Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: apple

  • Apple News: Only Our News Fits

    Apple News: Only Our News Fits

    iOS 9 has a new tool, Apple News. This is the replacement for the Newsstand app everyone shoved in that ‘Apple Shit’ folder on their iPhones and muttered about how it took up space on their 16G iPhone they didn’t care about, and damn it, I don’t have an iWatch so why do I care about that app either?

    You know you have that folder.

    News, though, is actually pretty damn cool! It’s actually a news reader app I like and want to use. Except for two big issues.

    You see, I have an Apple Watch and I like how it alerts me to things. I get a wrist buzz, I look down, I know things. A text message, a direct message from Twitter (since few people can do that), an email in a certain box (not yet, but as soon as I figure that out…). What I want with News is for my watch to buzz when there’s a new article about a specific thing.

    The first thing I did was set up News to search for topics I wanted. Like you do. And I put in ‘Jorja Fox’ because I’m still running that website.

    Apple News search for 'Jorja Fox' shows me 'Jordan' and two other people with the name Jordan, but no Jorja

    Interesting, right? No Jorja. I clicked on ‘Show more topics’ but even after scrolling and scrolling, I couldn’t find her. The same thing happened with ‘George Eads’ and ‘Rachel Ray’ but not ‘Bobby Flay.’ Looking for ‘Jennifer Tilly’ brought up ‘Jennifer Lopez’ (close!) but weirdly enough I was able to find ‘Sara Sidle’ (the character Jorja played on CSI).

    News Favorites: ADI, CSI, Sara Sidle

    I ended up managing to make my favorites (Animal Defenders Intl, CSI, and Sara Sidle), but I couldn’t find the movie ‘Lion Ark’ or ‘Extinction Soup.’ Actually, finding the ADI was incredibly hard.

    The search function doesn’t seem to trigger for exact matches as much as it should.

    If you want to add a website, it’s not at all logical. You have to add an RSS feed if the news site isn’t located there and even that isn’t logical. Go to Safari, find the RSS feed, click it, and your iOS device will ask you if you want to open in News. Say yes! There you go.

    Except… How do I add an arbitrary search? You don’t. You can’t. If you want to have a ‘Cat Cora’ channel, or a ‘Jorja Fox’ channel, you’re out of luck. If the name doesn’t show up it doesn’t show up, and yes, I scrolled and scrolled. Then I got a little smarter and got the Google RSS link:

    https://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&q=Jorja+Fox&output=rss

    I opened that on iOS and added it. And it didn’t work. Oh it added something, but it wouldn’t open within News.

    Then I tried Bing:

    https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=jorja+fox&go=Submit&qs=n&form=NWBQBN&pq=jorja+fox&sc=8-9&sp=-1&sk=&format=RSS

    And Apple News said it couldn’t add Bing to News. Bias much? After iOS 9.0.2 dropped (literally that night), I was able to add Bing, but only if I went to that URL and viewed as desktop (if you didn’t know, there’s “Request Desktop Site” button in Mobile Safari).

    Added news.google.com and all I get is a spinning circle

    Now sometimes there’s a button in the ‘Share’ setting in Safari that lets me add to News. And sometimes there is not. Way to go, Apple. In all cases, I get the spinning circle of doom after I add something to News.

    Naturally I went to look for help on Apple News and found none.

    In the midst of all this, I realized a horrible thing. You don’t get alerts on your Watch from News. You do from a variety of other news apps. You can’t from News. So they’ve made a great new tool that doesn’t let you add arbitrary searches, doesn’t alert you to new news about the searches you can make on your Apple Watch. And while I do have notifications on, it doesn’t seem to notify me about anything.

    In contrast, I added Google News & Weather to my iPhone and, once I logged in with my Google account, it remembered I had a saved search and showed that. Except it also showed me general news and weather. I can’t dismiss those. I have to show them, above my custom news, all the time. Plus the alerts I get are for world news, not my personal searches, which is funny since Google can email me when my custom search has new articles, so I know it can do this.

    Here’s what I want: A ‘News Reader’ that lets me get alerts on what I want to get alerts on. If a site it scans publishes something with my keywords, it pings me. When I read the app, it would sort by date (hiding duplicates by default), and let me thumbs-up or thumbs-down the article to help train it as to what was relevant.

    One of the apps I tried, while looking for that, was Nuzzel. Cute hedgehog aside, the idea that I can get the news from people I follow (and one presumes I trust) is nice. But that only shows me what people know about. News360 suffered the same problem as Apple News, that adding certain arbitrary topics proved impossible. It could find some of my terms but not all. At least they had a way for me to file a bug report, though.

  • WordPress iOS App: Good for Bloggers

    WordPress iOS App: Good for Bloggers

    This is a big distinction.

    The app is great. I love using it to write a blog post when I’m on the go, and save for my annoyance that it wants to default to publish and even if I move it to draft, it saves the date and time that moment in time, it’s a good app.

    But it’s not great for non-bloggers.

    Let me step back. I run a little database site on WordPress. It’s a listing of TV shows and characters and while it has a blog, it has a bunch of custom post types. Want to know what you can’t write on the iOS app? Pages and CPTs. You also can’t add new users or plugins or anything like that. All I can do is write up a blog post about things. Sure, I can upload pictures but I can’t add them to the library in general, just to posts (and yes, I care about that sometimes). Uploading and setting a featured image is also more complicated than it should be. I often end up with the image uploaded twice.

    Realistically, I look at the iOS app and I’m not sure who the target audience is. It’s very easy to add my WordPress.com account and view my reader there, but that’s a different group of people than the ones who want to blog. Then there’s the thought of actually blogging. If you’re on WordPress.com, you can’t add custom post types, so that issue is null, but you still can’t edit pages or Portfolios (which comes with all .com blogs now).

    It makes you start to wonder if there should be separate apps, for WordPress.com and self-hosted people, and to that I think not. I’m always going to be logged in to WordPress.com on my iPad because of Jetpack and a desire to see my stats. But at the same time, I really don’t care as much about my WordPress.com blogs. I should, but over time I’ve merged them all into my self-hosted sites because it’s easier for me to go to one place. It’s with that in mind I think we should just have one place for all our WordPress iOS/app needs.

    Then you have to consider what the use-case is of a WordPress app. For me, it’s that I want to work on a draft post while on the go and save it offline, only to have it magically get tossed up onto my blog when I’m online. I think of it like Numbers and iCloud. I can edit my archery spreadsheet on my iPhone while I’m at the range and it’s automagically updated on my laptop when I next open Numbers there. Of course, WordPress blogs don’t really work that way.

    But at this point, that’s all the iOS app is good for, because I can’t administer my site from it. This isn’t so bad, since people like Boren are rabid mobile-first devs for the WordPress admin dashboard. At the same time, we’ve only had it be mobile responsive since 3.8 or so, and it’s been spotty for doing ‘everything’ due to OS limitations, which makes it imperfect. As much as I’m a fan of using WordPress to WordPress, it’s the simple things that make me look at Desk for my laptop. Someplace to write.

    Except for that, the iOS app still fails because I can only write a blog post, and most WordPress sites are more than just blogging now.

    At WordCamp San Francisco 2014, I heard more and more people refer to their sites as ‘A WordPress’ than ‘A WordPress blog.’ Every day at work I hear people asked if they would like to setup a WordPress on their site. We’ve verbified the word, but we haven’t verbified the app yet.

  • iPad Mini

    iPad Mini

    I normally don’t review hardware. I like it, but given my one experience with serious electrical work (buy me a coffee, it involves a barn roof), I tend to not mess with it. So I’m purely a hardware consumer.

    That means when things like the iPod came out, I was highly interested. A deck of cards and it has all my music? I’m in! Now I have an 8G iPhone (yes, the smallest one) and it’s perfect for what I need it for: a phone and a walkman. Don’t get me wrong, I have a couple games (Tetris, Bejeweled, and Dungeon Raid), but for the most part I use my smartphone to handle the phone and texting stuff, directions when I’m in a new place (which happens a lot now) and listening to baseball games.

    I also have a laptop, which I use to code and write and … well you know what they’re for. Then I have an iPad. I’ve had one since they first came out as I’ve always had a mad crush on the idea of an Apple Tablet. Back in 2004, a whole decade ago, I wanted it for ebooks. Today, I use it for books, comics, surfing the web, Angry Birds (do do doot do!), email, and writing. Yes, I like writing stories on my iPad.

    Recently, I started looking at the iPad Mini as a viable choice. It’s smaller, lighter, and still retina. At the time, my iPad was the ‘new’ iPad (3rd gen, with Retina), and it worked well, but always felt heavy and clunky in my purse. The main issue I had with the mini was how would reading comics feel.

    Answer? Awesome. The retina display is somehow better on the mini, crisper and clearer without me having to crank the brightness up. It has good battery life (reading all day) and the apps are more responsive than my iPhone. There’s less lag jumping between them. This is due to the beefier processor, I know. I also got more disk space, so now I don’t have to download one manga at a time and delete it when I’m done. I like to re-read.

    Dude reading an iPad

    The only thing I don’t like is reading it in the sunlight, which I know is a common kvetch of the iThings. I love reading on my deck or patio, in the sun, so now I just sit with my head in the shade and it works out. Also, and this is a first world problem, my iPad is so crisp, my eyes get tired reading on it. Though that I’ve solved by changing the iBooks font and colors.

    So why blog about this? Well my iPad also has an SSH app (iSSH) and a file editor (Diet Coda) and when you toss in WordPress and Chrome (with my normal profile saved), I can bring just my iPad to a WordCamp and be able to work or take notes. I joked I needed a svn/git app, but really I just use Coda, sync with DropBox, and pick up the files when I’m at my laptop. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

  • Upgrading Multiple Macs

    Upgrading Multiple Macs

    So Mavericks came out and it’s about 5 gigs. You’re looking at your three computers and crying at your bandwidth caps.

    p8eul

    So check this out. Go ahead and download the new OS:

    App Store

    Now BEFORE you run it, go to your Applications folder (mine is mid-download, but you get the idea):

    Mid Download

    By the way, that fake date is a very important date in Mac history. Cute, Mac.

    Copy that 5 gig app somewhere else. Maybe a thumbdrive if you have one big enough. You can then copy that to any other Mac and upgrade. Or make a bootable DVD and use that to install. Enjoy.

    Now I’ll be off to download once and upgrade thrice. Wish I could do it for iOS.

  • Command Line Mac Trash Tricks

    Command Line Mac Trash Tricks

    RM TrashWarning! I’m going to talk about the ‘rm’ command which is a super-deadly command in the linux world. No matter what, never ever ever consider running it unless you’re certain you know what it does!

    I review a lot of plugins, which means I download them all to my laptop, review all the code, possibly install them, and then delete. This means, on any given week, I have 5000 items in my trash. And this is without unzipping! (Yes, we get a lot of plugins, and TextWrangler lets me review most of them in their zips.)

    When I forget to empty my trash every day, I end up waiting hours for the GUI empty to run unless I use rm -rf from inside the ~/.Trash/ folder. The real command is this:

    $ rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

    I like this because it’s crazy fast compared to the GUI, and

    But sometimes I actually just want to commandline my trash. I’ll be banging on things in Terminal and a very simple ’empty trash’ command would be nice, right? OSX Trash lets me type trash -l to see what’s in my trash, and trash -e to run the normal empty command. It’s better than a lot of other scripts, because if I type trash filename and there’s already a file with that name in the trash, it behaves like Mac Norm. That is, it’ll rename my second file ‘filename date’ and I won’t have file conflicts!

    The only thing it’s missing is a ‘trash -p’ command, which would let me run the force rm and just dump it all. Yes, I know rm works, but if you’ve ever typed it in the wrong window, you know why it’s a terrifying command. Still, back to the age old rm commands, what happens when you have that annoying locked file error? Like me, you probably kvetch about quitting everything to delete.

    More command line magic!

    $ cd ~/.Trash
$ chflags -R nouchg *
$ rm -rf *

    Finally, to make this full circle, I made a dead simple alias to prevent me from fat fingering the rm too much:

    alias trashdump='rm -rf ~/.Trash/*'

    Fast, efficient, and potentially deadly, but less than manually typing it in all the time. Deleted 2000 files in seconds, versus minutes.

  • Bugged

    While many Windows XP users are stressing over the major upgrade of SP2, Mac users got a tiny security patch, a small 10.3.6 upgrade, and a taste of our first, real virus. For years I got to brag about how my Mac would never get a virus and how I was safe because I didn’t have the flaws of Windows, or Outlook, or what have you. Then, right around Halloween, came the Opener malware script. It’s not a virus, but I’ll save that rant for another day. Opener has existed for Unix for years and since OS X is a Unix based operating system, it makes some small sense that Opener was adapted to a Mac platform. The benefit is that it’s a known entity and not all that hard to remove.

    Malware is software that does bad (mal) things. Opener is a shell script (similar to DOS) that attacks the root of your computer. Instead of emailing everyone you know, or deleting your user directory, Opener attacks your firewall, installs remote access software, plunks down a password decoder app (John the Ripper, of all things) and proceeds to take over your Macintosh. Pretty hefty for a first virus. Symantec calls it SH.Renepo.B, and their write up of it covers all its evilness in great detail.

    The blessing is that Opener has to be installed, either by hand or by another executable, and the safest way to prevent it from happening is to not install software you don’t get off a CD, lock your computer when you walk away, and use secure passwords. If you’re into filesharing, be it Limewire, Kazza or BitTorrent, be very careful. One of the ways this is distributed is in a PKG or DMG file, wrapped around the actually program you’re trying to install.

    None of this would have been possible if Macintosh hadn’t gone to OS X, the Unix based operating system.

    I hailed OS X as a fantastic leap forward for Macintosh. One of Mac’s many problems is the lack of software available. Sure, they have some of the best, native, handwriting recognition software ever (Newton 1.0 not withstanding) in Inkwell, and Microsoft 2004 is fantastic, but truly a fifth of the programs available for Windows can be found for Mac. By breaking Macintosh into the Unix world, suddenly Mac aficionados found themselves immersed in the open source world of Unix.

    Upgrading from System 9 to OS X was no mean feat and as with all upgrades, it’s not the sort of thing you should do on a whim. System 9 and OS X are as different as 95 and XP, just as System 7 to System 8 was giant Macintosh leap. The main problem everyone saw with OS X is that the majority of the software used had to be rewritten. To a degree, this backfired on Macintosh, as the prohibitive cost of upgrading hardware and software daunted a fair number of users. Apple built in a safety catch called Classic Mode, which let you run some (but not all) software via an emulator. I removed mine from my Mac after a year, having rarely used it.

    The other secret blessing was that Mac had been urging coders to move to a setup called ‘Cocoa.’ Cocoa apps had a fancier look and feel than the generic old school (classic) Mac, and a very different underlying structure. Microsoft, Adobe, and just about every major software company except Quark had jumped onto the Cocoa bandwagon, and many Mac users were pleasantly surprised at how much of their software simply worked natively on OS X.

    That was a very long digression to the heart of this tip, which is how to upgrade to Mac OS X.

    A lot of people are still on OS 8 or 9, and having been there, I tell you that you really need to upgrade. The actual upgrade process is not painless, and having heard the horror stories of XP SP2, I think they’re rather comparable. Unless you want to take your Mac to the Apple Store, you have to purchase the CD, and it’s not going to have the latest and greatest security patches. If you don’t have high speed internet, the upgrade will take a very long time (3 days on a 14.4 modem based on an upgrade I did last month).

    The first thing you have to know is that you must not, under any circumstances, simply throw in the CD and let it boot to the CD by holding down the magic C key. If your Mac didn’t come with OS X, the odds are that this will not work because your firmware is out of date. For most Mac users, this ‘firmware’ concept was new and unwelcome. I can count the times I’d ever done it on a Macintosh on one hand, and I’ve supported a lot of Macs.

    Apple.com has a great chart on which computers need an upgrade and where to get it. Surprisingly enough, the very new PowerMac G5s need an upgrade, while some iBooks from 2001 don’t at all. My rule of thumb is always to check if I need a firmware, as there’s no real way to know unless you memorize the list. If you happen to have OS X 10.0 or 10.1, you may have managed to upgrade without the firmware, and you’ll need to do it now to proceed. The catch here is that you have to apply these firmware bits with System 9. If you’ve already nuked your classic set up, you may be out of luck. Apple suggests that you start from System 9.2.2 at the lowest, though I’ve found you can upgrade from 9.1 in a pinch.

    Before you upgrade, remember to write down (or print) your internet settings. Yeah, I know it goes without saying, but having seen people call their ISP for tech support on getting a Mac set up at 3 AM, well, best to be safe. If you’re on dialup, go to Control Panels from the Apple menu, and then choose Remote Access from the submenu that appears. That’s where your ID, dial-up number, and password are kept. If you’re on DSL, check with your ISP, though I’ve found that my Macs auto-detect the setup very nicely.

    The next trick is actually upgrading. No matter what they tell you, don’t insert the CD and reboot, holding down the C key. While that might work for a new Mac, bought within the last two years, if your Mac is seriously older, you’re better off inserting the CD and clicking restart button from within the CD window that pops up. There are a few reasons for this, but the simplest one is that not all CD drives are created equal, and not all will reboot to the CD correctly. If you don’t start it from the CD, you may find yourself on a grey screen with a rainbow colored beach-ball, and a panic attack. Don’t worry, just reboot (unplug if you have to) and run it the other way.

    Once you get the upgrade started, go out for coffee. It takes a long time. Mac says 30-60 minutes. I say double it. After the whole thing was done, I still had about an hour or two of software updates, which was really frustrating. Even when I bought a new Mac from the store and asked them to run the latest updates, I found that I had a couple left when I got home. I chalk it up to bad timing, but it was really annoying. The software update feature’s been around since System 8, but I find it useful. I have mine set to check once a week (Thursdays, 7pm) and to download the update in the background. It slows my net imperceptibly, although I am on DSL, and when I tell it to install, it slashes the time for that considerably.

    Once everything is upgraded and done and configured, the actual ‘work’ takes less than an hour. Mac imports all your documents to their ‘new’ place, and if it didn’t, you still have access to the old sections. Most people I know did an ‘update’, leaving their old system files intact. I was the sort who backed up my documents and software, and did a full wipe the hard drive reinstall when I bumped to OS X 10.2. After all, I wanted the pure Macintosh feeling. The downside to that is you automatically loose Classic Mode, and any way of accessing the old Mac software. I didn’t find it a great loss.

    Mac has their own site all about why you should upgrade as well as one on why you should switch from Windows. I don’t think everyone should use a Macintosh, but I do think everyone who uses a Mac and can switch to OS X should. Mac’s aren’t for everyone, and while Mac pitches a hundred stories about people who love their Macs, I’m sure there are a hundred people who love their PCs. I’m not trying to start a flame war. I think people should keep an open mind. If all you want is email, word processing, and the web, a Macintosh may not be a bad idea.

    How to Upgrade: Switch to Mac