By John Moltz

January 13, 2023 3:08 PM PT

This Week in Apple: The king of content

The Apple headset cometh (but later-eth), Eddy Cue wants to sell you some hot Apple content, and get your dirty fingers off my screen!

Headset-ing into 2023

If Apple has its way, 2023 will be the year of the Apple headset. (Maybe next year, Linux on the desktop.)

Mark Gurman tells us that the company will reveal the headset at an event in the spring, before WWDC, and then release it in the fall.

It’s very exciting (whatever the heck it is) but I hope you weren’t hoping for new AirPods, iPads, Apple Watches, or Apple TVs this year because Gurman also says Apple has moved resources from those products to the headset to make sure it launches on time.

Well, maybe you can take the money you were going to spend on those products and buy… uh, half a headset, if it’s really going to be sold at the rumored $3,000 price point. Surely they’ll sell them that way.

Maybe by canceling everything else, Apple thinks it’ll be the year of the Apple headset by default. That could work.

Thank you for your services

Literally everyone: “…”

Eddy Cue: “Hey! I still work at Apple!”

Literally everyone: “Oh. Uh… OK. Cool.”

Yes, Eddy Cue would like you to know that Apple services are a very big deal, thank you very much, and they’re doing super great, K? Thanks, bye.

Cue gushes:

It’s remarkable how much great content is at our fingertips…

Please do not touch the content! The content is for the eyes not the fingers! Animals.

Last week marked my 34th anniversary at Apple…

Being at the same company for 34 years in the tech industry is like saying “I was formed on the great island of Pangaea during the Triassic period.” But it is a great testament to Cue’s utility to Apple and his devotion to the company.

Jason wonders if this note was posted in advance of Apple’s quarterly results, which look to be rough this time around. Probably, but also the timing might have to do with the Golden Globe Awards coming out this week, which saw a few Apple productions nominated, with Paul Walter Hauser winning best supporting actor for “Black Bird”.

Because in Hollywood, if you don’t stand up and take credit for something, did it even happen?

I want to touch you all over

Friends, I have spent the better part of the last 20 years trying to get my wife and son to stop touching my laptop screen and now Mark Gurman is telling me it’s all for naught?

Apple Inc. is working on adding touch screens to its Mac computers, a move that would defy long-held company orthodoxy and embrace an approach that co-founder Steve Jobs once called “ergonomically terrible.”

OK, Steve said a lot of things. He said “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” He said “You’re holding it wrong.” He said “You’re fired.”

A lot, apparently. Often in elevators.

There’s a big difference between the things Apple says publicly and what it’s working on behind the scenes. You can decry the filthy marketing aspect of it, but don’t necessarily think that they’ve changed their minds.

Not gonna lie, though, there have been times since the introduction of the iPad when even I’ve started to reach for the screen. Some of us have been saying for 10 years that Apple might eventually make a touchscreen Mac but that, to do it right, it would have to “reinvent user interaction on the desktop”. Since then, it’s gone a long way toward making trackpad gestures a convenient way of interacting with macOS. Is that enough? Probably not by itself, because there are still so many touch targets that are too small for a finger. But when you think about how the cursor on iPadOS works, you can imagine a system that lets you activate a small touch target with your finger without having to hit it exactly or by making a completely different set of interface elements like Microsoft did on Windows.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy a bunch of those touch-enabled gloves for my family before they grease up my screen.

One can only imagine the kind of content Eddy Cue is preparing for the Apple headset. I can’t wait for my family to point it all out by reaching in and touching the screen on mine, if I can ever afford one.

[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.]

By Shelly Brisbin

January 12, 2023 9:36 AM PT

The real secrets of iOS and accessibility

There’s a joke I tell a lot: if you encounter an article whose headline includes the words “secret features” and “iOS”, chances are you’re about to be taken on a whirlwind tour of your phone’s accessibility settings. “Did you know you could….?” Or. “Buried deep in iOS settings, you’ll find…”

Truth is, these aren’t secret features at all; they’re just unfamiliar to people whose eyes, ears and hands operate in a typical way. And these “secrets” are rarely written about, even in comprehensive coverage of iOS. “Invisible” might be a more honest way to describe these tools.

I can make a better case for the secret feature moniker when it comes to little-known ways you can use the accessibility suite to do typical iOS tasks, whether you have a disability or not. iOS accessibility has layers, is what I’m sayin’. So let us peel some back.

Continue reading “The real secrets of iOS and accessibility”…

By Jason Snell

January 5, 2023 5:08 PM PT

When two calendars are not better than one

Speaking of Shortcuts, last weekend my pal Lex Friedman (who just started his own consulting business!) asked me to see if I could help him solve an automation program.

Lex wanted to use this shortcut to quickly generate a list of times where he’s available for meetings. This is a great use of automation—I wish I’d thought of it. Unfortunately, the shortcut only checks a single calendar, and Lex wanted his availability judged based on entries in two different calendars.

I thought of a million ways to attack this problem, but in the end I tried to keep it simple and just modified the existing shortcut. But here’s the problem: While there’s an action in the Calendar app that lets you filter calendar events based on criteria you choose, it doesn’t support both and and or logic.

So how do you find all (for example) all all-day events in a date range, in a specific calendar, containing some specific text in their title? You can’t just add a second calendar there, because the events are generally on one calendar or the other, not both.

I thought the solution was to first find all the events that match the criteria, regardless of calendar, and then place a second filter action that limits to one of the two desired calendars. Seems like it should work, but I just couldn’t get it to. Something fishy is going on there.

Here was what worked: I duplicated the Find Calendar Events action, making two separate actions, one for each calendar. I placed the results of both actions in a variable, and used the variable for the rest of the script. (In the case where I needed to sort the two sets of items together, I added a third filter action that takes all the events in the variable and sorts them together.)

This is pretty unwieldy. I don’t understand why my attempt to filter the filtered items failed, nor do I understand why Apple hasn’t allowed more sophisticated filtering actions. (To be fair, I also don’t understand how Fantastical—the app that Lex and I both use on macOS and iOS—doesn’t offer any actions like this one!)

In any event, if you need to get in touch with Lex, here’s how. I’m sure he’ll tell you when he’s available.

By Jason Snell

January 5, 2023 4:31 PM PT

Create visual feedback for running Shortcuts

Earlier today, I was complaining to Shortcuts expert Matthew Cassinelli about how there’s no really good way to view progress of a running Shortcut on macOS. Yes, the Shortcuts menu item in the menu bar sort of tries to display progress, but… it doesn’t provide any information I find particularly valuable.

I’m frustrated because I do have some Shortcuts that take time to run, yet unless I have them beep or display a notification when they reach a certain point in the process, I have no idea what they’re doing or if they’re even working.

Based on a recommendation from Matt, I managed to come up with my own little notification system. It uses SwiftBar, my favorite utility for ambient data in my Mac’s menu bar, but you could also adapt it to work with BitBar or One Thing or any other utility you’re comfortable with.

Step one is a python script, echo, that serves as my SwiftBar plugin. It reads the contents of a text file and converts them into a format SwiftBar wants: The first line is displayed in the menu bar, and if there are additional lines, they’re displayed when you click on the first line. The script also inserts a timestamp so you know the last time the status was actually updated. (Like I said, some of my Shortcuts take a very long time to run.)

Step two is writing to that text file from Shortcuts and telling SwiftBar to update the menu bar immediately. That’s pretty easy. First, I use SwiftBar’s “enable plug-in” action to turn on my plug-in. Then I create a text field containing my status, save that to my file, and use SwiftBar’s Reload action to immediately force the new data to appear in my menu bar.

The result is just what I want—an indicator of where we are in the process, and when I click, a little more information about what’s going on.

Then at the end of the job, I just need to remember to tell SwiftBar to deactivate the plug-in until I need it next. And that’s it! It might not be the ready-made solution I wanted, but it’s better than not having any idea what’s happening.