512 Pixels

Syambra Moitozo:

I grew up in Silicon Valley two decades before it was cool enough to be the title of a show on HBO. My parents were conventional hippies who drove Volvos donned with “Save Tibet” and “Question Authority” bumper stickers. The public elementary school I went to in the Santa Cruz Mountains had only 30 kids in the 5th grade.

No matter their livelihoods or income levels, whether they were on food stamps or had enough money to get their kids their own miniature drivable Power Wheels Jeeps for Christmas —the parents would help out in whatever ways they could. My dad would take our class on nature walks while another girl’s mom led our Girl Scout troop. In 5th grade, we’d stay after school so my friend Sara’s dad could teach us about computers.

Sara’s dad happens to be Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

Whoa.

Displays and wireless routers aren’t the only things Apple has left behind over the decades. This month on MacStories, I wrote about all sorts of businesses Apple has exited. It was a lot of fun to write about old-ass scanners and more.

Apple’s new Support app for iOS makes getting help with an iOS product a lot easier. Thumbs up.

Astra is a new iPhone app that acts as a client to Amazon’s Alexa service. It’s like having an Echo right in your pocket. Everything that works on the stand-alone devices seems to work in the app.

I’m a big fan of what Amazon is doing in this space. I just bought an Echo Dot to put on my desk after loving the Echo we put in our kitchen earlier this year.

Astra is on my home screen.

I remember being impressed by this at the time:

Apple maintains a list of known malicious software that is used during the safe download check to determine if a file contains malicious software. The list is stored locally, and with Security Update 2011-003 is updated daily by a background process.

If you do not wish to receive these updates, you can disable daily update by unchecking “Automatically update safe downloads list” in the Security pane, in System Preferences. This option appears in Security preferences after Security Update 2011-003 is installed.

Speaking of the iPad Pro, Jason Snell’s wish list for the device is spot-on.

Federico Viticci has been using an iPad as his main computing device for years, but the 12.9-inch iPad Pro has unlocked a whole new world for the most handsome writer and podcaster I know.

Most of the photos I take for this website are done with my DSLR, but sometimes I end up posting photos taken with my iPhone. Those images include geolocation data, which is not something I want to share with the world.

I used to use Photoshop for removing this information, but thankfully, Preview on macOS makes it easy to get rid of this information.¹

Open an image, then choose Show Inspector from the Tools menu.

On the second tab, there will be a GPS section. Simply click the Remove Location Info button on this pane and save the image again. All geolocation data will be removed, keeping the location of your top-secret bunker safe and sound from the Internet.

Designed by Apple in California and A Personal Guide to Personal Computers are not the only books Apple has published in the last 40 years.

So Far: The First Ten Years of a Vision was published in 1987, and celebrated the company’s tenth anniversary. Unlike *Designed by Apple in California," this book mixes text and photos nicely. It’s built on the premise that Apple is about far more than computers.

Chapter names include things like “Freedom,” “Courage,” and “Sharing.” The book is full of little stories about people making a difference in the world using Apple computers. It’s all very upbeat and touchy-feely. It even includes numerous page with the names of all past and present employees as of January 1, 1987.

This week on Connected:

AirPods are shipping, Mario needs the Internet and Myke has a story.

My thanks to our sponsor this week:

• Foot Cardigan: Fantastic socks delivered to your mailbox every month. Get 10% off any subscription plan with the code WORLD

Today’s update to macOS brings a bunch of fixes:

• Improves setup and reliability of Auto Unlock
• Allows addition of a Chinese Trackpad Handwriting button to the Touch Bar Control Strip
• Adds support for taking screenshots of the Touch Bar using the Grab app or Cmd-Shift-6 shortcut
• Fixes an issue that caused the Touch Bar emoji picker to appear on the display
• Resolves graphics issues on MacBook Pro (October 2016) computers
• Fixes an issue where System Integrity Protection was disabled on some MacBook Pro (October 2016) computers
• Improves setup and opt-out experience for iCloud Desktop and Documents
• Fixes an issue with the delivery of Optimized Storage alerts
• Improves audio quality when using Siri and FaceTime with Bluetooth headphones
• Improves the stability of Photos when creating and ordering books
• Fixes an issue where incoming Mail messages did not appear when using a Microsoft Exchange account
• Fixes an issue that prevented installation of Safari Extensions downloaded outside the Safari Extensions Gallery
• Adds support for new installations of Windows 8 and Windows 7 using Boot Camp on supported Macs

It’s out in the Mac App Store now.

10.12.2 also brings another change: the removal of the “time remaining” estimate in the battery menu bar item. Some have said that this is a good change, as those estimates were rarely accurate. I’d rather Apple fix their battery meter than remove it altogether.

Copland was Apple’s failed attempt to modernize the classic Mac OS in the mid 1990s. While parts of it would end up in Mac OS 8, the dream of a modern Mac operating system wouldn’t be realized until after Apple bought NeXT.¹

Copland is a really interesting (and sad) chapter in the Mac’s history. Here are some documents I’ve collected over the years about it:

• An Introduction to Copland
• Copland Technical Overview

“Mac OS 8 Build D11E4” was a preview build of Copland. It ran on very select hardware, and had to be connected via a serial cable to a Power Mac running a special Debugger program:

• How to Install Mac OS 8 (D11E4)
• Mac OS 8 (D11E4) Release Notes

Good times.