A small app to open old iChat logs (.chat and .ichat files). When upgrading to Big Sur I realised the new Messages.app can’t open them anymore. Not that I need to frequently, or ever. Recently though I was tidying up my archive and found a folder with unreadable past conversations. This fixes it.

I am pleased to find out I am not the only one frustrated by the behaviour of the back button in Photos or bewildered by where it will take me in Music. There’s a growing list of apps, developed directly by Apple, that would benefit from having proper navigation but have opted for an erratic and lazy back button:

The more common apps that have long featured back and forward buttons do not function in these peculiar ways. Web browsers do not; Finder doesn’t; neither does System Preferences. And, as I was writing this article, I was worried that it would be made obsolete by the forthcoming release of MacOS Big Sur, but everything is pretty much identical as of the latest beta. If the back buttons in the apps listed at the top of this post do not conform to the system standard in any way, the obvious question is something like: “why do these apps have a back button at all?”

In every instance, it seems to be a catch-all attempt to solve complex UI design problems. In Catalyst apps, it kind of works like the iOS system back button. In the App Store and in Music, it is a way to display web-based pages without having to implement a hierarchical navigation structure. In Photos, I suppose it is a way to reduce the amount of toolbars and buttons onscreen compared to iPhoto, and to make it conform closer to its iOS counterpart.

TidBITS:

Have you ever wondered why, if Dark Mode is such a revelation, it took Apple 35 years after the first Macintosh to revert to the look of the light-on-dark CRT-based monitors of the Apple ][ and IBM PC era? Were those green-on-black and amber-on-black screens really so wonderful?

No, they weren’t, and one of the Mac’s most significant design decisions back in 1984 was an interface that put black text and graphics on a white screen, just as had been done in books for hundreds of years.

Improvvisamente mi sembra di essere tornato indietro al PowerBook G4, a Tiger. Scaricate.

Joshua Topolsky sul nuovo iPad:

If you think you can replace you laptop with this setup: you cannot. Imagine a computer, but everything works worse than you expect. […]

But this doesn’t COME CLOSE to replacing your laptop, even for simple things you do, like email. AND one other thing. Apple’s keyboard cover is a fucking atrocity. A terrible piece of hardware. Awkward to use, poor as a cover. Okay in a pinch if you need something LIKE a keyboard.

John Gruber:

A MacBook is better in some ways; an iPad is better in others. For some of us, our personal preferences fall strongly in one direction or the other. “Imagine a computer, but everything works worse than you expect” is no more fair as criticism of the iPad than a statement like “Imagine an iPad but everything is more complicated and there’s always a jumble of dozens of overlapping windows cluttering the screen” would be as criticism of the Mac.

Secondo me hanno ragione entrambi. Per alcune persone un iPad è più che sufficiente; per quelle stesse persone un Mac risulterebbe troppo complicato e non necessario. Ne conosco diverse che hanno rimpiazzato il loro computer con un iPad perché non hanno necessità di un computer; gli basta controllare la posta, navigare in internet, guardare video — e per tutto il resto esistono applicazioni specifiche. E scrivendo ciò non è mia intenzione sminuire l’iPad: l’iPad può anche essere utilizzato per produrre qualcosa di serio, per lavorare — non solamente per un consumo passivo. Apple sta pian piano portando iOS a parità di funzioni e flessibilità con macOS, ma personalmente mi sento ancora dentro una gabbia quando lo uso: è come muoversi dentro percorsi predefiniti. Per uno smartphone la cosa mi sta bene, ma se dovessi rimpiazzare il mio computer con l’iPad mi sentirei ampiamente limitato nei miei movimenti digitali.

Ma credo che Topolsky sappia che per molte persone l’iPad è sufficiente, e non credo abbia scritto la sua recensione pensando a loro: penso piuttosto stesse pensando a quella schiera di blogger che da anni, da quando un iPad era effettivamente inferiore a un Mac, hanno sviluppato workflow convoluti, script arzigogolati, e processi di lavoro ridondanti — cose che su un Mac richiedono un click — per convincersi che l’iPad è il futuro.

iPad e Mac possono convivere. iOS pian piano inizia a somigliare a Mac OS. Nel frattempo, però, non pigliamoci in giro fingendo che siano flessibili in ugual modo.

OverSight è una piccola utility sviluppata da Objective-See per monitorare l’uso e l’accesso alla videocamera e al microfono integrati nel Mac; l’app invia una notifica ogni volta che questi si attivano.

Andrew Ambrosino ha delle buone idee su come dovrebbe essere il prossimo OS X (o macOS, data la nomenclatura recente: watchOS, tvOS), che ha raccolto su Medium. Il primo OS X risale al 2001, circa 15 anni fa. È evoluto molto negli anni — sia in termini di design che funzionalità — finendo con l’includere App Store, Continuity, e altre funzionalità perlopiù prese da iOS, ma non ha cambiato il modo in cui pensa e funziona: l’organizzazione delle cose (file system al centro di tutto) è rimasta la stessa:

We produce far too much content and our work is too often collaborative to rely on a manual model that was designed many, many years ago.

Last year I had the privilege of working at Upthere (if you haven’t seen what they’re doing, go take a look). Started by Bertrand Serlet and others a few years ago, the goal has been to introduce a brand new stack that forms a cloud filesystem and model for organizing content. The model is simple and the implementation complex– it lacks hierarchy and relies on powerful search and self-organization, along with building in sharing and collaboration into the filesystem itself. It’s about time for macOS to shift to this type of organization.

Un altro punto debole di OS X riportato dall’articolo è l’assenza di molte delle applicazioni sociali di cui facciamo uso sui dispositivi mobili. Perché c’è un app per Instagr.am, Facebook, Gmail, etc. sull’iPhone mentre sul Mac, spesso, dobbiamo ricorrere a un browser — riempiendoci di tab?

MacOS 11 should introduce a common framework for presentation, a brand new model for content, and a common thread for people.

On iOS we’re used to using native apps for just about everything, yet on OS X, much of the same services are only available as web apps. While they don’t suffer from the same performance degradation as the mobile web (or at least the old mobile web), does it really make sense that so many of us keep open 10 tabs for the services we use most? The browser is really a terrible window manager. But of course, developers haven’t wanted to build their apps for yet another platform, so web apps have been simply good enough.