Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: ios

  • Hiya: Bye-a Spammers!

    Hiya: Bye-a Spammers!

    Do you get calls from scammers and telemarketers?

    Trick question! We all do!

    I stopped getting so many recently, thanks to Hiya. The claim?

    Hiya identifies the calls you want to pick up and automatically blocks the ones you want to avoid.

    And guess what? As of iOS 10.1 it sure does. I installed it after a day when I had eight scammer credit card calls in a row. In November, a day happened when I got a series of robocalls, and I didn’t answer any of them. My phone flashed, said it had a call, and then it went away, like a hangup. Curious, I popped into my call log to see who’d butt dialed me and saw Hiya flagged the number as a scammer.

    They were right. They’ve been nothing but right since I installed it and configured it, and I’ve been unbothered by crazy phone calls.

    Setting up the app is onerous, I’ll warn you. On an iPhone, after I installed Hiya, I had to go in to Settings -> Phone -> Call Blocking & Identification. There I had an option for Hiya to allow the app to block calls and provide caller ID. And once I toggled that on, it took minutes for my phone to sync everything up but … Once it was done, the app worked exactly as expected.

    The bother went away.

    Now for the dark side. Hiya needs access to your contacts. Their privacy policy isn’t fully clear on what they do with it, but they do say they take the numbers in your contacts to build a whitelist. After all, people you add to your contacts aren’t likely to be spammers. But they also claim not to use your information, sell it, or market to your contacts. They also don’t sell to 3rd parties.

    As a California resident, I can write and request (once a year) for a list of everyone they gave my information to, so I may do that later, but they appear to be on the up and up. They’re FTC governed, though given that the drama with all this started because they’re doing fuck all at stopping spammers, your milage may vary.

    Me? I’m kicking scammers to the curb.

  • Review: Spark Love for Your Gmail

    Review: Spark Love for Your Gmail

    Moving my email to Google Apps has, thus far, been interesting. I don’t regret it, and consolidating multiple emails down to three was a good choice. The learning curve of adding in email aliases so I can mail from all the accounts I use, and the limits of Gmails shitty filters so everything is funneled to the right place, has been tricky.

    As I mentioned before, I have a ton of aliases. Adding them in on the Google Admin back end (just renamed G Suite) is weird but easy enough. To be able to email from them, you have to also add them in via the normal Gmail web app. It’s tucked under Settings > Accounts, and under “Send mail as”, click Add another email address.

    But if you don’t want to use the web app (and I don’t), Gmail can be a bit of a turd. It doesn’t work great with the desktop Mail.app, and it works terribly with iOS’s mail. Gmail and Apple are just at odds with how email works. They both want to control your experience and redefine email in different ways. Frankly I prefer the Mac way, but that’s personal preference.

    What is a universal problem is that I needed a way to email from my aliases, and if you set up email as Google Mail in the iOS mail app … you can’t.

    Yes, you read that right. It is flat out impossible to set up email aliases for a Google mail account. If you want to use the iOS mail app and Goggle email and aliases, you have to set up Gmail as an IMAP app, and that’s sort of a shit show in the making. Gmail’s IMAP implementation is non-standard, to put it simply. Among other things, you can only use 15 connections to IMAP per account. If I had the desktop app open and my iPhone and iPad, weird shit happened.

    Now, there are solutions. You could use the Gmail app, but it sucks and doesn’t have an Apple Watch component. Also it’s ugly. Excuse me. It’s basic. You could also use Google’s Inbox app, but you have to use Inbox and the email filters aren’t as robust.

    This leads us to our final solution. Spark.

    This app was something I’d played with before, as it had email alerts on the Apple Watch, and I wanted to get pinged for some work emails while updating all DreamPress installs over at DreamHost. Sadly, the fault of the app not meeting that need is Gmail, again, which has no way to filter properly and send an alert only when an email meets specific criteria.

    What Spark does do is everything else. It has a Watch component, it syncs between my iPad and iPhone, it looks like an iOS app, it acts like a Google app, it pulls in the features people rave about Inbox, and it has email aliases that are simple to set up. Whew. The only thing it doesn’t do is show me a count for unread messages in my folders.

    I can live with that.

  • Mailbag: Hugo from iPads

    Mailbag: Hugo from iPads

    So I’ve done the whole Hugo thing and it’s great and it totally works for me. That 1% itch left from Jekyll is gone. So queue the inevitable…

    But what about mobile posting?!

    Why on earth the planet is obsessed with posting everything from their phone, I don’t know. Things like Instagram and Twitter make it easy for us to ‘communicate’ (and I use that loosely) and post photos of our lunch. And yes, the iOS app for the iPhone means I can ‘live blog’ but, to be honest, I hate it on my iPhone.

    My iPad though… I love posting from that.

    And yes, yes I can post to my Hugo run site from my iPhone or iPad. Remember, I can push my new content by running a git push command. The server will build, sync, and clean up on its own. All I need to do it is a Git app on my iPad that doesn’t suck

    Working Copy does not suck.

    It’s an iOS app that pulls my git repository to my iPad (the whole thing, so make sure you have room). Then I can edit files, commit them, and push. Hugo on the server does the rest, just like it would from my desktop.

    Working Copy is different from many other Git related apps because can hook into any git repository. I’m not using GitHub for this project. I want to do 100% self hosting, and that means no GitHub. Also no BitBucket. These tools are fine for what they are, and in fact I pay GitHub for some private repos. But I wanted my repo on my server, in part so I could do exactly what I’m doing.

    The tool is incredibly simple. It’s a familiar file navigator, tap through the folders. Tap edit to edit, make changes to the post, hit done. There’s even a preview feature that mostly works. Some of my Markdown files are very weird.

    If I wanted to edit in Byword, which is what I do most of my writing in for non-novel related things, I can share and go back and forth. I’d love it if the WordPress iOS app (or Calypso) did that. Write in Byword, send to other app. But even a copy/paste is simple enough. In this case, I can write in Byword and share to Working Copy. The interface takes the title of my document and let’s me pick the folder.

    Once I’m done with my edits, I commit my changes. Then I can push, or not. There’s an option to commit+push, but it crashed my app. A skim of reviews showed this happened to others. The iOS interface can be a bit tetchy so having this be two steps doesn’t bother me.

    I did find it odd that there was no button to push. I had to go back to the main folder, swipe-left, and press the orange push button. But that, and the weird crash, were it for annoyances.

    While free to download, it’s $9.99 for unlimited deployments. It was free for 3 weeks, which I tried out over WordCamp US and found simple and perfect for my workflow.

  • 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.