Federico makes a confession, the trio considers how Apple could improve Do Not Disturb and then Myke forgets how Round Robins work.
My thanks to our sponsors for this episode:
David Sparks and Brett Terpstra are back with a new project:
60 Mac Tips, Volume 2, is a collection of tricks and tips to make you more efficient on your Mac. There are 60 screencasts and two hours of video that explains why each tip or trick is special and how to use it on your Mac. Learn these tips and turn yourself into a Mac power user.
Among these 60 screencasts are tips on macOS, Siri for the Mac, using the keyboard, Spotlight, Automator, Safari, Mail, Apple Notes, Apple Photos, Terminal Tips, and third-party apps. After reading and watching these tips and tricks, you’ll be more efficient on your Mac than ever.
David and Brett are two of the smartest guys around when it comes to this. Go check it out.
If you own one of these 4K or 5K displays, this seems like a nice update to the software that makes it integrate with the Mac so well.
In the excellent Monday Note:
Acquiring Sony would give Apple a huge competitive advantage: access to the most advanced [camera] chips of the industry, ahead of its smartphone competitors. Given the camera’s importance to the iPhone, this is a strong competitive argument against Samsung’s Galaxy or Google’s Pixel.
And:
A brand new Apple Pictures Entertainment built on SPE would make Apple one of the Big Six Hollywood studios, with a market share nearly at par with 20th Century Fox (both stood in the 10 percent range over the recent years). No doubt that, with the iTunes store, Apple TV, iPad and iPhone, an Apple-Sony Studios would thrive.
And:
Sony’s Playstation dominates the game console sector with a market share of 57 percent and about $20B in sales. PS4’s sales are twice that of Microsoft’s Xbox and four times Nintendo’s Wii.
I find it hard to argue with this. I don’t think it will happen, but the pieces are all here.
Balance is a powerful menubar app for your money built by a team from Apple, Stripe and Ethereum. It was featured in the U.S. Mac App Store when it launched in February.
Balance uses Plaid.com, the best API for securely accessing your financial data. It gives the app a read-only token to access your account history.
With one click or keyboard shortcut you can pop open Balance and check all of your accounts. Lock the app with a password or TouchID.
As a native app with local data storage, Balance is super fast. Quickly search through all of your downloaded transactions with powerful filters.
Balance is Hazel for money. You can create rules to trigger useful notifications to help you stay on top of your finances.
The basic plan starts at $4.99 / month. Balance is launching on iOS and watchOS later this year, and is also building a full windowed app for macOS. Early customers will get access to betas for all of these.
Check out Balance on the U.S. Mac App Store today. International support is planned for later this year.
I was exchanging emails with a reader about the lack of meaningful Touch Bar improvements in High Sierra over the weekend, and this morning, saw this on Twitter from Michael Lopp:
High Sierra fixes for MacBook Pro Touch Bar appear to be zero. Please tell me I am mistaken.
— rands (@rands) October 2, 2017
I don’t have any major problems with the Touch Bar on my MacBook Pro; I just don’t find it all that useful. I type too quickly for the Quick Type to keep up in a helpful manner, and many apps I use don’t offer much in custom shortcuts. In apps that do, I am so hardwired into keyboard shortcuts, I can’t be bothered to move my hands from the keyboard to tap a glowing button.
It’s not all bad, mind you. I love the emoji picker, and I think for users who aren’t use to keyboard shortcuts, the Touch Bar is a big win. But as a pro Mac user using a pro Mac notebook, I find a bit underwhelming.
I — like most users — love Touch ID on the Mac. It’s fast, widely supported by the operating system, and of course, by apps like 1Password. There’s no evidence to support that Apple would ship Touch ID without the the Touch Bar, as both technologies rely on the tiny Apple Watch-like computer (complete with Secure Enclave) buried inside my laptop. That’s a bummer, as I think biometric login is the future.
Of course, if Face ID is coming to Macs at some point, the need for Touch ID will diminish. As I outlined in that post, there is evidence that the iMac Pro could be the first iMac to ship with Face ID, but it doesn’t come with a Touch Bar on its custom space gray keyboard. Once Touch ID is gone, will the Touch Bar go with it?
Backing away from the Touch Bar would be a bitter pill for Apple to swallow, but every hardware release where it stays contained to the MacBook Pro, I can’t help but wonder. High Sierra’s lack of major update to how the system and apps can use it makes me wonder even more. Is the Touch Bar going to end up just a weird blip?
To mark Childhood Cancer Awareness Month each year, I raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I do so via the hospital’s annual marathon.
This year, my oldest two kids — including our St. Jude patient — are running the kids marathon. They’ve been running around the neighborhood with my wife, and will run the last mile in downtown Memphis this December.
We set up a fundraising page with a $9,000 goal; one grand to mark each year of our son’s life. Each one is a miracle.
You, dear Apple community, came out strong this year:
Thank you. It’s a crazy world, and there a thousand good non-profits that need support. You have lots of options, and it means a ton to me that you’ve chosen to rally around this hospital that cares for kids with cancer, all without charging their parents a dime.
Today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he hopes to finance his plans to colonize Mars by making SpaceX’s entire fleet of vehicles — the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy, and the Dragon spacecraft — obsolete.
Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress, Musk said that SpaceX will eventually start stockpiling these vehicles and then focus all of its resources into developing the company’s next monster vehicle: the Interplanetary Transport System, codenamed the BFR (for Big Fucking Rocket).
The ITS would be capable of sending stuff to low Earth orbit like the company’s Falcon 9 is today, but be scaled up to go the moon or Mars. (Oh, and SpaceX could use the tech to for city-to-city rocket travel here on Earth.)
The former is really interesting. Vice President Mike Pence, who has revived the National Space Council, is widely assumed to push NASA to focus on lunar missions before a trip to the Red Planet. SpaceX enjoys a large NASA contract now, and wants to be in place as a provider for moon missions for the US government, not to other nations and private-sector companies.
Grush continues:
Of course, Musk’s ultimate goal is still Mars, and he’s still making incredibly optimistic predictions about when the company is going to get there. Last year, Musk claimed the first crews would start flying to the Red Planet as early as 2024. This year, he said the first two cargo ITS ships will launch to Mars in 2022. That’s just five years to create an entirely new rocket, send it to another planet, and land it on the surface intact. If it does land successfully, it’ll be the heaviest vehicle to ever make it to the Martian surface in one piece. (The most we’ve ever landed on Mars has weighed about 2,000 pounds, but the ITS can supposedly land between 20 to 50 tons.)
As always with Musk, these timelines are unrealistic, if not downright silly. That aside, SpaceX is clearly thinking beyond low Earth orbit, and that’s probably wise, as NASA is as well.
In 1988 Apple’s Advanced Technology Graphics Group created a short filmed named Pencil Test to show off the capabilities of the Macintosh II:
The company published two support documents about the film.
Reading this documents is a little wild. The Macintosh II was a modular system, unlike Steve Jobs’ original all-in-one. Apple speaks to both sides of the closed/open coin, claiming they have the best of both worlds: integrated system software and factory hardware with the ability to accommodate modularity at the same time:
There are advantages and disadvantages both to the totally integrated systems and the open modular systems. Totally integrated system’s advantages include having hardware and software tied directly together and having one place to get support. Disadvantages include being locked into the one company’s point of view about how to do things, working only with their tools, and, often, being locked into that company’s software. An integrated solution on non-Macintosh systems is most likely pieced together from a variety of third-party products.
Open module systems offer one of the main advantages of Macintosh: integration. With the Macintosh consistency of user interface, different modules from different publishers have the familiar user interface. The best drawing program can be used with the best animation program while using the best video card.
What’s even more interesting is the company Apple is gunning for in these documents:
Amiga animation and Pencil Test do not compare well. The Amiga solution uses 256 colors/8 bits per pixel, while Pencil Test uses 16,800,000 colors or 24 bits per pixel. Doing the shading used in Pencil Test on an Amiga results in a palette of a few main colors with many shades of those few colors. Also, be aware that many of the video products for the Amiga work at a resolution of 320 x 200 pixels. This is a fairly low-resolution graphics when compared to the Macintosh solutions using a minimum of 640 x 480 pixels. Using a product like RGB/Videolink 1400A, it is feasible to use pixel counts as high as can be purchased; that is, 2048 x 1024, 1024 x 1024, and so on.
Of interest, the developers of the top Amiga animation products are in the process of moving their applications to the Macintosh II. Many have completed the move.
Big thanks to Brian, who emailed me about these kbase articles.
Small problem: it doesn’t exist.
This week on Query: HEVC, iOS 11 feature fragmentation, iOS 11’s Do Not Disturb While Driving feature and much more!
The new, second-generation Echo is smaller, with better speakers and a design I find far nicer than the first-generation model that currently sits in my kitchen. At $99, it’s cheaper, too. Seems like a win.
The $35 Echo Connect is far stranger. Pitched as a phone replacement, it plugs in to your old analog phone line and lets you make phone calls, including to 911.
Both devices go on sale later this year. I’m excited about the former, but as we stopped paying AT&T for a landline years ago, I’ll pass on the latter.
There is also the Echo Spot, a smart alarm clock and the Echo Plus which doubles as a smart home hub and looks just like the original Echo.