Tag: Apple

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Apple

The Brightness control in iOS 7’s Control Center sucks

I’ve written before about changes in iOS 7 that have left many users feeling a bit lost and confused. Over time I think that users will become used to the changes, and that Apple will likely fix most of those problems. For example, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they centre up the Home Screen page dots, as they were in iOS 6 and before. Real slick, that little slip.

But here’s something that’s been really annoying me lately: the Brightness slider in Control Center, the panel of collected controls that slides up from the bottom of the screen with a swipe. It’s mostly all quite useful stuff but I have one big problem with it: the background screen/app you were looking at fades a little when the Control Center is brought up, making accurate Brightness adjustments nothing but guesswork.

My wife doesn’t think this is an issue but it drives me absolutely fucking nuts, sorry to curse but it really, really does. I read my iPad in all sorts of places and frequently manually adjust the brightness to match. It used to be that I’d go to the Brightness slider in Settings and look at the screen as I adjusted it till it got to where I wanted it – at the lower end of the scale a small adjustment makes a big difference so it makes perfect sense that one would use the brightness of the screen as an indicator of how bright the screen will be once you have adjusted the slider that controls the brightness of the screen.

I mean, that’s such an obvious use of feedback that it doesn’t even need saying, right?

Wrong!

In iOS 7 the screen is dimmed when Control Center comes up. When you put your finger on the Brightness slider to adjust the Brightness, the screen brightness still adjusts in real time relative to the movement of the slider but when you close Control Center the goddamn screen gets brighter again. For. Fucks. Sake. Back into Control Center we go, adjust the brightness down a bit more. This time as I move the slider I feel like I’m adjusting the screen to be darker than I want it, but remember it’s going to brighten up when I close Control Center. Maybe it’ll be where I want it this time.

So adjusting Brightness is now a game of trial and error. Great!

There’s a very simple way to fix this: when you touch the Brightness Control the screen could temporarily brighten up to the correct level, allowing you to make the adjustment accurately instead of trial and error. Release the control and the screen drops back to the ‘Control Center’ level.

Alternatively, I considered suggesting they don’t fade the background when using Control Center, just softly blow it out of focus, but that probably looks weird on an iPad. Also, those blur effects are only supposed to be used on layers that sit above other layers and on the iPad the Control Center layer only covers a small portion of the bottom of the screen so lowering brightness probably seemed like the next best thing to differentiate the layers.

Well, it drives me round the bend. Grrr, and argh.

Categories
Editorial

Amazing new Mac Pro page at Apple.com

The Mac Pro page is up on Apple.com now and it’s pretty cool, with lovely animations of the construction and components as you scroll through the details. I’m most interested in what they have to say about the core and the fan; I’d love to know how they determine the effectiveness of their fan as they iterate the design.

I was watching the WWDC 2013 Keynote live on Apple’s site and saw the reveal of the new Mac Pro. I like it. I was most surprised by the size, it was hard to put in context until they showed it next to a current Mac Pro. But is it a plastic exterior? Looks like it. Seems like it might look a bit tacky ‘IRL’ if so.

Either way, I particularly liked Phil Schiller’s “can’t innovate, my ass”. In fact I was struck by how comfortable and confident everyone seemed, especially the knowing winks to the audience referencing certain textures and effects in certain mobile operating systems…

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iOS & Mac how-tos

How I got my old A1088 Airport Express plug to work on Mountain Lion

I have a really old A1088 Airport Express plug, which I believe is one of the first. The latest version of the Airport Utility for Mountain Lion doesn’t work with the A1088, and requires you to install version 5.6 from Apple. I’ve had this version installed since Lion so when I updated to Mountain Lion it was already on my system, but I’ve read that installing it fresh onto ML is problematic.

This article is not about that installation issue, but if you’re having problems with this step I’ve read that this post by Frank Tisellano will solve those problems for you with an Automator script that will extract the utility onto your ML system with the minimum of fuss.

My issue was coaxing the Airport Express back onto my network after I had to get a new router recently. It was much trickier than I’d expected, but then I’ve always found the AE plugs a little bit flakey so perhaps I was expecting it after all, and just hoping it would be easier.

The flashing amber light of mystery

What I had was a blinking amber light and no idea what it meant. Turns out it means there are error messages waiting to be reviewed, and the only way you can review them is to get the Admin page for the plug up in Airport Utility 5.6.

Problem: I couldn’t get Airport Utility 5.6 to see the plug.

Solution: Hard reset the plug.

This is achieved by unplugging it and pushing down on the tiny grey button visible underneath the plug where all the sockets are, using the tip of a pen or paperclip. While still holding that down, plug it back in, and keep that button held down until the AE plug flashes a light at you. I’ve read it should be amber and flash rapidly, but mine was green and flashed more slowly.

Release the button and the AE plug should restart in due course, and eventually become visible in Airport Utility 5.6. It shows a yellow dot on the Summary screen and clicking that reveals any errors. I had two: it couldn’t detect an ethernet cable, and it was running on Default Settings which needed to be changed. I ignored the first as I intended to run on a wireless network, not cabled.

The problem I encountered was this: no matter how many times I reset or hard-reset the plug and entered all the correct information (that I wanted to use it for AirTunes; a custom name for the plug, and a password; and my existing wifi network and password) and Airport Utility updated the device and let it restart, it would not be able to connect to my network and would become inaccessible via the Utility again, requiring another reset. I got really familiar with that flashing amber light.

At least one of the next two steps will probably fix it

In the end, I got it all working after having made two changes at once to the settings I was entering; I know, I know, you’re only supposed to change one thing at a time when troubleshooting, but I was getting bored and lazy at this point.

1) I made absolutely certain the plug was on the correct channel when attempting to connect to my wifi…

2) … and I changed my password mode from WPA+/WPA2 to just WPA2. This required also changing the password settings on the router to match, but having read that some people isolated a WEP issue with the same model of AE, I thought it might be worth a shot.

I only caught the channel issue by accident when I reviewed the Summary page for the AE before confirming the update, and it’s a sneaky one. The plug had stored all the correct details except for the channel. I hadn’t seen an option to change the channel anywhere in either the automatic nor manual setup pages for getting the plug onto my own wifi network, so I dug around in the other options.

In the settings for extending an existing wireless network (as opposed to just joining that network) there is an option to change the channel. I set it to the correct channel then switched the setup mode back to ‘Join a wifi network’ – the option to change the channel disappeared but switching back to the Summary page revealed that the channel change had stuck even though I was set to ‘join’ and not ‘extend’ my network.

And this time when the device restarted it flashed amber for a few seconds and then switched to a much more pleasing solid green. Success!

tl;dr

So in summary, if you’re having these issues with an A1088 Airport Express plug (or a similarly decrepit model) and Airport Utility 5.6:

  • first check the channel it’s searching on
  • and then check the password type (just in case that does make a difference)
  1. first check the channel it’s searching on
  2. and then check the password type (just in case that does make a difference)

A couple of people have got in touch to say it worked for them, so maybe it will for you too. Good luck, and thanks for stopping by!

Update: I first wrote this post in late 2012 – it’s now summer 2013 and my Airport Express is still going strong, even surviving a full house move and new network setup!

Categories
Apple

An Insp-Apple-Executive-Assistant-ector Calls

On Tuesday this week I emailed Tim Cook after I read about Mat Honan’s Mac being wiped via iCloud’s Remote Wipe feature. I pointed out that Apple has tremendous control over my data now, partly via iCloud but especially Remote Wipe. What happened to Mat is an example of why people warn about over-reliance on the cloud.

A member of the executive assistant team, Philippe, called me back today and we spoke about my concerns in light of Apple’s response later in the week. He was a nice guy, friendly and open to constructive criticism from a customer’s point of view and promised my comments would be read.

My concerns when I wrote were that no amount of technical safeguarding on the customer’s part would have prevented this particular trick from working. Having a backup would have made it a mere inconvenience, but it would still have happened. Even Apple were caught by surprise, claiming their protocols should not have allowed it. But it did happen, because of human error at customer support in the face of an ingenious manipulation.

Apple said they were taking that facility offline for 24 hours to examine what went wrong and fix it. iCloud is Apple’s future so I have to trust that this is pretty serious shit for them and it’s Going To Get Fixed; Philippe didn’t explicitly disagree with that observation.

Of course, somehow eliminating human error for password reset won’t make iCloud impenetrable; I expect individual accounts get hacked via other techniques as often as any other world class online service, so back your stuff up. But if Apple starts to allow password reset over the phone again, whatever they’ve done we just have to trust them if we want to keep using the service.

I told him I understood why Apple don’t make many statements about stuff like this until they know what they’re dealing with but that when they do know I’m going to want to be reassured that it’s fixed.

I’m still using iCloud but this week I turned off Remote Wipe for my Mac. If something this avoidable and out of my control happens again, I’ll have to review how I use it again and it’ll start to feel like when I had a Facebook account and I had to keep checking my Privacy settings every time they tweaked something. Using an Apple service shouldn’t feel like managing Facebook.

Philippe didn’t give anything juicy away, obviously, as he was calling to listen and reassure. I cheekily asked how the Executive team found out about the hack and what the feeling at Apple was about something this serious; but, you know…

Finally we talked about the security of Find My Phone and how a savvy thief knows now that if you can turn the phone off you’ll disable the signal. If the option were available to disable shutdown or maybe even Airplane mode without a PIN, I’d use that if it bought me a couple more hours tracking time.

So if you see that turn up in iOS 6, that was my idea.

Categories
Apple Editorial

I like going to an Apple Store

I went to the Apple Store in Westfield today to have a Genius look at the faulty Sleep button on my iPhone. When I got to the Store twenty minutes early I nodded and smiled to the waiting groups of assistants near the door, none of whom tried to get in my way beyond saying hello as I passed. I made my way to the MacBook Airs to have a play, and launched the Apple Store app on my iPhone. The app noticed I’d arrived for my appointment and offered to check me in. Yep, thanks.

Back to those Airs. So thin, so light; they are so choice. If I had the means I very probably would pick one up. Although, perhaps a 15″ would be better for me. There’s no hurry. And, to be fair, I have no need whatsoever so I’ll just wait and see what comes out next year and then find another reason to put it off again.

However, before I can start poking through About This Mac there’s a buzz in my pocket and a notification lets me know they’re ready for me at the Genius Bar where Jonathan will be helping me. And fifteen minutes early too; that’s a first, although the whole of Westfield seems a little quiet today.

As I head over to the Bar to seek out Jonathan I’m easy to spot but nonetheless a red-shirted Genius hanging out at the end of the bar catches my eye and calls out my name, waving me over.

“The system works!” he jokes, catching my smile.

Jonathan has a look at the phone, verifies the issue, ticks some boxes on his iPad and heads off to get me a shiny new handset.

What impressed me about this trip was not the resolution to the issue itself, but how Apple keep you involved in the appointment process and create a bond directly between you and the Genius before you even see each other. Personal touches like this are why I enjoy going to Apple Stores, even when it’s just to get a repair done on a faulty bit of kit. Are there many other companies whose retail experience leaves you feeling this way?