As the year comes to an end, it’s time for the Ninth Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2022, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
The 30th birthday of PCalc makes us consider how long-lived tech products must constantly change and adapt, Dan is forced to power cycle a Caseta hub, and we celebrate some holiday traditions.
[This is the last episode of the year. We’ll be back January 6. Happy New Year to all!]
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Speaking of James Thomson, he and John Voorhees and I celebrate the holidays with our annual gift exchange, and then it’s time to make predictions for what will happen in 2023—but first, it’s time to score our picks from the past year and crown a new champion. Typical episode of Connected.
The built-in Mac OS calculator of the day was a very simple affair, and so I decided I would write a calculator that could do binary and hex, to help me with my programming. And so the idea for PCalc was born. I bought the books Inside Macintosh, Volumes I, II, and III, and sat down to figure it all out. We didn’t have the Internet back then – well, no web at least – so that was basically all I had to go on. Eventually, I started to get the internal logic working, and built a user interface around it all. System 7 was new, so I eventually got a copy of the massive Volume VI to see what had changed there. I didn’t think I needed any of the stuff in the middle.
In its life PCalc has been many different code bases, lived on a huge number of Apple platforms, and gone from being just for fun to a major moneymaker to a low priority to the highest priority to an incubator for a driving game. A lot can happen in thirty years.
(Disclaimer: I appear in James’s story as the guy who made an innocuous suggestion that turned into a PCalc spin-off app.)
We’ve reached the end of the year, and just like last year that means it’s time for me to look ahead at what’s coming for us in 2023. These are my fearless predictions! Okay, maybe there’s a slight bit of fear. Don’t look directly into my eyes. I’m sensitive that way.
While this year’s Mac lineup was a little less than I expected–probably due to supply-chain issues–I suspect that’s going to result in a huge 2023 for the Mac. And on the iPad side, while I expect a quiet year, there’s still a wild card that might make a bit of noise.
Someone bought the bar we were all hanging out in, and they started interrupting the music with edicts about bar rules, fired most of the staff, aren’t paying their bills, installed a velvet rope where VIPs can spit on the other bar patrons, had bouncers start to randomly remove people, and are bricking over the fire exits.
I’ll get my coat.
There are other bars, of course. There are communities on Discord or Slack, and microblogging services like Mastodon and micro.blog. People with big audiences might build their own Substack, or ask people to follow their Tumblr, or set up a blog via WordPress.
Or maybe just chill out and read a book? Imagine a main character who isn’t getting milkshake-ducked or bean-dad-ed into oblivion, for once.
Gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
One reason a lot of people have a hard time walking away from Twitter is because it’s where we’ve invested all our valuable time and resources crafting bespoke non sequiturs, and hewing reaction memes from the finest 12th generation copies of JPEGs.
Fortunately, the previous management at Twitter offered us all archives of our posts, and no one has removed, or broken it yet. Get that archive, if you haven’t already. That archive works locally, except all the URLs are t.co URLs, and those will stop working if you delete your Twitter account, but it has important things like media. It’s not easy to share anything from this archive, if you have something old you want to link to elsewhere.
One solution, from Darius Kazemi, is a lightweight static site generator that can be uploaded basically anywhere on the internet and work, his example is here. You don’t have to upload it at all, and it can just live on your hard drive. Like I just used it to find the time I uploaded an image of a shark from Jaws with the human-like teeth from the original Sonic: The Hedgehog trailer. Normal stuff I tweeted.
The whole thing runs in javascript in your browser and doesn’t upload your archive to any service, or require you to install node or python or anything. If you have a large archive, like I do, you’ll need to unzip it, move the media directory out, and re-zip it. Instructions are straight forward. The result works as expected, and you can modify the CSS however you see fit. Like I commented out the height restrictions in the CSS because that’s just how I wanted to see it.
This is also useful for preserving my very long Twitter thread of all the times the iOS Photos widget has put text over my boyfriend’s face. Now that important work can live forever anywhere I decide to host it.
I hope you have found a friend
A difficulty with moving to new services, that has basically stifled all newcomers in social media, is that there’s no easy way to coordinate where you’re moving to without losing people along the way. There’s too much friction and people give up, or even if they all move, they don’t see each other. There are solutions to that which require some data to be present in your Twitter profile to work out what other people also have that data and draw that connection elsewhere. You need to periodically check because someone might show up, but hopefully if they’re late to the party they’ll check and find you first.
One of the heavily recommended services for finding friends on Mastodon, movetodon.org by Tibor Martini, works pretty well for this. Of course, at any moment this app could break. (If, for example, Twitter crafted another sudden policy decision to kill links to other social media sites.)
Use this time to follow people to other sites they link to besides Mastodon instances. Mastodon isn’t a crowd pleaser—so don’t expect, or demand, that people try Mastodon just so you can mirror your relationship from Twitter to Mastodon.
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from
No matter where you go after Twitter, it’s important to not try and reproduce the same social patterns from Twitter. As tempting as it is to blame Elon Musk for everything, it’s not like Twitter was the optimum social experience beforehand. We’ve all been trained to take a photo, screenshot, or link and post it to dunk on. Certainly one of the difficult things to get used to with Mastodon is the design decision to not have quote tweets because of the bad behavior that they can, but don’t always, encourage.
If you’re logging into your Discords to throw in a link and ask “can you believe this?”, maybe you should also think about how you’ve got the space, and the social skills to talk about it with appropriate context and nuance. To treat the space you’re going into like it’s for conversation with people that also want to talk with you, and not just be outraged.
We should also all be conscious of moderation in all of these other social settings. Moderation was a nebulous thing that Twitter management hired contractors to do to other people, but in smaller social settings, it can be the thing your buddy has to say to you about your behavior. People of a certain age know something about that from Usenet, BBSes, and various web forums. We might all be so used to shouting in overcrowded spaces we’re not paying attention to how we talk in the smaller ones.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end
I met some great friends, acquaintances, and interesting people through Twitter. I’ll find more in other places too—we all will. No one owns that, even if they buy up and ruin the spot where it happened in the past.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Upgrading the Home architecture requires that all devices accessing the home be updated to the latest operating system version, so many users have yet to take the leap, but users who have upgraded have reported some issues. Amidst those reports, it now appears Apple has removed the option for users to upgrade their Home app architecture.
I hadn’t yet taken the plunge, mainly as I was waiting for my wife to update her Apple devices. But reports seem to be that the upgrade has not been smooth sailing for many folks.
The improved Home architecture has been touted as a major feature of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, even though it didn’t arrive until the latest updates. It’s one that I’ve been looking forward to, since we’ve been a HomeKit-only household for some time, and the reliability has been less than stellar. Just the other day, I ran into an issue where none of my Lutron Caseta lights would respond in HomeKit until I restarted the hub (the first time I’ve ever had to do that).
I’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this story when and if they reply.
Whether TikTok’s algorithm explanations will ruin the magic. How we collect and share our holiday gift ideas. The weather app(s) we’re using in light of the end of Dark Sky. The coolest gifts we’ve bought for ourselves this holiday season.
Apple’s self-repair program, which was announced last year, arrived in April, and came to the Mac in August with support for the M1 MacBook Air and all three M1 MacBook Pro models, has now been extended to support Mac desktops and the new Apple Studio Display. Newly supported Macs are the M1 iMac, M1 Mac mini, and Mac Studio.
While the repair program expanded to Europe earlier this month, these models are currently only available for repair in the United States.
The self-repair program is generally intended for tech savvy people who would prefer to fix their devices themselves. For most of us, I’d expect the best option is to take your device to an Apple Store, mail it in to Apple, or visit a local repair center. But not everyone has those options—and Apple will sell or rent you everything you need to do the job yourself, if that’s the right option for you.
Earlier this year, Belkin released the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Notebooks, a $30 adapter that lets you attach an iPhone to the top of a MacBook screen and use it as a webcam via macOS Ventura’s Continuity Camera feature.
Now there’s the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Desktops and Displays, a $40 adapter for other displays. I’ve had a preproduction version for a while now, and took possession of the final shipping version this week. (It seems more or less identical.)
While I like the MacBook adapter with some reservations—which mostly have to do with the weight of an iPhone adjusting your MacBook’s display when you don’t want it to, and it’s hard for Belkin to ignore the laws of physics—I have very few reservations of this new adapter. It works well on my Apple Studio Display but would work just as well on an iMac, a third-party display, or even a television.
The adapter can be folded up compactly (left) but unfolded into a three-piece configuration for placement.
The adapter is essentially three separate fold-out pieces (meaning you can fold it down to make it compact for travel or storage purposes): There’s a magnetic puck you attach to your phone, a stand that goes over the top of your display with a lip to keep it attached to the front, and a leg that goes against the back of the display to provide leverage. You can slide the puck forward about halfway if you want to get the phone a little closer to you (and to be sure it’s not picking up the edge of your display).
You can slide the MagSafe puck forward to get it right above the display.
The leg piece also has a threaded tripod mount, so if you’ve got a tripod handy, you can pretty much attach any MagSafe-compatible iPhone and use it anywhere. It’s a nice alternative to something like Studio Neat’s venerable Glif. You can also tilt the adapter, of course—Belkin says the range is from fully vertical to 25 degrees downward—so you can make sure your shot has just enough, but not too much, headroom.
It’s probably because of the metal magnet required in order to offer MagSafe support, but the whole adapter feels solid, a bit more like a piece of camera equipment than a cheap and fragile computer accessory.
Continuity Camera is a great feature. If you’ve got an iPhone 12, 13, or 14 and need a good webcam, you basically shouldn’t buy one—it’s already in your pocket. While mounting one to the top of a MacBook is a little awkward, there’s no such awkwardness on a larger display. I highly recommend the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe for Mac Desktops and Displays for anyone who wants to put that excellent iPhone camera to use on their Mac.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, but the news doesn’t stop! We discuss next year’s Mac lineup, the end of Apple’s NFL Sunday Ticket negotiations, and reports that Apple is planning to open up the iOS app ecosystem in response to new rules from the European Union. But before we’re done, we also take a little time out to re-tell our Apple origin stories. Happy holidays to all Upgradians!
The end of the year is nigh, and with it comes a host of pieces looking both back at the year that was in Apple news, and forward to the year that will be. And who am I to eschew such a trend?
2022 was dominated perhaps, more than anything else, by economic challenges for Apple, including the disruption of the global supply chain, continued pandemic-related problems, and of course, inflation. But despite what is charmingly termed “headwinds” by market watchers, the company persevered and delivered yet another impressive slate of products, with the financial performance to back it up.
When it comes to major moves the company itself made in 2022, they may not always be obvious at first glance. You can’t always directly tie these decisions to Apple’s ongoing success. They’re more often the kind of small moves that lead to big changes later on down the road.
Freeform is an interesting addition to Apple’s productivity offerings, and there are several other notable items in Apple’s last software update of 2022. Meanwhile, the company begins planning major changes due to new EU rules for 2024.
My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
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Whether we’d install a third-party app store on our phones, our most anticipated Matter devices, the tasks we’d pawn off onto an AI chatbot, and our non-holiday holiday traditions.
Lawsuits, new laws, and proposed regulations have been swirling around Apple and some of its core business practices for years now. But on Tuesday came the first report—from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, perhaps the most reliable breaker of secret Apple news—that Apple’s planning on changing its App Store policies in major ways.
This is a report with a lot of details, portraying Apple’s reaction to a complex and evolving set of circumstances around the world. But Gurman’s track record strongly suggests that this is real—and it means big changes are afoot for many users of iPhones and iPads.
I have lots of questions, as I know most of you have. Here’s what I think this all means, at least based on what we know right now.
