Feels like playing whack-a-mole.

If only there was a good place to show these release notes without having to open a dedicated application.

This website only works in Microsoft Edge, so I guess it’s my own fault for trying to open it in Microsoft Edge.

This screenshot of the YouTube upload interface was taken on December 7th. I was not allowed to use the current day or the day before as Recording date. Not even a refresh helped, but manually clearing the cache fixed it.

Oh hey, it’s throwback “no idea which day of the week this will be published”-day! The great unification of iOS and macOS continues, so the annoying behavior of how multiple AirPlay targets are (not) selected has crossed from macOS to iOS 14.

Sorry, a bit wordy again. But it would be wrong to not complain about absolutely infuriating things only because they are hard to adequately capture with just a screenshot.

Screenshot #1: Playback currently on the iPhone, but for my shower I want to switch over to my new HomePod mini in the bathroom, mmhb. I tap on it.

Screenshot #2: As expected, playback is now on mmhb. I finish the shower and go into the office – aka my living room¹ – to start working. I now want to switch over to my existing HomePod, mmhp. I tap on it, carefully making sure I don’t hit the checkbox, as I don’t want to add an additional option to my selection, I want to select only this one entry.

Screenshot #3: Playback is now coming from both HomePods at the same time. I’m mildly annoyed that I now have to manually turn off the HomePod mini in the bathroom by tapping on it, and confused as to why they would make the checkbox the thing I have to tap in order to switch over to this single speaker instead of adding it to the list of active speakers.

Screenshot #4: While finishing this thought and starting to move my finger, they animate the tap target I’m going for away under my ass, replacing it with a new combined list entry. My first tap goes into the spot where mmhb would have been a millisecond ago and does nothing. My second tap happens before I completely realize what is going on, and hits the new checkbox. This disables both HomePods, so now my iPhone is raving again.

This interaction alone would be bad enough, but the worst is yet to come: Contrary to what I thought in step 3, there is actually no way at all to switch over completely. It doesn’t matter where in the list I tap on an inactive target, when another target is already active. It will always add it. I will always have to do the magical finger dance of quickly disabling the bathroom speaker after enabling the living room speaker when I want to switch over speaker instead of activating house party mode.

Of course, as with most modern Apple things, there are delays in the animation, and the timing of how often you can tap and have it recognized is a bit wonky. Too long to not be a nuisance, too short to reliably hit it before the animation removes your tap target. Now that I’ve learned my lesson in step 4: You can tap the little arrow in front of the combined entry to expand it and then turn off the speaker you were coming from, so you don’t have to take the extra step where for a few seconds your iPhone blasts you. You can see all of this in action in this screenrecording.

By the way, bonus annoyance: Compare the sorting in #2 and #3. I don’t quite get it. Is it because all inactive speakers are always below all active speakers, leading to the sort order shown in #2? And in #3 both speakers are active and are sorted as one group of two items, not two groups of one item? Fair enough. I’d expect Apple to handle this case where the behavior adds nothing but confusion better, but okay. However: If #3 is showing both speakers sorted as equals, then why is the sort order not the same in #1? Maybe it’s recency of use? Who knows. All I know is: It just worksn’t.

If you look closely you can see the point in time at which I foolishly clicked on “Show More” in an iMessage conversation attachement list. After taking the screenshot I force quit the app because the jet engine noises coming from my laptop were a bit bothersome.

Webapps are the future.

See that “System Font Regular 11” setting? Change that to something else (No, don’t actually!) and then try to change it back. Do you know how to? I certainly don’t have “System Font” in my font list. And there is no “Reset to default” button.

That whole dialog is an absolute mess, let’s start with the three font selections:

• “Message list font” is obviously for display purposes only, it’s the font used in your message list. So far, so good.
• “Message font” is the font in which messages themselves are displayed, then? Yes, but not just that. It’s also the font in which you compose new messages. (What’s that I hear you say? There’s a dedicated “Composing” settings tab? I know, isn’t that crazy?)
• “Fixed-width font” is the main reason why I would never have guessed that these settings also apply to composing messages. (Other than the fact that you never compose a new… message list.) The entire point of a fixed-width font message, aka plain text email, aka the only good kind of email, is that I literally can’t control the font of it.

To be fair, the help article about that part of the dialog is excellent and states all that very clearly. Where it really loses me is the checkbox for “Use fixed-width font for plain text messages”.

Apple seems to have a different definition of “plain text email” than I do. I’m a technical person, to me this is a very simple, technical and binary difference. An email is either plain text, or it is not, and this binary choice is one I make as the user. They seem to partly agree – I can choose between “Plain text” and “Rich text” as my default “Message format” in the “Composing” tab. When composing a mail, the “Format” menubar item has a menu item “Make Rich Text” (or “Make Plain Text”, of course).

What you select there, and more importantly what you see in your compose window, doesn’t necessarily reflect what you’re going to send, though.

You can make a simple experiment: Open a new message, and type “Hello”. Make sure it is in Plain Text format by checking the “Format” menubar item. Now open the “Fonts & Colors” settings and toggle “Use fixed-width font for plain text messages” on and off. The font of your message should alternate between your two font choices. The setting influences how the message is rendered while you compose it. It will send a plain text message in any case, because that’s the message format. So far, so good.

Now, change the message format to Rich Text. The font of your message should permanently change to the “Message font” setting, toggling “Use fixed-width font for plain text messages” won’t change it. Makes sense, because it now is a “Rich Text” message, and the setting only applies to “plain text messages”, right?

So what will Mail.app do in this case? It’s sending a plain text email. Even though you’ve explicitely set the message format to Rich Text. Test it and check the raw message source. It seems that as long as your message doesn’t contain any formatting, it will always send a text/plain email.

I cannot stress enough how much I need my communication tools to give me full autonomy and transparency into what I send out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for forcing plain text emails on people, but at least do it in a way that they can understand. I’ve spent almost two hours experimenting with these setting and trying to write it down in a way that was at least somewhat comprehensible (I know, I failed miserably), and I’m still only 99% sure I understood everything now. I’ve run my own mail_server_ for a couple of years with no troubles, but this dialog still makes my head spin.

Thanks RoundMidnight!

What do you do when your support calls with Apple repeatedly drop with “Call failed”? Easy, you reschedule!

Thanks Ryan for the video/story!

Remember when you could reboot your computer without rebooting your phone first?

I’m not even kidding: I needed to reboot my Mac because I was unable to navigate character by character using the arrow keys when composing new iMessages in Big Sur, but Finder refused to quit during the reboot with the above error message. It was still syncing my iPhone. (Remember when we thought the iTunes rewrite would be a good thing? Good Times!) I tried quite a few things on both devices, but was unable to cancel said sync in any other way than to reboot the phone.