For a long time Mac Power Users co-host David Sparks and I would meet when I was visiting southern California and we’d talk about how our jobs were grinding us down. Then all of a sudden, he and I were both out on our own and grappling with any number of issues involving being independent workers after 20 years of working in a traditional job.
David suggested there might be a podcast in that. Our discussion of how to structure such a thing so that its scope didn’t overwhelm us and all the other work we were doing ended up being the jumping-off point for the first episode of “Free Agents”, the new podcast we kicked off this week.
(Thanks to Chris Breen for the theme song and Matt Alexander for the narration.)
If you’re interested in hearing us talk about the issues around being an independent worker, check it out. The show will be short and appear fortnightly, and we’re hoping to do two short topic-based episodes followed by an interview with an independent working person.
As long as we’re talking reports about Apple’s behind the scenes activity, Shalini Ramachandran and Daisuke Wakabayashi at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) have an extensive piece about Apple’s continuing efforts to create a TV service of some variety, and the challenges the company’s faced from its…occasionally unorthodox negotiating strategy:
Apple’s point man for TV is Mr. Cue, 51 years old, the company’s senior vice president of internet software and services. He grew close to Mr. Jobs after starting as an intern in 1989. Mr. Cue favors bright shirts and fast cars, is on the board of directors at auto maker Ferrari NV and often spotted courtside at home games of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
Mr. Cue is also known for a hard-nosed negotiating style. One cable-industry executive sums up Mr. Cue’s strategy as saying: “We’re Apple.”
Cue’s style seems to have paid off for them in the past, but I wonder if it’s up to the task of dealing with Hollywood. Seems like Apple hasn’t gotten a lot of traction, and its plans keep changing—now it seems to be delving into original content.
Roll 20, the over-the-Internet tabletop gaming platform we use over at The Incomparable for Total Party Kill and some episodes of Game Night has struck a deal with Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast to let folks buy digital versions of official D&D modules to run online.
This is a great move for both D&D and Roll 20; it gives Wizards access to a robust gaming platform (without having to build its own, which it tried in the past) with an active community, and it gives Roll 20 the opportunity to build in officially supported content, making it even easier for folks to get started running D&D online. Sounds like a critical hit to me.
The initiative is now prioritizing the development of an autonomous driving system, though it’s not abandoning efforts to design its own vehicle. That leaves options open should the company eventually decide to partner with or acquire an established car maker, rather than build a car itself. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Interesting details, including a prominent hire from BlackBerry.
The new take keeps the story in a period setting and offers a fresh view on the characters. Set six years after the original Rocketeer and after Secord has vanished while fighting the Nazis, an unlikely new hero emerges: a young African-American female pilot, who takes up the mantle of Rocketeer in an attempt to stop an ambitious and corrupt rocket scientist from stealing jet-pack technology in what could prove to be a turning point in the Cold War.
The 1991 film is an incredibly fun piece of retro style. I’m looking forward to this sequel.
On the latest episode of the weekly technology roundtable, Jason and Dan are joined by PCalc developer James Thomson and writer, editor, and podcaster Shelly Brisbin to talk the rise of biometrics, looking for retail therapy at the end of the world, augmented reality and the Pokey Man, and the ups and downs of Adobe and Apple’s long relationship.
This week, we explain how Bob Mansfield is the Michael Corleone of Apple, discuss the benefits and risks of biometric security, suss out rumors of a third iPhone model this fall, and guess what 1990s Internet property Verizon will buy next. And, of course, you get our patented prognostications about Apple’s quarterly earnings. Timely, as always.
The company sold iPhone number one billion last week. That’s a lot of phones. (Also couldn’t have hurt to hold the story until after the company’s financial results.) Wonder how many Macs they’ve sold over their entire history?
Another quarter brings with it Apple financial results-nearly $8 billion in profit this time, despite a whole lot of tough year-over-year sales and revenue comparisons. But as a part of the results we also get the chance to hear directly from Apple’s executives, in the quarterly ritual of the conference call with analysts. There’s always good stuff to be gleaned from this call, and this quarter was no exception. Here’s what we learned.
Apple continued its grin-and-bear-it slog though a brutal year of quarterly financial results Tuesday, thanks to the incredible success of the iPhone 6 raising the bar so high that every single year-over-year comparison is destined to look tiny. Apple will probably keep taking its lumps for a quarter or two, but the numbers—$42.4 billion in revenue, $7.8 billion in profit—are pretty much in line with Apple’s business in the year before the iPhone 6. It suggests that Apple will probably continue to have miserable year-over-year comparisons for a couple of quarters, but then things may start to even out.
A friend of mine was looking to find every file on her Mac with a particular file extension (i.e. “.jpg”). Now, there are a few ways to do this: by default, I might just type the file extension in the Finder’s search box. But that can give you false positives if that extension is a string that might occur elsewhere in a filename.
You can also search by Kind, but not every file extension on the Mac is mapped to a Kind. However, the Finder actually has the ability to search by a bunch of advanced criteria that you might not even know about. Here’s how to find them.
Select Find from the Finder’s File menu. On the left is a dropdown menu for search criteria.1 At the bottom of the dropdown you’ll see an option for “Other…”
When you select that, you’ll get a sheet with a ton of different search attributes. And I’m talking a lot. Files on the Mac have a lot of metadata associated with them—some applications even add their own metadata attributes—but most of those attributes aren’t exposed directly to the user.
You can filter this big sheet of options using its own search box. So, in this example, if we’re looking to eventually search by file extension, type ‘extension’ in the box and you’ll probably see a couple options come up. The one we want is “File extension”, so click the In Menu checkbox that’s next to it, and then click OK.
Now, when we return to the search window and select a criteria from that dropdown menu again, you’ll see the option for File Extension is now in the menu. Select that and type in the extension you want and voilà: a list of every file on your Mac with that extension.
The best part is that ‘File extension’ search option (and any other options you add) will now stay in the dropdown menu, which is great if it’s something you end up using frequently—you won’t have to repeat this process every single time you want to make that particular search.
There are other handy search criteria in that advanced search options sheet. A few I find particularly useful are “System files”, which includes those files that are part of OS X and aren’t usually searched, like preferences files, plug-ins, and so on; “File invisible”, which lets you more easily search for files based on their visibility; and even “Pixel height” and “Pixel width” which let you narrow your search by, you guessed it, image dimensions.
If you don’t see those dropdown menus, probably because you started typing in the search box of an ordinary Finder window, click the + button in the search bar; it’s next to Save. ↩
[Dan Morenis a freelance writer, podcaster, and former Macworld editor. You can email him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter at @dmoren.]
It turns out that people these days really like GIFs. But the GIF format turns out to be a very expensive way to encode animated images when compared to a modern video codec like H.264. We’ve found that GIFs can be up to twelve times as expensive in bandwidth and twice as expensive in energy use. It’s so expensive that many of the largest GIF providers have been moving away from GIFs and toward the <video> element. Since most of these GIFs started out their lives as video clips, were converted into animated GIFs, and were again converted back to video clips, you might say that the circle is complete.
But while this move does spare websites’ bandwidth costs as well as saving users’ batteries, it comes at a usability cost. On iOS 9, <video>s will only begin playing as a result of a user gesture. So pages which replace an <img> with a <video> will require a user gesture before displaying their animated content, and, on iPhone, the <video> will enter fullscreen when starting playback.
Better support for GIFs was one of my wish list items for iOS and while this doesn’t totally address that—for better or worse, GIFs are still the standard for sharing animated images online—it does seem like Apple is skating to where the puck will eventually be.
Bob Mansfield had stepped back from a day-to-day role at the company a few years ago, after leading the hardware engineering development of products including the MacBook Air laptop computer, the iMac desktop computer, and the iPad tablet. Apple now has Mr. Mansfield running the company’s secret autonomous, electric-vehicle initiative, code-named Project Titan, the people said.
Scrivener for iOS and a new mechanical keyboard for iPad arrived at Jason’s house this week. This week on Upgrade, Myke Hurley and Jason discuss using a specialized writing tool for longform work and the challenges of building an iPad keyboard that doesn’t turn the iPad into a laptop. Plus they recap the latest trailers from Comic-Con.
Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) said on Monday it would buy Yahoo Inc’s (YHOO.O) core internet properties for $4.83 billion in cash to expand its digital advertising and media business, ending a protracted sale process for the fading Web pioneer.
The purchase will boost Verizon’s AOL internet business, which it bought last year for $4.4 billion, as it gains access to Yahoo’s ad technology tools, BrightRoll and Flurry, and search, email and messenger assets.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of back and forth over what exactly Verizon’s going to do with Yahoo and its properties, but probably a lot of the same thing its done with AOL: enhance its ad business and find more revenue streams. Yahoo also retains a certain degree of name-brand recognition, which can’t hurt. Still unknown is the fate of Yahoo’s web services like Flickr and Tumblr.
My thanks to forScore, the leading sheet music reader for iPad, for sponsoring Six Colors this week. forScore lets you do everything you can do with paper, and more, with your iPad. It uses standard PDF files, so you can scan your existing collection or find virtually anything online. You can even annotate with an Apple Pencil.
Ever since I decided to embrace the iPad Pro, I’ve been trying to figure out the best option for an external keyboard. One of the things I do for a living is write. As much as I like the iPad Pro 12.9’s software keyboard, I like physical keyboards even more.
The $150 Logitech Create will turn your iPad Pro into a laptop, but it’s a pain to get the iPad in and out of the shell, the screen angle isn’t adjustable, and it’s not particularly attractive. The Zagg SlimBook Pro is similar, but my former Macworld colleague Dan Frakes says that the keyboard isn’t quite as good as the Logitech model.1
Most of the time I’m still using either Apple’s $99 Magic Keyboard and an iPad stand, or the $169 Smart Keyboard. The Magic Keyboard is an excellent keyboard, but a lot less portable than a case that comes with you all the time. The 12.9-inch Smart Keyboard is bulky (in a way the 9.7-inch model isn’t) and the keys aren’t great, but they’re always with you, which is a pretty good feature for a mobile device.
My ideal iPad Pro keyboard accessory would be a mix of all of these different products. It would have the key travel of a physical keyboard and the ability to be used comfortably in my lap, and ideally the screen angle would be adjustable.
So where does that leave us? With a bunch of different products that do some, but not all, of those tasks.
Razer’s Mechanical Keyboard Case for iPad Pro
Onto the scene rolls the next contender, the $160 Razer Mechanical Keyboard Case for iPad Pro. It offers, Razer claims, the “world’s first mechanical switch for a mobile device.” I’m not entirely sure about that, but this case does feature an ultra-thin keyboard that still, somehow, offers mechanical keyswitches that provide feedback (both tactile and aural) unlike other keyboards.
And yes, the keys on the Razer case are clicky and noisy. There’s definitely a tactile pop to them, though when I put my headphones on and cranked up the tunes I found that it lost a lot of its oomph—the clicky sound is more noticeable to me than the tactile feedback.
The Razer case comes in two parts: A keyboard that also serves as an iPad cover, and a polycarbonate case with an integrated metal kickstand that you slip on the iPad Pro. The kickstand feels substantial, and allows you to choose just the right angle for your iPad (rather than locking you into a single angle, as so many iPad stands do).
But that substance also adds bulk, and I don’t think I’d want to use my iPad for extended amounts of time with the Razer shell on. It’s like a heavy winter jacket—clothing I’d put on for a purpose, but not wear the entire day. I wouldn’t attach the Razer case unless I knew I was in for a whole lot of typing.
To be specific, attaching the entire Razer case to your iPad Pro adds 2.1 pounds, compared to 1.6 pounds for the Logi case. The whole thing ends up weighing in at 3.7 pounds… in other words, it’s heavier than the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
This doesn’t disqualify the Razer case necessarily—you can’t pull 2.1 pounds off of a MacBook Pro and carry the screen around the house—but let’s call it what it is: This is a case that turns your iPad into a laptop. If that’s a dealbreaker, consider that the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the 12-ounce Smart Keyboard weighs in at 2.5 pounds.
One of the big advantages of the Logitech Create keyboard is that it largely duplicates the placement and feel of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air keyboards. If you’re used to Apple laptop keyboards (other than the new MacBook, that is), you’ll feel at home on that keyboard. The Razer keyboard, on the other hand, is a peculiar layout unlike any keyboard found on other Apple devices. The up arrow key is nestled between the shift and slash keys, the command keys don’t have any extra width, and the key in the very bottom corner slides up the software keyboard.
I’m sure I could get used to the Razer’s key layout in time, if it were like any of the other keyboards I use on a regular basis, but it’s quite different, and most long-time Apple keyboard users will have a learning curve. (To Razer’s credit, the keyboard does have all the keys you’d expect on an iOS keyboard: there are equivalents for Home, Lock, Search, the Emoji/International keyboard, and the aforementioned software keyboard toggle.)
Even though this keyboard is integrated into a case, it uses Bluetooth instead of Apple’s Smart Connector. This means you’ll need to charge it—Razer says it’ll last 600 hours with the backlight turned off, or about 10 hours if you have the backlight turned up all the way.
But this design feature also has a big advantage: you can pull the keyboard right off of the iPad stand (they’re magnetically attached), and operate them separately. I love this approach, which gives you a whole lot more ergonomic flexibility. I was able to place the iPad higher up on a table and put the keyboard down in my lap rather than compromising on an uncomfortable in-between position, as I would with a laptop. (Zagg’s case also offers this feature.)
The Zagg and Logitech cases still have one serious advantage: Thanks to their hinges, both will let you use the device on your lap with the ease and stability of a laptop. The Razer case can only prop the iPad up by using the kickstand on the back of its backshell, so it’s really only for use on a flat surface.
Finally, there’s this logic problem: It’s great to type on those clicky keys, but at what cost? If you’re using a mobile device, do you want to bring a super clicky keyboard with you, so everyone else in the cafe can stare daggers at you for filling the air with the loud sounds of typing?
In the end, I have to say that while I’m impressed with the Razer case—it feels solid, looks good, and that keyboard is truly clicky and tactile—it isn’t really what I’m looking for. I appreciate the detachable keyboard, but the lack of the ability to use it in my lap like a laptop really hinders its utility, and the key layout is not to my tastes. And while it’s a much more attractive product than the Logitech Create, it adds even more bulk and weight.
If you want to turn your iPad into a nearly four-pound black laptop with mechanical keyswitches, this is the product for you. For everyone else? I think I’d still recommend an external Bluetooth keyboard and a stand or Apple’s own Smart Keyboard.
I haven’t tried the Zagg SlimBook. It’s next on my list, though. ↩
