Apple has a knack for building things under our noses over the course of years… actually, even decades. They’re really good at building onto their technology when it works. When it doesn’t work, they throw it out and start over, only to build it up in the way that matches their final vision. We saw this happen with the M1 chip. It took them more than a decade, but they finally cashed in on their vision. I think we’re about to see that happen again at WWDC 2021.
Many years ago, I embarked on a home automation hobby that has drained my budget. Home automation is a horrifically expensive hobby (like most of them). There’s a lot of trial and error. You’ll almost always buy stuff that doesn’t work or integrate well. It’ll be expensive. You’ll want to replace it because it’s not perfect.
I started off with the center of my universe on Amazon Alexa (like most people). I am also an Apple-holic, so I often employed hacks to make third-party gadgets work in the HomeKit space. Homebridge has been quite successful at filling in the gaps where necessary - the glue to the Alexa and HomeKit ecosystems. Alexa was my “home’s personality” according to family and visitors and for the most part, that was ok.
Apple never announces hardware updates at WWDC. They only talk about the software and things that developers care about. The new hardware always comes in the September/October timeframe. I don’t understand why the press continues to think Apple will release new hardware at WWDC.
Yes, they talked about Apple Silicon, and they gave you a good guess about when it’s coming out - but they didn’t announce anything that you can buy, yet.
How is it that Apple has followed this formula for more than a decade and people still don’t get it?
I really want to use my iPad to write code. It shouldn’t be this hard. I don’t know why, but it really is. Today, I’ve been playing with round-tripping through Working Copy and Code Editor by Panic (formerly Coda). I think I’ve almost gotten it worked out, but man is it painful. I shouldn’t have to run a webdav server on my own iPad to edit documents and save back to GitHub.
I guess the good news is that I’m able to ssh into a local copy of my git repo without leaving this window. I sure have put down a lot of money on text/code editors just to experiment and find out which ones aren’t working out.
This should be so much easier. I feel like iPadOS has been band-aided to death so that it can avoid being a Macbook when people want to use it like a Macbook.
Recently, my mother moved in with us because she has needs that require her to be attended. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to make her comfortable in the home. Part of that comfort entails setting up a TV for her to watch her shows. We’re an all-streaming home now, as I finally pulled the plug on DirecTV about a month ago. My mother is a die-hard DirecTV fan because she’s used to it.
Now, I have to ask her to get used to the way we watch shows in this house and it’s been painful.
My series on whining about macOS Catalina continues today as I tried to use AWS Cloud9 in Safari. It doesn’t work. You have to enable third-party cookies to make it work. Apple has apparently removed the ability to re-enable third party cookies in Safari 13.
Want to use it on iPadOS? Nope. Can’t enable third party cookies in iPadOS on Safari or Chrome. No more Cloud9 for me. Just deleted the environment.
I managed to get a fresh install of Google Chrome working under Catalina. But it wasn’t easy to unravel. Apparently, if you have spctl enabled on first launch, Chrome will create a jacked-up profile folder that it can no longer access. I discovered this by running the binary from inside Terminal, where the story was told.
To fix, here’s what I did:
WARNING: Unfortunately negative post.
This has been an interesting year in the Appleverse. iOS 13, iPadOS and macOS Catalina were all dropped on us. This new software “regime” has been quite the challenge for me.
iOS 13 and iPadOS haven’t been that troubling. They generally work and do what they promised to do. I did find it curious that iOS 13.1, 13.1.1 and 13.1.2 all dropped in pretty rapid succession. That’s usually a bad sign that things weren’t up to standards and had to go through some quick resolution. There were either fixes or outright removals to get things out the door. I don’t like it when that happens, but I get it. I’m glad they stay on top of things well enough.
Catalina and Apple TV on the other hand… have been a complete shitshow.
Update: I resolved the Google Chrome issue. If you’re just interested in the resolution, please go here.
In iOS 11, you don’t only have to use the dock for single apps. You can drag an app group into the Dock as well. I just found this out by “trying it out.” That makes it much more useful for app switching when you swipe up from the bottom.
I’m really liking iOS 11 a lot. It sold a new iPad to me… an iPad Pro 256gb 12.9”. I just had to have it. I can almost turn it into my work machine, but the Files app let me down. I couldn’t rename a file extension with the Files app. I needed to do that and it hosed me since I couldn’t. I reported that though :)
If you’re plagued by the Apple Software Update popping up every day to remind you that iCloud for Windows 5.1 is available to install… even when you already have it installed… you need to go registry-diving.
This community post on the Apple site worked for me. Whew. Finally. That was super annoying.
Hope you’re all well. Reach out to me and let me know how your life is going.
