Perpetual Random Apple Rants Thread

[analogika]

Apple's TV app for the Mac is an utter piece of shit. I'm honestly at a loss for thinking of any worse bit of Apple software I've had the displeasure of using in the past 35 years, except for the TCP/IP control panel in MacOS 9. But I can't even rationally define that memory; it's just a really bad vibe.

But the TV app. Wow.

1. It shows ads for other shows, without a way to opt out. It shows a "Skip" button, but not long enough for you to actually get up and it hit. If you move the mouse while the button is fading, it will still fade and disappear no matter how you rush to hit it.

2. No "Skip" button for the "Previously on" section. Yeah, I just watched all that stuff a couple of minutes ago. Thanks.

3. No "Skip" button for the Intro.

4. No way to go to the next episode at the end of an episode. None at all. Even if you skipskipskipskipskipskipskipskipskipskipskip through the credits and all the various dubbing studios, it will just end there and bounce you back to the welcome screen.

5. It ALWAYS defaults to the system language, even within a single sitting. For Every. Single. Fucking. Episode. You have to go and change the language Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

There's probably a dozen other catastrophic interface failures in there that I've just got used to, or that just don't stand out as being worse than Netflix (and boy, do I hate Netflix' interface).

 

[analogika]

Today’s very specific rant is about Teams. Yeah, I know, it’s the devil. But it’s a large part of what pays my mortgage, so I roll with it.

My Mac and my PC are great at Teams. Massive calls with dozens of participants, all with their video on, no problems. Call quality is chefkiss, as is stability.

My 11” M1 iPad Pro, on the other hand, can’t reliably make a no-video call to one other person without me wondering “when will the network drop out?”. This is on the exact same 5GHz wifi network, on a 500Mpbs cable connection, as the Mac and PC.

“So use the Mac or PC, you idiot”, I hear you cry. Well, I do. But the iPad has one absolutely killer video feature lacking from the other two - Centre Stage. Which is just brilliant. But the call won’t reliably stay up.

Oh, So Pro.

The "Microsoft Rants" thread is thataway —>

 

[analogika]

I was all set to accept your judgement, but then I noticed that it was not just Teams that was having an issue - the actual wifi signal on the iPad dropped (no wifi icon, spinning doodad in the status bar, etc.)

Judgement: rejected!

Original claim: "Today's very specific rant is about Teams."

Claim rejected.

Rant is very specifically not about Teams.

Valid rant, though. 16.1.1 fixed an issue that would drop wifi connections on iPhone, but apparently introduced weird issues on iPad.

Turning off Location Services for Networking and Wireless seems to temporarily work around the problem for some users.

 

[analogika]

What the actual fuck, Apple?

Non-resizable window.

This is on Monterey. What the hell do I do now?

Is Ventura at least less fucking useless?

 

[analogika]

I don't get a lot of sync conflicts with iCloud Drive (unlike OneDrive, which seems to experience a conflict for almost every file I edit from an iPad) but on the rare occasions when I do that is what I see.

Keep them both and go look at them to see which one is actually the right one. Then file a feedback asking for a usable sync conflicts dialog.

Holy shit. It never occurred to me that it wasn't either/or!

I had spotty internet access in the studio yesterday and today, and had sync errors across multiple Numbers files.

 

[analogika]

Rant, because a friend was just hit by this:

Apple Watch 3. Sold as new until THREE MONTHS AGO.

iPhone suggests software update is available for Apple Watch 3.
Friend says go ahead.

iPhone says that iOS must be upgraded before Apple Watch can be updated.
Friend says go ahead.

Apple Watch will no longer update, and will no longer pair with iPhone.

What the actual fuck, Apple.

(Turns out that Apple Watch can be updated to iOS 8.7.1, which will again allow pairing with iOS 16.
BUT: you can't update to 8.7.1 from an iPhone that's already been updated to iOS 16.
So: a second, older iPhone with the older iOS needs to be used to go to watchOS 8.7.1, so that pairing will be possible again.
Except the Watch is now caught in an endless reboot loop while trying to install the update. Now needs to be physically sent in for service/hardware reset.)

 

[analogika]

Adding the year to the name may cause marketing issues if they ever want/need to drop back to a >12 month release cadence.

They tried that with iLife for a while, but it became stupid because the individual apps were ready for updates at different times or didn’t need work, and things were taken back out of sync.

 

[analogika]

Paid apps in the app store / text input / notifications mostly.

I think I'm still leaning towards it, but it has made me stop and think a bit about what I consider to be vital/important /lesser in my phone

As of one of the newer updates, the stock keyboard supports swipe input.

I find the predictive text input really weird — it works in waves for me. It feels like system updates “reset” the training sometimes, and the keyboard auto-completes become utterly brain dead for a while.

 

[analogika]

Why the hell does Ventura 13.1 keep making my menu bar disappear? I have to go into System Settings and toggle it to get it to come back. It happens nearly daily. It's driving me batty.

Are you inadvertently running particular apps or windows in full-screen mode? That hides the menu bar.

 

[analogika]

Is the Music app on the iPhone intended to be more difficult to use than a classic iPod circa 2005? I find the interface utterly inscrutable.

It's actually fine if you're not using Apple Music. Pretty similar to how it's been for a long time…

Of course, I can't actually use it in offline mode (I'm not an  Music subscriber), because FUCKING ITUNES WON'T SYNC PROPERLY FOR SHIT, AND HASN'T FOR YEARS.

Every once in a while, I'll hook up the Library and have the phone erase and re-sync everything (takes about a day and a half, including converting down to 256 kbps). Three days later, most of it is kinda half-deleted again, except for one or two tracks on the albums it does have.

Driving me up the fucking wall.

My remedy will be to maintain the active copy of the Music library on a 1GB micro-SD permanently placed in the SD card slot of my incoming 14" MBP, so that it's always mounted whenever iTunesHelper decides that it's time to ignore everything and sync up and delete whatever it can't find at the moment.

 

[analogika]

I'm still angry they removed the 3D Touch phone favourites shortcut.

And yes, the constant long-press accidental triggering of shit I don't want to do.

"Not discoverable", my ass.

 

[analogika]

The only way I solved iTunes/Music syncing being a heap of steaming ass was... stop doing it, and just pay for an iTunes Match subscription.

I finally got on the streaming service bandwagon last year (with Apple Music, natch), and all the ITM stuff still works fine for stuff I've loaded locally, so at least I've got that going for me.

I have a bunch of albums in different versions where I'm very attached to the original masterings, and I assume that iTunes Match will substitute whatever dynamically smashed or 2010's-sounding version is the latest available.

How does it handle live versions and bootlegs now? It used to be pretty bad, when I last researched.

I'd also put it aside because of the song limit (my archive is rather large).

Though I just found out that they've actually raised the limit to 100,000 songs, so I could just about manage… Hmmmmmm….

 

[analogika]

I did it a few months ago assuming that Match had gotten all of the kinks out by now. I'm missing 75% of my music. It's all marked as "waiting to get from cloud" on satellite devices and on my source machine it says Cloud Status: Waiting, which is meaningless. Support docs say "leave the machine on over night", but the machine has months long uptime kind of thing.

Ah, yeah - I remember that from switching on iCloud Photos.

Nothing, no feedback, over WEEKS. And then it was all up.

Whatever. As long as it works…eventually.

Thanks for getting back to me, even if it derails the thread.

Is it correct that the downloaded stuff is non-DRM'ed? Or are they just the locked-in Apple Music versions?

 

[analogika]

I’ve got a reasonably-sized iTunes Match-ed library, most of which is not downloaded. Happy to verify whatever needs verifying if someone can tell me what kind of thing I need to download, and what to look for once it’s downloaded.

Wow, thanks so much for the offer — and apologies to the rest of this rant-fest for derailing, but I really want to grab the opportunity, and we might as well do it in public…

Could you force one of those non-downloaded tracks to download and do a Get Info on it, please?

Under "File", it should give details on the type of file it is ("purchased", "protected", etc.).

 

[analogika]

Thanks, guys!

Looks like it may actually be an option for me in the future!

 

[analogika]

Receive file on iPhone via AirDrop —> Save to Files app.

Files App shows last used folder in fucking icon view. On a 5.4" screen.

I switch to List view, navigate to destination, save.

Receive another file on iPhone via AirDrop —> Save to Files app.

Files App shows the same allegedly last used folder — in fucking icon view.

 

[analogika]

In the iOS Music app, in the album view where it displays the list of tracks, there are no durations:

View attachment 51358

Side note: Gawd I hate when Westerners appropriate Japanese characters for optical similarities to Roman letters. I'm okay when they're Roman letters in a typeface made up to resemble Asian lettering, but when it's outright just the characters, like the Katakana here...

I started reading that as resechitemu…; it didn't make sense, and then I got to the "ko", which inexplicably had been flipped, before it dawned on me.

Just plain "レタス" would have been much cooler and infinitely less stupid.

 

[analogika]

So you never read a manual just to find out what a program is capable of?

I’m a Mac user.
Unless it’s a professional tool, having to read the manual means that the UI is a failure.

 

[analogika]

Yeah, changed that too, today.

Why the hell did they switch it off by default?

 

[analogika]

On my experience it’s a bit different as the ATV “ads” only auto play when your cursor is on the ATV app, and they don’t play with sound or take over the whole screen. IMO that’s not too terrible, but YMMV.

I haven’t ever tried to move the TV app from its top left spot, but if you don’t use the TV app and it’s moveable, you could just banish it to the bottom of the stack (or just move it from the primary start spot, so when you boot up it’s on a non moving app to start)

He’s talking about the ads they play in front of every. Single. Fucking. Episode. Of. Every. Series.

Made worse because THERE’S NO WAY TO JUST CONTINUE WATCHING. You have to return to the menu after every episode and dive back in for the next episode — which gives you another set of pre-roll ads.

 

[analogika]

^^^ speaking of which: when the hell did Key Caps (the visualised keyboard layout that can be accessed from the menu bar) stop showing the current font?

I seem to recall this having been the norm back in the OS9 days — you could select, say, Zapf Dingbats, and then open Key Caps to take a look at the characters offered with various combinations of shift and option.

I tried this a while ago and was dismayed to find that it only showed the system font, with no way to change it.

WTF. That was so useful!

 

[analogika]

I went looking for Key Caps and couldn’t find it. Turns out in Ventura (at least, possibly earlier versions of macOS too) you access this by going to System Settings (ptooie!), Input Sources -> Edit, and choosing “show Input menu in menu bar”, and you get an icon to clutter up your menu bar, but you can choose “Show Keyboard Viewer” from its menu. The Keyboard Viewer itself is very useful, even if it does lack the ability to follow the system light/dark theme, and won’t let you choose the font.

It’s been that exact way for some years now.

Possibly since OS X; I’m not sure.

 

[analogika]

FWIW, on the command line in Windows, Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V does not equate to copy/paste, and will instead be more similar to the Mac, sending ^C and stop a running command line program.

Wow. They actually managed to fuck even that up?

 

[analogika]

Apple doesnt spam me… I get the annoying pre-roll ads on TV+, but that’s it

 

[analogika]

I've been giving Stage Manager a chance, as per Eclectic Light Co.'s excellent Guide Stage Manager for the Unimpressed, and actually really liking it, despite some weird quirks and rough edges.

Then I played a couple of gigs on the weekend and noticed an absolutely fatal flaw:

Stage Manager window groupings are lost after logout/restart!

This makes it virtually useless to those of us working in multiple accounts.

E.g.: I do office/teaching/notation work in one account, where I built a window set of online lesson calendar/YouTube Safari windows, the Numbers sheets with lesson plans and protocols, and some other lesson tools. And another with basic communicators — Franz, WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage.
Etc.

Studio production and gig performance are in a different account, where Stage Manager is not used. For reliability/performance reasons, I log out of the "regular" user when in the studio/on stage.

When I log back into the account, all the optimised Stage Manager window groupings are lost.

I have to assume that this is a bug/incomplete, and not by design.

Right?

 

[analogika]

So it is. In my defense, why the view menu (without keyboard shortcuts)? This should either be something you can select directly in the window or in settings/preferences for the app!

absolutely. This is an application setting, not a view option — it's not something you're likely to switch on-the-fly. I immediately hit Cmd-, to try and change it just now, and was super annoyed to see that it only threw up a (locked) notification preference setting — which belongs in the System Settings.

 

[analogika]

Oh boy. Since iTunes/Music hasn’t been able to wirelessly sync properly to iPhone for the last five or more years, I‘ve given Spotify a run, and grown increasingly annoyed by it.

So I finally reactivated my old Music library, and it seems to be syncing — but I’m going wired only now.

BUT: over the decades, I’ve classified hundreds of spoken-word albums as „Audiobooks“, albeit only partially tagged properly, which I’d like to correct.

Audiobooks are now handled exclusively by the Books.app, which OFFERS NO WAY TO EDIT METADATA!!!????

What the actual fuck.

Also: Audiobooks are still in the old iTunes Media folder on the external hard drive, which Books is also UNABLE TO USE.

What the double fuck.

So I added all the files manually, which copied 80 GB of data to the internal drive.

Triple fuck.

They’re STILL NOT FUCKING SYNCING. MOSTLY. Well, some are. Partly. Like, the first chapter. For some. Most will show up on the iPhone but not contain any data, at all.

I’m not even going to start on the fact that Books.App on iPhone is the single most atrocious piece of shit Apple has ever foisted upon me, in thirty-five years. Jesus Christ, what a complete clusterfuck.

 

[analogika]

I'd agree wholeheartedly with this, except that the current iteration of Music is even worse to me, at least once I leave the walled garden of my own library.

I’m deathly afraid of  Music fuxking up my meticulously preened metadata and multiple versions of various albums (e. g. Original Master for listening, deluxe reissue for the bonus tracks, or vinyl master for track continuity during album playback, etc.), which is why I opted for Spotify for streaming. Music is for physical (file) library only. It works well enough for that.

 

[analogika]

Yeah, the fact that syncing simply Did. Not. Fucking. Work. coerced me into streaming.

Except I’ve found that I hate streaming.

Now, let’s see if it keeps me around this time as the lesser of two shitshows.

Books.app, though — fuck me sideways with a glass cactus.

 

[analogika]

I think radically changing the UI and making muscle memory obsolete for no particular improvement is a bad idea. But that's just me.

I don't think "muscle memory" applies to the old System Preferences. For one, the position of the window isn't necessarily always the same, and more importantly:

The positions of the individual preference buttons within System Preferences has constantly shifted over the past twenty years. Like, literally every other release at least.

Whatever "muscle memory" may have been formed would need retraining every other release or so.

 

[analogika]

System Prefs ordered alphabetically (which apparently no one knew was a thing)

Egad! They actually DID (within categories)!

(Up until about 10.6 or so ? — certainly not in the Catalina/Monterey/etc releases)

Of course, they didn’t change the order for any language, so (American) English was literally the only interface where the ordering made sense…

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_Preferences

 

[analogika]

Yeah, I get that a lot, with AirTags as well.

I’d MUCH rather have those false, easily verifiable notices, than not be notified if I did leave something sitting on the curb.

 

[analogika]

I don't have a pre-Ventura machine any more, but I'm pretty sure it was there up until the end of System Prefs.

Most decidedly not. In fact, I included a link for your convenience showing, among others, the (not alphabetically sorted) System Preferences from Catalina and El Capitan.

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_Preferences
At some point, Universal Access got renamed "Accessibility", but its position did not shift, but none of the other categories followed alphabetical order at all by El Capitan.

EDIT: I did some sleuthing:

OS X 10.5 Leopard was the last system where the System Preferences were in fully alphabetical order:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mac-os-x/9780596529819/ch04.html
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard already had stuff non-alphabetically, fourteen years ago:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mac-os-x/9780321657879/ch23.html

 

[analogika]

I never said it was sorted alphabetically by default. It was an option, and one that I was using right up until the end of System Preferences.

I misread you, but it got me looking down Memory Lane, so that was good.

 

[analogika]

It's actually not new. The "Love" button which has been there from Day 1 in Apple Music has been renamed to "Favorite" and expanded to include Artists, Albums, and Playlists.


This is sub-optimal for anyone who started out with iTunes and prefers to organize their music library by Artist and Album. Blame this new feature on all the Spotify converts that Apple is trying to appease because that's how it works in that app and such users have been complaining for years because Apple Music doesn't work that way.

Yeah, iTunes grew from a century-long culture of people cultivating their own music collection.

By far the most common consumption of music from that era was having the radio play it at you, though.

Spotify stems from that culture of having somebody else serve up music for you, and if you like something enough, you’ll acquire it for yourself.

Very different concepts, with different priorities, the combination of which is, to my mind, why the Music app has turned into such a weird mess.

 

[analogika]

I really don't understand what the ideological beef is here. All I was saying is that Apple has a history of proprietary bolt-ons that add functionality to existing open standards. They are often very successful (with AirPods being the #1 example). It would be consistent with Apple's history to use a similar technique to turn iCloud Mail into an Outlook competitor.

That's pretty watered-down, though. What cateye said:

Apple, the company who just loves to take something open and standard and tweak it so it becomes juuust proprietary enough to introduce friction when using it with anything but a fully Apply-blessed workflow

(emphasis mine)

That implies that Apple deliberately breaks standards through their additions.

Which is the bit people are disagreeing with.

 

[analogika]

Safari. My software browsological sibling in deity. Sort your shit out. The loudspeaker icon goes in the tab that’s actually making noise, not all of them just because noise is occurring somewhere in the tabosphere.

View attachment 67560

^{(YouTube is making sound. The Ars thread is not)}

That speaker icon is there so you can quickly mute the sound, regardless of where it is coming from — it might be in one of twenty tabs in a window on the third desktop over.

And no, muting all audio is not the same thing: if I’ve got a podcast or a YouTube mix running somewhere in an open tab, and a FaceTime call comes in, I can’t just mute everything.

 

[analogika]

There's some smarts to how Apple has done this, but it's facing a headwind: The dominant browser in the market does it the way Señor Jameson expects: only the tab making the noise gets the icon. So for anyone who may have used that other browser at some point, Safari's behavior is going to be confusing.

I've spent the last 35 years not giving a shit whether other products have inferior implementations of basic functionality, and I'm not about to start now.

It's worth noting it's just the compact tab presentation that suffers this problem since the tab + address bar get spooged into one confusing bar. If you keep the tab chrome separate, as God intended, then the icon shows up in the address bar and not on the tab, which signals with more clarity that it's a browser-wide control.

So I think we have our solution: Commander, stop using those filthy compact tabs.

Yep, that's the problem, and the fix.

Plus, an additional bonus:

Which of those tabs is playing the audio?

Answer: none of them. It's in another window.

The player icon in the menu bar might be an option, but it isn't shown on my 14" MBP, because the menu bar is already full with other stuff I need to see there.

 

[analogika]

Is the modem one for VPN?

You can drag widgets off of control center and add them to your menubar.

Holy non-discoverable interface, Batman!

That’s SO useful. Alas, Apple have completely fucked the foundation of Macintosh usability: discoverability.

Sad.

 

[analogika]

You can also enable them in System Settings, which is easily discoverable

I knew that — which is in keeping with the „a clear and discoverable way for everything, and shortcuts for the experts“ ethic. But I seem to recall not finding every item there.

I’m also still reeling from the reorganisation of System Pre…Settings, so I might just be remembering my disorientation.

I actually don’t necessarily disagree with the decisions made in the new System … Settings, btw. They’re just so different.