RNC vs Apple

Oh, look, Fox News thinks supporting the status quo is apolitical, at least when it’s a status quo they like.

Co-host Steve Doocy noted that Apple had dropped its support of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to protest some of Trump’s comments on the campaign trail. “But should the company be getting political?” Doocy asked.

Got it: not supporting the RNC is “political”; supporting the RNC is “not political”.

Root — the author of The Power of Relentless, a book which unironically uses the word “mega-success” in its subtitle — said that the company is making “a very, very big mistake, tragic, and I think [Apple CEO] Tim Cook is going to regret this.”

Yeah, I’m pretty sure the guy who felt a social responsibility to come out as gay is going to regret not supporting Trump’s and/or the GOP’s hate-mongering and bigotry.

“I think Apple has a big problem now,” he said, “because there are what? Sixty million-odd Republican voters? If every one of us pulls our support of Apple products or sells our Apple stock, I think the board will quickly make the decision to fire Tim Cook.”

“I think a boycott is a good move now,” Root continued. “I think all Republicans should boycott Apple products and pull their support of Apple stock until the decision to is made to fire the biased, prejudiced Tim Cook.”

Doocy said that “while we love the design and everything else — whether it’s the iPod or iPad or whatever else — it’s made in China! Isn’t this just what Donald Trump’s been saying about the jobs?”

Yep, because you’re all going to switch to using smartphones and laptops made in…oh, wait, China. So that doesn’t work.

So you’re all going to stop using smartphones and laptops and make do with a dumbphone…which is made in China.

It really doesn’t matter what brand, if you want to stick to US manufacturing, that pretty much means no computing devices, and very few consumer electronics. Though the Mac Pro is “manufactured” (I think actually assembled) in the US, so you can still buy that.

Oh, except you’re boycotting Apple because they manufacture things in China.

That is, if the whole political/apolitical distinction they’re making weren’t bullshit to begin with.

iOS 9 Revokes Permissions?

iOS 9 introduced a bizarre permissions/sharing problem: Apps that need permission (at least some of them) to access some part of the OS no longer had it. So, Camera+ couldn’t access the camera, Fantastical couldn’t access my calendars. In both cases, the apps had had permission and I’d been using them right before the update. In both cases, the app directed me to go to the Privacy part of the settings and allow access, and in both cases where there should be a list of apps that have asked for or been granted access, there was nothing. I tried wiping and re-installing Fantastical in the hopes that it would trigger a request.

iOS 9.0.1 fixed this for me. The access came back without me even having to authorize it. (iPhone 5, in case it matters)

I’m tossing this up here because I couldn’t find anything online about it. So now there should be at least one Google hit relating to it, if someone else is having the same problem.

USA Today Needs a Content Editor

I was reading an article in USA Today (found sitting around the office), and went to look up more about it online. Which led me to an older article about the debut of variable song pricing in the iTunes Store. From that article:

As people got used to buying music online, Apple had trouble arguing that it was simplest if all songs were 99 cents; when it became clear DRM was on its way out, Apple let go of control over pricing in order to keep its service in line with competitors like Amazon.com Inc. [1]

Now, this is a perfect example of something that is grammatically correct, and the facts it provides are basically true, but they way in which they are presented totally misrepresents the relationships between those facts. At least, if every other story I can find on the matter is to be believed.[2,3,4,5] That is, the facts that every other story [a sampling of which I’ve sourced] I can find agrees on are:

Spotlight Sucks

OK, I know that spotlight does all sorts of nifty, powerful things. However, it shouldn’t do them at the expense of the simple things that a find utility should be able to accomplish. I can’t remember the last time I could think of some text inside of a document to search for that was in any way unique—or even unusual—and on the rare occasions when I can, I can’t think of the exact text, only the rough sort of text (“it was something about haikus”). And without a verbatim quote, a text search agent of this sort is pretty useless. Now, that’s all very fine and dandy—the fact that I don’t search that way doesn’t mean that it’s bad that it provides those capabilities. For all I know, there are tons of people who really need to search inside of files on a daily basis. And, if i were using this in a work environment, I can think of several instances where it would be supremely helpful: finding everything relating to a client by searching for the client’s name or trademark, frex. But I don’t work with a lot of proper nouns, and they’re often in the filename when i do.

So, on to my complaint: Spotlight is near-useless for locating files. Oh, it’s great for locating file contents, but if what you know, prior to performing the search, is stuff about the file, rather than about its contents, it’s not much help.