512 Pixels

My thanks to Thord D. Hedengren and his newsletter, Switch to Glass, for sponsoring the site this week. Switch to iPad isn’t just for those who have made the switch from a traditional computer to a more versatile one. It’s a newsletter — and a website! — about getting the most out of your iPad.

Supporting Switch to iPad costs $5/month or $50/year, but 512 Pixels readers can try it free for 14 days, no strings attached, using this link. The site, however, is completely free, so do check that out too.

Last week, I wrote about the first email sent from space, and how there was a discrepancy in what date has been reported for the event:

So where’s the mystery in all of this? Well, according to NASA, Apple, and Guinness Book of World Records this message was sent on August 9, 1991. STS-43 took place from August 2 to 11 that year, so I feel confident the date the message was sent is indeed August 9.

Despite this, I’ve seen it reported several times that August 28, 1991 is the date in question, including the Computer History Museum. I suspect this is the source often used, leading to the wrong date being published in multiple other places. I’ve contacted the museum with my research and will update this post if they get back to me with clarification.

I am happy to report that the Computer History Museum responded to my email containing my research, and have updated their entry for this event to reflect the correct date: August 9, 1991.

This is the power of investigative journalism, I suppose.

This week on Connected:

September is here, and that means iPhone and Apple Watch rumors are heating up. Stephen and Myke go through what’s new on that front, cover some cool new Mac accessories, share regrets about Nest and kick off National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you already know that St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital holds an important place in my heart. My oldest son Josiah is the reason:

In a couple of months, he’ll be turning 13. Many parents of pre-teens will tell you that’s probably a miracle in and of itself, but Josiah is special. When he was just six months old, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

To be honest with you, his diagnosis feels like it was several lifetimes ago. It’s hard to keep track of how much he’s been through between surgeries and physical therapy and chemo and MRIs and feeding tubes and speech therapy and on and on and on. Cancer doesn’t give a rip about what you had planned; when dealing with a tumor, you’re on its turf most of the time.

Josiah made it through. He’s no longer a cancer patient; he’s a cancer survivor.

That’s thanks to the work being done at St. Jude.

When we first arrived, they already had all of his case files from our local children’s hospital. They had a plan to beat his brain tumor, and that’s what they did — without charging my family a single dime for any of it. In fact, in the 12 years we’ve been a St. Jude family, we haven’t paid anything for his care. They saved his life, and they did it without putting financial stress on what was at the time a very young family.

This work is possible thanks to donors from all around the world, and that’s why each September, I talk and write about St. Jude. I can’t help myself; when you’re given such an amazing gift, it must be shared.

This month, you’ll hear about St. Jude across the Relay FM family of podcasts, and from 12-8 PM on September 17, Myke Hurley and I will be co-hosting the third annual Podcastathon for St. Jude on Relay FM’s Twitch channel.

We’ve set our goal for this year’s campaign at $333,333.33, and are already at over $80,000 raised! If you can give anything, I’d love for you to donate to this amazing mission.

As always, thank you.

This week, an old Q&A-style Apple Support document:

Are there problems with connecting an external SCSI hard drive to the Macintosh Portable? I have a Macintosh Portable with an internal 40MB drive. When I tried to connect a 45MB external drive, the Macintosh Portable refused to boot. The “Sad Mac” icon came up with the error code: 0000000F 00000002.

The Macintosh Portable can access and use any external SCSI device that a Macintosh Plus can access. There may be an issue with the SCSI driver on the hard drive and compatibility with the Portable boot ROMs, but we do not have any information on this problem.

Ron Amadeo has written a real tale of woe for Ars Technica:

Google Talk, Google’s first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can’t say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today.

The iPad is a truly magical piece of glass. It’s the primary computer for many. That’s why Thord D. Hedengren started Switch to iPad, a weekly newsletter about making the switch to a better computing life.

Switch to iPad isn’t just for those who have made the switch from a traditional computer to a more versatile one. It’s a newsletter about getting the most out of your iPad.

It isn’t just a newsletter anymore either; Switch to iPad now has a new home on the web. The website is free and updated by Thord several times a week.

So far, Thord has discussed things like note-taking, developing and designing on an iPad, email apps, games, and a lot more. At the time of writing, there are over 60 issues of Switch to iPad sitting in the archive. That’s more than 60,000 words about the switching to the iPad.

Many of those words are free to read, but the majority requires a paid subscription. Supporting Switch to iPad costs $5/month or $50/year, but 512 Pixels readers can try it free for 14 days, no strings attached, using this link. The site, however, is completely free, so do check that out too.

Take a look at Switch to iPad, read a couple of issues and if it’s your cup of tea, consider a subscription.

Starting with a pet project for Steve Jobs, all the way to a modern, web-infused set of applications across multiple platforms, iWork has expanded into a suite of tools more than capable of meeting almost anyone’s needs. This week on MPU, David and I talk through Keynote, Pages and Numbers, giving tips and comparing them to office suites offered by other companies.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
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My thanks to Black Ink from Red Sweater for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week. Black Ink celebrates the art of crosswords by offering a beautiful solving experience on your Mac. Download and solve right in the app, or print the puzzles with your preferred layout to solve with a pen or pencil.

Thirty years ago, a Macintosh Portable was used to send an email from aboard the space shuttle Atlantis as part of the STS-43 mission.

The email in question was sent to Marsha Ivins at Johnson Space Center and said:

Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!

The message was sent via AppleLink, an online service created for use between Apple, its customers, and its various dealers and partners. (It was replaced by eWorld in 1994.)

Adam Engst wrote about this event back in 1991:

According to Michael Elliot Silver, AppleLink Development Project Manager, this success came after two failed connections. An error message reading “The modem pool is not responding” was reported by the Atlantis crew, apparently caused by a spike in the signal putting the ROLM data switching system “back to sleep” after a connection had been established the first time. The second failure occurred because the ROLM had not reset itself properly. The third time was the charm, but because the TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) was in low-power mode (part of one of the experiments) and because the shuttle was at a poor attitude in relation to the TDRS, the signal was very weak, and after a couple of minutes the signal began dropping in and out and was lost.

The message was part of a wider set of experiments looking at what sorts of computer controls were best suited for use in microgravity. Here’s Engst again:

The cursor-control experiments were designed (by Lockheed scientists) to determine what kinds of cursor-control devices might be suitable for use on future shuttle missions or on the planned space station. Since there is no gravity to speak of in orbit, a mechanical mouse, which depends on gravity holding a heavy ball against rollers, is useless. The devices that were tested were the Mac Portable’s trackball, a modified aircraft control stick fitted with a thumb ball at the top, a two-inch trackball, and an optical mouse. No test results are available as yet, but we will try to pass them along as soon as Apple or NASA releases them!

According to earlier reports, the Macintosh is not the computer of choice for the space program; a DOS-compatible laptop is. However, Lockheed discovered that the Macintosh had the widest variety of pointing devices available right now, so it became the obvious choice for the experiments. Some future experiments will probably take place with a DOS laptop, but if this mission is any indication, the astronauts will soon be clamoring to get their Macintosh back!

Apple has an archived support document about the project, which includes a very-90s Editor’s Note about the jargon used in the message:

cry = cryogenics (meaning, send more fuel for life support–air, etc.)

CS = Reaction Control System (meaning, send more fuel for maneuvering/control) In other words, they wanted to stay up there!

So where’s the mystery in all of this? Well, according to NASA, Apple, and Guinness Book of World Records this message was sent on August 9, 1991. STS-43 took place from August 2 to 11 that year, so I feel confident the date the message was sent is indeed August 9.

Despite this, I’ve seen it reported several times that August 28, 1991 is the date in question, including the Computer History Museum. I suspect this is the source often used, leading to the wrong date being published in multiple other places. I’ve contacted the museum with my research and will update this post if they get back to me with clarification.

Update: The Computer History Museum got in touch and fixed their error!

Steve at Mac84 has launched a new series talking about which Macs are good choices for burgeoning collectors. If you’re looking for a new pandemic hobby, this video is for you.

Apple’s constant reworking of Safari 15 this summer has been one of the most interesting software stories to come out of the company in a long time. It’s not very often that we see Apple rework something so thoroughly in public.

I’m a fan of the changes Apple has made to Safari 15 so far. The iPhone version was a big mess, and the “compact” tab designed that debuted on the Mac and the iPad made little sense on devices with larger screens. As the time of this writing, we’re still in the beta cycle, but I suspect the options to move the iPhone’s browser UI to the top or bottom of the screen will ship, as will the ability to go back to the compact view on the iPad and Mac. Combined with the option to show color in the tab bar, it’s hard to believe these are all the same browser:

I’m showing the Mac version of Safari 15 here, but the iPhone’s changeable UI is just as jarring. I’m also using the Mac version as an example because it’s what I use all day every day when I’m at my desk.

My personal preference is to disable the use of color in tabs, and to banish the compact view forever. This leaves my Safari looking liking this. My yet-unaddressed complaints revolve around the new tab design that I end up with after setting my preferences:

And here it is for you Dark Mode lovers:

First, there’s the ordering of the UI elements at the top of the screen:

• Address and Search
• Tabs
• Favorites Bar

This divorces the tab — which includes the name of the current webpage — from the webpage itself. Maybe everyone at Apple prefers their bookmarks in the Sidebar instead, but for those of us who are used to the more traditional location,¹ having the Favorites Bar split the tab and its content makes skimming what tabs are where more work than it should be.

To make matters worse, it’s hard to tell at a glance which tab is active and which is inactive. Previous versions of Safari didn’t struggle with this, but Apple has seem to fit to bring the age-old “which iPad app has focus” problem to the browser. Using the Monterey beta, I almost always end up trying to tab to or away from the wrong tab because I can’t quickly register which one is active when looking at the tab bar.

That’s not to mention that they look just downright silly, especially if you’re big into wide Safari windows:

Aaaaand that’s not to mention that the button to close a tab appears under the site’s icon at just the right moment for you to accidentally close a tab you’re just meaning to click into.

Apple has made good progress in righting was a terrible wrong with the first version of Safari 15, but just because it’s basically fixed on the iPhone doesn’t mean it’s fine on the iPad or the Mac.