512 Pixels

If you’re reading this, you probably already know your way around a Mac pretty well. You get your work done and everything’s fine.

But you probably want to use your Mac faster and more efficiently. You know it’s possible to really make your machine sing, but who has time to go hunting for tips and tricks by exploring an endless slurry of old blog posts and Youtube videos?

There’s a better way: Master Your Mac.

Master Your Mac is an email course for folks just like you: capable Mac users who want to up their game. Each week, you’ll receive a short, specific, actionable lesson in your inbox that will teach you a new trick or tactic for using your Mac faster and more efficiently. No basics here — this is pro-level stuff.

Sign up today and and start really putting your computer to work for you.

Today’s a big day at Relay FM.

Since leaving my job this fall, one of the big projects I’ve been working on is our new membership plan.

Relay FM is home to a wide selection of shows, and now you can choose to support the hosts you love directly monthly or annually. We’ve always felt Relay was part of a bigger community, and I think this is a nice extension of that idea.

We are throwing in some fun perks, and have lots of ideas for future member-only goodies. I’d love if you found a couple of shows you enjoy to help support.

This video may be everything wrong with Apple in 1996. I’d write more about this, but I fell asleep.

This week on Material, Relay FM’s Google-focused podcast:

We’re joined by Matías Duarte, Vice President of Design at Google. We talk about everything from Material Design to how to camouflage LEGO against couches.

Boom.

Now I know I can’t install iLife ‘05 on my original iBook:

iLife ‘05 requires a computer with a display resolution of at least 1024 x 768 pixels. This means that iLife ‘05 cannot be installed on the original iBooks. The original iBooks are Blueberry, Tangerine, or Graphite in color. The iBook (FireWire) computers, which are Indigo, Key Lime, and Graphite in color, are also affected.

This week on Connected, Federico and I talk about the Mac App Store, iCloud Photo Library and (sigh) iPhone 7 rumo(u)rs.

My thanks to these three sponsors:

• lynda.com: An easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. Free 10-day trial.
• Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
• Foot Cardigan: Make giving socks as gifts fun and cool! Get 10% off any subscription using code CONNECTED at checkout.

Earlier this month, I spoke at Ignite Memphis about podcasting: what it is, why it’s growing and what makes it special. It was a ton of fun, and the video is online now.

Sketch:

We’ve been considering our options for some time. Over the last year, as we’ve made great progress with Sketch, the customer experience on the Mac App Store hasn’t evolved like its iOS counterpart. We want to continue to be a responsive, approachable, and easily-reached company, and selling Sketch directly allows us to give you a better experience.

We don’t expect this decision to be unanimously popular, but we want to share how we arrived at it. We take your satisfaction and support seriously, and hope you can understand the choice we have made.

Unsurprising news for unsurprising reasons.

Well, Fraser Speirs wins our corner of the Internet today.

Are you a full-time freelancer or independent worker? Do you make a pretty good living and like the work you do? Every year, do you think “man, why is my tax bill so high?" then think, “well, I guess this is just how it is for folks like me."

Then, you write that big check to Uncle Sam. You may find yourself wondering if you could have done something different. Or, if the check is really huge, you might even wonder if it wouldn’t be cheaper to just get a regular job again…

Chances are, if you’ve read this far, Andrew Carroll can help you.

He’s a CPA/PFS, CITP, and CGMA and the General Manager of NCH Tax & Wealth Advisors in Fullerton, California. What all that means is that, to be honest, he probably know more about taxes than you or anybody you know.

Andrew has worked with dozens of people just like you in situations just like the one described above.

The Freelancer’s Guide to Escaping Taxes is a distilled version of the same advice he’s been giving to folks just like you for years. If you want to know the truth, Andrew figured out it’d more efficient to spend the time writing it down than repeatedly saying it. Go check it out.

Hosted by Aleen Simms, Less Than or Equal is built on the belief that high-quality conversations about equality, awareness and understanding help drive us to a place where everyone of every gender, sexual orientation, race, color, physical ability, and physical appearance deserves to be treated equally by the tech industry and other geeky communities.

We’re excited for Aleen to be working on this project as part of Relay now. Go subscribe for some of the best interviews out there.

During the Photos beta, I gave both Photos.app and iCloud Photo Library a run for their money. I imported my photos — which had been living in Dropbox — and uploaded them.

It was a mess, so I decided that Dropbox + Finder was the way forward for me. I removed my files from iCloud after reading this support document.

After 30 days, I checked, and iCloud seemed to have removed my photos. I went back to Dropbox a little annoyed, but happy that I had given Apple’s solution a shot.

Over the week of Thanksgiving, I decided to give it another try. I hadn’t really spent any time with Photos.app since OS X El Capitan, and I had heard a lot of good things from people I know about it.

I imported my photos and uploaded my 70GB photo library to iCloud. Everything went very smoothly, so I turned on iCloud Photo Library on my iPad.

Aaaaaand it all exploded.

After two days, my iPad still just showed a spinner when I tapped the Photos app.

Today, I opened Photos.app on my Mac to look at some photos I’d taken with my iPhone over the holiday and noticed something that made my heart stop.

Most of my albums had duplicate entries that were empty. I assume these were brought in from data that I told iCloud to delete, but it hadn’t.

A bunch of empty duplicate albums would be annoying to clean up, but upon digging, I discovered that not all my albums had been duplicated. Some — including one with 1800 family photos from a vacation — had been overwritten with an empty album of the same name. Turning iCloud Photo Library back on from my iPad introduced some sort of leftover data not deleted from my iCloud account, overwriting (and removing) newer data on my Mac.

Because I am a nerd, I have backups. I have all of my photos safe and sound, but I’ve got iCloud Photo Library off forever now. I can’t trust it after this failure. I know that there’s a lot of talk that CloudKit is better than the shit Apple first shipped with iCloud, but this is unacceptable.

I understand Apple not wanting to expose a lot about what’s stored in iCloud, but I trusted that when I told the system to remove all traces of my previous iCloud Photo Library — per their directions — that it would work.

Clearly, it didn’t. I don’t know if the leftover data was left on iCloud itself or maybe my iPad, but it shouldn’t matter. I told Apple to remove my data and it failed in doing so.

I will probably keep my photos in Photos.app, but I won’t be uploading them to Apple’s service again. Photo management needs to be bulletproof, and iCloud has proven, yet again, to be far from it.