512 Pixels

Apple Support:

Downloading, installing, and removing Dashboard widgets has been greatly improved in Mac OS X 10.4.2 and later. For the best widget installation experience, be sure to update to the latest version of Mac OS X 10.4.

In short, when you ran a Dashboard widget for the first time, it was in “test drive” mode, meaning you had to tell Mac OS X you wanted to keep it installed after playing around with it the first time.

To remove a widget, Apple made a Widget Manager for easily uninstalling unwanted widgets:

In 10.4 and 10.4.1, this process was way worse:

1. In the Finder, choose Home from the Go menu.
2. Open the Library folder.
3. Open the Widgets folder.
4. Look for the widget that you want to remove from the Dashboard Widget Bar, and drag it out of the Widgets folder. If you want to delete it, put it in the Trash and empty the Trash.

Yikes.

Benjamin Wallace at Vulture:

The streaming platform raised $1.75 billion and secured a roster of A-list talent, but it can’t get audiences to notice.

SheetPlanner helps you organize information, manage your projects, and schedule your tasks and activities with unparalleled power and flexibility.

Get organized…

Organize information using the Outliner to provide structure. Populate the start, finish and progress columns to create a schedule and track progress. Add custom, text, number, date, symbol, list and picture columns to track additional information.

Make a plan…

Visualize tasks with start and finish dates on the Timeline. Change the Timeline scope to get a high level view of your project over multiple years or zoom in to weeks or even days for more precision. See the progress of each task in the Timeline. Customize the color of Timeline bars. Preview and print the Timeline.

Get things done…

Use filters to focus on what’s important, due today, due tomorrow, or whatever criteria you determine. View filtered tasks in the timeline, month and yearly calendar. Check items off as they are completed in the outline, timeline, month or year views. Hide completed items to stay focused.

You can download SheetPlanner from the Mac App Store, where a 21-day trial is available.

Today, David Sparks and I are thrilled to introduce More Power Users, a special dedicated feed for MPU members that includes ad-free episodes, as well as regular bonus segments, more focused on news or current happening in the Apple community. This is something we don’t get to do very often on MPU, and we’re excited to have this conversations together.

(For example, this week after our interview with David Smith, we talked for a while about the possibility of touchscreens coming to Macs.)

You can join here:

• $5/month
• $50/year

If you are already a MPU member, just sign in to your Memberful account, select More Power Users from the drop down list and easily subscribe in your podcast app of choice.

My thanks to The Omni Group for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week.

Since their founding in 1992, The Omni Group has created powerful tools for productive professionals. Designed for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, the Omni Productivity Suite is software engineered with pros (and their work) in mind.

Some things never change, I suppose.

This week’s episode of Connected is a special one:

The guys talk with Jenny Chen, an Apple engineer who works on Apple Pencil software, and Stephen Tonna from Apple’s product marketing team about what’s new in iPad OS 14, including Scribble and the release’s updated design language. Then, Federico, Myke and Stephen discuss the future of both Apple Arcade and iPhone chargers.

I really enjoyed getting to chat with Jenny and Stephen. iPadOS 14 is seriously cool.

My thanks to them and to our sponsors:

• PDFpen, from Smile: The ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac.
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• Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2021.

This time on Liftoff:

Black holes doing weird black hole things, a progress report on the SLS and a discussion of how some of NASA’s facilities should be renamed.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Tuparev Technologies: Introducing StarBrush: Modern astronomical imaging tool for everyone.

This week on Ungeniused: a PSA from me (and a begrudging Myke) about how the Winter Olympics are the coolest games in town.

Haiku is an open-source project dedicated to rebuilding BeOS. The group just released the second beta, and Jim Salter has a thorough look at it over on Ars Technica.

If you aren’t familiar with BeOS, check out this episode of my podcast Flashback, on which Quinn Nelson and I dug deep into the operating system and its parent company.

Apple Support:

A Macintosh Manager administrator can hand out files to members of the currently active workgroup, or to specific users that belong to the active workgroup (Figure 1). This feature is only available when logged in as a Macintosh Manager administrative user, either a Workgroup Administrator or a Global Macintosh Manager Administrator. When logged in to a Panels environment, this feature is found in the File menu. If the Hand Out command is dimmed, bring the Documents Panel to the foreground to make it available.

What was Macintosh Manager? Dennis Sellers has details.

Kellen Browning and Jack Nicas:

The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said that Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”

“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”

The NYT never took part in Apple News+, but even that seems to have resulted in disappointing revenue for publishers. I know some in the Apple world would prefer the company to be between them and publishers to obscure their personal information, but clearly that doesn’t work with existing business models. I don’t blame the NYT for making this call.