These damn Electron apps draining our battery!

Also running and actively being used:

• Slack
• Visual Studio Code
• Chrome
• 1Password

The only browser you have to restart to just update an extension.

Looking for a specific song using the search function and then wanting that song to be played next seems like a fairly normal and common use case to me, but once again Music.app makes it seem like anything that’s not Apple Music was just left in there by accident. You can only right-click search results on the album art instead of the entire search result column, and neither “Play Next” nor “Play Later” are functional – consistently, also after restart and reboot. It works once you click “See All” in the upper right corner, but still only the album art is a right-click target in that view. Albums themselves can’t be right-clicked at all in search results, only opened by left clicking outside of the big play button they show on hovering (or the name). What a mess.

It may seem petty to be overly annoyed by the Apple Music ad in the upper left corner of Music.app in Monterey. I say ad because I’m not a Apple Music¹ user, and it looks like there is no way to disable it. Let me know if I overlooked something, but I can’t find a way to get rid of it. When you first open the new Music.app preferences, it mentions that some stuff was moved to the “Screen Time” prefpane under “Content & Privacy” (the entire prefpane is just horrible, almost Windows preferences levels of chaos), but nothing about Apple Music is to be found there.

I’m even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe it’s a bug, maybe it was simply forgotten. I honestly don’t care anymore, it makes no practical difference if this particular instance is actually a forced shit experience to push their services down my throat or “just another bug” or carelessness. I’m tired. Tired of all the bugs, and tired of all the shit experiences for anyone not willing to pay a monthly fee. Not that the experience is much better if you do pay, as documented way too often in previous posts.

This decline in software quality and user experience has now gone on for so long that we’ve almost grown numb to it. When I complained about this to Philipp privately, his initial reaction was “Just subscribe and be happy”, and he was only partly joking. I have the same reaction to similar things sometimes, most recently when a friend shared his multiple day horror story of trying to get a Minecraft account unbanned after it was (probably, because usually you can only guess what the algorithm has decided today) flagged for the heinous act of not having a phone number in the connected Microsoft account. “Just add the damn phone number” I thought, because I have personally long given up the fight to not have to share my phone number with everything I use. He was of course right how utterly unacceptable his experience was, not even being given a way to contact support after being locked out of something he paid for. But we’re all so damn tired that sometimes it feels better to “just give in” and stop fighting.

Is it unreasonable to expect seeing this very tweet in the app after tapping “Switch to the app”? For me, this opens the app and shows my Home timeline, every god damn time. It even says “Open this in the Twitter app” right there, surely this can’t be the magical “full experience” they mention.

I’m happy that Safari extensions are becoming more popular again but if Steve would see the workflow of installing an extension these days some people would be shown the door.

1. Install “app” from AppStore
2. Open app that is sometimes just one button
3. Safari Preference window opens
4. Enable extension in that window
5. Find small button to configure options of installed extension
6. Click on small “warning” sign on the extension icon in the menu bar to grant permissions to the extension to read the current website

An extremely helpful error message, as encountered by Fuchen on Windows 11.

When discovering new iOS apps while using my Mac I often wish that I could trigger the install directly from there.

It seems like that would be a true “This is what only Apple can do. You’ve seen how our operating systems, devices, and services, all work together in harmony. Together they provide an integrated and continuous experience across all of our products” feature.

Unrelated: Mapper, seems like a useful utility.

If you can check whether or not I meet the requirements, should you not also be able to tell me which one(s) I don’t meet? Without me having to download and install a dedicated app?

A few months ago I got a new credit card. I immediately changed it in Apple Pay, which I use almost every day. When I noticed the old card was still set as a payment method for my Apple ID I was happy to see an “Add Apple Pay” button and thought how smart that is – Apple Pay has my CC anyway, of course it can be a payment method here. Neat! Just one tap and it’s done, and then I just can remove the old CC. No need to waste time entering the new CC details again. Or so I thought.

I get that the store credit / balance doesn’t count – it could be gone by the time the subscription is due (although a CC might decline the payment as well, I guess). But Apple Pay is just a technical layer above a CC in my case, so I don’t understand the reasoning here. Also, this is a prime example of “check before, not afterwards”. Why allow me to initiate the deletion and then hit me with an error instead of explaining why removing the CC is not possible?