Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

macOS Tahoe Music (app) breaks shuffle

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Sigh. Shuffle by Album seems to be broken in Apple Music (the app, not the service; what is it with companies giving their apps and services identical generic names?) under macOS 26 Tahoe.

After starting Music, if I go to my library’s Album view (that is, songs that are downloaded and stored locally), the shuffle icon in the new control bar appears to be glowing (with a bad effectThe left side of the audio control bar in Apple's Music player under Tahoe, with the shuffle icon highlighted in red with a very harsh, hard-edged glow with no fade. It looks really ugly.), but if you check options, through the menu bar, Controls > Shuffle shows “Off” and by “Albums”. If I switch that to “On”, I get about a two-second SPoD (Spinning Pizza of Death) — which seems really odd for an audio player on an M4 Mac Mini — before it responds again.

Pre-Tahoe, I could either hit “play” or double-click the “Albums” item in the Music app sidebar, and Music would randomly choose an album, play it through, then randomly play another album.

Now, If I hit the “play” control, Music starts playing the first album in however the album list is sorted; I usually keep my Album display sorted by year, so it always starts playing the oldest item in my collection (Victrola 88049, Enrico Caruso performing “Ideale (My Ideal!)”). If I double-click the “Albums” item in the sidebar, Music starts playing the first song of the first album sorted alphabetically by artist (for me, that’s “Take on Me” off of A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low). Either way, though the shuffle icon is still glowing, checking the menu bar’s Controls > Shuffle shows that that’s now set back to “Off”.

If I let it play as-is, it just plays through the album. If I set Shuffle back to “on”, then it start shuffling by song, not by album. Well…sometimes. Right now, I can’t get it to shuffle at all, even though Shuffle is turned on, both in the menu bar and with the glowing shuffle icon in the control bar.

Revised original line: Shuffle is either partially broken (only shuffling by song, not by album) or entirely (not shuffling at all), possibly randomly choosing (…shuffling?…) between the two options.

I know Apple’s gone all-in on their streaming Music service, but I really wish they still had a few people assigned to making sure they had a decent basic audio player. Music just gets worse and worse for those of us who have extensive non-streaming collections.

Environment:

  • M4 mini (2024, 16 GB)
  • macOS Tahoe 26.0.1
  • Music 1.6.0.151
  • 41,596 tracks on 4,044 albums (136.4 days, 317.43 GB)

Related question:

Are there any third-party audio players for macOS that write back metadata to the macOS Music library?

The biggest reason that I’ve stuck with Music is that I use its smart playlists to regularly update the playlists that live on my iPhone, so they’re regularly updated and the songs on them rotate around. (My regularly used playlists all have some variation of “exclude if listened to in the last two months” as one of their rules.)

As far as I know from past digging, no third-party audio players write metadata (esp. when last played) back to the Music library, so the smart playlists wouldn’t work anymore.

If there’s a good, functional audio player, especially if aimed at people who actually value listening to owned music rather than streamed, that plays nicely with the Music library metadata, I’d dearly love to know about it.

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

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I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!

  • ♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.

  • 🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)

This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.

  • 🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.

  • 🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.

  • 🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.

  • 🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.

📸 Photos

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.
Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.
Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.
Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…
A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.
This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is _no way_ I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!
People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.
Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

  • Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.

  • Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.

  • Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.

📺 Watching

  • Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.

  • I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.

🎧 Listening

I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.

  • Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.

  • Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.

🔗 Linking

Particularly interesting reads from across the web.

  • Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.

  • This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”

  • Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”

  • Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….

  • Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”

  • Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!

  • Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”

  • James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”

  • Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”

  • Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.

  • Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.

  • Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?

  • Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”

  • Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”

  • Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”

Weekly Notes: April 7-13, 2025

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  • 🚀 Almost to Norwescon! So, lots of that when I’m not doing other things.

  • 🥚 While we’re not terribly religious, we do like the cuteness and spring celebration of Easter, so since Norwescon takes place over Easter weekend, we continued our annual tradition of celebrating spring a week early. It was a gorgeous day, so we took a nice walk in the morning, and then dyed eggs in the afternoon.

📸 Photos

Eighteen eggs dyed bright colors sitting in an egg carton in the sun.
Colors and speckles and eggs, oh my!

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

We got sucked into the reality tripe of Million Dollar Secret. It’s ridiculous, many of these people are horrible, and it’s keeping us entertained.

🔗 Linking

  • Online Markdown is a pretty impressive web-based Markdown editor. I’m starting to find some annoyances with Markdown (it focuses on presentational markup rather than structured markup — for example, _using underscores_ to add italics adds italics as <em> tags rather than <i> tags, but since I’m often marking up book titles, <em> is the incorrect tag to be using), but until/unless I decide to go another way, this looks like a good tool to know about.

  • Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence: What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked: “With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond — including the power of ridicule.” I’m hoping this is just paranoia, but afraid it isn’t.

  • Nicholas Barber at the BBC: ‘It was a magical chemical balance’: How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend: “An independent British comedy made on a shoestring by a television sketch troupe? It sounds like a film destined to be forgotten within weeks of leaving cinemas – assuming it reaches cinemas in the first place. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still revered as one of the greatest ever big-screen comedies, 50 years on from its release in April 1975.”

  • Nancy Friedman at Strong Language: “Smut”: “Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to ‘Smut.'”

  • Ex Astris Scientia: Design Issues of the Original Enterprise: “The article discusses problems or uncertainties about the design of the original Enterprise by Matt Jefferies, as it appeared in TOS.”

  • Tim Hardiwck at MacRumors: How to Adjust Mac Volume and Brightness More Precisely: “Before you press the volume or brightness controls, hold down the Option and Shift keys together on your keyboard. Now go ahead and make your adjustments, and you should see the onscreen indicator move forwards and backwards in smaller increments (four over each segment).” I’ve been using macOS since it was Mac OS, and I never knew this trick.

  • Bauhaus Clock: “A Bauhaus clock screensaver for Mac, designed to be present even when you’re not.” Pretty! But apparently I should have downloaded it sooner; the page is now saying “currently unavailable”. Oh dear….

Weekly Notes: March 31–April 6, 2025

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  • 🚀 This weekend was a little bit of convention conflict, as Saturday we had the final Norwescon 47 planning meeting before the con, and Sunday was Seattle Worldcon‘s announcement of this year’s Hugo finalists. Got everything done, but it did make me glad there aren’t many weekends where I’m trying to do stuff for two conventions at the same time.

📸 Photos

Single-panel comic of two men sitting on a park bench, one is about eight inches tall. The small one is saying, "You think you've got problems! Not only am I the incredible shrinking man, but I've also been bitten by a werewolf so every full moon I turn into a gerbil!"
From a conversation with a friend, one of my all-time favorite Bizarro comics, clipped and saved back when I was in high school.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Guillaume Lethuillier: The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst: “Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph.”

  • Jessica Bennett at The Cut: If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More? A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance.: “‘In this class, we’re going to flip the script,’ she went on. ‘It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.'”

  • Nilay Patel at The Verge: Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air: “This is the third year in a row that I’ve published a story recommending you just stop thinking about printers and buy whatever random Brother laser printer is on sale, and nothing has happened in the miserably user-hostile printer industry to change my recommendation in that time.”

  • Sarah Jones at the Intelligencer: Then They Came for People With Disabilities The right-wing effort to roll back civil rights finds a new target.: “Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.”

  • Shelly Brisbin at Six Colors: Twenty Thousand Hertz Dives Deep Into Apple Accessibility History: “The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features.”

  • Watts Martin: What makes an app feel “right” on the Mac?: “So it’s possible that the right question—at least for me—isn’t ‘is this app using a native UI toolkit,’ it’s ‘is this app a good Mac citizen.’ In other words, does it embrace long-standing Mac conventions?”

  • Seattle Worldcon 2025: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: “Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.”

iPhone security: Hard locking and lockdown mode

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An iPhone showing the Lockdown Mode pre-activation warning screen.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE PROTESTING or in any sort of situation where there’s a higher-than-average chance of having potentially adversarial encounters with the police, and if you have an iPhone, please remember these two tips:

  1. Memorize how to quickly “hard lock” your phone. It’s easy to do, even as you’re pulling your phone out of your pocket or bag: hold the power button and either volume button for about two seconds. Your screen will flip to show the “slide to power off” toggle, along with the Medical ID and emergency call toggles. Once you’ve done this, Face ID/Touch ID is disabled, and you must enter your passcode to unlock the phone. (If you keep holding the buttons for five or more seconds, your phone will automatically call emergency services.)

    While there are some legal disputes over this, currently the police cannot force you to surrender your phone passcode, but they might be allowed to force you to use Touch ID/Face ID to unlock it. By hard locking your phone, you’re locking them out until/unless they get a warrant. If the police ever ask you to surrender your phone, hard lock it as you hand it to them.

    I also recommend switching from a standard 4- or 6-digit passcode to a longer, alphanumeric password. To set this up, go to Settings > Touch ID/Face ID & Passcode, tap Turn Passcode On, and tap Passcode Options and set your passcode. This is much more secure than a short numerical passcode, and if your phone ever gets confiscated, will make it much more difficult for authorities to gain access to your phone.

  2. Either before you join the protest, or if you see the police presence start to ramp up, TURN ON LOCKDOWN MODE.

    Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode > On

    Note: This is not a setting that most people need to have enabled full-time. It’s designed, in Apple’s words, “for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.” Turning it on will severely restrict how your phone works in a number of ways (see Apple’s Lockdown Mode support document for details). However, it also makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you, intercept your communications, or otherwise gain access to your phone.

Make your voices heard! But keep yourself safe as you do.

Android users will have to do their own research for these or similar techniques. Or get better phones. ;) (Yes, I’m kidding. Use what works for you.)

(Image yoinked from AppleInsider’s Lockdown Mode post until I can make my own.)

My First Mac

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To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, lots of people on Mastodon are posting their #MyFirstMac stories. Of course this is something I’m going to join in on!

My first Mac was a Macintosh Classic. Saved up and bought it myself for my senior year of high school. Got the very lowest entry-level version: 1 MB of RAM, no internal hard drive. Booted it up off of one 1.4 MB floppy; a second 1.4 MB floppy had Microsoft Word 4 and every paper I wrote for school that year. Lots of disk swapping!

Since then:

Happy 40th birthday, Mac!

More rambling about my digital life in this Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux) post from 2003.

Apple Music Grumbling

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(That’s both “the Apple Music service” and “using Apple devices to listen to music”, to be clear.)

For all the things Apple does well that I like and appreciate, and that keep me as a customer, some things absolutely drive me up the wall.

I have a big music collection, so I’m particular about how I keep things arranged on my computers and my iPhone. I have a bunch of custom smart playlists, keep my phone set to only sync certain playlists, and do not automatically sync my entire library. I simply have too much music to do that, and I don’t want to have to scroll through every playlist to find one of the few that I use on my phone.

Because of this, for a long time, I avoided Apple Music. (For other reasons too, including that I am particular about my metadata and have spent ridiculous numbers of hours making sure it’s correct, and Apple has a particularly annoying habit of overwriting user-defined metadata if you give it full access to the on-device library.) I finally signed up a few years back when the Apple One collection of services hit a good cost/usefulness ratio. It has come in handy (particularly for my wife), but I make sure to keep the “sync library” setting turned off, so that I know that I’m the only one managing the music on my phone.

For a long time, this worked fine. 95% of my phone-based listening was from my on-device library; the 5% of the time that I actually used Apple Music (I like their “Get Up!” playlist when I’m making breakfast in the morning, and will sometimes pop on their “Chill Mix” or a downtempo or trip-hop station as background music when I’m reading or relaxing before bed) was a nice way to get a mix of stuff I knew and stuff I was unfamiliar with. I’ve found some good new (or new to me) tunes that way as well, so even when it’s only a small part of my listening, Apple Music has been helping with music discovery as well.

So this was working. When I listened to Apple Music and heard something I liked, I’d “favorite” it. This would both help to train Apple Music so it would find more stuff I liked, and allowed me to go back and find the things I liked so that I could then go back and actually buy the full tracks or albums from the iTunes Store. As someone who doesn’t trust streaming services and regularly purchases the media that I enjoy so that I know I have a copy and don’t have to worry about it magically disappearing when licensing agreements change (I want to own my media, not rent it while being told I’m buying it), this seems like exactly the kind of use that Apple and the studios and artists would want. Streaming, like radio, is a way to find new things that I then go and spend more money to own (and send a more reasonable number of pennies back to the artists).

Unfortunately, for some reason, they’ve made an obnoxious change with iOS 17. Now, every time I try to “favorite” a song, I’m told that I have to turn on the “sync library” setting. Apparently, Apple no longer really considers your Apple Music library and your on-device library to be separate things. The first time this happened, not realizing what would happen, I made the mistake of turning on the “sync library” setting, and while I could then favorite tracks in Apple Music, it also completely screwed up what was on my phone. I had every playlist that I have on my computer on my phone instead of just the ones that I manually select, but for some reason, they were all empty, and therefore useless. There was still a lot of music on the phone in the “Downloaded” list, but the playlists didn’t show anything, and it was incredibly difficult to figure out what was actually on my phone and what was in the cloud somewhere without digging through that “Downloads” list. That got disabled again after a couple days of trying to figure out a way to make it work.

I really don’t understand this change, and why Apple Music can no longer learn about my tastes without completely screwing up the systems I’ve had working for years for keeping just the music I want on my phone. But the end result is that Apple Music is now far less useful to me than it has been, and I’m less likely to use it (but, of course, Apple’s unlikely to care, because I’m just going to keep paying for it as part of the Apple One subscription…).

Apple does a lot well. But I really wish they’d put a little (well…a lot) more thought behind the entire music experience, especially for people like me with large libraries that we’ve put a lot of effort into sorting, tweaking metadata, and generally futzing with to make sure they’re set up just as we like.

ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment

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I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.

Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.

I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.

It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.

On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)

On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.

And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.

Pity, that.

2023 WWDC Thoughts

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Thoughts as they came during the WWDC keynote…

  • 15″ M2 MacBook Air: Nice! But since I got a 13″ M2 Air not long ago, I’m not due to upgrade for, oh, a decade or so.

  • M2/Max/Ultra Mac Studio: I have no need for a Mac Studio. My M1 Mini does me just fine, and I don’t think I’ve ever really stressed it. But if I had absolutely ridiculous amounts of expendable cash, I’d love to get one of these.

  • Apple Silicon Mac Pro: Again, I have no need. But if I had more ridiculous amounts of expendable cash than necessary for the Mac Studio, sure, let’s toss a Mac Pro on my desk! (But starting at $7k…this seems unlikely.)

  • iOS

    • iPhone
      • Customized contact posters: Looks slick. But since it’s pushed to other people’s phones, hopefully they can disable it either globally or by contact. I could easily see “pranksters” sending some…interesting images that way.

      • Live voicemail transcription: Okay, that’s nifty.

    • Facetime

      • Facetime voicemail: Also nifty. But I don’t Facetime very much, so maybe not for me.
    • Messages
      • Looks like some nice incremental upgrades. Check-in is an interesting balance between convenience and creepy.

      • Custom animated stickers will probably land somewhere between fun and annoying.

    • Autocorrect is due for updates, but a Transformer language model? Hopefully I get the Autobot release and not the Decepticon release.

    • I’ve never been able to reliably get into any sort of journaling routine (I can’t even keep this blog going without months-long gaps…), so I doubt the Journal app will change that, but for people who are into this sort of thing, yay?

    • Standby will make a nice bedside clock while traveling (I don’t keep my phone by my bed at home)…but I’ll need to upgrade to a phone with an always-on display to really take advantage of it (I’m still on an iPhone 11, though, so it’s getting close to time to upgrade…maybe this fall?).

    • I get Siri triggering when I don’t need her often enough with “Hey Siri”, won’t shortening that to just “Siri” make that problem worse?

  • iPadOS

    • Widgets and Lock Screen customizations are things that look like they should be really useful, and I’ve never taken the time to try to set them up and figure out how to make them work for me.

    • PDF improvements? Actually, these are looking pretty nice, particularly being able to fill out forms that have been “scanned” with the camera. And the live collaboration on PDFs in Notes.

  • macOS

    • Next version name: Sonoma.

    • Widgets on the desktop, for those who aren’t driven up the wall by a cluttered desktop! (My desktop might occasionally get one or two files dropped on it temporarily as I’m actively working on them, then they get put back away. I hate a cluttered desktop.)

      • Heh. You can tell they recorded this more than a couple days ago, with the Apollo for Reddit call-out.
    • Though I’m not much of a gamer and likely won’t do much that benefits from this, it is nice to see gaming-focused improvements.

    • Oh, the presenter overlays and gesture effects are going to be giving Camo Studio and mmhmm a challenge, at least at the basic feature level. As with any Sherlocking, it’ll depend on what they can do above and beyond the basics.

    • Safari Password family sharing is good, but I agree with those who think that Apple should pull their password/keychain stuff out into a standalone app instead of having it buried in the preferences.

    • Profiles is long overdue, but will be nice to have outside of Chrome.

    • Webapps is just the macOS version of iOS’s feature that I never use, right?

  • That guitar is great. Obviously.

  • I like the AirPods Pro audio features and improvements, I just wish I could get used to how they fit.

  • Oh, AirPlay in hotels needs to get widespread fast. I’d love to have that instead of trying to figure out if the hotel’s TV will let me plug in an HDMI cable.

  • If I used FaceTime more, I’d be more interested in the AppleTV integration. Nice to tie that into continuity camera.

  • watchOS

    • First question: Will my Apple Watch 4 support Watch OS 10? Or will I need to add that to the “upgrade soon” list? Other than that, looks to be the expected incremental updates.

    • The updates to the hiking part of the workouts app are neat, but are they available on the iPhone too? Some of those (like marking the last known cell signal point) look really useful outside of when using the app for a hike.

    • Again, the Mindfullness app and mood tracking look nice…but are they limited to the watch? Okay, looks like that’s also on the phone.

    • How many children have Apple Watches? More than I’m aware of, obviously.

  • Wow…”one more thing”! Haven’t heard that in a while.

    • The Apple headset (Vision Pro) looks a lot like the goggles the away team wore in TOS’s The Cage.

    • I’m still not sold on my need for or interest in AR, but the demos are pretty fascinating to watch.

      • Movies and TV are so often used as demos, because you can get a virtual “big screen”, but it still seems kludgy to have to strap this thing to your head instead of just looking at a TV.
    • I do like that it doesn’t need controllers, but just tracks your hands and gestures. Must be sensors on the underside of the goggles.

    • The screen showing your eyes to other people was an accurate rumor. I’m surprised. That’s…again, somewhere between neat and creepy, but at least last first blush, looked very uncanny valley.

    • How difficult must typing be with a virtual keyboard? At least with the iPhone/iPad screen you have that to type on, even if you can’t feel the individual keys. But without any physical contact? (This is also one of the issues I have with nifty sci-fi holographic user interfaces.)

    • Seeing people on FaceTime calls with the headset, sure. What do they see?

    • Wait, a 3D camera? Interesting.

    • Disney’s on board, huh?

    • Okay, time to get some of the tech details. This’ll be interesting.

      • I still can’t imagine wearing something like this on my head for hours at a time, let alone a full workday.
    • They’re actually addressing the “how do people see you on FaceTime?” question.
      • Okay…your own personal uncanny valley avatar! Yikes.
    • Snark aside, there’s a lot of neat stuff here. Definitely not for me, at least not at this stage, but it’ll be very interesting to see where it goes over the coming years.

And now, cue all the hot takes on how bad all of this is and now doomed Apple is once again!