Safari isn’t the most popular browser on the planet, but its focus on speed, security and privacy set it apart from the competition. This week, David and Stephen get into the pros and cons of the application, and some of its unique features.
I’ve been using Chrome on the Mac for years, but I switched to Safari about a month to prep for this episode. I have to say that I’m surprised how much I like it.
Orion and the Mobile Launch Platform are making progress, InSight’s struggles continue and NASA is sending a 8-rotor drone to Saturn’s moon Titan.
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macOS Catalina Developer Beta 3 added a new screen saver named Drift:
Like some of Apple’s other screen savers, including my long-time favorite Flurry, Drift comes with several options for its color scheme:
The options are mostly pretty self-explanatory, except the top two. “Desktop” takes its palette from the current desktop picture, while Spectrum shows a wide range of ever-changing colors:
I’m a fan. Apple certainly doesn’t have to add things like this to macOS, but I’m glad it does
In a report published today, Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple will roll out a new keyboard design based on scissor switches, offering durability and longer key travel, starting with the 2019 MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro is also getting the new scissor switch keyboard, but not until 2020.
The new scissor switch keyboard is a whole new design than anything previously seen in a MacBook, purportedly featuring glass fiber to reinforce the keys. Apple fans who have bemoaned the butterfly keyboard should be optimistic about a return to scissor switches.
This week, on the 250th(!) episode of Connected:
Federico reminds everyone that it’s okay to not have strong feelings about Jony Ive leaving Apple, while Stephen feels tempted by iOS 13. Meanwhile, Eddy Cue talks about rumors of Tim Cook meddling with Apple TV+ scripts and Project Catalyst continues to make news.
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After listening to the most recent episode of The Talk Show, I decided to go hunt down video of Steve Jobs dropping the “i” from his title, and becoming Apple’s full-time CEO. That took place at Macworld Expo in January 2000.
This keynote is wild,1 as it includes the first public demonstration of Aqua, but something right before the CEO announcement caught my attention. In this clip, Jobs talks about how Apple viewed itself, and why some who called for it to be broken up into a separate software and hardware company were wrong:
Over at Ars Technica, Samuel Axon has published an in-depth look at Catalyst, including interviews with several people inside Apple:
Apple seeks to funnel some of its success with the iOS App Store over to macOS using Catalyst. We’ll go over how developers use what Apple has built step-by-step, as well as what challenges they faced. And we’ll share Apple’s answers to our questions about how the company plans to maintain a high standard of quality for Mac apps as an influx of mobile-derived apps hits the platform, what Apple’s long-term plans for cross-platform apps across the entire ecosystem look like, and more.
I wonder how long it will be before someone offers to mail me one of these for my collection.
I’ve followed Tyler Stalman for a while now, and I was super excited to get him on Mac Power Users this week:
Tyler Stalman is a photographer, videographer, YouTuber and small business owner alongside his wife Ania Boniecka. Oh, and he loves gear… maybe too much, as he confesses to Stephen and David.
This conversation was a lot of fun. Tyler and Ania are extremely busy, and their travel schedule makes me tired just thinking about it, and out of that, he’s made some really interesting decisions about their gear and how they get work done:
Lee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica about a huge project in Houston:
For the past two years, historians and engineers from the Kansas Cosmosphere’s Spaceworks team have been lovingly restoring and detailing the 1,200-pound (544kg) historic sage green Ford-Philco consoles that populated the control room—repairing damage from decades of casual neglect and also adding in the correct control panels so that each console now correctly mirrors how it would have been configured for an Apollo flight.
At Macworld Expo 1999, Apple’s big news was the Power Macintosh G3, a high-end tower desktop. After introducing it, Steve Jobs played a promotional video, prefaced with a Henry Kissinger quote and featuring Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s The Look of Love on the soundtrack. (If you know who’s singing, please tell me; I’m not sure, and it stumped Shazam.) The video touts lustworthy features such as a 400-MHz processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and USB (“the future of I/O!”).
Apple today announced that Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, will depart the company as an employee later this year to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients. While he pursues personal projects, Ive in his new company will continue to work closely and on a range of projects with Apple.
Of course, this was foretold on Connected earlier this year: