I HATE APPLE

i don’t use icloud for photos. it takes up too much room on my phone. hence the need to pour them into my computer!

or is icloud for photos better now at conserving space, only downloading them to your phone as and when you want?

i use dropbox's camera upload feature to get photos from my phone to my computers but that's because icloud gives me the fear. afaict icloud photos is actually very good and will solve your problems tracer.

man it always used to just eat up room. i fear icloud too. it’s not like the wire’s a hassle, it’s just.... why?

I'm pointlessly old school and manual about photos; I don't enable iCloud because I figure it's going to immediately wipe out my free storage allowance and I'm going to start paying (even if it's only 79p/mo) for storing a load of crap, and what if I need something a week later and can't get online? Instead, every few months I connect the phone to the Mac + external HDD, open Lightroom and let it import everything it doesn't already have in its catalog. I then filter by device (i.e. if the metadata says it was something wifi'd off a proper camera, I can get rid, as it's elsewhere anyway), and wipe all the non-iPhone stuff. I then clear out the camera roll up to about three weeks back, great swathes at a time.

I figure anything I really want to access is in the online storage I already pay for (Lightroom CC, Flickr) and maybe quicker to find too. I feel a bit weird about absolute junk (Funny screenshots! "Which of these brands of chickpeas did you mean?" My gas meter reading! etc) sitting on some permanently-on server farm in Virginia, hastening our species' demise. Better to just...stick that in a drawer.

I do what caek does for my phone but what MJ does for my camera.

Me too

Dropbox camera upload is just a way to get phone photos onto my computer so I can treat them like camera photos (and to back them up while they’re not yet on my computer)

There’s probably even a way to have Lightroom watch that folder and Hoover up photos as they appear.

Very n00b question maybe but...if I wait for one of these new ARM laptops, I'm concerned that some apps that I run won't be supported. Knowing Apple, I'm wondering if y'all have any sense of whether open source tools (basic shit like the OpenOffice suite) will be okay?

Sorry for possibly stupid question, thanks!

it looks like it's going to be pretty much OK — the boxes run intel software at reasonable speed, and Apple is working with some open source projects to help them move across. OpenOffice isn't on that list, I don't think (but you do get Pages etc for free with a new Mac now too)

i'd be surprised if there weren't working ARM ports of those open source projects within six months. but yeah, you do get Pages/Numbers/etc. for free with a new Mac

Lol I hate Pages so much, will never work with it. I might actually buy one of these current machines that will be mothballed in 2-3 years because the new ones look so bad for applications I've been using for much of my adult life and don't want to stop using.

I’ve got a pretty strong stomach for badly done weird European open source desktop software and even I use google docs rather than open office.

ha yeah my kids have used LibreOffice in school for years & I have...stayed away from it

So last night I put my new iPhone SE on one of those wireless charging pads and this morning it was on 72%, hot to the touch, and was giving me a temperature warning, saying it couldn't be operated until it cooled down.

Yikes?

Uh-oh, that doesn't sound good. Maybe the coils aren't quite lining up and that's generating excess heat? Is your SE in a particularly bulky case?

Mine has been fine on a cheap Qi charger (that I bought a few years ago cos the kids wrecked the USB charging port on my Android tablet) - I use it most nights. There's a sweet-spot of about an inch in which it works, any higher or lower on the pad and it doesn't charge. Maybe your placement was a bit marginal?

sounds like it could do with a frame of some kind to help locate the phone correctly. get the lego out!

Eh wireless chargers are unreliable ime.
I prefer wired assurance

Wireless charging just makes the already hideously wasteful and inefficient phone charger that much more wasteful and inefficient.

Fsck charging in general
We need e ink phones that last for a month
Apple get on dis!

Not to be pedantic but eInk displays use more power than LCDs when they are trying to display moving content.

Who said anything about moving content. We need to get back to basics. Text.

phones should just mechanically print your content onto a scroll of paper that you replace daily

then we could rely on our canadian neighbors for the raw materials (paper) instead of china (rare earth minerals)

We'd be living in the alternate timeline of April and the Extraordinary World where Canada was colonized for its lumber

year of the depend adult etc etc

in Apple Music i've clicked on 'iTunes Store' in the left column because i want to search for a song and download it. it shows me a bunch of music, top albums, etc... but there's no search box? i feel like i'm going crazy?? (NB i do not subscribe to Apple Music and don't want to.)

haha never mind i'm an idiot, it's at the top of the left column. i looked for like 15 minutes. :/

there's a slider/blocky radio button at far right once you click in the usual search field at the top of the library selector, it lets you change the search target location to the store.

yes! ALLLLLLL the way on the other side from the search box. it's.... unusual!

it's garbage

Yeah sometimes that shit is right in front of my face and I still can’t see it. I blame it on the relentless redesign mania. I’m still using “itunes” like it was 2004

finally moved my iTunes library (from my 2008 iMac) to Apple Music (on my 2020 iMac)

had to manually copy and paste art for about 750 albums but otherwise nbd

i’m happy to note that doug’s applescripts still all work in apple music

oh shit really? That’s an actual lifesaver for me, I never even thought of checking bc zero chance right

I think you might need to update where it lives in your Library folder but otherwise yeah!

i had to get a couple updated scripts.

finally moved my iTunes library (from my 2008 iMac) to Apple Music (on my 2020 iMac)

Impressive! Have you noticed many changes between 2008 iMac features and functionality and iMac 2020?

Sounds like you may have escaped the great Catalina music artwork whole system slowdown ("processing artwork") of autumn 2019.

i'm finding BeaTunes amazing for cleaning up my library. duplicates, artwork, compilations etc

predictably, my 2020 iMac runs much faster than my 2008 iMac was running at the time of its demise ... otherwise I'm not seeing much difference

nb as a Mac user since the late 80s I've always tended to turn off or ignore a lot of the small gleamy features introduced along the way and basically just want the Finder and a handful of applications to behave as they have since the early versions of OS X

had really been thinking my 2017 macbook pro was a complete dog (bought it new a year ago); fan running out of control non-stop these days. I finally did the SMC/PRAM reset trick and for the first time in probably 30+ years of owning Apple computers, this actually worked.

i do still have a lot of issues with Apple Music throwing errors while trying to add a new album from Apple Music itself. It has something to do with library synching; it's never a problem adding on my iphone, but from the computer, it seems like if I've added something on my phone, then try to add something else on my computer, it fails about 95% of the time. Restarting Apple Music itself fixes this. I tend to add a lot of local files and upload them to the music cloud on top of subscribing to Apple Music, and the problem seems to be completely around doing both of these things.

Things like Spaces and Mission Control never really took off for me. I see people using them effectively but it's not for me. I just need 3 monitors to organize my thoughts.

spaces was better when you could set it up as a 3x3 grid rather than as a single line. I still use it but it's annoying to have to go six screens over to get the project you need.

that's just too many screens

too many projects iirc

i use spaces for full screen terminals only. everything else on one space.

the number of pdfs I have open for each project, though: it has to be this way for me. not a mainstream use case but spaces helps me work better

agreed. the original form of Spaces was definitely easier to use