Mmmm…mystery meat!

A day or so ago, Apple updated its iWork Web apps (just as I was finishing Take Control of Pages—thanks !!). One of the new features in the updated Pages for iCloud app that Apple touts is the ability to “Rename a document in the editor.” A minor improvement, but a welcome one…if you can figure out how to do it. The document title appears nowhere in the document editor that you can see, and there doesn’t seem to be a menu that has a Rename command on it.

But, oh, our fruit-flavored app builders in Cupertino are tricksy sprites, and the method for document renaming that they have come up combines simplicity with opacity. Here’s how it works: click the tool (wrench) icon on the document editor toolbar and then, on the menu that appears, click the filename shown at the top: the name item becomes editable right on the menu. Because nobody expects a menu with items that are also editable fields!

The amazing mystery meat document-renaming interface!
The amazing mystery meat document-renaming interface!

A Yosemite Success Story

A few months back my agéd mother said, “I need a new computer.” This is what she always says when her iMac misbehaves in some small fashion, but in this case it was misbehaving in a big way. Like many people, she got bamboozled into clicking a pop-up ad for MacKeeper and her computer was now experiencing major Spinning Pinwheels Of Death to the extent that she couldn’t do anything on the machine for more than a few minutes — at best — before one of those twirly rainbow SPODs would appear.

My youngest brother, who is primarily a Windows guy but who knows his way around the UNIX command-line, spent hours heroically tracking the various bits of MacKeeper malware down and expunging them, and though he succeeded for the most part, her computer’s operation was still a few orders of magnitude short of optimal. It got to the point where we had to move her to a new user account: fortunately, though MacKeeper mostly trashed her login account, its effects did not jump the wall to the new account we created. Finally, she could do her bill-paying and read her email, but most of her files and pictures and music were still in the old sad, bad account, so I made an appointment to spend a morning moving her files.

However, a couple days before the appointment, she called and asked with the same child-like eagerness with which she’d probably clicked the MacKeeper pop-up’s button if it was safe to install Yosemite, OS X 10.10, which had just been released. I cringed but figured she’d probably do it even if I said “No,” so I told her it was risky but up to her. She installed it. Fortunately, nothing dire happened. At least, I thought not; I didn’t get a follow-up call saying otherwise.

On the day of the appointment, I sat down at her Mac and logged into her old, bad, sad account to see about moving her files and pictures and music. What I found was astonishing: no SPODs! Or, at least no more than would be normal in any account waking up under a new OS for the first time. The old, bad, sad account was no longer bad and sad (it remained old): the OS X 10.10 installer had apparently found all the remaining corruption and cruft that MacKeeper had left behind and cleaned it all out.

Whenever a new OS for the Mac is released, one always sees stories about how it has messed up formerly fine computers. These stories make for great press and give us all a secretly delightful frisson of fear (“Thank god it didn’t happen to me! Yay, me!!”), but for every such story we see, we can’t know how many stories like my mother’s there are didn’t get reported, where the new OS fixed a machine that was on its last legs.

Battery and the iPhone 6 Plus

I’m hearing a lot of moaning and teeth-gnashing about how the new iPhones can’t hold a charge any longer than a two-year-old with a weak bladder (e.g., this report). After the first day or so I was a bit worried: I charged my iPhone 6 Plus completely before going to bed on the first day and the next morning it was down to 78% charge after sitting completely unused all night.

The next day charge seemed to go down somewhat faster than it did on my iPhone 5, too. But then things began to change, and last night I completely charged the iPhone 6 Plus again before going to bed. This morning, the reported charge was 100% — it barely dropped at all. Right now, in fact, it is still indicating 100% charge after 43 minutes of usage and 10 hours and 48 minutes of standby.

Seems to me that it takes a while for iOS 8 and the iPhone to settle down. It also seems to me that as the onslaught of background app updates slows down (only a couple apps updated last night), battery life gets better (I didn’t take Adam Engst’s advice to turn off automatic updates for iOS 8 because I wanted to see what the result of leaving them on would be).

All this to say that over the next few days I’m sure we’ll be seeing all sorts of scare stories about bad iPhone 6/iOS 8 battery life problems, but take them all with a grain of salt: it’ll take a week or so of use before you can have a reliable baseline of battery life information.

New from : iWork Cross-Platform Incompatibility

Last week Apple introduced iOS 8 and, along with it, a reconfiguring of iCloud document storage. Moving from the old, sandboxed system in which apps had access only to their own documents stored in iCloud, iOS 8 brought iCloud Drive, which allows apps to open documents in iCloud from other apps. This has been a long time coming, but there is a hitch in the transition. It’s this: when you activate iCloud Drive, all of your iCloud documents are moved into the new storage system.

That means, sadly, that apps using the old Documents in the Cloud method of accessing iCloud documents won’t see any of the iCloud Drive files. This includes all apps on Macs that aren’t running a version of OS X that supports iCloud Drive. Such as Mavericks (OS X 10.9)—the most current Mac OS that Apple has released. iCloud Drive capability is coming with OS X 10.10 (“Yosemite”) sometime next month.

Fortunately, Apple has made iCloud Drive optional in iOS 8, though the iOS 8 Setup Assistant really tries to convince you otherwise: if you decline to make the transition, the Assistant makes you confirm your Luddite ways.

Much less fortunately, the iWork for iCloud apps that run in a modern browser do not make iCloud Drive optional: it’s either activate iCloud Drive (which affects all of your iCloud documents on all of your devices) or no iWork for iCloud for you—click “Not Now” and you are booted out of the iWork for iCloud app!

iCloud drive not optional
Click this and lose access to iCloud documents on your Mac running Mavericks

If you click “Upgrade to iCloud Drive” the consequences can be severe: if you are not running the Yosemite beta on your Mac, and if any of your Apple devices are not updated to iOS 8, they all lose access to your iWork documents stored in iCloud.

Here’s a chart that shows what works with what:

iCloud document accessibility matrix
The current matrix of iCloud document accessibility — not even Neo could understand this!

Right now, Apple’s vaunted “Everything you love, everywhere you go” claim comes with a great big asterisk and a footnote that reads, “Eventually. But not today.”

Thanks, Apple!

[Note: Kirk McElhearn, the “iTunes Guy” at Macworld, points out that Windows users can access iCloud Drive with the new iCloud app that Apple released for Windows. But, since they can only run iWork within a browser on a Windows computer, they are only affected if they have iOS devices that don’t run iOS 8. I do note the irony, though, of Apple giving better service to Windows users than to Mac users!]

Whither Rosetta?

Ever since OS X 10.7 Lion was released, we’ve all been wondering just what happened to Rosetta.

Apparently, it went in search of comets! Currently, it’s approaching comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Rosetta is due to arrive at the comet in August and deploy a lander in November. So no wonder OS X no longer includes Rosetta! It’s off exploring the solar system!!

Caption: The two lobes of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko symbolize the PowerPC/Intel duality of Rosetta.

Rosetta_OSIRIS_NAC_comet_67P_20140714_625

The Author’s Big Mistake: A Case Study

Once upon a time, I was asked to review an interactive book. I wrote the review, posted it, and that was that. For a few weeks.

Then the book’s author discovered my review. And he even thanked me for it. At first.

Then, he didn’t. Within hours, he proceeded to commit, in a torrential series of responses to the review that dwarfed the review itself in sheer volume, what Paul Fussell described in his 1982 essay, “The Author’s Reply as Literary Genre,”: “the A.B.M. — the Author’s Big Mistake—that is, the letter from an aggrieved writer complaining about a review.”

It was, in a weird way, a beautiful thing to behold as the aggrieved author posted comment after comment (revising each several times [I got an email from the server each time he revised a comment]), spinning ever more wildly out of control with each submission. Some people tried to talk him down gently from the ledge, but he would have none of it. I stayed out of the fray, remembering both the wisdom of Sir John Falstaff and a poster that a friend of mine had back in the 1970s which read, “Never wrestle with a pig: you’ll both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

The comment storm continued for the next week, but it eventually died down. Then, someone else found it and posted a series of screen shots, with commentary, to Imgur. And that, in turn, spawned a reddit thread.

Before the author chose to “prove” that my review was wrong, the review had gone largely unnoticed, but once the author engaged, hilarity and mockery ensued. And the attention that the author’s rebuttals attracted, and the scorn that was subsequently heaped upon him, is why Fussell calls such responses the Author’s Big Mistake—and Fussell didn’t even have the Internet to provide him with examples!

Beowulf: The monster and the cricket

I like Tolkien and I like Anglo-Saxon poetry. So, when a friend sent me a link to a New Yorker piece by dance critic Joan Acocello, titled “Slaying Monsters,” I clicked.

Then I had to scrape the stupid from my retinas.

Selected quotes from this farrago and my notes on them follow:

* On Beowulf’s lack of a “real psychology”: “Unlike Anna Karenina or Huckleberry Finn, [Beowulf] is not a filter, a point of view, standing between us and his world.” Maybe because Beowulf is NOT A FUCKING 19th CENTURY NOVEL!!

* On Grendel’s piteousness: “Tolkien describes how, after the fight with Beowulf, Grendel, ‘sick at heart,’ dragged himself home, ‘bleeding out his life.’” Because Tolkien meant the passage to…oh, wait, he only translated it.

* On Grendel’s childlike nature: “One reason Grendel seems childlike is that he has a mother.” Because everyone with a mother is childlike. Like George Clooney, and Hitler.

* On the battle between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother: “It also shows a man killing a woman.” That fucking sexist pig, Beowulf, and his misogynist collaborator, Tolkien!!

* On the poem’s treatment of time: “As the time planes collide, spoilers proliferate.” Which must have really affected the poem’s box-office receipts.

* On Anglo-Saxon: “If you don’t know German, it doesn’t sound like anything at all.” Your knowledge of Dutch won’t help you, either, you fools! And don’t even talk to me about Frisian!

* On the duties of being a professor: “That is why Tolkien had a job: at Oxford, for decades, he taught the first half of ‘Beowulf.’” Wanted: professor of Anglo-Saxon. Must know first half of English epic, be comfortable wearing burnt cotton.

* On Heaney’s translation compared to Tolkien’s: “Heaney, to his credit, took responsibility for this poem, and turned it into something that regular people would want to read, and enjoy.” Irregular people read something else while trying to coax a bowel movement.

* On Tolkien’s interest in the poem: “Like Beowulf, Tolkien was an orphan.” After the age of 12; before that he was only half-an-orphan, or an orphan-let.