Category Archives: Apple

Apple

“Memories of Steve”

Don Melton, one of the original developers of Safari, has shared some of his memories of Steve Jobs.  It starts with this observation:

Anyone at Apple or Pixar — both large organizations — will tell you that Steve knowing your name was an honor. But also occasionally a terrifying responsibility. That was the bargain.

MacIT

“what your conference proposal is missing”

Great advice from Sarah Mei about how to approach writing conference proposals, including this:

If you relentlessly focus on answering “Why?”, your proposal will get more interest, more attendees, and better reviews.

I especially like that she takes a real example and breaks down ways to improve it.  If you’re thinking about what you’ll submit to MacIT 2015, reading this will help you get into a frame of mind to create a great proposal.

MacIT, MWSF

MacIT 2014 presentations

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I’ve been way too busy to write up a post about how awesome MacIT 2014 was this year.  For now, I’ll post public links to presentations that I’ve found:

For those of you who attended MacIT 2014, all of the presentations should be available on the website.

There were plenty of tweets during the week, including lots of pictures (many of which are pictures of slides).  The hashtags #macit2014 and #macitconf were the ones that I found the most useful.

Edited 2014-04-06, 21:12: added “Essential Security & Risk Fundamentals”.
Edited 2014-04-07, 10:10: added “Building Better Users”.
Edited 2014-04-10, 14:09: added link to github repo for Facebook’s IT tools.

  1. This is an Evernote shared notebook. As of 2014-04-07, Clif’s presentation is about halfway down in the notebook, past all of the stuff about iBooks. ↩
MacIT, MWSF

on the eve of MacIT

On the eve of MacIT, I give you this wisdom from @sadserver …

If you watch a movie of your life backwards, it’s about a sysadmin who regains youth/happiness as they forget more and more about computers

If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go have a little existential crisis now.  If you’re at MWSF or MacIT, we can cry into our beers together.

Apple, user experience

consistency matters

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There is an inconsistency in two things that I use frequently, and it trips me up all the time.

In OS X Mavericks (and previous versions1), when using the Finder, there’s one keyboard shortcut that I use all the time.  If you have a long list of folders and files, you can go to the parent folder and type the first letter of the file that you want.  It will jump to the first file that starts with that letter.  I have lots of folders with lots of files in them, and I use this all the time so that I don’t have to scroll.2  For example, if you have a folder with a lot of files in it, and you want to jump to “nadyne.txt”, you can select the parent folder (say, Documents) and then type an N.  You’ll be taken to the first item in the list with an N, and have much less scrolling to do.

However, in iTunes 11, if you want to jump to the first item in the list that begins with an N, the focus has to be on the list itself.  For example, if you want to jump to “Neko Case” in your artist listing, you have to have focus there, and then click N.  To be consistent with the Finder, you would need to have focus on the parent object of “Music”.

I don’t really care which behavior is the winning behavior, I just wish that the two were consistent.  I trip over this all the time, and it drives me utterly batty.  (And yes, I’ve submitted the Radar: 15750167.)

  1. I can’t say how far back.  Muscle memory says that it’s far back indeed. I can’t remember when it didn’t work this way on OS X. ↩
  2. I use this even more frequently now that the arrow buttons have disappeared from scrollbars, but that’s another post for another time. ↩
iPad, iPhone, Mac

I need a new password manager

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I need a new password management application.  The one that I had previously been using (which won’t get named here) has been deleted due to anti-employee actions.  I’m looking for a password manager that works well on my Mac, allows for syncing passwords with multiple computers, and preferably has an iOS app too.

iPad, iPhone

How to get Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto, and iMovie for free on your new iPad

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I succumbed, and bought a new retina iPad Mini this weekend.  My old iPad, the first release of the iPad 2, was showing its age on iOS7.  Apps were running slower, and the spiffiness of the newest iPads had me thinking about an upgrade.  Based on specs, I couldn’t make the decision between the iPad Air and the iPad Mini; in-store playing with the two iPads side-by-side, I knew that I wanted the iPad Mini within seconds.

I knew that new iOS 7 devices (anything purchased after September 1, 2013) were supposed to get iPhoto, iMovie, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers for free.  After I had transferred everything from my iPad 2 to my new iPad Mini, I opened up the App Store to download these apps.  But they all showed their full price, and didn’t show that they were free for new devices.  My husband also purchased an iPad Mini at the same time (upgrading from the short-lived iPad 3), and the apps all showed up free for him.  If you’re like me and the apps didn’t show up for free, here’s what worked for me to get it:

  1. Quit all apps: double-tap your Home button and swipe every running app up to fully quit out of it).
  2. Clear out Safari’s caches: Open up the Settings app, tap on Safari, then “clear history” and “clear cookies and data”.
  3. Try downloading the apps again: Open up the App Store and search for one of them.  It should show up as “free” now.

The support page says that you’re supposed to be presented with a dialog offering to download all of them for you when you launch the App Store, but that wasn’t the case for me.  I had to individually search them all out.

On my first attempt to do this, it mostly worked.  I was able to search for and install Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto, and iMovie.  However, Pages behaved strangely: it showed up for free, and when I tapped on it to install, I would get the round progress indicator and then the “free” button again.  I tried a couple of times without success.  I finally waited for the other apps to finish installing, verified that they had all worked correctly, and then repeated the steps outlined above.  This time, when I searched for Pages, there wasn’t a “free” or “install” button, just the round button that had previously indicated progress.  When I tapped on it, I got a message saying that I had already purchased the app and that it would download it again to my iPad.  It did, it works, and I haven’t yet seen a charge for it.  As far as I can tell, it has worked.  I can’t explain why everything except Pages behaved well, but at least I was able to finally install it.

I couldn’t find this documented anywhere else, so I’m sharing it in case someone else has the same problem.