iOS 9 and Snow Leopard Moments

Mark Gurman, who is known for landing Apple scoops, is reporting at 9 to 5 Mac that iOS 9 is going to be light on new features and heavy on bug fixes.

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“For 2015, iOS 9, which is codenamed Monarch, is going to include a collection of under-the-hood improvements. Sources tell us that iOS 9 engineers are putting a “huge” focus on fixing bugs, maintaining stability, and boosting performance for the new operating system, rather than solely focusing on delivering major new feature additions. ”

There’s been a lot written about iOS 8 and Yosemite and how they seem to be just above (or below, depending on who you ask) the acceptability line. I’ve written before that I consider the iOS 8 / Yosemite releases to be a special case. The community at large, myself included, wanted for so long for our Macs and iOS devices to talk better amongst themselves. Also, how many home screen posts have I put up here where the subject concluded that if they were in charge at Apple, they’d make it easier for iPhone and iPad apps to share information.

Apple delivered on these requests with iOS 8 but making changes this substantial necessarily came with a lot of bugs. I don’t have any of Mark Gurman’s sources but I’m willing to agree publicly right now that iOS 9 will at least feel like the upgrade Mark explains in the above quote. This is true if, for no other reason, because I can’t think of any update to iOS that would be nearly as ambitious in scope as iOS 8 was.

Appleworld.Today

Out of the ashes of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, which shut down last week, a group of former TUAW writers have formed Appleworld.today. I’m so glad to see Dave, Kelly, and Steve start their own thing.

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MPU Two-Pack

This week we released two episodes of the Mac Power Users.

MPU 239 includes a workflow interview with Adam Christianson from the Maccast podcast about his history with Apple, life as a programer, and experiences through the years podcasting and Mac User Groups.

MPU 240 is the February live feedback show. Topics include financial management apps, more on FileVault, antivirus, upgrading your Mac, and we are joined by professor Bonni Stachowiak, who uses screen casting software for student feedback. Katie and I also reveal easy ways to push our buttons.

WesterosCraft

I’ve heard the stories about MineCraft and I’ve witnessed nephews and nieces obsessing over videos of people playing MineCraft but I’ve never really got it. Part of this is the fact that I am a geek and grew up in an era when all we could think about was getting smaller pixels. 8-bit led to 16-bit led to 32-bit and so on. We were always pushing the envelope for the next leap. So when I first heard of MineCraft and its blocky graphics, I thought it was some weird throwback that would never last.

Boy was I wrong on that front. MineCraft is as much, if not more, of an obsession as anything my childhood could throw down. This past weekend I stumbled upon this video where a group of players decided to build a replica of Westeros from Game of Thrones. The word got out on the Internet, lots of MineCrafters showed up, and they did something truly remarkable. Now I get it.

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Photo Management and the Mac

For so long, photo management between our Macs and iOS devices has felt like the mythical white whale. We are all taking more pictures than ever and at the same time using multiple devices, making photo management a nightmare. It didn’t help that iPhoto and Aperture lingered, feeling like relics of a bygone era and every independent company that tries to come up with an innovate web-based solution seems to fold up before it gets any momentum.

However, at WWDC in 2014, Apple promised they are taking photos to the cloud and they really get it this time. They even explained they were working on a new photos app for the Mac, called, appropriately, Photos that would let us seamlessly work between devices.

Then there was silence.

In fact, there was so much silence that I began to wonder if there was a problem. Today, the most recent developer build of Yosemite showed up with the Photos app for Mac, ready for testing. I’m so eager to see this work (and so tired of iPhoto) that I loaded it up and, after making appropriate backups, pressed the button to move my iPhoto library into Photos. I’m not going to go into great detail about it. Others have. I will say however, that the app feels pretty good for a beta and already runs much faster on my Mac than iPhoto ever did with the exact same library.

Am I feeling a glimmer of hope?

There is going to a public beta at some point and nobody outside of Cupertino has tested it enough yet to really render judgment but right now it feels like Apple has a contender for solving the photo problem.

Yosemi-fied Tweetbot

Today Tapbots teased the pending release of Tweetbot 2 for Mac, which will be a free upgrade for existing users. For a long time, Tweetbot was my Twitter app of choice but I spend a significant amount of my Twitter time on the iPad and the application still has that retro, pre-iOS 7 vibe. I know the gang at Tapbots is manic about their UI design and won’t update the app until they can get it right. That’s one of the reasons we love them so much. I just couldn’t wait any longer.

Then I read Federico Viticci’s manifesto on Twitter clients and decided to try the official Twitter app for awhile. I’ve been doing that now for about 6 weeks and I don’t find it terrible, but I also don’t find it particularly efficient for the way I use Twitter. It definitely has not won my heart over the way Tweetbot did several years ago.

I view an update to Tweetbot as a promising sign that Tapbots will give a similar upgrade to Tweetbot for iPad. Alternatively, I’d be just as pleased if Tapbots would just build iPad support into the existing iPhone application. The developer tools make it a lot easier to build an alternate layout for iPad or the larger iPhones. Marco Arment appears to have stumbled into the iPad version of Overcast. Either way, an updated Tweetbot on Mac and long-overdue version on iPad would make my day.

Sonos: Blue Note Edition

Oh boy. This one will be hard to resist.

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MPU 238: 10 Mac Apps. 10 Mac Utilities

Katie and I frequently get asked to share our favorite apps for setting up a new Mac. This week’s Mac Power Users episode answers this question as we explain our 10 favorite apps and 10 favorite utilities. We also take time to stop and explain a tip or two with each pick. Enjoy.

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Condense, OCR on the Fly

Have you ever had an image of some text on your screen that you wanted to quickly turn into actual text? I seem to bump into that issue often and have a complicated workflow involving screenshots, conversion to PDF, and other steps. At least that used to be my workflow. Now I just use Condense. This Mac app makes easy work of yanking text out of a picture of words. You push one button in the app that puts a crosshair on your screen. You drag that over the offending word-picture and Condense pulls out the text.

There are settings to strip out carriage returns, correct for angled text, and set the contrast. You can also have it automatically save the captured text to the clipboard. It will paste anywhere else on your Mac as plain text and in the few days I’ve been using it, I’ve found it remarkably accurate.

I think what I like about Condense most is that this is a problem I encounter often and, for some reason, it never occurred to me that an application to fix this was both possible and so useful. I like that developers can still surprise me. I discovered Condense this week (thanks to @mkhudon) and I’m impressed.