Category: Apple

upgrades and backups and stuff

I decided to spend some time today messing around with my desktop PC and my MacBook. Specifically, I wanted to get full backups done for both of them, then upgrade the MacBook to macOS Sierra, and apply the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on the desktop PC.

I succeeded on the MacBook. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to update an image backup I made a few months ago. I also ran a Time Machine backup. Then, I downloaded and installed Sierra. Downloading it took quite a long time. The update itself was pretty quick. Maybe a bit less than an hour. I’m not seeing anything really new or exciting in Sierra. I didn’t turn on the new iCloud File Sync feature, mostly because I don’t need it, but also because it scares the crap out of me. I really don’t want my OS to randomly start deleting files off my hard drive, thanks. Even just the purgeable storage thing is a bit scary. Please don’t tell me that there’s free space on my hard drive, when it’s not actually free! Anyway, it’s all working fine.

On the PC side, I didn’t get very far. I tried making a new image backup with Macrium Reflect, but it ended in failure twice. I think the external drive I’ve been using for backups may be failing. I started a full chkdsk on it, and that’s been running for hours. Depending on what that reveals, I may run out to Costco tomorrow and pick up a new external drive, or order one from Newegg. The drive in question is probably ten years old, and it’s just a 1 TB drive, so it’s only big enough to hold a single image backup. So replacing it with a 4 TB drive might be a good idea regardless. Oh, and my other external drive, that I’ve been using for Windows File History backups, is also a bit flaky. I keep having to unplug it and plug it back in to get Windows to recognize it. (Other than that it seems to work fine.) So maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace that too. Heck, if I get a 4 TB external drive, I can partition it into two volumes, and use one for image backups and the other for File History. Of course, that leaves me with a single point of failure, so maybe that’s not a good idea.

iOS email apps

As I’ve mentioned in a recent post or two, I’ve been messing around a bit with third-party email apps for iOS. I’m not really that picky about email client features. I just want something that can do a good job of letting me read my email, and navigate from message to message easily.

Most third-party clients add on a bunch of bells and whistles designed to make it easier to “manage” your email. I don’t really have the kind of problems that these features are designed to solve. I don’t need a “focused” inbox, or an ability to “snooze” messages, or any of that stuff.

I do want to be able to apply Gmail labels and stars though, which is what I use for organization. Aside from the official Gmail app (and Google’s fancier Inbox app), no third party app fully supports Gmail labels, as far as I can tell. All of the ones I’ve tried support starring an email by flagging it. And they all see Gmail labels as standard folders, so you can move messages, but you can’t apply multiple labels.

The standard Apple Mail app was tweaked a bit in iOS 10, and is mostly a good solid app, but I’m still a little annoyed that they got rid of the next & previous buttons on the iPad version. It just makes it harder to move through messages.

None of the other apps I tried have next/previous buttons either, which is a bit of a disappointment. They all do, however, allow you to move between messages with left & right swipes. This sometimes works well, but it can be a problem if you’re trying to zoom & pan an HTML email that isn’t well-formatted for a mobile screen. (Panning and swiping are a bit too similar.)

Microsoft Outlook is a very nice app, except for the glaring issue I mentioned in my previous post: on the iPad, you can’t hide the message list, so you can’t see an email in full-screen.

Today, I gave Spark a try. It’s a really nice app, and has a lot of features similar to Outlook. It does allow you to view messages in full-screen on both the iPhone and iPad, so that’s nice. About the only thing I was disappointed with was that some HTML emails weren’t rendered as nicely as in Apple’s mail app. This isn’t a big problem, and only seems to affect certain messages. I’m guessing that those are messages that aren’t optimized for mobile, and Apple maybe takes some liberties with them, or perhaps they’re slightly malformed messages and Apple does a better job of “failing gracefully.” I’m not really sure. (I’m also not really sure where iOS email apps stand, in terms of HTML rendering. Are they all using the same rendering engine? I would have thought they were, but then I can’t explain why there are some differences.)

So, anyway, I still haven’t made a decision on which app(s) to stick with, so for now, I’m keeping the Apple app, the Gmail app, Outlook, and Spark all installed, on both my iPhone and iPad. I should really whittle that down though; it can’t be a good idea to have four separate apps all checking my Gmail box all the time.

I think I can rule out Outlook for now, so I should probably get rid of that. And I’m keeping the Gmail client, since it comes in handy when I want to do something tricky with Gmail labels. (Though I could also just use the Gmail web site for that. It works fine in Safari.) I think I’m going to keep Spark around for a while longer and see if I find it easier to use than Apple’s client. I may switch over to Spark as my preferred app at some point, possibly just on the iPad.

 

Outlook for iOS on the iPad

I decided to mess around with Outlook for iOS today, to see if I could talk myself into switching over to that, from the default iOS mail client. Outlook is a pretty snazzy mail client, with lots of interesting features, most of which I don’t need and will probably never use.

There’s one glaring issue with the iPad version of Outlook, and I’m really surprised it hasn’t attracted more attention. Similar to Apple’s mail app, the main view is a list of messages on the left, taking up about a third of the screen, then the contents of the active message on the right. In Apple’s mail app (and in others I’ve tried), you can hide the list of messages, so you can read an email using the full screen width. In Outlook, there doesn’t seem to be any way to hide the message list, so you can only ever use two-thirds of the screen to read your email. I’ve found that there is a way to open a threaded conversation in a pop-up view that uses most of the screen, but there’s no way to do that with a single message that’s not part of a conversation.

I’m not the only one to have noticed this issue, but it hasn’t gotten much attention, from what I can tell. There’s an issue open for it on UserVoice that’s gotten over 4000 votes, but it’s been there for more than a year, so I don’t think  it’s something that Microsoft is likely to fix soon.

I may have to go back and listen to the MPU episode on iOS email again. Really, I just want an email client that lets me read my email using the full screen, and has buttons allowing me to move to the previous and next message. That’s not asking for too much, is it?

iOS 10 – iPhone

Since updating my iPad to iOS 10 worked out ok, I decided to update my iPhone tonight. That too worked out fine. I’m not seeing much in iOS 10 that’s really interesting or useful so far. The changes to the lock screen and notification center are interesting, but I don’t know yet if there’s anything useful there, or if it’s just visually different. I need to read up on that and play around a bit.

I’m not enamored of the changes to the Mail app in iOS 10. The iPhone and iPad apps are a bit different; the iPhone app still has previous/next buttons, though they look different and work a bit different than they used to. And I’m not sure if I like the way they now handle message threading. I’m sure I can live with the new Mail app, but I might as well look at some alternatives.

A while back, I gave Outlook a try, but didn’t stick with it. Maybe it’s time to try it again. They recently made some changes to it, adding some fancy calendaring stuff. I’m not sure if I need any of that, but it might be fun to play with.

 

iOS 10 – iPad

I upgraded my iPad to iOS 10 last night. It took quite a while to complete, and there were a couple of points where the iPad seemed to be locked up, making me think that something bad might have happened, but it finished eventually.

So far, I haven’t found anything in particular that I’m really liking or excited about. On the other hand, there are a few things that are definite annoyances. Having to press the home button to unlock the iPad is the first. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it might take a while. Swiping on the lock screen brings you to the camera or the widget list, depending on which direction you swipe. So I guess that’s a reasonable change, though I don’t really feel a need to access that stuff while the iPad is locked.

The biggest change I’ve seen so far, and I haven’t seen much discussion of it, is that they seem to have removed the “next” and “previous” buttons from the mail app. There’s probably some sort of swipe action that will take you to the next or previous message, but I haven’t discovered what that is yet, so for now the only way I can navigate from one message to the next is to go back to the message list and select the next message. I know that I can’t be the only person who was using those buttons frequently. I did find one other guy mentioning it in the comments for this article on iMore. (Apparently, this change only affects the iPad version of Mail and not the iPhone version. I haven’t upgraded my iPhone yet, so I can’t verify that.) Maybe it’s finally time to switch to a third-party mail client.

I need to read up on iOS 10 some more. MacStories has a gigantic review. As does Ars Technica. Take Control has an ebook. And I’m hoping for a dedicated episode of MPU soon.

I’ll probably upgrade my iPhone over the weekend, then also upgrade my watch to watchOS 3. I’m hoping that watchOS 3 is as good as some people are saying it is. I’ve heard lots of good things about it.

Mac OS 9

There’s an interesting (and lengthy) article up on Ars Technica today about people who are still using Mac OS 9. I’ll admit that I miss some of the stuff from the classic Mac OS (prior to OS X). And even some stuff that was in earlier versions of OS X, but got changed or removed somewhere along the way.

In particular, I’m still annoyed about what they did to the scroll bars in OS X Lion. I really don’t like the thin scroll bars, with no arrow buttons. (I may have blogged about this recently. Or I may have just thought about blogging about it. I’m not sure…) I wish Apple would allow tools like Kaleidoscope to work in OS X, so people like me could do a bit of UI customization, to suit our peculiar preferences.

I’ve been thinking about stuff like this recently, since they announced the iPhone 7, with no headphone jack. That got me thinking about all the useful stuff that’s been removed from phones and computers recently, mostly by Apple: user-replaceable batteries, user-replaceable hard drives, CD/DVD drives, and so on. (And also thinking about the mostly useless stuff that’s been added, mostly by Microsoft. Basically, all the reasons so many people want to stick with Windows 7 and skip 8 & 10. But that’s a post for another day.)

no more Tekserve

I just heard the news that Tekserve is going to close soon. I got my MacBook fixed at Tekserve late last year, and they did a good job on it. There’s really no other place to take a broken Mac anymore, other than the Apple Store. And Apple is picky about what they’ll fix and what they won’t. (They wouldn’t have touched mine, since I have a 3rd party SSD in there.)

This is really disappointing, but I guess it was inevitable. Rents in NYC are going through the roof, so smaller independent stores of any kind have trouble staying in business. And there are multiple (official) Apple Stores in NYC, so fewer people are going to bother with (or even be aware of) an independent Apple retailer.

I guess if I need my MacBook fixed again, I’ll have to take a trip out to PowerMax in Oregon!

File History on Windows and photos in OneDrive

In addition to the backups I did last weekend, I also turned on File History on my desktop PC. This is kind of like Time Machine for Windows. I’m using a separate external drive for this, so now I have one external drive with my Macrium image backup, and one being used for File History.

I also decided to move all my photos into OneDrive. Previously, I had a big folder of old photos on my desktop PC, containing digital photos from my pre-iPhone days, and scanned photos from ScanCafe. That folder had about 12 GB of stuff in it. Most of that space is used up by the full-resolution ScanCafe photos. I just moved that folder so it’s now under the OneDrive hierarchy. It took a while to upload, but it’s all in OneDrive now.

On the Mac, all my iPhone photos are in the Apple Photos app. I don’t want to try to move that library into OneDrive, since it’s not a normal folder. (And, by the way, it would be so much more convenient if it was a normal folder, but that’s a rant for another day.) Instead, I copied the photos from ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Masters into OneDrive, which should be all the original full-resolution photos from my iPhone. That’s about 2 GB worth of photos. I’ll need to remember to do that occasionally to keep the copy in OneDrive up to date. I should probably write a script for that.

So now I have all of my photos in the cloud, which is probably something I should have done quite some time ago. And I think I’ve got myself covered pretty well on backups, on both the Mac and PC.

catching up with backups

With yesterday being Friday the 13th, I thought this weekend might be a good time to review and catch up on backing up my desktop PC and my MacBook.

I bought my new Dell desktop back in January, but hadn’t gotten around to running any kind of backup on it yet, which is a little embarrassing. So today I installed Macrium Reflect Free and did a full image backup to an external 1 TB drive. I’ve been using Macrium for PC backups for the last few years, and I haven’t ever had any problems with it. I should probably buy a paid license at some point, but the free version has always been enough for me.

On my MacBook, I’ve been using Time Machine to back up to an external drive, ever since I re-did the MacBook after my hard drive crash last year. I’m not doing that as often as I’d like, since I don’t keep the USB drive hooked up to the MacBook, so I need to remember to set it up and let it run once in a while.

I’ve also been meaning to do a full backup with Carbon Copy Cloner, but just never got around to it. So I’m running that now, and I’ve also finally paid for a copy of CCC. (Previously, I’d only ever used trial versions.) Now that I have a real, paid, version of CCC, maybe I can talk myself into running it a bit more often.

I now keep nearly all of my important files in OneDrive, so I don’t feel like I need to make frequent backups, really, but I do like the idea of running some kind of automated backups on a regular basis. My router has a USB port that I can hook up a drive to, and use it as a NAS drive. I used to have a drive hooked up to it, but I never did much with it, and gave up on it at some point. I should try that again, and see about using it for automated key file backups. I’m not sure if it would work with Time Machine, but I could give it a try. (And I’m pretty sure it would work from Macrium on the PC, doing a select file backup rather than a full image. Or even just the free backup program that comes with Windows.)

And I know I should really set up CrashPlan, BackBlaze or Arq at some point, and start doing automated backups to the cloud. I just haven’t quite talked myself into that yet.

scary iTunes bugs

This week, I’ve been following the unfolding saga of the guy who says that iTunes ate his music. There was a lot of FUD being tossed around after his initial blog post. Then there was a good follow-up on iMore, and a second follow-up that probably nailed the issue on the head. I’m still pretty leery of Apple Music, and I’m careful about backing up my iTunes library. (Maybe not as careful as I should be, though.)

For streaming music, I’m a big fan of Slacker Radio, and I subscribe to their $4/month “plus” plan, which allows me to listen offline, with no commercials. Slacker doesn’t seem to get much attention in the media, with most coverage concentrating on Spotify, Apple Music, and maybe Pandora and Tidal. But I don’t think there’s any service as good as Slacker for the price.