512 Pixels

Brian Stucki, on the MacStadium blog:

Here we are in 2017 and we’re bringing back a second life for the Xserve.

Since Macminicolo merged with MacStadium, we now have more space and many more options for Mac mini, Mac Pro, and 1U servers like the Xserve. While Mac Pro is definitely our focus, I feel like I owe the Xserve fans an update.

Our hosted Mac private clouds are powered by VMware and include unlimited use of vSphere Enterprise (ESXi) 6.x. Since this software can handle any number of server nodes to draw from, we use both Mac Pro and Xserve to build the fleet for customers. This helps us find just the right balance of price and power for any situation.

I really loved the Xserve hardware, and managed my fair share of them back when I was a full-time IT guy. I’m glad to see they are still working hard for customers.

Jeremy “Mr. Emoji” Burge:

After months of work aligning Unicode 10.0 code points with new features in Emoji 5.0, the 2017 emoji list is now final.

These include smileys, people, food, drink, flags, and for the first time: new fantasy characters such as a mermaid, genie, and vampire.

We are today releasing the final version of our sample images for this update. These have been designed in the “Apple style” to picture how these emojis may look when hitting phones later in the year.

Lots of fun stuff in here.

This fortnight on Liftoff brings a flight-proven Falcon 9 launch, news about Enceladus’ ice sheets and the return of the mighty RS-25.

My thanks to our sponsor:

• Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get three meals free with your first purchase, and free shipping.

This week on Connected:

Workflow has been purchased by Apple and everyone has feelings about it.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Incapsula: Secure and accelerate your website. Connected listeners get one month free.
• Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get three meals free with your first purchase, and free shipping.
• Eero: Blanket your home in fast, reliable WiFi.

We’re holding a Relay FM meetup at WWDC:

We are hosting a meetup on Monday, June 5th, from 7 - 9:30 PM at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

The event is free and open to all ages. There will be beer, so if you want to drink, you’ll need your ID on you. We aren’t doing a live show this year; this is just a good, old-fashioned social event.

We will have tickets available in early April after Apple’s WWDC lottery is complete.

Click through to get an email when tickets go up next week.

First released as part of iOS 9.3, Night Shift slowly shifts the color temperature of your screen to be warmer as the evening goes on. Some claim that this may help you sleep better, as blue light is harsher and can disrupt your sleep cycle, but the science is out on that.

I don’t know if it actually doing anything helpful, but I’ve enjoyed Night Shift on my iPhone and iPad over the last year. I often am wrapping up the day one of these two devices pretty close to bedtime, and I find the warmer tones pleasing. It may be the placebo effect, but using up a device without — ahem, watchOS team — is jarring.

With today’s release of macOS Sierra, Apple has added Night Shift to the Mac.

Of course, savvy Mac users have enjoyed a similar effect for years by way of f.lux, a free Mac app that adjusts the color temperature of the Mac’s display based on time. I’ve used it for years, and I find it hard to remember it doesn’t actually ship with a clean install of macOS.

As is the case with any Sherlocked application, f.lux will have a battle on its hands now. However, there are some pretty big differences between the two that may allow f.lux to stick around for many users.

System Requirements

Night Shift is available on the following Macs running macOS 10.12.4 or later:

• MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or later)
• MacBook (Early 2015 or later)
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or later)
• Mac mini (Late 2012 or later)
• iMac (Late 2012 or later)
• Mac Pro (Late 2013)

If you are using an external display, it must be one of these to be work with Night Shift:

• Apple LED Cinema Display
• Apple Thunderbolt Display
• LG UltraFine 5K Display
• LG UltraFine 4K Display

Update: A bunch of people on Twitter are saying Night Shift works on third-party external displays, so I’m not sure what this is about.

F.lux, on the other hand, can run on a wider range of machines, virtually any external displays and older operating systems. It’s also available for Windows and Linux.

Exceptions

One of my favorite features of f.lux is the ability to disable it based on what application is in the foreground. For example, I have Adobe Photoshop marked as an exception. as f.lux changing the color temperature of my display could cause me problems while editing photographs.

Apple’s Night Shift has no concept of exceptions. If the screen is warmer, it’s warmer for all applications.

Customization & Schedule

At first glance, f.lux and Night Shift offer pretty similar options. However, f.lux generally gives deeper customization options.

Both Night Shift and f.lux can run automatically between sunset and sunrise, based on your location.¹ Both can be manually turned on before the appointed time. F.lux can be disabled for an hour or longer from its menu bar app, while Night Shift can be toggled on and off via Notification Center.

You can adjust the warmth of things manually, for instance, in both, but f.lux also exposes a setting for what the temperature should be during the day.

Wrapping It Up

Night Shift, like many other macOS or iOS features, is much simpler than its third-party competition. It will be fine for millions of users, but for those of us who want more control, f.lux will continue to be a good option.

I’m going to give Night Shift a try, but I bet the ability to set apps to be excluded from the warmer tones will lure me back to f.lux pretty quickly.

Best of luck!

As tradition dictates on these anniversaries, I’ve rounded up a bunch of links for your enjoyment:

• Apple’s original press release
• The OFFICIAL 512 PIXLES Newton Guide, written by Thomas Brand
• iFixit Teardown of the 2000
• David Gewirtz’s review of the Newton 2000 over on Tidbits
• LowEndMac’s excellent writeup on the Newton’s history

Jacob Kastrenakes, with some upsetting news:

The US Senate has voted to overturn consumer-friendly internet privacy rules that would have prevented internet providers from sharing your web browsing history without permission.

The privacy rules, passed last year by the FCC, required internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to get each customer’s permission before sharing personal information like which websites they visit. But internet providers want to be able to sell that data and use it to target ads, so they’ve been vocal about opposing the rules since around the time President Trump took office.

Hey, this won’t seem so bad after the GOP takes healthcare away from millions, right?

Like me, Casey Newton still relies on syncing to iTunes to put music on his iPhone. And like me, he’s finding that more and more complicated:

For my system to work, iTunes has to sync. But with each passing year, the act of syncing seems to take longer than the year before. Hours pass by as my phone is “backing up,” even if I fully backed up the phone minutes before. And increasingly, sync doesn’t work at all. Sometimes I plug in my phone and iTunes doesn’t recognize it as a device. Sometimes the dreaded “unknown error” occurs. Most frequently, I get this: “iTunes cannot sync photos to the iPhone … because your Photos Library is not yet available. Please try again later.” (I am just learning that there is apparently a fix for this one.)

By themselves, each of these problems is undoubtedly fixable. Taken together, they convey the strong impression that sync is not a high priority at Apple. Even when syncing works, it often takes an unbelievable amount of time. And little wonder: there’s no profit in the perfect sync. Apple would undoubtedly prefer that I back up my entire library to the cloud and subscribe to Apple Music for $10 a month and watch all of my problems evaporate.

Yup.

Peter Hartlaub at the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Apple II Forever” was an event staged by a company still working out the bugs.

The April 24, 1984, press and exhibitor gathering was late to start and later to finish. Apple executives sat on the kind of metal folding chairs that one would find at a recreation center singles dance. Steve Jobs — hair feathered gloriously — hadn’t quite settled into his permanent turtleneck-and-jeans uniform yet, choosing a bow tie, suspenders and Velcro-strapped Nike high-tops.

But even at this early public launch of the Apple IIc computer, the marketing panache that would infuse countless future Apple events could be seen.

We recently found rare Chronicle archive photos of the event at Moscone Center in San Francisco — one of the first spectacle-permeated launches of a new Apple product. The photos were taken by Gary Fong, a longtime Chronicle photographer and photo editor who often found artistic ways to shoot routine happenings.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Click through for some amazing photos of a very young Steve Jobs, but be sure to listen to this, too:

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

Apple has finalized a deal to acquire Workflow today — a tool that lets you hook together apps and functions within apps in strings of commands to automate tasks. We’ve been tracking this one for a while but were able to confirm just now that the ink on the deal is drying as we speak.

Workflow itself has been acquired, and is now free on the iOS App Store. The team behind it, led by Ari Weinstein, will be working for Apple.

As you may imagine, Federico Viticci has written about this news:

At this stage, it’s not clear what Apple’s plans for Workflow in the long term might be. I have a few theories, but this isn’t the time to speculate. I’ll say this, though: Workflow has been the driving force behind my decision to embrace the iPad as my primary computer. Workflow is a shining example of the power of automation combined with user creativity and its underlying mission has always been clear: to allow anyone to improve how iOS can get things done for them in a better, faster, more flexible way. Workflow is the modern bicycle for the mind. There’s nothing else like it.

I have a million questions, many hopes and quite a few fears about this. Workflow is the foundation on which many like Federico have built their iPad-as-a-work-machine houses. I can see a future where it becomes more deeply supported and integrated into iOS, like an Automator or AppleScript for the modern age, but this would require Apple to really commit to making the hooks for it in iOS deeper and more accessible.

As I said on Connected this week, I believe Apple is on the cusp of making a major push with iOS in terms of making it more friendly and powerful for professionals who want to work on the iPad. Workflow being part of iOS would certainly be a good step in that direction, and one I hope Apple is ready to make. So far, things don’t look awesome, but those changes may have been out of Apple’s control.