Cool new iOS13 feature that adds an additional “Speaker” to your old iPhone. Switching between the two entries has no effect. As you can see (above the artist name), even when selecting this ominous “Speaker” entry, the actual audio target is still the iPhone itself.

I wanted to change the audio output in the new Podcasts.app in Catalina from my MacBook (nmbp) to my HomePod (mmhp). Can you guess where you have to click to achieve that? Correct, you need to click the checkbox in the mmhp line. Nothing else in the UI is clickable. And they don’t behave like checkboxes, they behave like radio buttons, i.e. only one can be active at a time. So… how do you set the audio output to multiple targets, a primary feature of AirPlay 2? Well, you don’t.

For about two weeks now I’m greeted by this notification whenever I boot up my Windows 10 gaming machine. Needless to say, my password has not changed. Clicking the notification takes me to somewhere in the settings, and there is a huge “Fix now” button. When I click it, a progress spinner appears for a few seconds, and afterwards everything is fine. Without any interaction from me whatsoever. So… why don’t you just fix it automatically then? Why does it keep reappearing? What am I actually fixing? When I ignored the message for a week, everything still worked perfectly fine.

I wonder if it shows up in different spots around the button throughout the day.

Amazing usability, who doesn’t like memorizing numbers just to type them in in the next screen (the one hidden behind the popup).

Against what kind of attack does this even protect me? Illiterate phone thiefs?

I have this one iMessage conversation that (always) takes about 1.5 seconds to load when switching to it. Check the delay between the contact list marking it as the active conversation and the content actually changing.

There is nothing special about this conversation. No large media in it, or anything else that could explain it. This has been going on for almost a year now, and it keeps happening after restarting (both the app and the whole computer). In fact, this bug even survived me switching to a completely new computer, which I did not restore from backup. I just logged into iCloud and it downloaded my iMessages from the cloud – and as soon as the messages were back, the behavior was back as well.

Of course, the conversation opens as instantly as any other on my iPhone.

There’s one kind of permission prompt that always really throws me off and interrupts my workflow.

It’s the one that forces you to go into System Preferences, unlock the specific preference screen by confirming your account password, then enable a checkbox and on top of that restart the whole app you just allowed the access for. I really get annoyed every time I get this prompt because I know it’ll take me 5 clicks, one password prompt and one app restart to continue my work.

Most of the time it’s for something mundane like “Let this color picker read your screen” or “Allow this FTP app to read your local files”. In some sense that probably is reasonable for some users but there should be a pro-mode to disable all these if you know what you are doing (not downloading random apps from the internet). The whole workflow to allow this is also pretty confusing and for some non-technical users probably even a barrier.

I upgraded to Catalina pretty early on and didn’t have that many problems with it (most of them are documented on this blog), after the initial phase of clicking on “Allow” for a few hours it’s basically like the macOS you are used (for better or worse) to but that one is still very disruptive.

I think I’ve never really talked about .Mac via iMessage or any other means. What I did talk about a lot is the Mac. For some reason the top suggestion is .Mac though.

I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the item at the top of “Up Next” will be the next track when I skip to… the next track. But no. Of course not, silly me. Instead, that item vanishes into some magic in-between and can’t be seen anymore. But it’s still there, and now it’s at the real top of “Up Next” that will actually play next. Every time I skip to the next track, the one you’d expect to come up doesn’t, and instead it’s the one you’d have expected one skip before.

Of course there’s also some more double trouble in the list. It just works!

Nothing shows Apple’s recent lack of attention to details more than the fact that the Music.app looks like this on my fresh Catalina install with the latest version of macOS (10.15.1 Build 19B88).

It’s not some odd, third-party utility that somehow looks a bit funky on an obscure version of macOS. It’s the flagship rewrite of the new Music.app shipping with Catalina which makes this even more worrying.