It’s nice that I can now have an eye on the charging status of my watch without leaving the YouTube app.

I can hardly overstate how much I hate being sent commercial emails which I didn’t ask for. This is a particularly dumb example – I already bought the damn thing. A day before the spam email for it arrives. Which it only does because they manufactured my consent to receive their spam from me “opening an account” by ordering. I’m so glad this shit is illegal where I live. Maybe the EU should export some freedom to the US when it comes to these things.

Guess what happens if you click on the profile picture or “Justin”?

If you — like I did myself — guessed that it opens the Apple Music profile of the person (like it’s the case for all other instances where you see someone’s profile picture in the Music.app) you’d be wrong.

What actually happens: It immediately sends a follow request to the person just like if you clicked the “Follow” button. This is especially infuriating if there are multiple people with the same name and default avatar and you don’t know who’s who.

Fuchen writes:

In order to use Finder.app, you have to first learn the basics of graphic design. Because if you don’t, how would you be able to tell the positive space of an icon from the negative space of it, and click on the correct area in order to select the item?

Apparently the fruit company knows what item you want to select when you are clicking. It just wants to punish you for not being a good graphic design student (or maybe punish the developer for not embracing the Big Sur style icon).

Hilarious. I think you could argue for not accepting the clicks outside of the icon, but clicking into the donut hole should select the donut. I can’t quite remember if it was in earlier versions of macOS or in Windows Explorer, but I’ve had similar problems when trying to select Finder/Explorer items and clicking into the empty space inside the 0 of e.g. a Date Modified timestamp, instead of hitting the number’s actually visible pixels.

I can see how Instagram has issues filtering this really hard to detect spam.

One would think that our current generation of computers is powerful enough to render a window without flickering. Maybe the next generation will fix that.

But… what if I want to be warned again?

PS: Eagle-eyed readers zooming in a few hundred percent will see that there’s a nearly invisible checkbox in front of “Do not warn me again”. That’s #e5e5e5 on #e9e9e9.

(Feedback submitted: FB8970075)

Wouldn’t it be great if iMessage could also show me what is amazing, instead of only the tweet that says there is something amazing? Quote Tweets have been a thing since early 2015. iMessage has had Link Previews since iOS 10, i.e. late 2016. Over four years, and it still can’t preview Quote Tweets properly, forcing you to leave the conversation and switch to the Twitter app or – worse – the browser if you want to know what you’ve been sent.

Makes me wonder if it’s deliberate and part of some shitty content licensing agreement between Apple and Twitter.

How do you hide an image in Photos.app? You open the Share menu. Obviously! Remember the classic Windows joke that you have to click on “Start” to stop it?

Thanks Fuchen for the submission!

This is one of those issues, the picture above will make sense towards the end. After upgrading to macOS 11.1 (not 11.0.1!), I was unable to participate in Google Meets calls:

• Upon joining a meeting, all other participants appeared as if they had disabled their camera and microphone
• Despite seeing my own image and the mic indicator clearly picking up me speaking, towards all other participants I appeared as if I had disabled my camera and microphone
• Chat messages within the Google Meets room would go through in all directions, so some communication was at least possible

This was happening in all my browsers (Safari, Firefox, Chrome) and regardless of if I was using my corporate account or my personal account. Some research revealed that I was not alone in having that problem. Some more research revealed… well… I don’t quite know how to put it. Insanity? Madness?

Seriously, go read through that Google support thread. It’s a perfect summary of the technology hellscape we’re living in:

1. No official response whatsoever, even for people who pay for the product.
2. A “Platinum Product Expert” (whatever the heck that is) hits the user with some generic copy&paste “solution” that has nothing to do at all with the described problem
3. The same “Platinum Product Expert” (whatever the heck that is) then again grossly misinterprets the actual problem, and rather assumes that the user is simply too dumb to use and understand the product. (Which tells you a lot about the quality of Google products…)
4. A ton of other people report having the same issue, some of them including different and bizarre workarounds (that only work for some users, of course):
   • Use Firefox
   • Unplug all USB-C devices
   • Disconnect your external monitor
   • Route all your traffic through a VPN
   • Change IPv6 configuration to “Link-local only”

Personally, I got it to work by enabling WiFi and unplugging my ethernet cable from the USB-C network adapter. This was in the last few days before the holidays, not too many meetings afterwards, so I mostly forgot about it.

In the first week of the year, I noticed something peculiar during meetings, though. I looked like shit, and not just because I slept too little. Now take another look back at the image on top. The left version is how my camera feed used to look during meetings. And the right version is how it looked now. It’s zoomed in. And believe me, when I actually sit in that chair it looks much worse. You can open the image and zoom in, you’ll see it’s also quite washed-out on the right. It took me a while before I connected this to the problem from above. First I thought maybe 11.1 updated my webcam drivers and now uses some shitty face detection zoom-in, or Google Hangouts Meets got that feature.

But no – for some reason, Google decides to choose 360p when I’m on WiFi and set quality to “Auto”. Even though my connection is more than capable of handling 720p over WiFi, as proven by dozens of meetings I’ve successfully handled with forcing the quality to 720p.

And apparently this setting not only influences how Google sends your webcam video signal, but also what video signal it requests from the webcam in the first place. In my case, a shitty zoomed-in low-resolution signal.