Category: Apple

Apple TV 4th Generation – Impressions

I was eager, when Apple announced the fourth generation Apple TV, to get it and check it out. I was especially excited by the concept of a real app store for the TV and by the ability to game on the device.

Then reality hit. For years, I had been using an Apple TV in our family room, and it’s been invaluable for entertainment. Mostly kids’ entertainment—movie rentals through the iTunes Store, complete seasons of “Scooby-Doo”—but I’ve used it to play music and watch movies too. But the hookup I was using to connect it to the rest of my gear was no longer supported. In particular, Apple used to have an optical out on the back of the older generation Apple TV devices in addition to HDMI. That allowed me to connect the device to my faithful Onkyo TX-DS494 so that I could put the sound out through my Bowers & Wilkins DM 602s.

But the new generation has no optical out! And the Onkyo, alas, has no HDMI inputs. So I had a choice. I could get the Apple TV and run the sound through the comparatively unsatisfactory speakers on our television. Or I could wait until I could afford to replace the Onkyo.

That time has come. I have a Marantz SR6010 (last year’s model new in box at a substantial discount from list!) on its way, and I hooked up the Apple TV last weekend so we could get used to the new interface.

First impressions: the new UI is considerably easier to navigate. And I really love the App Store. I was able to find something like 29 applications—a mix of video apps like the PBS Kids app, YouTube, and others, plus some games—that I had already purchased for the family phones that were available to download to the TV. Score! There were even a few fun games for free, like the Lego Batman game. I’d love to see more games in the store, though, especially games that support the controllers. And more retro games. Why can’t I play Lode Runner on the Apple TV? I can on my iPhone.

Gaming is probably the biggest let down right now. The controller I bought, the SteelSeries Nimbus, is a little too big for my six year old’s hands so he’ll have to use the Siri remote. That works pretty well for him, though he got tired of driving his race car off the track in the first game we played pretty quickly.

But the simple handoff of text input from the onscreen remote to the iPhone is brilliant, and makes up for some of the other disappointments with the device. I can’t wait to hook up the new receiver when it gets here and really take the thing through its paces.

New Mac time

I got upgraded at work from a late-2011 MacBook Pro to a late-2016 MacBook Pro—the kind with Touch Bar. I’m learning and relearning a lot of things that I had figured out how to do on the old machine as I set things up. Observations:

  1. The thing is fast. (Probably mostly because of the SSD drive, though the 3.3GHz vs. 2.4GHz processor may have something to do with it.)
  2. And so much more reliable. I was kernel panicking all over the place in the old machine.
  3. I hadn’t tweaked the old machine as much as I was afraid I had. After moving my home directory over, there were only a handful of apps I had to reinstall from scratch. I had also been smart enough to do most of my custom fonts in my user/Library/Fonts directory rather than in System, which made migration much easier.
  4. Speaking of migration, Thunderbolt really did the trick. I think moving all 300+ GB of stuff took about six hours, much faster than I remember when I used Firewire or Ethernet in the past.
  5. The keyboard is a non-issue. Feels great. Maybe a little loud but very easy to type on.

There are some things I’m still getting used to:

  • I hit the Siri key by accident a fair amount.
  • I really should have registered my index finger rather than my thumb on the fingerprint sensor.
  • The touch bar is pretty cool, but not much uses it yet. I spend most of my day in Chrome and it’s got nothing there.

And the big thing I’m waiting for: better USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) docks. While I’d love something like the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock, which has pretty much every port you’d ever need, they don’t ship until sometime in March, presumably thanks to the TI chipset issue. In the meantime, the only thing I’m really missing is an Ethernet adapter, and that’s just because it’s back-ordered.

(Also, it’d be great if I could get SheepShaver working, but that’s not required for work, obviously.)

Ten years ago…

…(yesterday), the iPhone was announced. I went looking through my blog archives, and found my reaction.

Particularly funny is reading, after-the-fact, the commentary claiming that Nokia, Blackberry and others had such a big lead in mobile device design. Ten years on, it’s even more apparent than ever that all mobile prior to the iPhone was just a prelude. And every successful device since then has leveraged the same design architecture—big touchscreen, flat device, minimal hard buttons—whether from Apple or from any one of a galaxy of imitators.

I rewatched the launch announcement last night … on my current iPhone.

Follow up: iOS 10.2 fixes my gripes with Music

Yesterday’s iOS 10.2 update appears to address the two most nagging problems I had with the original iOS 10 Music App, including the discoverability of the Repeat and Shuffle controls and the temporary disappearance of star ratings.

Which is a big relief. Because I’m here to tell you that Siri was very capable of misunderstanding instructions like “give this song four stars.”

Thanks, Apple, for paying attention to the feedback.

End of an era: no more AirPort routers from Apple

Bloomberg: Apple abandons development of wireless routers. End of an era. I just bought a new AirPort router a few months ago and love it, but the handwriting was certainly on the wall with this product that hadn’t been refreshed in three years.

As much as I’ll miss the AirPort brand, this move is consistent with Apple’s product strategy. Contrary to popular opinion, they don’t always insist on making every bit of gear in the ecosystem—only the ones where the existing options aren’t satisfactory. They haven’t made a printer in almost twenty years and got out of external displays earlier this year; dropping out of the wireless business is a logical next step.

The Airport years

I installed a new Airport Extreme (6th generation) on our home network yesterday. We haven’t run Cat5 through our whole house the way we did in Arlington, so our primary FiOS WiFi router has to live in the basement right next to the FiOS network box, and its signal is unacceptable in about a third of the first floor and almost all of the second.

We had been limping along with an Airport Express in the upstairs bedroom as a second network, but it didn’t really have enough signal strength to solve the problem. I experimented with substituting in our old Airport Extreme (dating from around 2007), but it had weird range problems, with range and signal strength dropping unexpectedly. So we decided to bite the bullet and get a new router.

Man, am I glad we did. The range and speed from the new router are incredible; I even get WiFi out at the kids’ bus stop now. And things that used to give the old network fits, like running the microwave, are no longer an issue.

I was talking about it with Lisa last night and we realized that we bought our first AirPort router before most of the planet had WiFi. We had the original “flying saucer” model back in the fall of 2000—so long ago, the base station had a dial-up modem in it. We’ve come a long way.

“Uncontrollable innovation”

New York Times: Why Samsung Abandoned Its Galaxy Note 7 Flagship Phone. Like John Gruber, I am curious about the closing quote, from Park Chul-Wan, the former director of the Center for Advanced Batteries at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute:

“The Note 7 had more features and was more complex than any other phone manufactured. In a race to surpass iPhone, Samsung seems to have packed it with so much innovation it became uncontrollable.”

Uncontrollable innovation? That’s an interesting claim.

I think the thing that’s forgotten here, as in so much of the smartphone feature war, is that features aren’t useful if they can’t be used, or safely manufactured, or if they don’t meet a customer need.

It doesn’t sound to me like the problem was out of control innovation. It sounds to me like the problem was an engineering culture that created a product that was untestable, and a management culture that made it impossible to react rapidly to new developments in the marketplace.

iOS 10 Music App: second take

I’ve been living with iOS 10 for about a week now, or long enough to have gotten up the learning curve imposed by some of the UI changes. (This is starting to be my general rule of thumb. Any UI change, even if it’s for the better, can be jarring and disruptive the first time you encounter it, but the benefits take a while to perceive). The first week I tweeted a series of questions about the new Music app, most of which I’ve managed to resolve. But there’s one very important question left unanswered, about how iOS 10 Music handles smart playlists synced from iTunes.

Relocation of Shuffle/Repeat controls: Now that I’m used to the change, I actually like Apple’s relocation of the Shuffle and Repeat controls to the newly created “swipe up” pane, which also displays the “Up Next” queue. Placing these controls, which are used infrequently during a normal playback session, where they can’t be hit accidentally counts as a UX improvement in my book.

Relocated lyrics: Given the rights issues around song lyrics, I always was a little surprised that Apple provided a way not only to add them to your own tracks but also to view them in iOS. When I first experimented with iOS 10 Music, though, I thought this had been removed. Good news: they’re still there, just with access moved to a new option on the … menu (or on the Swipe Up pane).  This is somewhat less cool than the move of the Shuffle and Repeat controls because the Lyrics option only appears if the file actually has lyrics, meaning I had to search through a bunch of songs before I could actually find one where the button showed up to verify that this actually worked.

Playlists syncing as empty: I have a few smart playlists that appear to sync but don’t appear populated on the iPhone. Fortunately it looks like there’s a workaround: plug in the phone, uncheck the playlists, sync, then check the playlists to select them and sync again.

Disappearance of star ratings: I’m less OK with this change. iOS 9 introduced “love” as a ratings option alongside star ratings. I didn’t use it because I don’t find “love” granular enough when you’re managing a library of 40,000 tracks. There’s a big difference between “desert island disk” level and “yeah, that track’s OK and I might put it on the right mix tape.” But it looks like star ratings are disappearing, even if they are still in iTunes (and accessible via Siri). Not cool.

 

It’s not nice to fool Mother Apple

Daring Fireball: Dropbox’s MacOS Security Hack. Gruber rounds up a bunch of links on Dropbox’s bad security practices in its Mac client. Basically, as documented by Phil Stokes, Dropbox asks for your admin password, injects itself into the list of applications that can “control your computer” in the Security & Privacy control panel, and reinjects itself if it’s removed from the list. Thankfully Apple has closed the loophole that allowed this to happen.

The conclusions I take from this:

  1. Dropbox really wanted to ensure that it could take some action that required Accessibility apps
  2. Their product manager didn’t trust users to grant the right authorizations and didn’t want to give them the ability to remove the permissions
  3. Their engineering staff either didn’t push back or got rolled over
  4. Their security staff either wasn’t consulted or didn’t think that this was dangerous—surely no one would ever find a vulnerability in the Dropbox Mac Client and use it to run unauthorized code? Oh wait.

Their PMs respond: the Accessibility permissions were necessary to integrate with other third party applications, and Apple’s APIs didn’t grant the right level of access.

As they say: Developing…

Smart thermostats, dumb market

One of the things I’ve been theoretically excited about for a while in iOS land is the coming of HomeKit, the infrastructure for an Internet of Things platform for the home that includes standard controller UI and orchestration of things like smart thermostats, light bulbs, garage door openers, blinds, and other stuff.

I’ve been personally and professionally skeptical of IoT for a while now. The combination of bad UX, poor software engineering, limited upgradeability, and tight time to market smells like an opportunity for a security armageddon. And in fact, a research paper from my company, Veracode, suggests just that.

So my excitement over HomeKit has less to do with tech enthusiast wackiness and more to do with the introduction of a well thought out, well engineered platform for viewing and controlling HomeKit, that hopefully removes some of the opportunities for security stupidity.

But now the moment of truth arrives. We have a cheap thermostat that’s been slowly failing – currently it doesn’t recognize that it has new batteries in it, for instance. It only controls the heating system, so we have a few more weeks to do something about it. And I thought, the time is ripe. Let’s get a HomeKit-enabled thermostat to replace it.

But the market of HomeKit enabled thermostats isn’t very good yet. A review of top smart thermostat models suggests that Nest (which doesn’t support HomeKit and sends all your data to Google) is the best option by far. The next best option is the ecobee3, which does support HomeKit but which is $249. And the real kicker is that to work effectively, both require a C (powered) wire in the wall, which we don’t have, and an always on HomeKit controller in the house, like a fourth generation Apple TV, to perform time-based adjustments to the system.

So it looks like I’ll be investing in a cheap thermostat replacement this time, but laying the groundwork for a future system once we have a little more cash. I wanted to start working on the next-gen AppleTV soon anyway. Of course, to get that, I have to have an HDMI enabled receiver…