512 Pixels

I’m pretty content with my Apple Watch, but MY WORD LOOK AT THIS THING.

It’s Top Nine time over on Instagram, so it’s also Top Nine time here on the blog.

Here’s my year, boiled down to nine images:

1. The Vision Pro box & my original Macintosh, which turned 40 this year.
2. Myke and I were given St. Jude’s Creator Achievement Award. Our community raised over $1 million in support of St. Jude this year.
3. Merri and marked our 17th anniversary this year. That photo is from our wedding day in 2007. Sometimes I think about re-piercing my ears.
4. This summer, we celebrated Relay’s 10th anniversary with a live show in London.
5. A photo of my Tacoma and mountain bike, taken on my sabbatical in October.
6. A comparison between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the original model from 2007.
7. The photo used at the top of my Vision Pro review on 512 Pixels.
8. Another classic photo, this time from 2004. I had a lot of hair in high school.
9. I was in San Jose for WWDC this summer and the town is overrun with Tesla Cybertrucks. This one was parked in a compact spot.

The Vision Pro taking two slots of this grid is pretty funny. It proved to be much more popular on Instagram than it has been in my life.

This week on Connected, we revisit the biggest stories of year, ranking each month on the most scientific scale known to humankind: the Ticci Scale.

There’s a new version of Pedometer++ rolling out now that makes it easy to see your step count over time:

David and I have been talking about this feature for a while now, and it is exciting to see it shipping. I love being able to scroll back and see my progress over the years, and it’s easy to share a graph from the app.

Pedometer++ 6.2 also allows you to import your complete Apple Health history. Before now, the app only fetched recent step count data when installed for the first time, but we realized that the new Trends feature would be much more compelling with a complete picture of your step count data. Importing historic Apple Health data is fast, and can be done from the in-app settings screen.

Pedometer++ 6.2 is rolling out in the App Store now.

Apple Support:

In iOS 18.2 or later, the Mail app automatically sorts your email messages into categories to help you find and manage messages quicker.

• Primary: Find personal messages and time-sensitive information.
• Transactions: Keep track of your confirmations, receipts, and shipping notices.
• Updates: Catch up on news, newsletters, and social updates.
• Promotions: Browse your coupon and sales emails.

The rollout of this feature is weird. Mail categories are only on the iPhone, and while the feature shipped with iOS 18.2, it’s not part of Apple Intelligence, as it runs on phones older than the 15 Pro.

(Or maybe it is, as this feature is not in the EU?)

Like Gmail’s categories before it, this feature is not for me. It makes me feel like I’m checking multiple inboxes instead of just one. I turned it off the second it showed up, and you can, too:

• Go to the Mail app on your iPhone.
• Tap the More button at the top of the screen, then choose List View.

I was recently moving some files around and came across a column I wrote for my college newspaper. I was on the design side of the paper¹ and didn’t get to write that much. In the fall of 2006, I was given a short-lived column covering the tech news, and this entry is from October 25.

This week, the geek world was all about one word.

iPod.

Monday marked the fifth anniversary of Apple’s beloved music player. On Oct. 23, 2001, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, stood on a stage in California and introduced the world to a 5GB, $399 device that would play music back faster and easier than a Walkman.

Today, the iPod can hold up to 80GB, and play music, as well as show pictures and movies.

After month of being behind almost every other laptop maker, Apple released an updated version of its pro laptop, the MacBook Pro, with Intel’s latest mobile processors.

Somewhat lost in the hoopla about the iPod’s birthday and new Macs was what would have been today’s biggest story in Geekdom - the release of Firefox 2.0.

The popular browser, known for its safety and large collection of available plug-ins and extras, now sports better safety features (including phishing detection that can help keep your private information safe), better tab management, better handling of RSS news feeds and something new called “Session Restore,” that lets users re-open a tab they may have accidentally closed, or if Firefox or your computer crashes, users can re-open all the tabs they had open at the time of the crash.

Also, the search bar on Firefox comes with extra search engines built-in. Now, instead of just searching Google, users can search Yahoo! and Answers.com. All of this new ness in Firefox is wrapped in a new user interface, which brings Mac-like shiny buttons to the browser.

Firefox is not the only browser to be updated recently. Microsoft started shipping the newest version of Internet Explorer. Now at version seven, the update added many features that IE has lacked for several years, including security measures, tabbed browsing, and support for more complicated web site designs. Webmasters have been complaining for years that sites will often work fine in every browser expect Internet Explorer. Hopefully, that will be different now.

Speaking of Microsoft, the company is promising its next-generation operating system, named “Windows Vista” to consumers who buy PCs this holiday season.

Starting tomorrow, PCs sold with Windows XP and Office 2003 on them will be bundled with a coupon for a free or reduced upgrade of their software. Vista, which will be released in January - six years after XP was released, sports a brand new user interface, improved security features, a new search tool, Windows Gadgets (small applications that tell users the weather, upcoming events, etc.), an updated version of Microsoft Office and better backup software built-in.

President George W. Bush made it in the tech news this week as well. In an interview with CNBC, the president said he does not use e-mail because of the political liability.

He said of Google and Google Earth, “One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can like, I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes. Yeah, I do it some.”

Be sure to note that he referred to the Internet giant as “the Google.”

The bloggers had fun with that one this week.

Oh yes, Google. As the Helmsman reported, Google bought YouTube for a mere $1.65 billion. Since then, 29,549 videos have been pulled off the site, after Japanese copyright holders complained that their work was hosted on the site illegally.

Illegal file on YouTube?

Get out.

From the Apple TV+ Newsroom:

Following the acclaimed second season premiere of “Silo,” today Apple TV+ announced that the global hit, world-building drama has been renewed through season four. The fourth season of “Silo” will bring the series to its final, thrilling chapter, telling the complete story of Hugh Howey’s New York Times bestselling trilogy of dystopian novels. Starring and executive produced by Rebecca Ferguson, “Silo” season two is now streaming globally on Apple TV+, and new episodes premiere every Friday through January 17, 2025.

I rewatched the first season ahead of the current season, and fell in love with this show all over again. I’m glad the team behind it will be able to wrap it up on their own terms.

PowerPhotos is the ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac. It works with the Apple Photos app, filling in missing features that Photos itself doesn’t provide.

PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photo libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag-and-drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while keeping all your photos in the Photos app.

Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your libraries side by side in multiple windows, multi-library search, advanced exporting, converting old iPhoto/Aperture libraries, and more.

PowerPhotos 2 can be downloaded for free and offers many of its features for free. Purchasing a license unlocks advanced features such as library merging, deletion of duplicate photos, and unlimited photocopying and exporting.

Existing PowerPhotos 1.0 or iPhoto Library Manager users can use their serial number to upgrade for 50% off the regular price, and 512 Pixels readers can use the coupon code 512PIXELS to receive a 20% discount.

Many people have more PDFs and files than they’d like. This week on MPU, David and I explore two great applications that make managing files more straightforward and efficient.

I use several of Rogue Amoeba’s apps on a near-daily basis. They are critical to my work as a podcaster, and my Mac would be noticeably less useful without them.

With the transition to Apple silicon, installing these programs became much more complicated, and I feared that Apple was pushing tools like Audio Hijack, Loopback, and others off the platform.

In the background, it seems like the folks at Rogue Amoeba were living in fear as well:

Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected.1 We spent weeks attempting to get ACE working again, but eventually we had to admit defeat. ACE as we knew it was dead in the water, and all options for replacing it involved substantial reductions in functionality. Though we did not discuss it publicly at the time, things looked grim for the future of our products.

Thankfully, cooler heads in Cupertino prevailed, and a two-step plan was discussed. ACE would be given a stay of execution, even if users had to jump through a bunch of hoops to install it.

The second step has finally come to fruition. Here is Paul Kafasis again:

That brings us to the beginning of this year, when the two-part plan first proposed in 2020 was finally nearing completion. With that in mind, we announced our intention to streamline the first-run experience for all of our audio capture apps. We promised that soon, the painful setup process would be a thing of the past.

We thought we could see the finish line, but we had really only completed the first 90% of our work. We still had to complete the second 90%, transitioning our apps to use ARK, our next-generation audio capture backend. This involved many more months of working around myriad issues, reporting bugs to Apple, and waiting for MacOS updates to fix them. For those of us here at Rogue Amoeba, this past year was a very long one indeed.

Installing Rogue Amoeba’s apps is now much simpler for those running macOS 14 or later, and I’d bet everyone at Rogue Amoeba is sleeping much better now.

Graham Fraser at the BBC:

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.

Apple declined to comment.

I used notification summaries during the beta of iOS 18.2, but ended up turning them off. I felt like I was reading everything twice, and saw summarization errors all over the place. None of them were as spicy as this Mangione example, thankfully.

This week’s Conduit had a pretty mediocre guest:

Jay is gone away again, so Kathy brings in Stephen Hackett as a guest host and they can actually talk about Yearly Themes!