Category: Apple

thoughts on iOS8, iDevices, and Yosemite

I have some random Apple-related thoughts that I wanted to jot down, so I’m putting them all into a catch-all blog post. Enjoy. (Or Ignore. Or roll your eyes. Or whatever.)

I’ve upgraded both my iPhone 5s and iPad 2 to iOS 8.1. I’m not having any serious issues with the iPhone, and I’m liking some of the changes. But the iPad 2, which was already showing its age, has gotten quite slow and unstable since upgrading it to iOS 8. I had hoped that 8.1 would help, and it did, but not quite enough. So I decided it was time to get a new iPad. I couldn’t quite justify the cost of a brand new iPad Air 2, so I bought a used iPad Air 1 from someone on eBay.

Meanwhile, I took this opportunity to get rid of my old iPhone 4, which had been gathering dust for the last year. I traded that off via Apple’s trade-in/recycling program with Brightstar. I got a $35 Apple gift card out of the deal, which I guess is better than nothing. And as for the old iPad 2, I’ve arranged to sell that to Gazelle for $100. (Brightstar offered a bit less than that, so I went with Gazelle.)

And on my MacBook, which is only a bit more than a year old, I am now running Yosemite. It’s working OK, but with a few minor quirks. The most annoying was having a Java warning box pop up randomly. The annoying part is that it really wasn’t obvious which software was triggering the warning. It would come up randomly, and I couldn’t nail it down to any particular program. (I really wish Apple would include that information in the popup, but I guess that’s too much to ask.) I had already installed the newest Java JRE straight from Oracle, but apparently that’s not what the mystery program was looking for. So now I’ve also installed Java from Apple’s 2014-001 installer. I haven’t gotten the popup since then, but it hasn’t been long enough that I’m going to declare victory. And it rubs me the wrong way that I still don’t know which program is using Java, and why it doesn’t work with Oracle’s version.

I’m actually thinking about doing a backup of my MacBook, then wiping it out and doing a fresh Yosemite install, then moving just the programs and data I need back onto the hard drive. This MacBook has been running slower than I’d like for some time now. I’ve thought about replacing the hard drive with an SSD, and I may still do that at some point, but I’d kind of like to just clear out all the cruft first, and see if that helps.

trying out 1Password

I’ve been trying out 1Password for the last few days. I have the (now free) iOS client installed on my iPhone and iPad. And I have the 30-day evaluation versions of the Mac and Windows clients installed on my MacBook and my desktop PC.

In a nutshell: I have a few minor issues with the Mac version, but I think I’ll stick with it, and switch over from KeePass.

There are a few major issues that I want a password manager to address, and none of the solutions I’ve tried previously manage to do all of them well. 1Password isn’t perfect, but I think it does better than anything else I’ve tried.

First, since I’m working with multiple platforms, I need something that runs on all those platforms (or that can be accessed from them all), and that syncs my password database across them without any snags. With KeePass, I was keeping the database in DropBox, and that was working well on the desktop, but was a bit awkward to deal with on mobile. (If I switched to something like LastPass, this problem would go away, since it’s a hosted service rather than client software, but there are other things I don’t like about LastPass.)

With 1Password, I can keep the database in DropBox, and all clients (Mac, PC, and iOS) seem to be able to access it with no problems. I haven’t seen much in the way of documentation about the 1Password database (though I haven’t really gone looking for it), but it appears to be structured as a bunch of individual files within a folder, rather than as one big file, like in KeePass. The obvious advantage here is that this should do a lot to resolve the occasional conflicts that would happen with KeePass. The typical issue with KeePass would be that I’d save a change to the password file on my MacBook, while it was disconnected for some reason, then make a different change on my PC, and save the file, then later go back to the MacBook, and have that machine then try to sync the password file, and cause a conflict. Then, I’d have to open the two conflicting password files, copy the change from the conflict file back to the main one, and then delete the conflict file. Not a horrible thing, and it doesn’t happen often, but it’s a pain when it does. With the way 1Password does things, I think I’d be fine in this scenario, as long as I was changing two different passwords on the two different platforms.

I didn’t come up with a good way to export my passwords from KeePass and import them to 1Password, so that was a bit of a hurdle to get over. But I’m now looking at this as an opportunity to clean up my password database, tossing out some old ones and re-organizing things a bit. I’ve manually copied/pasted over 100 entries from KeePass to 1Password now. That’s gotten me through about one-third of the database, I think. I’ve done this all on the Mac client. While it hasn’t been too much trouble, it has exposed a few things about the current version of the Mac client that I’m not too happy about.

The main issue is that they’ve gone a bit too far in embracing the Yosemite aesthetic. The main window just doesn’t have enough contrast between the background color and foreground text. It’s basically grey on grey. This just isn’t working well for my tired old eyes. Maybe it looks better on a Retina screen, but I don’t have one of those. I posted a question about it on the AgileBits forums, suggesting that maybe they could have an option to change this. They replied that I wasn’t the first person to ask about it, but they didn’t specifically commit to doing anything about it. So I may just have to live with that for now. (As a side note, I recently discovered the “zoom” function on my Mac, so I’ve been using that to make text more readable, especially when I’m using the MacBook at night.)

I also have a few other minor nits to pick with the Mac client, but nothing major. For instance, I’ve found that if you have a lot of text in the note field on a password entry, it doesn’t quite refresh the screen correctly when you’re scrolling through it. And I wish the folder and tag lists would default to ‘show’ instead of ‘hide’, when you open the client. But I can live with this stuff for now.

The newest version of the iOS client is great. I can’t really complain about it at all. It can be unlocked with Touch ID, which is really nice and much easier than having to type in a master password every time. (Though Touch ID hasn’t been working well for me lately, which is a subject for a different blog post.) And it integrates with iOS to the extent that Apple allows — which isn’t much, but it’s better than it used to be, and it’s better than any other password software I’ve tried. There’s a good recent review of the new iOS client up on MacStories. There’s not much more I could say about it that they haven’t already said.

So, to summarize, I think I’ll be migrating the rest of my passwords over from KeePass into 1Password, and paying for the Mac & Windows desktop clients. (And maybe paying the $10 to unlock the premium features in the iOS client, though I probably don’t need them.)

password management

I’ve been using KeePass to keep track of all my passwords for several years now, since 2007. I use KeePass 1.x on my Windows machines, KeePassX on my Mac, and iKeePass on iOS. I keep my KeePass file on DropBox, so it stays in sync on the Mac and Windows machines, no problem. And iKeePass pulls the file in from DropBox every time I open it. (I don’t think I can save changes back to DropBox though. If there’s a way to do that, it’s not intuitive.) iKeePass works well enough, but it’s not great, and it hasn’t been udpated since 2012. So, I’m (once again) looking for something better.

I started using an app called DataVault in 2010, but I never really got that far with it. I had the Mac client and iOS client working, but syncing was a hassle, and it was just easier to stick with KeePass. I think the syncing situation with DataVault has probably gotten better since the last time I looked at it, but I really don’t want to go back to it.

This week, I decided to see what was out there in the way of alternative KeePass clients for iOS. I tried MiniKeePass, which is a free open-source program, with source available on GitHub. It’s being actively maintained, and can open files from DropBox, so that’s all good. But, to open a file from DropBox, you have to go into the DropBox program itself, find your KeePass file, then choose MiniKeePass from the “open in” menu. So it’s a bit unwieldy. Once it’s opened, you can just pull it up from within MiniKeePass, but it will never update automatically. To pull in a new version of the file, you have to go back to DropBox. So, it’s a nice enough program, but not quite perfect.

I’m thinking about giving up on KeePass and giving 1Password another try. I’d messed around with it previously, but never really talked myself into committing to it. There were various issues with older versions that kept me from getting too excited about it. But I think I may take another shot at it. They currently have Mac, Windows, and iOS clients, so that’s good. And they support keeping the database in sync with DropBox, so that’s also good. (I’m not sure how seamless that is on iOS, but it’s likely better than iKeePass or MiniKeePass.)

One possible sticking point: 1Password used to support import from KeePass, but they dropped that in version 4 (I think), and I don’t know if they added it back for version 5 (but I don’t think they did). But, really, I should probably take this opportunity to clean up that database and re-organize everything. I’m just not looking forward to how much work it’ll take to do that.

 

Apple iOS devices

I’ve updated both my iPhone 5s and iPad 2 to iOS 8.1. The iPhone is working fine, but the iPad is really showing its age. It’s running pretty slow, and some apps are crashing occasionally.

I’m looking to buy a new iPad, but I’m still not sure if I want to shell out for the new Air 2, or get last year’s Air 1. Either would be much speedier than the iPad 2.

Meanwhile, though, I decided to trade in my old iPad, and my old iPhone 4, which has been gathering dust for the last year. (I’m not sure why I didn’t do something with the old iPhone sooner, but better late than never, I guess.) I was surprised to see that the iPhone 4 is still worth $35 from Apple’s recycling program. I’m not sure if they’ll actually pay that, or if they’ll mark it down for some reason, but I wasn’t expecting anything for it, so whatever I get is fine. And, while Apple’s site gave me a value of $85 for the iPad 2, Gazelle offered me $100, so I’m sending that to Gazelle. (Gazelle’s offer for the iPhone 4 would only be $25, so I’m slightly better off using Apple’s program for that.)

Yosemite upgrade

I went ahead and upgraded my MacBook to Yosemite today. As is usual with recent OS X upgrades, it went smoothly and I didn’t have any problems. My MacBook seems slower, but that may be due to some post-install stuff that’s running in the background or something like that. I’m going to give it some time, and see what happens.

I’m not seeing anything in Yosemite at this point that I’m at all excited about. But I’m also not seeing anything that bugs me too much either, except for the way they screwed around with iTunes yet again.

I just bought the two new Yosemite books from Take Control, and I’m hoping that I’ll learn something from them. Oh, and I should really read John Siracusa’s review. I’m assuming that there will be some useful stuff in there.

Cloud Storage, Yosemite, and other stuff

I haven’t upgraded my MacBook to Yosemite yet, but I probably will soon. Before I do any major OS upgrade, I like to clean things up a bit. One thing that’s been on the back-burner for a while is going through the list of programs that are running in the background and seeing which can be dropped. I’m currently using Bartender to keep my menu bar under control. But even with that, it’s clear that I’ve got too much stuff running.

For a while, it seemed like every company out there, regardless of whether it made any sense or not, wanted to become a cloud storage provider, like Dropbox. So, at various times, I’ve had programs running on my Mac and/or PC to keep a local folder synced with cloud storage services from Dropbox, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and maybe a few others. Currently, I seem to be running clients for Dropbox, Amazon Cloud, and Google’s Music Manager.

For better or worse, I seem to have drifted into using Dropbox across all my devices. So that stays. And the Google music software just uploads any new music from my computer to my Google Play library, which is useful, so I’m keeping that. (And I think I should write up a blog post on that some time too.) But, after looking into where things stand with Amazon’s cloud drive, it looks like they’ve probably discontinued the Mac client software. If you look at their Cloud drive site right now, there’s no mention of the Mac client, and searching Amazon’s site didn’t turn up any place from which to download it. So I guess they’re not that interested in it anymore. And I’m not really using it, so away it goes.

I haven’t found much else that I’m willing to give up. So I don’t think there’s much else I can do to streamline my OS X install before the Yosemite upgrade. But the MacBook has been running slower than I’d like for a while now, so I’m hoping that either Yosemite speeds things up somehow, or that I can find some (relatively) painless way to speed it up on my own.

LaunchBar 6

I’ve been using LaunchBar on my Mac for quite some time. It hasn’t changed much over the last several years, and, for a while, I don’t think it was very popular, as Mac apps go. But LaunchBar 6 was just released, with a bit of an interface refresh, and it’s getting some attention, including a good review on Cult of Mac, and a lengthy and useful writeup by Shawn Blanc. I just installed it, and paid the $19 upgrade fee for it. That seems pretty reasonable, given that they haven’t done a paid upgrade since 2010. I’d recommend it to any Mac user who likes the idea of being able to quickly launch programs without having to use their mouse or trackpad.

Streaming Music Services

In general, I’ve never been the kind of guy who likes to listen to music at work. And in most of my previous jobs, I really wouldn’t have been able to listen to music, since there were a lot of interruptions and interactions that would have prevented me from getting too far into anything before I’d have to take my headphones off to answer a call, or run over to a user’s desk, or whatever. But, in my current job, I’m doing a fair amount of “heads down” programming, with few interruptions. And I’m actually finding that some of the office noise distracts me enough that drowning it out with music allows me to be more productive.

For a while, I tried just listening to Coffeetivity. This was kind of helpful, but also kind of boring. I may give it another try at some point. I also tried focus@will. The idea here is kind of cool, but I’m not convinced it would make me more productive than listening to music of my own choosing. Again, I may give it another try at some point, maybe the next time they run a 50% off sale on a year’s subscription to their “premium” service. And, as I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I was really in love with turntable.fm. Unfortunately, they shut down a while ago.

After messing around with all this stuff, I settled into a habit of listening to Pandora a lot. I set up some “stations” based on my favorite artists, and that worked out pretty well. About a year ago, I paid $36 to subscribe to Pandora One for a year, so I could get rid of the ads. That didn’t seem like a bad price, even though it really doesn’t buy you anything other than ad-free listening.

This past weekend, I got a notice that it was time to renew. (Normally, that would have happened automatically, but my credit card got stolen a while back and I had to replace it, so they couldn’t put through the charge on my old card.) I really wanted to just renew it for another whole year, but Pandora discontinued the annual plan a while back. So the $36/year (effectively $3/month) plan would become a $4/month plan with no annual billing option. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go forward with that, so I basically just let the subscription lapse. Then, on Monday, when I looked again, I realized that I was no longer eligible for the $4/month “loyalty price,” and would have to go on the new $5/month plan. So I decided that was a but much, and I’d look around at other options.

For now, I’ve settled on Slacker. The ad-free version is $4/month, and it gets you a few things that you don’t get with Pandora. The one feature I really like, and I wish Pandora allowed, is the option to download stuff for offline listening. I can’t use my employer’s wifi to stream music to my phone at work, so I have to rely on my Verizon data connection. This generally works OK, but I can wind up getting pretty close to my data cap sometimes, and I think it drains the battery a lot more than listening from a local cache. So just being able to download a cache of stuff over my home wifi, before leaving for work, is useful.

I’m also finding that Slacker’s “curated” stations are interesting. I listened to “The Current” station today, and it was really good. I’m not sure how often the content on that station is refreshed, but I could see myself listening to that one quite a lot. So, overall, I’m finding Slacker to be just as good as Pandora, but with a few more bells and whistles. Over time, I’ll see how well it holds up — whether or not there are any glitches with the app, how often content is refreshed, and stuff like that. But I’m feeling pretty good about it.

a little more on digital comics

As a follow-up to my post earlier today, I spent some time today looking through my e-mail receipts for Comixology and Dark Horse Digital purchases, and made lists in Evernote for stuff I’ve read and stuff I haven’t read yet. First, let me say that I was surprised to see how much stuff I’ve bought, in both apps, but haven’t actually read yet. But now that I have decent lists to start from, I should be able to keep track of it all, going forward.

Thoughts on digital comics

OK, this is going to be my obligatory post on Amazon’s purchase of Comixology, and possibly some related topics, depending on whether or not I run out of steam before I get to all the stuff that’s in my head right now. 🙂

First, let me say that I have hundreds of books in my Comixology library. I can’t tell you how many, because Comixology’s web interface for browsing your library really doesn’t tell you much. (OK, picking up my iPad and looking at the app, I can see that it’s apparently 635. But there’s no way to see that on the web, as far as I can tell.) This is the main beef I have with Comixology, both with their web interface and their apps. Since their books are DRM’d, I can only store them and read them in the Comixology apps (and site), and they really haven’t put much work into making any of their interfaces really useful for people with more than a handful of books. Even something as simple as keeping track of read vs unread status across devices would be nice. They have said that they’re “working on it” and “we need to do this“, but they really haven’t done it. The iPad app will mark as “new” stuff that you’ve just downloaded and haven’t read yet. But that’s only tracked in the app itself. The “cloud” view doesn’t track when or if you’ve read something. And since they just replaced their apps with new versions, all that info from the old app is effectively gone now.

I’ve recently started using Goodreads to keep track of my reading for dead-tree and Kindle books, and I’m thinking that maybe I should use it for Comixology too. Though single-issue comics don’t fit well into Goodread’s model, really. Maybe I should just track them in Evernote? The thing that really clutters up Comixology is all the free comics. Not that I’m complaining about all the free comics I’ve downloaded from Comixology, but it can make it hard to find the stuff I’ve actually paid for. Even just having a simple user-contolled tagging system or folder system would solve this problem. How hard would that be to implement? 

Moving on to the subject of Amazon’s purchase of Comixology, this could be good or bad. Removing the in-app purchasing option wasn’t a big surprise. You can’t do in-app purchase in the Kindle iPad app either. I want to say that Amazon’s purchase might let them spend more money on both the web and app interfaces, and maybe implement some of the stuff I’d like to see there, but then I remember what the interface looks like in the Kindle app, and on the Kindle itself, and I laugh at the idea that Amazon might implement nested folders or useful tagging in the Comixology app. (Not that I’m bitter or anything..)

Meanwhile, I just recently bought Comic Zeal for my iPad, so I can have a nice interface for managing and reading my DRM-free comics. Previously, I’d used Goodreader to read some comics I had in PDF format. Goodreader is a pretty great piece of software, and it works OK for comics, but it’s not perfect for them. So I looked around at comics readers, and Comic Zeal seemed to have the best reviews. I’ve loaded a bunch of stuff into it, including comics I’ve bought from Matt Howarth and some stuff from Drive-Thru Comics. I really like the ability to organize stuff. It’s quite easy to put stuff in folders by series, to tag books, and to reorder the list of books. The software does keep track of your reading progress in individual books, but I haven’t found any option to, for instance, show only unread books. But really, since I’m only using it for DRM-free books, I can just delete stuff that I’ve already read, and just keep that stuff on my PC. In terms of the actual reading experience, I’ve found it to be a bit slow on page-turning for some PDF comics. I really haven’t used it enough to have formed much of an overall opinion yet though.

I’m thinking about picking up the Image Comics bundle that Humble has on sale right now, so that would give me a bunch of new stuff to load into Comic Zeal and enjoy. If I do that, and actually get around to reading some of it, then I’ll probably post a follow-up with more thoughts on how well Comic Zeal works in practice.