Category Archives: Curse These Confounded Figuring Machines!

Updating iPhone while connected to Mac

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This info might be useful if you update your iPhone while it is connected to your Mac.

TL;DR: It’s 2023 an you’ll probably have to force quit/relaunch Finder on your Mac. My anecdotal experience is that, if the phone has updated and restarted, you should be OK relaunching Finder with the phone still attached.

I just updated my iPhone 14 Pro to IOS 17.0.3 from 16.7.1. I mostly did this so that I could use Progressive Web Apps, or “Save to Dock” as Apple calls this. It’s nice that Apple is enabling this 4 years or whatever after the world.

I decided to back up my phone to my Mac (2018 Intel Mini) before doing the OS change. I don’t have much on my phone, and I know I could back up to iClown or whatever, but I’m just funny that way.

Because it had been about a week since the last time I connected my phone to my Mac, I had to download an update in order to connect to the phone. I noticed that the phone started trying to sync before the update actually downloaded and installed, but I’m pretty used to Apple’s sloppy interface stuff, so I just glossed over it.

Seeing as the phone was already connected to the Mac, and the Mac is on a wired connection, I figured it would be faster to do the update from Finder while the phone was connected to the Mac.

So now we will jump ahead to the meat of the story: The update ran, the phone restarted a couple times, bugged me to set up FaceID, and Apple Pay, and asked if it could collect my user data in order to “improve” whatever. The phone is now saying that it is updated to 17.0.3 and seems to be running just fine.

Finder on the Mac however, was still saying that the phone is running IOS 16.7.1, that “Your Mac is preparing to update the software on this iPhone,”” the status at the bottom is showing a stuck barber pole and says “Updating iPhone firmware.” And all Finder windows were beachballing and unresponsive.

I had no better choice than to force quit/relaunch Finder and see what happened. The iPhone was still connected, but given how many times you have to tell the thing to trust the Mac before you can do anything normally, I assumed that after restarting Finder, the two devices would be pretty much unaware of each other.

..aaaand Finder came back up. When I click on the iPhone, Finder now shows it with the proper IOS version showing, and immediately started the sync process.

So there you are: Finder still sucks, but sometimes you can still fix it.

I’m not shy, so I asked for the digits

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Good interview and article on Hackaday about Adobe’s latest foot-shootin’ spree/licensing disagreement with Pantone.

Because I am windswept and interesting, I haven’t used Pshop in about 20 years. As a result, I didn’t realise how very…Adobe-like Adobe was being about this EG not just displaying Pantone colours as black, but also REMOVING Pantone information from your existing PSD files when you save them.

Anyway, If you are still being used by Adobe software, you might try the Freetone plugin, which provides you with a palette of colours with code names very, very similar to Pantone codenames. The plugin is free to almost anyone who does not work for Adobe.

Not my actual notes

IOS Notes are blank

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On my iPad or iPhone, I will often switch to the Notes app and find that my existing notes all appear to be blank. I can see the list of notes on the left pane of the Notes app, but the right pane, where the text is supposed to appear, is blank.

This is a great excuse to freak out, so I will put my solution right here, in case you came here all freaked out.

The short solution that works for me

If there is a “Done” button at the top of your open note, tap that. Then force close the Notes App, then re-open it.

So far, this has always worked. When I re-open Notes, all my notes are there, the text is visible, and everything behaves as it should.

It looks like this is yet another problem in how stuff is displayed on the screen in IOS, and doesn’t affect the actual content of the notes themselves. In other words, it seems that this problem just prevents you from seeing the text, but the text is all there, and is saved whether you can see it or not.

I’ve looked for solutions/ways to prevent this from happening, and there just doesn’t seem to be any other advice that works better than closing and opening the app. Yup, I just said that about an app that does basic editing of text files in 2022.

There may be more than one cause for this, (apart from “Apple does not feel like fixing it yet”), which means that this solution might not work for you, and other solutions might.

I think this has only happened to me after the device has gone to sleep, but I am not absolutely sure of that. I’m not going to test it, because it doesn’t matter–“Never let your device sleep” is about as dumb a solution as buying your mom a new phone so her texts are a particular color.

Here are the two most plausible theories I found about this, which may or may not work for you.

It might be related to dark/light screen modes.

Turning off the “Automatic” setting under “Display and Brightness” –> “Appearance” might stop this from happening.

I had this problem even with “automatic” turned off, but it looks like this may have worked for some people. Doesn’t hurt to try it.

It might be because you are saving notes somewhere other than on the device or iCloud.

I keep a lot of my stuff–including notes–on a server I own, in a domain I own. Unfortunately, like a lot of stuff, Notes just might not be compatible with the Internet.

If you are the same kind of wild renegade who does things outside of iCloud, you could try copy/pasting all your stuff into notes you store in iCloud and see if that fixes this problem.

And then pour one out for the Internet we’ll never have.

Notes is probably the most useful app in the entire Apple universe. It’s the Apple application I use most, in no small part because its basic functionality allows me to work around problems that other applications create. I dream of a future in which Apple manages to solve the hard problem of transferring plain text files between devices using existing technology without screwing something up.

Desktop computers are least-worst at best

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The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

This is an opinion piece from The Register, and I agree with it completely.

And of course, I have thoughts.

Doing more, worse.

After 30+ years of development–and more important, marketing–we now have a rich, competitive market of 2 commercial desktop operating systems that are widely used. Yep, a whole two. Great job, everyone!

As the version number of each of these operating system increments up, more features are added to them.

For the last 20 years or so, the new operating system features that get the most attention (and more important, marketing) are things that were previously done by applications that were separate from the operating system, or things that could be separate from the operating system.

This includes stuff like ways to buy and play music, or ways to buy and play podcasts or ways to buy other stuff or see stock prices or buy and play games, or my favourite: ways to buy applications that allow you to control how your operating system operates

[I snipped out my inevitable rant about misusing monopoly positions without meaningful repercussions, “a fine is just a price,” the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) difference between selling “ease of use” and hiding important decisions from the user, and the similarities between “Buy your mom an iPhone” and just letting her eat cake–all my greatest hits. BUT I DO TAKE REQUESTS!]

Meanwhile, both the experience and the functionality of the basic operating system get continually worse for the average user.

What’s so bad about Windows/Mac OS?

Oh, I have lists of what is terrible about desktop operating systems, as does pretty much everyone. I am not dumping that out here.

If I start listing things that suck about one particular operating system, the conversation will quickly turn to an argument over which operating system is better or worse. That’s not what we’re doing here, and it’s also pointless.

[FWIW, I use FOUR different operating systems (I am SO interesting, aren’t I?) on a very regular basis, and given the choice, I use one of them more than the others. I haven’t thought of that one as “best” for a long time, though. It’s just less-worse. If you can muster a reason why the other one is less-worse for you, you are correct.]

What I am saying here is that, while these features keep getting added (and coming soon: the ads keep getting featured) to desktop operating systems, the core functionality–what an operating system should do for you at a minimum—and more important, the experience of using that functionality—is getting worse or at best, not improving.

No matter which operating system you currently consider the least-worst, your file manager still sucks, you can’t do some basic things you want to do, and other things seem much more difficult than they should. Every time you get a new computer, or a new version of an operating system is foisted on you, it requires you to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out what has changed, and how to do things you used to know how to do.

Here’s what happened: Instead of being a platform on which you can build an environment and set of functionality that lets you do whatever you want to do, desktop operating systems became platforms designed by and for what other people would like you to do.

OK, but how does this relate to Four on the Floor?

To illustrate what I mean by this, invoke the nice easy search (“start” if you bought a computer for Microsoft, or CMD+spacebar if you bought one for Apple or [Prolonged Argument over what is the best distro/desktop/window manager that somehow involves systemd] if you are using Linux)) on your desktop computer and type in “Change IP address” or “Add a drive” or “create a new directory.”

Does the desktop operating system you are using take you to where you can accomplish this task in that operating system?

or

Does it use its awesome weeeb integration to contact a search engine on the 1nternerbs and return articles that may or may not give you instructions on how/where to do the thing you want to do on your operating system?

It’s the latter, isn’t it?

Yup. I checked.

That search on your machine could absolutely be set up to do the former. It could learn or be updated to help people more easily find the things they need to do on their computer the most often, or even to know about upcoming changes they might need to make, and make those changes easier to make.

The only reason the search on your operating system can’t do that is because the people who make that operating system decided to do something else instead. Instead of making your operating system easier to operate, they added those other features, which you paid for.

And that’s why your awesome desktop operating system can much more efficiently find you the filmography of Jimmy McNichol than it can help you actually operate your system.

Cool story. So what can we do about this?

You can always find the solution on the Internerts.