512 Pixels

This week, Jason Snell puts on his best Italian accent and joins Stephen and Myke to talk about online collaboration, keyboards and the third rail of 5by5 podcasting — comic books.

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Microsoft’s released a product that the Apple fanboy in your life will love for Christmas.

Rusty Ross has written the definitive guide to VPN Server on Mavericks. If you’re thinking about upgrading, or have and are seeing issues, this article is for you.

Let’s be honest: the iOS experience is really all about the third-party apps.

Let’s be honest about something else: the difference between good apps and bad apps can be huge.

Let’s be honest about one last thing: discovery in the App Store kinda sucks.

Now that group therapy is over, I’d like to tell you about something I like: Shawn Blanc’s new site, The Sweet Setup. It sets out to become a catalogue of the best apps (iOS and otherwise) out there. Not the newest; the best.

There are lots of sites that review apps, and lots of great app reviewers out there, but The Sweet Setup approaches things a little differently. Instead of reviewing an app in a vacuum, The Sweet Setup tries to put the app in context, looking at its competitors and the landscape as a whole before making a recommendation.

At launch, the site is already full of great content. Here are some reviews you shouldn’t miss:

• The Best Radar App for iPhone and iPad
• The Best Podcast Client for iOS (Hi mom!)
• Our Favorite Markdown Writing App for the iPhone
• The Best Professional-Grade iPhone Calculator

The Sweet Setup is about more than app reviews, however. There’s a great blog, a growing collection of articles and more. Over time, the site will only grow in breadth and depth.

While Shawn gives a great overview of the site in today’s blog post, I spoke to Shawn this morning about why he launched the site:

Over the years that I’ve been writing about Mac and iOS software, I’ve compiled a huge back catalog of reviews that are, for the most part, still relevant. But since they are posted to my weblog amongst a waterfall of reverse-chronological posts, the old-but-relevant articles are now buried under the new. The Sweet Setup is built to have more “evergreen” content, that always focuses on the best app within a particular category.

Go check it out.

Peter Kafka:

Apple has signed on more video providers for its Apple TV box: Yahoo is now offering its Yahoo Screen service on the Web video gadget, and PBS has created an app that lets users watch some, but not all, of its shows.

Neither channel requires users to authenticate as cable subscribers, which is great. More content providers should be doing this.

Time Machine Server can be great. With enough storage, it’s easy to backup multiple Macs to a single location, leaving the worry about USB drives being stolen or Thunderbolt drives not being plugged in behind. With Mavericks Server OS X Server 3, Apple has improved the service with better disk space controls (as long as all clients are running Mavericks as well) in addition to an easy-to-use dashboard to see what clients are backing up when and how much space the backups are using.

Time Machine isn’t the perfect backup tool, and Time Machine server isn’t a perfect group backup solution, but it works well enough. However, I recently came across a bug with how it authenticates that surprised me.

In short, Time Machine on the local Mac will fail to connect, even if the Mac already knows the user name and password.

When you select a Time Machine Server disk that is shared from a known server, OS X will auto-populate the window with information from Keychain Access:

Usually, Time Machine will accept the credentials and allow the initial backup to begin after the customary 120 second wait time.

With OS X Mavericks, however, I have seen several machines accept the user name and password only to fail while connecting, showing a pop up a box with this dialogue:

The network backup volume could not be mounted because there was a problem with the network username or password. Open System Preferences and choose Time Machine then re-select the Time Machine backup destination to enter the correct username and password.

Of course, that’s a terrible error message. It doesn’t say anything helpful about the problem, it’s suggestion is to simply repeat what the user just did.

This 2012 Apple Support document gave me a clue what was going on, but the System Keychain entry for the Time Machine server was correct on these machines. Deleting the entries and re-trying didn’t solve the issue, either, as many in Apple’s Support Communities implied.

When save a user name and password for a server are saved in Finder, the login keychain learns it and provides it when needed. However, Time Machine requires a System keychain item, as Time Machine works across users. When the above dialog box is shown, OS X is creating a new System keychain item from the information it was presented by the user’s own login keychain.

This is where something is broken. On some machines, this transaction won’t take place, leaving Time Machine unable to connect.

To force Keychain Access to create a new entry and not attempt to copy the login keychain item, I ended up using the shortname for the users in question in Time Machine, and their standard, long name in Finder.

In our organization, the two names are the same, so I’ve given Time Machine the user name in the firstnamelastname format, as users won’t ever see that entry. In Finder, however, I stuck with Firstname Lastname as that is flashed when connecting to a server.

While I came across this with Time Machine Server as my destination, using a NAS or Time Capsule may expose the same flaw.

It’s crazy that this is broken in Mavericks. While I don’t know if the problem exists on other versions of OS X or OS X Server, using a different version of the username took care of it for me.

Katie Fehrenbacher at Gigaom breaks down the massive solar farm Apple’s built in North Carolina. This made me chuckle:

Apple manages the grass under the panels in a variety of ways, but one of those is a little more unusual. Apple works with a company that ropes in sheep that eat the grass on a portion of the solar farm; when the sheep finish grazing on one spot, they’re moved to the next.

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Bryan Cranston explains the link between Malcom in the Middle and Breaking Bad with a little scene from the Wilkerson bedroom.

I’m no stranger to the iPad. I’ve had the original, the iPad 2, the iPad with Retina display and the iPad mini.

Over the years and through the generational changes, I’ve used my iPads for the same core set of tasks:

• Reading
• Surfing
• Email management
• Note-taking and light writing
• Games

When the iPad mini came out last year, I jumped on it, excited to be able to do these things with something I could put in a coat pocket. In fact, I closed my iPad mini review this way:

With the iPad mini, Apple has come up with something that’s as full-featured as the larger product, in a smaller package for less money. It’s a win all the way around. I won’t be going back to the larger iPad.

A year later, I’m typing this on an iPad Air, having sold my iPad mini months ago. So, what happened?

In short, while the iPad mini’s small size made it very portable, I found myself not using it nearly as much as my previous tablets. While I thought I could deal with the non-Retina display, over time I came to dislike it more and more.

My biggest problem with the iPad mini, however, was the keyboard. While many enjoy the thumb-typing that the mini affords, I find it uncomfortable at best.

Between not wanting to read on the iPad mini and not wanting to write with it, the thing just sat in my backpack most of the time.

When I ended up selling my iPad mini a couple of months ago, I was willing to wait to see what Apple had up its sleeve for this holiday season. I’m not disappointed I skipped the iPad 4.

Hardware & Software

In his review of the iPad mini, John Gruber writes:

Last year’s iPad 4 and Mini were two very different iPads. This year’s new Air and Mini are simply two sizes of the same iPad.

I cannot emphasize this point enough. After three days of extensive use of the Mini (a review unit on loan from Apple), it works and feels exactly like the iPad Air. Everything about it is of equivalent or identical quality: the display, the cameras (front and back), the performance, the battery life.

He’s totally right. Read the other way, the iPad Air is a big iPad mini. The case with its flat back and rounded edges, discrete volume buttons and dual speakers is identical to the iPad mini.

Of course, all of the small details are outweighed by the fact that the iPad Air is a good bit smaller than the iPad 4.

The old iPad clocked in at 1.44 pounds, with the Air weighing an even pound. As a result, it’s much more comfortable to use while holding and is far less noticeable in a bag. It’s seven-tenths of an inch narrower, conforming to the iPad mini’s design with thin bezels down the side.

This image of my iPad Air sitting atop my wife’s iPad 4 really shows the difference between the two models:

All of this adds up to something larger than just numbers. When picking up my wife’s iPad 4, I’m now surprised by how much the thing weighs. In a way that only Apple can, it’s managed to make its year-old product look and feel … gross.

Battery life and LTE performance are great. Under the hood, the iPad Air sports the same A7/M7 lineup as the iPhone 5S, and the thing just screams. Apps open almost instantly, games are smooth and multi-tasking is fast.

The only things that appear to be slow are iOS 7’s transitions. While toggling the “Reduce Motion” in Settings can help some things, it can’t solve the core issues.

As many other reviewers have noted, the OS just doesn’t feel finished on the iPad. From the very first iPad, Apple’s struggled to scale iOS’ interface up to the larger screen, and 7 does very little to fix that. Things like Siri, Notification Center and Control Center feel hilariously large on the iPad Air, and icons still re-arrange slightly based on orientation. Don’t even get me started on how dumb folders look on this thing:

There have been reports of the iPhone 5S crashing out on the multitasking screen, and while I haven’t seen the issue on my iPhone 5, it is present on my iPad. Perhaps Apple’s new 64-bit code still has some rough edges.

That’s not to say iOS 7 on the iPad is bad. Everything works and it enjoys feature parity with the iPhone’s version, which is more than what could be said about Android on tablets for years, but iOS 7 lacks a certain amount of polish on the tablet.

The Smart Cover

Alongside the original iPad, Apple shipped a full-backed case that left a lot to be desired. With the iPad 2, the company introduced its Smart Covers, screen protectors that clipped on magnetically and could be folded over to form a stand.

While the iPad 2, 3 and 4 were compatible with the original, four-panel design, the iPad mini’s Smart Cover used a three-panel design, due to the tablet’s smaller screen and frame.

With the iPad Air, Apple’s brought this design to its full-sized Smart Covers, and the result isn’t great.

The new cover doesn’t have any points of overlap, and the iPad Air can come detached if typed on too hard. In the vertical orientation, the tablet feels secure, but I’ve had it tumble over backwards on more than one occasion while using it in bed.

In short, the new Smart Cover is a step backwards.

The Name

At Macworld 2008, Steve Jobs introduce the MacBook Air.

The name, Jobs explained, was derived from a simple fact: the MacBook Air was the world’s thinnest notebook. Jobs took pride in the fact that the MacBook Air — at it’s thickest point — was thinner than the next-best thing, the Sony TZ series of notebooks.

While the iPad 3 and 4 were thick and heavy compared to the iPad 2, the Nexus 7 and other Android tablets have been shaving weight and thickness with almost every release. With the iPad Air however, Apple’s almost showing off, moving the bar seemingly out of reach once again.

While the Air name is about weight this time around, too, I think there’s more to it than that. With last year’s non-Retina, sorta-underpowered iPad mini being a runaway hit, this year’s Retina, same-specs-as-the-big-iPad iPad mini is going to sell like hotcakes.

Last year, the iPad and iPad mini were drastically different; this year, Apple’s selling two of the same iPad — just at different sizes. I don’t think Apple views one model as the flagship anymore, but a new name and new chassis is bound to catch the attention of shoppers.

In Conclusion

I was recently prescribed my first pair of reading glasses. They aren’t particularly strong, but they affect my vision just enough to prevent the headaches I was getting after spending more than a few minutes on my MacBook Air or while reading a book. I can see at night just fine and can drive without them, but working is much less unpleasant now.

With the iPad Air, Apple’s 9.7-inch tablet is lightweight, powerful and comfortable to hold. While none of these complaints would have seemed valid two years ago, the iPad mini showed the world there was a better way to build a tablet, and those of us who still enjoy the larger screen size of Apple’s original iPad get to benefit from those advances.

The iPad Air is like my glasses. It’s not changing the world or fixing anything that was massively wrong, but it does help with the headaches that full-sized iPad owners used to deal with. I’m enjoying mine immensely, and it’s hard to imagine what we’ll be complaining about in two years when it comes to the iPad Air.

It’s nice to see Apple taking action here, but how is the company just now adding printer support? I know the service is in beta, but even that label seems a touch generous.

Update: Over on Twitter, Dave Chartier writes:

FWIW, I think Apple subscribes to the traditional definition of “beta.” Things are busted, features are missing.

That’s a great point. Before Gmail’s five years of beta, the term was used for something that was rough and incomplete. The word has lost its meaning, perhaps leaving iWork for iCloud stuck with a check it can’t cash quite yet.

My go-to Dropbox-powered, Markdown-equipped iOS text these days is Notesy. The $4.99 universal app is fast, powerful and has been updated for iOS 7.

Before using Notesy, I was a die-hard PlainText user. PlainText was one of the first apps in its category, worked well and looked good.

Before iOS 7, the app was free with a single in-app purchase to remove banner ads. While I was no fan of this method, I enjoyed the app and paid without any hesitation.

With its iOS 7 redesign, however, things got a little out of hand with the following in-app purchases appearing alongside the addition iCloud support:

• Remove Ads - $2.99
• Extended Keyboard - $1.99
• Live Word Count - $0.99
• Passcode - $1.99

In short, to enjoy all of PlainText’s new features, users would need to shell out $8. That’s not a big deal for most of us who really use our devices and believe good software is worth playing for, but it’s clear the larger App Store audience hasn’t taken well to it. The app currently has a two-star rating, with many of the reviews complaining about the IAPs.

I don’t bring all this up to throw PlainText’s developer Jesse Grosjean at Hog Bay Software under the bus. As a user of his products, I’ve been pained to see an app I once relied on get raked over the coals.

That made his blog post today all the worse to read:

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not the right developer for PlainText. I’m now looking for another developer take over the project.

With all of Hog Bay Software’s different apps I have found out the hard way that I don’t have time to make it great. I’ve come a little late to realizing that Hog Bay Software has expanded to do too many things without enough focus. I’m now in the process of scaling back so I can focus better on a few and make them great.

I always thought it strange that Grosjean wrote Writeroom as well, instead of focusing on just one text editor, but his closing paragraphs show he cares about PlainText’s future:

Even with this recent disaster of a release I think it’s in position to do better, if given the right attention. I just spent 4+ months rewriting the app. It now has modern iOS 7 foundation. It supports iCloud. It uses the official Dropbox sync framework. And it has three new features as in-app purchases in addition to the original “Remove Ads” purchase. It needs a few rounds of interface updates, but the foundation is solid and ready for the future.

My goal is to get this done soon so development of the app will continue without pause.

So, can PlainText be saved? While it’s current IAP-based business model clearly is the wrong one, the app isn’t as bad-off as it the App Store reviews portray. Grosjean writes that ad revenue and the old single IAP brought in $30,000 with 450,000 downloads.

I think PlainText can survive to see another day, but the lessons learned here about the use of in-app purchases can be applied more broadly. In all the chatter of paid apps being dead, it’s important to realize that many customers will quickly become unhappy if they are presented with several IAPs at once. It’s important to remember that PlainText’s users aren’t average consumers, as most people aren’t shopping for Dropbox-powered, Markdown text editors. It’s all about balance, and it’s clear to me that PlainText was tipped too far in the wrong direction.