Michael Cohen, Author at Worlds of Wanwood Leafmeal

Mainspring and Fall

A unplanned collaboration via email:

MICHAEL, are you grieving
Over Apple Watch not shipping?
This bright thing of man you
With your old heart care for, can you?
Ah, as the year grows older
That lack will make you smolder
By and by. And pout. And sigh
As, watchless, weeks and months go by,
And so you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, Cohen, the name:
False watch springs are the same.
Nor face had, no nor hands, expressed
What Mickey heard, Minnie guessed:
It is the pause man was born for,
It is Apple Watch you mourn for.

EBK-MEC

Apple Watch—First Impressions

My Apple Watch, a 42mm Space Gray Sport, is still in the Apple Store’s “processing” phase and hasn’t yet been shipped, but because everyone else is already posting their first impressions, I would be disappointing my massive fanbase if I didn’t post mine.

So far, it’s a mixed bag:

It’s much lighter than I expected: I can’t even feel it on my wrist.
Battery life seems excellent. It hasn’t needed a new charge yet.
App loading appears to be broken.
The Taptic Engine is beyond feather-light. I haven’t noticed a single tap.
The learning curve is swift.
So far, no alerts to stand up, perhaps because I work at a standing desk. Will investigate further.
Siri doesn’t listen.

As I become more familiar with how it fits into my daily life, I’ll be back to post more.

What happened in Super Bowl XLIX

A recap for those who missed it.

Balls were thrown. Some were caught. Some weren’t. Some balls that were caught were caught by the opposing team. Fans cheered. Fans booed. There was a fight.

The most important thing we learned was that putting babies and puppies in commercials has something to do with selling automobiles and beer.

Oh, yes, we also learned that Katy Perry likes to ride mechanical devices while singing.

Windy Weekend

The windows shiver, palm fronds rattle,
A hot wind blows from a graveyard somewhere.
Ana returns, her saintly eyes burning,
Bearing a nervous and dusty despair.

I don’t need those stinkin’ badges!

I’m delighted that Apple’s iBooks app can display an update badge to alert you when a book that you have purchased from the iBooks Store has been updated. It would be more delightful if the alert mechanism worked.

For example, here is what I see at the bottom of the iBooks screen on my iPhone. Looks like I have 32 books waiting to be updated.

However, when I tap the Purchased button, I see a list of every book I have purchased from the iBooks Store, but I see nothing to tell me which of them needs to be updated.

Meanwhile, back on my Mac, when I open iBooks (using the same iBooks Store account as on my iPhone), and then choose Store > Check for Available Downloads, this is what I see:

Looks like the alert update mechanism, like so much else in Apple’s cloud ecosystem, needs some debugging.

Bad Hovercraft

You see this thingie up there ↑ ? That’s the Apple Mail interface that appears when you hover over a message header in Mail’s messages pane so you can reply to the message, forward it, or delete it. Except that the thingie doesn’t always appear when you hover over the message header: sometimes Mail ignores your hovering, and you have to click outside of the Mail window and then back inside before Mail remembers what it is supposed to do.

I hate when that happens…