Apple on yozy//NET

How to Get the Local IP Address of an Apple Watch

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:03:48 +0200

The Apple Watch does not display its local IP address in the settings for some reason. Here is one way to get it, if you have a second Mac on the network.

Open terminal on the mac, run python -m SimpleHTTPServer.
Get your Mac’s local IP address (option+click on the network icon in the toolbar).
Send yourself an iMessage with text http://YOUR_MACS_IP:8000.
Turn WiFi off on your iPhone. This is important because the Apple Watch can use your phone’s WiFi.
Open Messages on your watch, find the message, tap on the link.

In the terminal on your Mac you will see something like 192.168.0.21 - - [12/Oct/2021 12:00:00] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -.

And there you have your Watch’s IP address.

WWDC 2019 Predictions

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 09:13:29 +0200

This year’s Apple WWDC keynote will be allegedly focused on “Marzipan” and new iPad functionalities of iOS 13. Here are a few predictions that do not concern any of these.

Apple will tease the new Mac Pro and it will contain at least one user accessible ARM CPU. This will be usable for tasks like machine learning and iOS development.
Apple will not introduce a new MacBook Pro format. Otherwise they would Osbourne the latest crop of 15” MBPs.
HomePod will get multiple user functionality through voice recognition. Siri can already train on various voices and it seems to be working okay.
iOS 13 will be compatible with A9 and upwards. It might be even A10 but I doubt it. If it is A10, I would expect a feature that requires big.LITTLE CPU, like fewer restrictions for backgrounded apps.

As a side note, I hope Apple will not make the iTunes successor too simple. I wish it would retain support for iTunes Store, iTunes Match and local music, all of which are of great importance.

Improving iPhone and Pixel Photos

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 10:01:42 +0100

MKBHD’s video about blind camera comparison concluded with a baffling result. The most interesting thing is not the winner, but the phones that got to share the last place: iPhone XS, iPhone X and Pixel 3.

Although their cameras are superior on technical level¹, people prefer pictures from other cameras because of increased brightness and saturation.

Of course there is nothing that stops iPhone and Pixel to do the same thing at the cost of losing information rendering further post-processing inflexible. That being said, I can imagine that being beaten by a Blackberry in a photography test must hurt.

Solution

The solution is simple. I am sure that if pictures after auto-enhance have been thrown in the competition, the results would be different. The winner might stay the same, but I doubt that iPhones and Pixels would remain dead last.

What Apple and Google should do is to add an option to turn on auto-enhance by default. This way no information would be lost and people who prefer pictures without it could disable it. It would make the pictures coming straight off-camera punchier.

But first Apple would need to fix their auto-enhance algorithm which makes everything orange.

Noise, dynamic range and colour reproduction are comical on some of the tested phones. ↩︎

What is Holding the ARM Mac Release?

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 10:30:00 +0100

The event held on the 30th of October solidified the idea roaming the Internet since a few years: ARM Macs are coming, and they are coming soon. A-series chips have caught up to all but the best Intel mobile chips¹, so why is there an Intel processor inside the new MacBook Air?

I have a theory: A-series chips are not powerful enough–but in an unapparent way.

In my previous article I have predicted that Apple would:

Rename the current MacBook to MacBook Air.
Discontinue the 13″ MacBook Pro without TouchBar.
Introduce a new, cheaper, 13″ computer called MacBook.

This did not happen as predicted. What was announced is a new MacBook Air, which is a 13" version of the current MacBook. Other laptops in the MacBook line were untouched.

What I think will happen next year is:

Apple will introduce a new 12" MacBook Air and “discontinue”² the MacBook line.
Apple will introduce a new 13" MacBook with Apple ARM chip³.

But herein lies the problem. Which chip would go in? If Apple took the A12X processor from the current iPad Pro and added a bit of RAM, this setup would breathe at the neck of the current 15" MacBook Pro with Touchbar⁴. This would have serious implications for the Pro line as the only differentiator would be the software they can use.

In order to offer compelling Pro hardware, Apple needs to make a beefier A-series chip. One that would give even the Intel desktop chips a run for their money.

An A12X chip is neck-to-neck with a 6-core Intel Core i7-8850H; it only falls behind an i9 ↩︎
In today’s Apple’s philosophy this means that it will continue to be sold, maybe with lower price. ↩︎
I expect this name to be something unexpected, what about an “Apple Mac”? ↩︎
If they added active cooling, I would bet that it could run circles around a 45watt 4-core Intel processor. ↩︎

Apple September 2018 Keynote Predictions

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 12:00:00 +0200

As a fun exercise I would like to make some predictions for the 2018 September Apple keynote. There are two rumored machines that should come out.

The new Mac Mini

According to rumors, this machine will be geared towards pro users. As usual, the statement is vague. What pro users? Developers, animators, writers?

Current Mac Minis mainly serve three purposes:

home media server
“rich man’s raspberry pi”
server in a colo

Professionals do not need home media servers, and since Apple does not make a standalone screen it means that the machine will have to be usable headless.

As such it will require Ethernet and power, which makes it possible to do away with all other ports. I expect Apple to offer a low-grade Xeon CPU option in order to allow for ECC ram and at least an option with 32G ram.

Why would Apple do this?

Nobody uses underpowered desktops today.
Apple needs and probably has a similar machine for internal usage.
The work on Xcode automation is useless if one cannot have an affordable Mac server.

The new MacBook Air

I expect Apple to sanitize their offering. Nobody except Apple pundits knows how are the machines named before they enter the Apple store.

I believe that Apple will:

Rename the current MacBook to MacBook Air.
Discontinue the 13″ MacBook Pro without TouchBar.
Introduce a new cheaper 13″ computer called MacBook.

This will make the lightest Mac have the Air moniker. The current MacBook is underpowered for the generic user and the current MacBook Pro without TouchBar is a compromised machine with no market.

CPU and Graphics

For CPU it will have the cheapest Intel 15W CPU Apple can get, with expensive upgrades to CPUs with the same TDP. It will not have a discrete GPU and no TouchBar.

Ports

People buying the Pro computer should be savvy enough to know which dongles to buy and people buying an ultra-light computer do not need peripherals.

However, Apple needs the Average Joe’s MacBook to work for most users today, not in an imaginary future. This means it needs at least one USB port. It does not need thunderbolt. It would be better with an HDMI port and an SD card slot but these are unlikely to be included.

I predict that it will have 2 USB-C ports for power and 1 or 2 USB-A ports (for symmetry).

Keyboard

If Apple wants to make this work they would need to backpedal to the old system. Even the new updated 2018 butterfly keyboard keeps failing. If they make a new body for this machine, it is possible that they would introduce a v4 of the butterfly switch mechanism.

The new RCS standard is just better SMS, and that is a bad thing

Thu, 10 May 2018 21:15:00 +0200

Google has managed to herd device manufacturers and telcos to support a new standard for messaging: Rich Communication Services (RCS). In short it is “SMS, but good”, with support for images and other rich media. After gChat, Hangouts, Google+, Meet, Allo or Duo, we can be skeptical on whether it will be adopted.

But I think it will. In order to understand why, let’s look at iMessage. When iMessage launched people already had means to communicate with their families, colleagues and friends: WhatsApp, Skype, Hangouts, Facebook WeChat… SMS usage varied country by country, depending on whether the service was paid per message. RCS will be integrated just like iMessage: when you send a message to a phone which supports RCS, it will be used instead of SMS.

When iMessage was introduced I had sporadic use of SMS and I knew few people with iPhones. But as that number grew, so did the amount of blue bubbles. Feature-wise iMessage was comparable to other platforms. What makes the Messages¹ app stand out is that it is present by default and cannot be deleted.

In a similar fashion, the Android Chat will replace SMS. RCS is not a new silo; it is the long needed update to an outdated system.

RCS–the messaging app killer

So many single purpose apps!

Each social network starts with an original idea but in the end the users will stay if it has a compelling messaging component. To build such a service, it is necessary to know your connections. Initially it was possible to borrow the social graph from Twitter and Facebook, but they have closed the pipes. New players piggy-back on the phone’s contact list to create a rudimentary graph of connections that is tied to telephone numbers. This is a great advantage for RCS it already has access to your contact list as it is your new default messaging service.

As people upgrade to RCS, they will discover that they do not need to have Messaging App X for “that one person”. As nobody wants to have a folder full of instant messaging apps, many will be replaced by RCS by erosion. When you replace the application you use for one person by RCS, they have one fewer reasons to use it. As times goes on, only the very large networks will survive.

What is the bad news?

When people left SMS for other services they have got encryption for free. Some services provided end-to-end encryption², some only at the transport level. With the exception of Signal, few people choose messaging services based on privacy — many do not even know what it means for them.

With RCS, this feature will disappear and many will lose the protection provided by encryption without knowing it. When SMS was created, security was not a thing in personal communication. Anybody who got hold of your phone could suck all of its information.

But our phones did not know everything about us back then. Today, there are lot of actors that would like to get their hands on them sweet messages: criminals, governments and criminal governments.

What can be done?

Nothing. We will see how this will play out but I fear that after RCS is entrenched, many messages will be floating around in plain text. I hope that the current secure services will solve problems that RCS can not, providing a compelling reason to stay off it.

The app used for iMessage and SMS, the equivalent of the future Android Chat. ↩︎
End to end encrypted messages (Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage), guarantee that nobody, including the platform provider, can read your messages. ↩︎

Thoughts about spam notifications in iOS

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 15:00:00 +0100

I try to keep my notifications minimal. Only those which are important should get through.

But when I receive notifications like this my blood boils:

Spam notification from Prime Video, for an episode I have already watched.

Amazon is not the sole culprit. When I received several notifications from The Fork I have confronted them on Twitter. They have promised to do something about it, and then a few days later I was spammed again… with the same notification.

Although this is forbidden by Apple App Store Review Guidelines, Design section 4.5.3, big firms do not care.

I think the main problem comes from the fact that these cost nothing and are invisible to apple. I think we should be able to report these to Apple, in the same way it is done for spam e-mail.

Where to put the report button?

Putting a button on each notification would be an overkill, it would be easy to hit it with a fat thumb.

It could go into the slide over or 3D touch menu in the notification center. But the problem is that if a notification pops up while the phone is unlocked, and you tap it by reflex, it gets a free pass. These are maddening.

My idea would be to put a section inside the Privacy tab. This view would display last few notifications you have received, with an option to report them to Apple and an option to ignore notifications with the same text from this application. At first, this would not have much impact, but over time Apple could use this data to pressure App publishers and maybe even start training Siri to act as a spam filter.

Possible future of the Mac Mini

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 06:26:53 +0000

The current Mac Mini has many uses and most of them are not for desktop users. So, what would you want to use a small “cheap” computer running macOS for?

A media center connected to a TV
A Facebook machine with iTunes music on it
A build/test server for developers
A server that one can put into a rack (like at Mac Mini Colo)

None of these things need a x86 processor.

I bet that whatever replaces the Mac Mini will be the first ARM based Mac. And it will be glorious.

The one argument for keeping the 3.5mm jack

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 13:20:36 +0000

The rumour about Apple removing the 3.5mm jack in the future iPhone has wreaked havoc around the Internet. There are several arguments for and against it, but I think there is only one that is valid: it would make it impossible to create accessories for iPhone without going through the MFI process.

Case in point, Apple has recently featured this application in their advert “Ridiculously Powerful”.

This application would probably never exist without the possibility to leverage a cheap and universal interface with the device.

Pondering the new iPhone lineup

Thu, 13 Aug 2015 07:12:52 +0000

Here is a theory. There have been quite a lot of rumours about a new “iPhone 6C” which ought to have the 6’s internals in a brand new 4" plastic body. However, with no parts leaks this late into summer, the existence of this model is not a given. (side note: there are no leaks for the iPhone 6S plus out either)

We know that Apple has already broken the pattern of older devices moving down the price range with the 5C. I think this year the pattern could be broken again.

After the iPhone 5C was introduced, the Internet was swamped with articles describing how much of a flop it was. The reality is that most people who buy iPhones in October buy the latest and beefiest one.

So, what if Apple introduced the new, plastic, iPhone 6C in September but only made it available in shops in December for the holidays? This would give them approximately until October to ramp up the production, which would explain the lack of the leaks.

Not only would they protect themselves. But they would also get an excuse for the lower number of phones sold.

Edit 2015-09-14

Well, first predition, first failure. My score so far: 0 out of 1.

Apple's (future) presence in China

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:01:33 +0000

Rumours about the new lower-cost plastic iPhone are so prominent that we can, rather safely, take the “iPhone 5C” for granted. Its target is purportedly the cost conscious customer, and according to many articles, Asian emerging markets (read China).

On my recent trip there I came to wonder if this is really the right move to increase presence in China. Walking around, one realises that Chinese people do not necessarily seek cheap stuff; when buying phones the thing that matters most is the size. People do not care that they can not put their massive 6.3" Samsung MEGAs into their pocket because it never leaves their hand. (I wonder what effect on health this will have on the long term)

It is quite unlike Apple to create derivate devices for specific markets. iOS, for example, is the same in every country with all social networking options available everywhere. However it is not a coincidence that all car makers make specific (bigger) versions of their vehicles tailored for Chinese taste. Such an enormous population is well worth additional upkeep expenses.

While the new iPhone will inevitably attract new customers, I would not bet it will help Apple gain much traction in China. The alleged new iPhone will not be cheap, and the price is not the main reason why people in China do not buy iPhones. One reason is the size, the other is that Chinese input method in iOS sucks. What they need is an ugly maxi-phone, which they could sell at a premium price. And buy Sogou.

Redesigns for the worse

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:03:55 +0000

With the iPhone 5S release approaching feature wish lists and redesigns of iOS7 are legion on the Interwebz. Undoubtedly many people find that iOS in its current state lacks features, looks old and boring, and more generally “has to catch up with the competition”.

Usually the argument goes in the lines of “the home screen is just a list of icons” or “Apple must put widgets on the screen” or even “iPhone should centered around people, not apps”. Many proposed changes poke around the lock screen, many of them add a lot of eye candy, most of them are just wishful thinking.

It seems that lot of designers want to be part of the apple experience, want to show their skill by “improving” the user experience of an applauded product. The problem is that they base their designs on opinions of a minority (albeit very vocal) of geeks and tech enthusiasts. They criticize Apple’s design decisions without looking at the reason behind them.

Let us look at some examples and see what’s wrong with them:

Case: the iOS7 redesign video

A few days ago Federico Bianco has published a video of his ideas of how iOS 7 should look like. General reception, if we take comments on forums such as Mac Rumors, was positive. But it these comments were several very good remarks.

Lock screen

The first thing that comes in mind after seeing all of those lock screen features is security. Judging from several security holes that have surfaced in the past months it is apparent that the less features the lock screen has, the better. In its current state it can display time, notifications (that you have chosen to appear there), let you call emergency numbers and take a picture. For any other action you need to type in your passcode. Now, of course not all people use the passcode protection but most people do and it is a good practice that should not be discouraged.

After the redesign one can reply to texts, call arbitrary numbers, switch off wifi and my personal favorite: put the phone into airplane mode. What a joy when some random bloke can cut your phone off as a prank whenever you leave your phone out of sight for a minute. Apple has put a lot of effort so that without passcode people can not access even your photos and this dude lets everybody happily use your call minutes.

Widgets

The widgets Mr. Bianco proposes are a nice touch, in theory the allow you to peek at some of the information the application provides and in some cases take some rudimentary action. In practice the implementation is quite poor.

One very important thing to consider when using the double tap/click is the action that happens when the user is too slow. For example if we consider the selection on iOS then if the double tap is too slow one would move the cursor with the first tap and open the selection menu with the second. Once there one can select the word with a single additional tap.

In the case of double tap opening widgets, a wrong gesture would open the app. No big problem as you can get the information from inside the app as well as from the widget, as long as it does not take too long to open which would be a major frustration. Instead of earning half a second you would lose two.

The one thing I do not get with all these on-screen widgets is their utility. Why would I throw out place for apps to put some random information instead? What is the point of putting them on the main screen when in order to access it you need to close your current app?

Apple does already have a perfect place for widgets, the only missing thing is opening the API. You have guessed it: the notification center. The NC is the best place to put all kinds of widgets for several reasons:

It is already there
It is accessible from everywhere
People are already familiar with it
Jailbreak community has already shown that it works

If Apple would open the API then a lot of people would be happy.

Settings drawer

Another active corner = another hidden feature. There is clearly a huge demand for quicker access to settings. However I would see this more either as a widget (made by Apple, there is not much hope that apps will ever get access to phone settings) or inside the app switcher alongside music controls.

Mission control

Task switching was remade by a great ton of designers such as here in this video. Some of them are already available for the jailbreak community, like the much appraised Auxo.

The common point of all of this switchers are snapshots or live previews of the applications. In the case of Auxo they are completely useless as they are hardly twice as big as the app icon. The icon itself is shrunk. It is beyond me how somebody thinks this is a good idea. A snapshot preview consumes considerably more memory than an icon and it is much harder to quickly recognize.

As for live previews, they bring up the problem of real multitasking. Although background running apps could, in theory, provide a live preview, for most of them that would be impossible. Simply because the background process is not the same and the renderer for the application does not run and should not run because of performance issues.

The shelf

This is the best idea in the video in my opinion. The major issue I have with it is the fact that it sits on your dashboard as a folder. The news stand like shelf can only show 3 files on the iPhone at the same time, which is really not enough if you consider the quantity of the files that would end up there.

I really like the idea of system-wide file repository, as long as it is organized by type and searchable and not in a folder-like structure.

Case closed

Well, my rant is finished. It was largely based on comments and articles I read previously such as the piece on Unsolicited redesigns. Of course redesigning something is a boatload of fun, however it would be nice if people first asked themselves “why” has the original author done it one way or another before trying to improve on it.