Apple Posts

Since it’s been a good six years since I did one of these, here’s what I am using in the year 2022 as far as tech and tech-adjacent things.

I’ve been an Apple fan for a long time. My first laptop was a Powerbook 5300cs, purchased secondhand at the Auburn University Surplus Auction. I’ve been using Apple equipment exclusively since 2007. My desktops and laptops are all Apple, I use AppleTVs exclusively for streaming, I carry iPhones and iPads. If it has a shiny Apple logo on it, I’ve probably bought one. So it pains me to write this post, but… The 2018 MacBook Pro sucks. There. I said it.

Hammerspoon is a pretty nifty tool. It’s kind of difficult to explain what it does, but the best I can do is that it allows you to use Lua to script actions on your Mac and, crucially, respond to events. For instance, I use Hammerspoon to lauch all my applications when I get to work and lay them out on the screen in the order that I like. I can do this because I was able to attach a location listener to work’s location, and execute Lua code on arrival. The amount of things that you can do with this tool is pretty stunning. It’s become an indespensible part of my macOS experience.

Today, with little fanfare, Apple dropped a bunch of new products, including a new cheap iPad and a red iPhone. What?

Since it’s been awhile since I wrote a post about what I use in regards to software, hardware, etc. Perhaps it’s time that I did that again. So here’s a list of what I’m using in 2016:

So there’s this program out there called Calibre which, despite it’s pretty terrible UI, is pretty much the gold standard for managing eBooks. Seriously, it’s such a great program whose only fault is its terrible engineer UI. One of the nice things that Calibre includes is a built-in web server that can serve books via OPDS. If you have an OPDS-compatible reader (I use Marvin), you can browse and download from your library directly on your device, basically creating your own private eBook cloud. But, this presents a little bit of an issue. Namely, I don’t want all of my books to be publicly available, while still providing a subset of my library for visitors to browse and use. But I still want to be able to access them myself from my “private reserve collection.” Fortunately, with a little bit of work, you can do that under Calibre.

Apple has launched a new Photos App for OS X, along with the ability to upload your entire library to iCloud. And with prices that are so cheap, there’s almost no reason not to. $3.99 a month is cheap insurance to know that every photo I’ve ever taken of my family won’t be wiped out in a tornado. But with this comes a problem - namely, how do you upload a 150 gigabytes of photos over a 5 megabit network connection? Well, you wait a really long time for it to upload. Which is fine, really, because I’m not in any particular hurry to finish. But, once I started the upload, I noticed that surfing the web became pretty much impossible because the upload to iCloud was saturating my upstream bandwidth.

So I was confronted with an interesting bug this week, and I wanted to share it with everyone so maybe it will save you some time. Put simply, NSAttributedString with NSHTMLTextDocumentType is slow. Dog slow. So obscenely slow that it should probably never, ever be used.

Here’s a tip when dealing with UILocalNotifications. If you want to schedule a notification for a specific time using fireDate, you need to apply a timeZone to the UILocalNotification object. Otherwise, iOS will intepret this as an absolute, countdown-based date based on GMT.

So last month I had the pleasure of attending 360iDev in Denver, Colorado. Overall, this was a very good conference. As always, I learned so much from my fellow developers.