For some reason, most of my (ca. 12.000) songs were deleted from my iPhone – not the related meta data, though: Everything was still showing up, but the songs without album art in those screenshots would just be skipped during playback.¹ When connecting the phone, Finder would indeed have transferred almost my entire library over again. That took several days the last time I did it, when setting up the new phone.

Instead, I decided to finally give up – a more final version of Music bankruptcy. I changed the settings to not sync music anymore. It took over 20 minutes for that “sync” to finish removing everything. Afterwards I deleted Music.app from my phone. It’s hard to put into words how cathartic that felt.

I’ll be using Plexamp going forward.

Bonus: This fun bug when sharing via Messages is still around.

Speaking of extremely helpful error messages, recently this error greeted me upon retrieving my phone from my running belt after finishing a run. I guess it’s a… non-modal modal?
It doesn’t allow you to do anything until dismissing it, but it also doesn’t stop anything – notably, it skips the broken track within a millisecond and just continues playback. It happens so quickly that even when actively observing you have no chance of catching the track that actually caused it. In my case it was the zeiDverschwAendung track, but I was only able to figure that out by skipping back in history and checking which upcoming track will actually not be played after all. The screenshots above are both from troubleshooting after the fact, that’s why the “now playing” track and the problematic track are only two apart. When I got this error “in the wild”, the problematic track was at least twenty tracks in the past.

I get that stopping playback in case of such an error isn’t the right choice – during my run I certainly would have been rather annoyed by that. But is it too much to ask to just put the name of the track into the message?

Syncing the iPhone didn’t fix the problematic track, by the way. I had to change from syncing all my music to “only select albums”, select all but the one album with this track, perform a sync to have Music.app delete its tracks from the phone, and then change back to syncing all music and sync again to get it to re-transfer this one broken track.

Tried enabling iMessage Contact Key Verification and got this extremely helpful error. For clarity, that is a list of all my Apple devices with iMessage.
I tried initiating the process on all three devices and always get the same error, so I don’t know what “Apple ID Settings” I’m supposed to update. I’ve updated the second Macbook to 14.2.1 by now and retried – no dice. Based on the requirements listed on the linked page, I don’t see why it doesn’t work, so specifying which device is causing an issue and why/what exactly would be helpful.

Under “If iMessage Contact Key Verification isn’t working” there’s a link to another support page, but it’s only about problems after already enabling it.

Schrödinger’s text input.

Thanks for your submission, 🌈 rainbow unicorn 🦄!

Hey EA, here’s a free password you can add to your unit test suite for the login module: 8K-6gURd6+%uL37HjVA2Bkj&

Works fine in the app, does not work on the website. Always a pleasure when you’re forced to change an actually working password due to buggy software. Somewhat mind-blowing that this happens so often that I’m used to being annoyed by it.

Finally had time to upgrade my personal Mac to Sonoma. Glad to see that iMessage still is a rock-solid steward of Mac-assed native macOS apps. Imagine how embarrassing it would be for a flagship application like this to feel like it was made with Electron year after year after year.

Fun fact: This incorrect positioning of the right border can also happen in the other direction!

Similarly to yesterday’s post, I have also been getting this prompt three times by now: Once right after the iOS 17 upgrade, once more after the 17.0.3 update and again today after going to 17.1 – where’s the “Don’t ask again” option?

It’s been a while since my last Apple Music rant. After the recent iOS 17 update the Music.app greeted me with the splash screen on the left side of the above compilation – as I mentioned time and time again, Apple Music could not be disabled any harder on any of my devices or my account.¹ This splash screen has zero benefit or relevance to me.

Even more ridiculous are the constant and increasingly desperate-feeling attempts at trying to suck me into using Apple Music. To give some context for the two other screenshots from the compilation: The first time I got the ad this time was about an hour after the upgrade finished. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten and ignored the ad, it definitely popped up during iOS 16 as well. What is “special” about an offer that you try to get me to please take you up on after every iOS update? The third screenshot above happened after upgrading from 17 to 17.0.3 a few weeks later – is it a bug to be shown more than once per major upgrade cycle now, or just Apple getting more obnoxious? Hard to tell these days.

The most important context however: I own a single HomePod, and I bought it in 2018. Five years ago. How is that still eligible for a “special offer”? I’d have more respect if they simply said “We’d really like for you to fall into our services trap and think that this free initial fix might do the trick” than for this. It’s dishonorable and pathetic.

Can’t even pay the services revenue tribute without running into bugs, amazing. The solution to this You have not completed the entire form. error is to log into appleid.apple.com and perform the action there instead, obviously – entering the exact same information¹. D’uh, silly me! But I don’t want to be too harsh, it’s not like Apple had at least six years to improve this.

This is absolutely bonkers. Because the ML stuff used for “Look Up” and “Copy Subject” is taking a while, the menu item positions are changing around (multiple times!) under your mouse cursor. I’m not sure if there’s a simpler and more straight-forward rule in all of UX design than to never do that. I had to stop using Safari because of how often this would make me click the wrong thing.

(To the surpise of absolutely no one: The movie sucked.)