far out in front that it’s a potentially existential issue. But several of these features simply aren’t up to Apple’s quality standards, and I worry that we’ve all become so inured to AI hallucinations and screw-ups that we’re willing to accept them.
We shouldn’t be. Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong. That’s a failure, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as being the nature of OS features in the 2020s.
So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.
Beta software contains an implicit promise that the developer will actively work to squash bugs and make the product better before it goes final. Adding a warning label in the interim is an easy band-aid, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Apple needs to do much more work here, and if it can’t, it needs to turn this feature off until it can release a version it can stand behind.
A new year dawns! We consider what it has in store for Apple and why the company’s A.I. features need to be judged critically. Then we turn back the clock to 2000 and consider the moment when Mac OS X changed everything.
Twenty-five years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS X, ushering in a new era for the Mac and the world of desktop computing at large.
That sounds like hyperbole, but after watching the keynote for a second time—the first time was from the front row, thank you very much!—it’s remarkable what an enormous moment this was for Apple and the Mac.
It’s funny. What’s remarkable about the moment is actually how uneventful it seems. When I watch the video back, it’s almost surreal how Steve Jobs keeps doing utterly normal, boring things in Mac OS X while the crowd completely loses its collective mind. Viewed by someone without any historical context, it would seem like a cult being whipped into a frenzy by its leader.
But I was there, and I can tell you that it wasn’t that. This was the moment, after sixteen years of classic Mac OS—and let’s face it, the last five of those were pretty rough—when all the failings of the Mac were swept away and replaced with something modern, ready for the challenge of the 21st Century.
How did that work out for Apple? The keynote seems so weird now because almost everything in it is just how the Mac works, even 25 years later. Yes, interface styles have changed over time, but that moment on stage in January 2000 redefined the Mac for 25 years and counting.
Sunday marks the 25th anniversary of the unveiling of Mac OS X, and yeah, I wrote the cover story for Macworld. While I was working on a forthcoming piece celebrating that anniversary, I asked my friend James Thomson if he had a good link about his time working on the Dock, which was unveiled as a part of that event.
The version [Steve] showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.
The timeline is interesting. James wrote his classic Mac utility DragThing before working at Apple, then was hired by Apple, then ended up working on the Dock, and then left Apple… to resume working on DragThing.
Also: James’s story about Apple trying to hide James’s location from Steve Jobs is an all-time classic.
This shouldn’t be that surprising as we already knew that Apple has made pretty much every Vision Pro it expects to sell before the next version comes out.
But it remains to be seen if Apple is can make the device more appealing than the expensive, heavy, and slightly weird first version. So far the big hardware difference expected is a faster processor so the Vision Pro can run Apple Intelligence — something not many are clamoring for — and play games that don’t exist yet.
Hardware seems to be less of an issue, though, than software and price. Still, some gems continue to roll out from time to time.
The mad geniuses at Sandwich continue to be committed to the Vision Pro and have already updated their Theater app for the device, adding Plex streaming as well as a planetarium to pre-existing features like YouTube streaming.
Meanwhile, Wicked director Jon M. Chu said he used a Vision Pro to help edit the film. You know, like you do?
He would then zoom in and “draw” on the screen using his finger to point out potential edits. “Like, ‘hey, this ear looks weird on the goat’ …”
Slow sales figures sparking production cuts are one indicator, but if you know of a better way to point out edits that need to be made to virtual goat ears, then I’d like to hear it.
I thought not.
Misrumored
A minor brouhaha (a kerfuffle, if you will) erupted this week, as it was widely reported that Mark Gurman was suggesting Apple would, in addition to moving the charging port, put voice control in the upcoming revision to the Magic Mouse.
Gurman then sighed, saying: “You know nothing of my work.”
…the rumor making the rounds today is just an incorrect back-and-forth translation of this line from my initial report…
Gurman was apparently just rattling off technologies, not suggesting they’d be squeezed into the diminutive device. And, thus, like Doctor Manhattan, did he leave the Earth for Mars, where he sat quietly to contemplate, far beyond the din of the masses.
OK, so if we can’t fulfill our lifelong dream of talking to mice, what else is on the horizon?
New details indicate that while phones continue to get larger, they are at least getting thinner. The iPhone 17 Air is now reported to be about 20 percent thinner than the iPhone 16 and 25 percent thinner than the Phone 16 Pro.
For further comparison, that’s 344 percent thinner than the current MacBook Air and an astonishing 900 percent thinner than a PowerBook 5300. Just, you know, to put it in perspective.
Siri, how could you?
Apple’s about to make it rain dollar dollar bills on us, y’all.
$95 million! That’s as much revenue as Apple makes in a quarter!
Oh, sorry, I misread Apple’s quarterly results. It makes $95 billion a quarter. So, it’s as much as the company makes in two hours. Yeah, they’re not even going to feel that. Dang.
Well, still. At least we aggrieved Apple customers are getting something.
Apple’s settlement will pay users up to $20 per Siri device impacted
Awww, yeah! Look out, Wendy’s! Ya boi coming for a 20-piece Saucy Nuggs Combo! And he’s gettin’ $2.21 back!
Unless there’s tax.
They may be able to take our privacy, but they’ll never take our Saucy Nuggs.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
The year of Apple Intelligence comes around (again), and Apple needs to decide where the Vision Pro goes next. [Post-show: The long way to Passkeys and magic links.]
My thanks to Fat Cat Software’s PowerPhotos for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
I spend a lot of time using and writing about Apple’s Photos app. And the pre-eminent utility for Photos on the Mac is PowerPhotos. It works in conjunction with the Photos app, filling in missing features that Apple didn’t provide.
You can work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while still keeping all your photos handy in the Photos app.
Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your libraries side by side in multiple windows, multi library search, advanced exporting, converting old iPhoto/Aperture libraries, and more.
PowerPhotos 2.0 can be downloaded for free and offers many of its features for free. Purchasing a license unlocks advanced features such as library merging, deletion of duplicate photos, and unlimited photo copying and exporting. Existing users of PowerPhotos 1.0 or iPhoto Library Manager can use their serial number to upgrade for 50% off the regular price, and Six Colors readers can use the coupon code SIXCOLORS25 to receive a 20% discount.
AppleVis has announced its 13th Golden Apple Awards, recognizing apps and games designed for (or useful to) people who are blind or visually impaired. The awards also honored a developer and included a new award for ongoing achievement.
The past year’s best app, as voted by AppleVis community members, is Seeing AI from Microsoft. Developed by a blind engineer within Microsoft, Seeing AI was first released in 2017, and has evolved to include a growing list of modules that use machine learning and AI features to read text, identify objects and products, and describe photos and people.
Jienfeng Wu took Developer of the Year honors for his resurrection of Soundscape, an app initially developed by Microsoft, and later dropped. Now called VoiceVista, the app allows blind users to understand their surroundings by using sound at various pitches and frequencies.
A new award, named for the founder of AppleVis, recognizes a developer who has made ongoing contributions to accessibility. The David Goodwin Award recognizes a developer who has made an outstanding and lasting impact for people who are blind, deaf/blind, or who have low vision over a minimum of the last three years. The inaugural award went to Envision Technologies, whose EnvisionAI uses AI to process visual information and provide it to blind users through an app or via the company’s smart glasses. Honorable mentions for the Goodwin Award went to Weather Gods Ltd (Weather Gods), and Aira Tech Corp (Aira Explorer)
Nominees for the Golden Apples were made by a committee of writers and podcasters (disclosure: yours truly included), and accessibility experts. The nominees were then voted on by AppleVis community members.
I’ve recently switched from using two computers in two different offices (the hard-to-heat garage and my well-heated back bedroom) to using one computer (a MacBook Pro) docked in either location. There’s a lot that has gone into this decision, which I will detail in a future post, but this post is about one of the most frustrating aspects of this switch: the inability of my computer and automations and settings to understand when the context has changed.
Fortunately, my Mac reacts to switches to my network configuration with aplomb, so I don’t have to dive deeep into Network Locations, though if I did, there are several alternatives to old classic utilities like ControlPlane.
But I record a lot of podcasts, and I have two entirely different USB devices that I use for audio. How can I make it so that when I press the “record” button, the right USB device is recording and receiving audio?
My overall solution ended up being pretty complex, but the key insight was to use a Terminal command to list all the connected USB devices. You don’t need to know a lick of Terminal to use it, because you can stick it in a “Run Shell Script” block in Shortcuts. Here’s the command:
This command will output a list of all your currently attached USB devices in plain text.
(Optional explanation: ioreg will display an enormous list of devices and ports on your system. -p IOUSB restricts it to USB devices and -w0 makes it display complete devices one per line, without truncation. That result is sent to sed, which uses a regular expression to match just the names of the attached USB devices. The final step is to use grep to remove the initial line, which summarizes the list rather than listing an actual USB device. You don’t need to know this.)
At that point, you can build a Shortcut that alters its behavior based on the contents of the output. For example, my Shortcut’s next step is an If/then block that checks to see if the result contains the text “MV7” for my Shure MV7 microphone or “USBPre” for my USBPre2 audio interface. But it’ll work with any USB device that happens to be attached at a given time.
