512 Pixels

Dave Wiskus’ newest video is a great look back at the history of the UI. Check it out.

The Verge’s Vlad Savov:

The iPhone’s lead as the smartphone to beat has rarely been defined by just one thing. At one point, the biggest advantage was the simplicity and speed of its interface; at another, it was down to the diversity and quality of available apps; and most recently, the iPhone has distinguished itself with the quality of its 8-megapixel camera. Today, the combination of all these things — simple and fast operation, strong optics and image processing, and a wide app ecosystem — is helping people create the best possible images with the least possible hassle.

While I think the iPhone has the lead over Android in several categories, Savov’s point about the iPhone camera is true:

The effortlessness of taking good pictures with the iPhone is probably that phone’s most underrated quality. And yet, its importance grows with every passing day.

I’m taking a photo a day this year, and while I have a nice Olympus mirrorless camera, I know that shots taken with my iPhone 6 are far beyond “good enough” for my usage.

Apple has cared about photography for a long time (despite what Aperture users may think), and that care is what drives the bar higher and higher when it comes to the iPhone.

Just look at the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. I’m sure it nearly killed some industrial designers at the company to have a protruding camera, but clearly good optics were of a higher priority. I appreciate that, and I think a large portion of the smartphone buying market does, too. It blows my mind that Android OEMs can’t get this right.

If you see weird DNS issues on your Mac, this article may help you sort them out.

I’ve finally crashed MPU:

Katie and David sit down with Stephen Hackett of 512pixles.net to discuss his previous life as an Apple Genius, how he juggles a day job, Relay.fm and being Editor-in-Chief of the Sweet setup with his family life, his love of old Macs and more.

A huge thanks to Katie and David for having me on. It was a ton of fun to talk about keeping everything I juggle in the air.

Jason Snell:

Over the years I’ve said numerous times that when it comes to battery life on iOS devices, Apple appears to have a target battery life in mind and builds its hardware—a balance of power-saving software, hardware efficiency, and battery capacity—to hit that number.

It’s an observation born out of reading spec sheet after spec sheet over the years while writing reviews of new iPhones and iPads. Every year, people who are frustrated with their iPhones running out of juice before the end of the day hold out hope that the next iPhone will ameliorate the issue. In general, those people have not been satisfied.

Turns out, every iPad has gotten 9-10 hours of battery life. There’s a little more variation on the iPhone side of things, but not much until you get to the 6 Plus.

Dan Goodin:

The potential privacy glitch affects people who have configured the Mac Mail App to turn off the “load remote content in messages” setting, as security experts have long advised. Spammers, stalkers, and online marketers often use remote images as a homing beacon to surreptitiously track people opening e-mail. Because the images are hosted on sites hosted by the e-mail sender, the sender can log the IP address that viewed the message, as well as the times and how often the message was viewed, and the specific e-mail addresses that received the message. Many users prefer to keep their e-mail addresses, IP addresses, and viewing habits private, a goal that’s undermined by the viewing of remote images.

Yeah, Apple doesn’t have a quality problem. No way.

A year ago, Federico, Myke and I looked back at the original iPhone keynote. It’s hard to believe the announcement was eight years ago.

Jason Snell:

If Gurman’s reports are accurate, this new model pulls the MacBook Air line away from the MacBook Pro. In fact, it returns the MacBook Air to its roots—as a product full of choices that we consider crazy at first, because they’re out of step with conventional computer design, but that will appeal to a target audience that doesn’t actually care about those de rigueur features.

We talked about this machine at length on yesterday’s show, but Jason’s article sums up my thoughts pretty squarely.

Everything about this machine screams next-gen, like the original MacBook Air, and even the MacBook Pro with Retina display. While the single USB port thing seems insane to me, I can’t write it off entirely. Apple’s always had forward-looking machines — think the 128k, iMac, etc — that have dropped things everyone at the time felt were essential.

I think this machine will come into the product line between the current MacBook Air and the MacBook Pros for that reason. Like the MacBook Pro with Retina display, I bet it will slowly push down the line, edging out the machines of today over the coming years.

Apple:

Over the years, Apple has driven incredible job growth and created entirely new industries. In fact, our products and innovations have led to over 1 million U.S. jobs — from our engineers and retail employees to suppliers, manufacturers, and app developers.

Connected is old enough to drink legally in the United States:

To ring in 2015, the boys spend some time with weird old browsers, Hackintoshes, the rumored 12-inch MacBook Air and Federico’s attempts to reinvent his nerd life.

It was made possible by these awesome sponsors:

• Hover: Simplified Domain Management. Use code ‘RECONNECTED’ for 10% off your first purchase.
• Loot Crate: a monthly subscription box service for epic geek and gamer items and pop culture gear. Use code VIRTUAL for 10% off.

Brian Stucki:

This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the first Mac mini. I feel confident in saying that no one has watched this little machine grow more intently than I have watched it. It’s the center of everything I do here at Macminicolo.

To celebrate a decade of working with the Mac mini, I’ve put together a timeline of hightlights from the last ten years.

I’ve used iTunes Match for quite a while now because my music setup is fiddly.

My iTunes library is quite large, so until a couple of weeks ago, the files reside on a RAID connected to my home Mac mini.

My main computer isn’t the Mac mini, however, but a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. Even though it sports a 512 GB SSD, I don’t want to sacrifice disk space to music I’m not going to listen to, so I use iTunes Match to keep the two libraries connected. I can download what I want to my laptop, or delete something I don’t, all without affecting the home library directly.

That was fine until a couple of weeks ago, when I upgraded to a NAS and put my 2-disk RAID out to pasture. Now, my iTunes library resides on the NAS on its own share. The Mac mini is running the iTunes application, pulling the files via SMB2 over Ethernet.

(It works shockingly well now that I read that sentence back.)

However, it came to light this weekend that the copying of my iTunes library hadn’t gone smoothly. I had some files missing, and others with bad metadata all of a sudden.

I couldn’t nuke the music from the home library with iTunes Match-supplied files — or files from my notebook — because the service had spread the bad metadata around my little ecosystem of pain.

I should point out that this isn’t iTunes Match’s fault. Really, the system worked just as it should have: iTunes detected a change in my library and synced it across my devices.

However, I wasn’t able to get iTunes Match to see correct data if manually changed. I would straighten out an artist just to watch iTunes Match sync and change it back.

So I started over.

Like every other cloud service Apple offers, there’s no man-behind-the-curtain preference pane to reset things. There’s no toggle labeled “Reset iTunes Match” anywhere.

However, iTunes Match can be tricked into being reset.

I started by launching iTunes from the Dock with the Option key held down, which let me create a new iTunes library. With this new, empty library, I logged into iTunes Match. This displayed my music collection as iCloud sees it. I hit Select All and delete, removing the files from iCloud.

It took a little while for iCloud to notice all my music was gone. I use iTunes Match on my iOS devices, so I erased all my local music on my my iPad and left it awake on my desk to keep up with what iTunes Match was doing. After about 20 minutes, the iPad showed no music.

Once it did, I turned off iTunes Match in the new library. I then copied my music from my known-good, local iTunes library into my new, completely empty iTunes library. It took a little time (and considerable disk space) for iTunes to copy all my music over.

Once the import was done, I re-enabled iTunes Match and let it scan my library. On its first pass, it only picked up purchased music, so I created a Smart Playlist to tell me what wasn’t on iCloud:

I selected all this music, right-clicked and selected “Add to iCloud,” forcing iTunes Match to take the music. After the service did its thing, my iTunes Match data fully matched my local, known-good library, ending the cycle of bad meta-data and mis-labeled songs.

All in all, I like iTunes Match, and this issue wasn’t the service’s fault, but Apple should allow users access to reset their data when things start to spiral. All of the juggling I had to do took a good amount of time and bandwidth, and it shouldn’t have to be so hard to straighten things out when needed.