My thanks to Kolide for once again sponsoring Six Colors.
Kolide takes a different approach to endpoint security and fleet management. They help companies meet compliance goals by enlisting the support of their users with a structured, message-based approach.
Here’s Kolide’s secret sauce: It communicates security detection and compliance issues to users via Slack messages, reaching them directly and providing them with the information they need to help make their organization more secure. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance.
Jason’s a Photos tips machine, we watch as Twitter burns, and there are some deep thoughts about how online communities aren’t controlled by the platforms they exist on.
Last week on the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa bemoaned the fact that Smart Albums in Photos on the Mac don’t take advantage of the sophisticated searches you can do from the app’s Search box, which include face, object, and scene detection.
It turns out they do, if you know where to look.
People are given their own rule type in the Smart Albums, so you can create a rule that says Person includes John Siracusa and that’ll grab all the photos of John in the library—in my case, 109 pictures.
The next step is the non-obvious one. Add a rule for Text, and set it to is and the name of the same term you’d search for in the search box. In this case, I added camera and the Smart Album ended up with 13 matched items… the same number found when I searched for Photos of John Siracusa and camera in the search box.
Why “Text?” You’ve got me.1 Even weirder, you can stack these, adding more Text is statements to filter to other keywords too. If you choose Text is not, it will search for the inverse. And if you choose Text starts with it won’t just find cows when you search for cow, it’ll also find cowboys and cowboy hats and who knows what else. Not that you can ever see these tags—you just have to guess.
There’s another caveat: this text search finds anything in your photo with the word you’re looking for. If there’s an address or location containing the word “beach”, it’ll be found when you search for beach. It’s a rough tool but it can be turned to your advantage… mostly.
Photos is very mysterious. And, of course, Smart Albums don’t sync, so they aren’t visible on iOS devices. But if you’re a dedicated user of Photos on the Mac, this is a great way to create albums based on those machine-learning categories. (And if you want to share a static version of the results with fellow members of a shared library, just add keywords to the photos collected in the Smart Album.
[The next edition of my bookTake Control of Photosis coming soon. Order it now and you’ll get the new edition for free!]
It looks like you can use Text to search for text found in the images by Apple’s Live Text feature, too. At least that makes sense. ↩
Our thoughts on all-in-one work platforms in regard to Zoom One, the mapping app(s) we use, our predictions for the future of social media, and our tech-buying habits when faced with supply-constraint delays.
Apple has done such a good job of improving the iPhone, iPad, and Mac upgrade experience in the last few years that I’ve come to take it for granted that when I buy a new piece of Apple hardware to replace an old one, I will be able to fairly quickly transfer all my stuff and go about my business.
Unfortunately, the Apple TV is still woefully behind on this front, as I discovered last week when I set up a new third-generation Apple TV 4K in my living room. Apple’s got some work to do here.
The setup starts promisingly: You can bring your iPhone near the Apple TV, and it will automatically log your Apple ID in. If you’ve got the One Home Screen feature turned on, all your apps will load and appear in all the right places. It will feel like you’ve done a data transfer.
But it’s all a mirage.
One Home Screen is a nice feature, but it’s not an iCloud backup of your Apple TV, nor is it the Apple TV equivalent of Migration Assistant. It is exactly what its name suggests—a home-screen-syncing feature and nothing more.
So after setting up my new Apple TV, I then had to log into every single streaming app. And I’ve got a lot of streaming apps—you know, for my work.
Not only is this process tedious, but it’s also inconsistent. Things aren’t as bad as they were in the olden days when you had to laboriously enter user names and passwords by typing them in on the on-screen Ouija Board by clicking a remote. These days, most streaming apps have you use your phone to log in on their website and enter a pairing code to validate your Apple TV.
But not all. Some would prefer that you enter a username and password manually. At least Apple TV remembers your email address and suggests it, so you don’t have to retype it, and if you’re using a password manager (either Apple’s or third-party apps like 1Password) on your iPhone, you can generally auto-fill your password from right on your iPhone via its Apple TV remote control capability.
And then there are a few apps that have cleverly built “local log-in” into their iPhone or iPad app. These apps, like Disney+, claim that you can open the app on the same network as your Apple TV, and the app will sense it and log you in automatically. I have tried this on multiple Apple TVs and have never gotten it to work.
Along the way, I was also forced to create a new password for Hulu (a part of Disney’s ongoing account merging and migration), enter the name of my local Channels server, and a bunch of other small items.
The end result was that I spent almost half an hour setting up this new Apple TV to work with the stuff my old Apple TV worked with. There’s got to be a better way! Yes, I know authentication is difficult, and even iOS migrations tend to lose certain connections with outside services. But right now, I’m not seeing any attempt by Apple to make migration easier.
In the past few years, Apple has ironed out most of the wrinkles of the experience of buying a new iPhone. I realize that the Apple TV is never going to be the company’s highest priority and that Apple TV boxes don’t get upgraded very often, but the current experience is just not up to Apple’s standards.
Whether it’s an iCloud restore, a device-to-device transfer, a new method for storing authentication (iCloud keychain?) connected to your Apple ID, or something else, Apple ought to do something to make this process a lot smoother.
For a long time, Apple has placed itself in opposition to Google. Google is fundamentally an advertising company whose customers are ad buyers, while Apple’s customers are people who buy Apple devices and services. Despite seeming so similar in so many ways, they’re really quite different.
But lately, it seems that Apple is interested in being a bit more like Google. As Bloomberg reported in August, Apple VP of Advertising Todd Teresi has a dream of taking the company’s current $4 billion in annual ad revenue and more than doubling it, into the double digits of billions.
I’m not one of those people who think that advertising is fundamentally evil. (I have, after all, spent my career working for media properties–including this one–that are funded by advertising.) But I do wonder if Apple’s quest to chase ad revenue reflects a culture that has lost the plot about what makes Apple great.
Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray “Official” check mark, according to a thread from Twitter’s Esther Crawford, who is heading up the new Twitter Blue initiative.
“A lot of folks have asked about how you’ll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the ‘Official’ label to select accounts when we launch,” Crawford says.
Much to my friend Stephen Hackett’s frustration, there’s no way to share albums in iCloud Shared Photos. All the photos can be shared, but the concept of an album is currently limited to a single Apple ID.1
I have no idea if Apple considers this an item for its to-do list or if it has decided that albums are old school and everyone should just search to find and collect stuff now. Fortunately, there are workarounds to this problem that allow you to collaborate with others in curating and collecting photos—but with limitations.
Every item in the Photos library can be assigned a keyword, and keywords are synced across iCloud Shared Photos. So if you want to collaborate with other members of your iCloud Shared Photo library—or even if you just want them to be able to view the curation and selection—you can do this by selecting all the photos you want to collect and assigning them a keyword.
Add keywords to a batch of photos via the Info window.
The best way to do this is via the Info window, which is accessible on macOS by typing Command-I. (Unfortunately, you can really only do this on macOS.) So select a bunch of photos—or even create an album and then select all the photos in that album—type Command-I, and then enter a new Keyword. I just went to Denver over the weekend, so I created one called denver-nov-22. (Think of it like the Photos equivalent of a hashtag.)
Now anyone in your shared photo library can see all the items that you keyworded denver-nov-22 by searching for that keyword. Keywords aren’t visible on iOS or iPadOS except via search, but a search will do the job!
iOS devices can search on keywords, making it easy to find tagged collections.
If your collaborators are using a Mac, they can even create a smart album that searched for items with that keyword.2
On the Mac you can create Smart Albums based on keywords.
This isn’t ideal—it doesn’t let people on iOS add items to the keyword and Smart Albums don’t sync with iPhones or iPads—but it’s something. And if you and your collaborator are both using Macs, it’s a pretty painless workaround.
[The next edition of my bookTake Control of Photosis coming soon. Order it now and you’ll get the new edition for free!]
iCloud Shared Albums are an entirely different thing that are very cool but unconnected to iCloud Shared Photos! Yeah, I know. ↩
But be warned: smart albums don’t sync to iPad and iPhone. Yeah, I know.↩
While I was writing my book about Photos, I spent a very long time tapping around in the new iOS 16 lock screen editor, and I thought that perhaps it was worth making a video about.
The strong dollar is helping to drive up Apple’s prices around the world, but is it teaching the company that high prices don’t matter? Also, Apple downgrades our favorite tvOS feature, Apple gets into the TV ad game, and iPhone production grinds to a halt.
Apple’s most recent financial quarter has come and gone, and the company posted (yet again) record revenues, pulling in a zillion dollars and ending its latest fiscal year with just shy of $100 billion in profit alone.
Let that sink in for a moment. $100 billion is such a large number as to be utterly incomprehensible to most of us who will never approach anywhere near even a single billion in our lifetime. It’s bigger than the gross domestic product of some countries–and not just a few of them. More than half of the countries in the world. Most of them. And again, that’s profit, not revenue, which was a soaring $316 billion, putting it in around the top 40 countries.
On the one hand, good for Apple. There was a time in living memory when the company teetered on the brink of going out of business; it’s since catapulted its way to becoming, by some estimates, the most valuable in the world. That’s a testament to the business acumen of its leaders, yes, but also to the fact that it makes great products.
Which makes it that much more jarring to see some of the moves the company has lately made that feel, for lack of a better word, cheap: the almost pathological need to take its cut on every transaction of the App Store, the recent influx of advertising, raising prices on its services. All of these are tactics that might have benefited a hardscrabble company trying to eke out a living, but when it’s applied to one that’s making more money than most countries in the world, they come across instead as unseemly.
While there are a lot of reasons why this has been Apple’s evolutionary path, to me it boils down to three main factors.
Social networking in the modern era is more than just a double-edge sword: it’s a spinning wheel of blades that provide only occasional respites of joy amongst a thousand paper cuts of indignity. But it also provides utility that can be hard to find elsewhere. Case in point, upon the arrival of my firstborn child, I found myself trying to figure out the best way to share photos with a variety of family members, near and far.
My Facebook and Instagram feeds are both replete with family pictures, and had this kid arrived a decade ago, I might not have hesitated in sharing photos there. These days, I’ve got a natural hesitation to post anything sensitive on social media, especially those owned by Meta, which seems to be increasingly bent on finding ways to outdo itself in distasteful behavior.1 And as someone with a moderate-sized following, I also think twice about putting my kid’s face out there in the world, especially when they’re too young to have a say in it. Though I have posted a few pictures of the kid on Instagram and even Twitter, in those rare cases I’ve relied on the excellent MaskerAid by noted podcaster and developer Casey Liss to maintain some degree of privacy.
But for everyday photo sharing, I turned to a much smaller solution that has proven to be delightful in its simplicity: Shared Albums in Photos. While all the limelight these days is being sopped up by their newer fancier relative, iCloud Shared Photo Libraries, a Shared Album has turned out to be the perfect way to provide the feel of a social network…but with only people I know. And like. Shared Photo Libraries might be the ideal solution for an immediate family looking to pool pictures, but Shared Albums still have their place: they’re a much better way to distribute a selected subset of photos amongst a larger audience than Shared Libraries allows (but not one as large as a social network.)
Our Shared Album includes me and my wife, as well as a half-dozen close relatives, including both sets of grandparents, all of whom get notified when new pictures make their appearance. Like a social media network, people can leave comments or “like” pictures and because it’s such a small and handpicked group of people, we don’t have to worry about things like content moderation. No strangers are dropping in to dunk on our pictures, and if the relatives try it, well, we know where they live.
My wife and I have taken great joy in curating the pictures we post, which as a plus can also include video and Live Photos (an Apple technology that doesn’t work very well on any other social network). Relatives have told us in person that the stream of baby photos is the highlight of their day2—and when was the last time you could say that about social media?
Room for improvement
Of course, handy as this feature might be, there’s still a few places that I feel Apple could make the experience even better.
Better notifications: As it stands, my wife and I each get notifications when somebody comments on our pictures that we’ve made, but I’d like at least an option to get notified when people comment on pictures that I didn’t post, so I can see what the family’s saying about that photo my wife uploaded without having to go check each time.
More robust responses: Apple offers a single paltry thumbs up “like” item for photos, but I’d love to see a couple more options: a heart, or a laugh—basically a version of Messages’s Tapbacks feature. Sure, any emoji can be posted as a comment on a photo, but sometimes you just want a quick and easy way to register something more than 👍.
More granular permissions: Currently there are only two roles for Shared Albums: owner (the person who creates the album) and subscriber (everyone else). It’d be nice to add a role in between, like a “manager” or “contributor”, allowing me to designate only certain people who can add media to the album. As it is, either you can allow all subscribers to post, or none.
Better sorting and filtering: There are a few sorting and filtering options in Shared Albums, but the former are mostly based on date, and the latter only really lets you filter by media type. I’d like to be able to filter by who posted something, or even where it was taken or who was in it. I’d also like to have a better overview that breaks up pictures into more easily digestible chunks, the same way the All Photos view does, allowing you to quickly flip through by month or year.
Editing photos: Once you’ve uploaded photos to Shared Albums, they’re frozen in amber. Which means if you want to tweak it, adjusting the image or, say, adjusting the effect on a Live Photo, you have no choice but to delete it and re-upload it, losing any comments the original might have garnered. In conjunction with those better permissions, Apple could make it easier to tweak photos you’ve uploaded.
Home screen widget: I enjoy the home screen Photos widget, which surfaces pictures from the For You section of the Photos app; it can be a nice way to revisit pictures you might have forgotten.3 But it would be great if I could pick a specific set of things to rotate through: say, pictures from just this specific shared album. The new customizable Lock Screen offers a ton of this kind of functionality that Apple should import into its simplistic home screen widget too.
I’m not sure how much interest Apple has in improving Shared Albums now that Shared Libraries are the new hotness, but to me they fill very different use cases. And perhaps with the social media apocalypse that’s now upon us, there’s a renewed interest in the ability to share things with only a small group of people that you know and trust.
“Hold my beer,” says Twitter. “At least, I think it’s a beer. I threw up somewhere earlier!” ↩
My mother will frequently text me if no new pictures have made their appearance in short order on a given day. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Today I fired up my Apple TV and opened the Apple TV app to be greeted with a revised Watch Now tab. Much to my shock and horror, they made it worse than it was before! I hopped online and came across Chance Miller’s post for 9to5 Mac, and Jason Snell’s post, where he reacted as negatively as I have. This is not what I had pitched at all when I wrote a few months ago about how Apple TV, the device and the app, needed a revised and unified home screen experience!
This new development is bad for a few reasons, starting with the fact that the Up Next list was the only part of the TV app interface that a user could really customize or control to plan their viewing experience—everything from being aware of the latest episode popping up online, to deciding you weren’t that interested in a show any longer. That personalization is important because the act of viewing TV is a personal experience in your living room.
This change pushes that off of the screen so the information isn’t even available to them at a glance without moving the interface down. This is another hostile layer, because remember that if you don’t subscribe to Apple TV+, the app will load with a splash screen telling you to subscribe to Apple TV+, and when that is dismissed it will deposit you on the Apple TV+ tab of the Apple TV app interface which you need to navigate away from to Watch Now. Now you need to go down, too. Obviously, Apple TV+ subscribers have fewer layers to get through because they don’t need the sales pitch, but they’re still getting the other shows pitched to them whether they like it or not.
What is featured?
The editorial layer Apple adds to their interfaces, across all their operating systems and services, leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t reject efforts to be told about other content that exists outside of my personal bubble—but what Apple provides is usually irrelevant to me, either because I don’t want to watch it or because I’ve already seen it!
Right now, for example, the list of titles in the Featured row that takes up most of this interface is almost entirely made up of things I’ve already seen. Some of them are, in fact, in the Up Next view right below it—but the view of the title in the “Featured” row is the same view everyone gets, whether or not they’ve ever seen the show. For shows that I’m watching, it doesn’t even offer me my next episode. There’s literally no personalization.
If Apple has a list of titles they want in Featured and a list of titles they want in Up Next, am I to believe that they lack the raw computing horsepower to remove duplicates from those lists? Or to override the unpersonalized button with a more personalized one?
How does any of this benefit me as a user? You’re going to take the brave, bold stance of recommending “Ted Lasso”—a show I’ve seen all of and which isn’t going to a have third season until some indeterminate time next year, maybe? What brain trust thought that the cultural zeitgeist around Ted Lasso was so strong right now in November of 2022 that it merited a featured position?
For Apple
For a long time, the Watch Now page has had a very, very, very bad For You row. Whatever logic is running behind the scenes seems to just make random associations out of a grab bag of anything I’ve ever seen. To solve this problem, as Apple often does in the Apple TV interface, they just push it further down. It’s now the 12th row down on the Watch Now screen, effectively about 4 “pages” of stuff away from the top.
That means that we’ve got Featured taking up that first page, the top sliver of the second page being Up Next, and then a bunch of other suggestions for things that some human being picked out of a hat for all users to see. It can be anything from sports, to suggestions for other things I can pay for, to Apple TV content (which is promoted in a thousand other places) and then the height of machine learning has a list of shows and movies I might like which starts with the critically panned TV adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Again, what benefit is there to browsing any of this material that has been put together without care or respect for me? If you want to take control of my TV from me, then it better be for a good reason, and not just because you’re oblivious to what I want.
What’s good for… Apple?
What this really comes down to is respect. I do not feel respected as a customer when I see my Apple TV autoplaying an ad for Abbott Elementary in general when it knows exactly which episode is next for me in the series.
If Apple wants to say that the Apple TV device, and the Apple TV app, are worth the money because they provide a premium experience, then they can’t keep sliding down into the same mediocre moves as any other platform owner.
The Apple TV in my living room isn’t Apple’s electronic billboard. If I wanted to own one of those, I’d have saved some money and just bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Before (left): What I want to watch is at the top level! After: Nope.
Apple is apparently beta testing some changes to the Watch Now tab of its TV app on Apple TV. As Chance Miller reports at 9to5Mac:
The Apple TV app is taking a page out of the playbook of other streaming services and pushing “Featured” content over the more useful “Up Next” aggregation. With a change rolling out starting today, the first thing you’ll see when you open the TV app is a dedicated row for “Featured” content…
This new dedicated row for “Featured” content replaces the new previous top-level row for “Up Next.” The Up Next row aggregates the next episodes of TV shows you’re watching from any app that integrates with the TV app, which is essentially any streaming service app other than Netflix.
In the last year since cutting the cord I have come to rely on the Up Next view in the TV app as the most convenient launching pad for the next episode of the shows I’m currently watching. It has worked exactly as Apple intended it to, making the TV app be a place I actually want to be! I once thought the lack of Netflix shows in the interface would be its doom, but it turns out that instead I’m just watching Netflix shows a lot less because they’re not in Up Next. Netflix take note.
But by pushing Up Next lower down (below the fold!) in Watch Now, Apple is joining the ranks of a lot of other apps—Netflix, Hulu, and many others—who have made the poor decision that it’s better to divert customers away from the shows they actually want to watch, in order to expose them to other content that they want to advertise.
My friend John Siracusa put it perfectly: This ain’t it, Apple. I don’t mind you suggesting new shows for me to watch. But to prioritize them over my own preferences? I thought that you were better than that. I guess I was wrong.
It’s pretty rare to see new hardware features unlocked by a firmware update, but smart lock maker Level is doing just that: its entire existing line of devices will be getting both Matter and, more interestingly, Thread support in an upcoming release. How the heck does that work? The Verge’s Nathan Edwards explains:
Via email, Level’s co-founder and CTO Ken Goto told The Verge that “all Level Locks are 100% hardware compatible with Matter” and that the 2.4GHz radios inside each Level lock will be upgraded to support Matter over Thread. Goto did not provide a timeline for when this update would be available.
As someone who installed a Level Bolt earlier this year, I’m excited to see it getting Thread. Along with Apple’s updates to the Home app and Matter support, I’m hoping that goes some way towards making the experience more reliable overall.
Sadly, the Bolt doesn’t have any NFC hardware, so it won’t be able to get Home Key support, though Level has released a new version of its more expensive lock, the Level Lock Plus, which does include it.
Workers have broken out of Apple’s largest iPhone assembly factory in China after a Covid outbreak forced staff to lockdown at the workplace. Video shared online showed about 10 people jumping a fence outside the plant, owned by manufacturer Foxconn, in the central city of Zhengzhou. Chinese people and businesses are continuing to grapple with President Xi Jinping’s rigid zero-Covid policy….
Foxconn, which acts as a supplier to US-based Apple, has hundreds of thousands of workers at its Zhengzhou complex and has not provided an official count of how many are infected. The Taiwan-based company claimed on Sunday that it would not stop workers from leaving. However, in footage shared on Chinese social media, and by the BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonnell, workers were allegedly filmed escaping from the grounds to begin lengthy walks back to their hometowns in a bid to avoid being caught on public transport.
That report was from a few days ago. On Wednesday Reuters reported:
China ordered an industrial park that houses an iPhone factory belonging to Foxconn to enter a seven-day lockdown on Wednesday, in a move set to intensify pressure on the Apple supplier as it scrambles to quell worker discontent at the base…
Foxconn told Reuters in a statement that its campus there continued operating under a “closed-loop management” system, referring to a bubble-like arrangement commonly imposed as part of virus prevention measures in China, where employees sleep, live and work isolated from the wider world.
[Foxconn] banned eating in the factory’s cafeteria, forced employees to take long, circuitous routes from their dormitories to reduce contact with others, and required daily coronavirus testing and temperature checks.
But what really worried workers were accounts that emerged from employees who had been taken into quarantine after testing positive. At the mercy of Foxconn to feed themselves, some said they were getting inadequate food or none at all, and were lacking other necessities.
As these stories spread on social media, other workers decided they were better off fleeing their job than risk catching the virus and being forced into quarantine. Two workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared retaliation from the company, said hundreds of workers had left the plant.
There’s a lot to ponder here, from the actions of Foxconn to the policies of the Chinese government to the reactions of factory workers, all written across the canvas of the factories that assemble Apple’s most popular product.
