Apple’s October ‘We still have a lot to cover’ Event

Opening

Yup. They had a ton to cover and I think Apple is going to have a huge holiday quarter and our bank accounts are all going to be pretty empty.
At least we’ll have some awesome new products to play with and we’re gonna talk all about ’em in this episode.

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Apple’s iPad Event

‘We still have a lot to cover’

Opening

iPhone
- Sold 9 million in opening weekend
- 5 days after launch, 200 million devices were running iOS 7. Nearly two thirds of devices now running iOS 7
iOS 7
- Over 20m listeners have listened to a billion songs in the US in the last month.
Apps
- Over a million apps in the App Store, over 60 billion downloads. Developers have now earned over 13 billion dollars.
Cook was stumbling and mentioned specifically that Apple is continuing to innovate

OS X Mavericks

Focus on 3 main areas Technologies, Features, and Apps.
Longer batter life. Over a million apps in the App Store, over 60 billion downloads. Developers have now earned over 13 billion dollars.
Compressed memory
- instantly compress inactive parts of memory, can fit 6GB of data in 4GB of RAM.
Graphics
- Mavericks can dynamically allocate more and less memory to the integrated GPU as needed.
- Integrated graphics now support OpenCL, so you can run tasks up to 1.8x faster. Running CPU tasks on the GPU
Safari adds, shared links for Twitter and LinkedIn
- New reader view
Finder tags
Enhanced notifications
Better support for multi screen displays
- Dock on all screens. You need to put your cursor near the bottom to have it move. Doesn’t;t work if you use dock on the sides
- Full screen multiple apps.
- AirPlay screens with extended desktop.
- Some USB “DisplayLink” screens seem to have issues. Seems to be driver issues and DisplayLink is reportedly working on a fix.
Maps, iBooks.
- Craig almost said turn by turn.
Free. Even for Snow Leopard users
- OS X Server is still an additional purchase of $19.99 USD
Free is working for the OS X Mavericks adoption rate with a web analytics site, GoSquared, reporting they’ve seen Mavericks traffic on the 40,000 plus sites they monitor rise over 7% in just 24 hours

Macbook Pro

Major updates to both 13 and 15-inch Retina Pros.
13-inch
- Under 3.5 lbs
- 0.71-inches thin
- Haswell chip, Iris graphics, up to 90 percent faster. 4th gen dual Core
- Intel Iris Graphics
- Up to 9 hours of video battery life
- PCIe-based Flash, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Thunderbolt 2. 60% faster Flash
- Starting at $1299. That’s a $200 drop from before.
- Shipping today
15-inch
- Crystal Well chip with Iris Pro graphics. Can also add a discrete GeForce 750M.
  - Quad-core chip
- up to 8 hours of battery
- PCIe Flash, 802.11ac, Thunderbolt 2.
- Starts at $1,999, down from $2,199.
  - 2.0GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD
- Shipping today
- Benchmarks are beginning to show up for the new systems and show approximately a 4–10% higher scores than their predecessors.

Mac Pro

4, 6, 8, or 12-cores
Intel Xeon E5 processors
1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory. 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB memory options.
Two AMD FirePro GPUs.
Half a terabyte of bandwidth, up to 7-terraflops
256 GB, 512GB, or 1TB of user-accessible Flash storage.
6-thunderbolt 2 ports
- 20Gb/s throughput
- Channel bonding, 6-devices per port
Four USB 3.0 ports, dual gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 UltraHD
Up to three 4K displays and an HDMI monitor
Mouse and Keyboard not included.
Pricing
- $2,999.00 USD for 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5, 12GB RAM, dual FirePro D300s, 256GB SSD.
- $3,999.00 USD for 3.5 GHz six-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics processors with 3 GB of RAM each, and 256 GB of PCIe flash storage.
- Available before the end of the year.
Mac Pro will be assembled in the US — 2,000 people over 20 states helping to build it.
- Assembled in the USA is powerful in the video.

Apps

Eddie Cue
iLife update — new iMovie, iPhoto and Garageband for iOS and the Mac.
All 64-bit and integrated with iCloud
iPhoto
- Faster smoother browsing
- New look iniOS
- Photo books on iPad
iMovie
- New iMovie, completely redesigned for iOS. Focused on editing and sharing.
- Picture in Picture and speed controls
- New design on the Mac
- iMovie theater, viewer in iMovie
Garageband
- All new look in iOS 7.
- 16 tracks. 32-tracks for 64-bit iOS
- New look on the Desktop
- Drummers built in.
iLife
- Free with the purchase of any new Mac or iOS device
- Available today.
iWork
- Full file compatibility across iOS, Mac, and Web.
- New context-sensitive format panel on the Mac.
- Completely re-written for the Mac
- Collaboration for iWork for iCloud.
- Free with a new Mac or iOS Device
- Available Today.
Apple also updated the Find My iPhone, Podcasts and iTunes Trailers apps. They all get updated clean iOS looks.

iPad

170 million iPads sold. “cumulative sales”.
They also like “usage” share. 81% vs. 19% vs all other tablets.
Over 475,000 iPad apps.

iPad Air (5th gen)

Thinner, lighter, more powerful than ever before.
iPad Air, really?
9.7-inch Retina display with a smaller bezel. 43 percent thinner.
7.5mm thin, 20 percent thinner than outgoing model.
1 pound, down from 1.4 pounds. Lightest full-size tablet in the world.
- 28 percent lighter
A7 chip inside. 64-bit.
- Up to 8x faster performance, 72x faster graphics performance than the original iPad
- Up to twice as fast as the previous generation
M7 motion co-processor
Faster WiFi with MIMO for 2x faster 802.11n — doesn’t seem like it has 802.11ac.
- Two antennas
Expanded LTE coverage
5MP iSight camera
- still a f/2.4 aperture
FaceTime camera
- updated with backside illumination
- 1.2 MP
- 720p HD
10 hour battery life
Slate and Black. Silver and White.
Same Pricing.
iPad 2 at $399? Lame.
Ships November 1st.

iPad mini

Retina display iPad mini
- 2048 x 1536 pixels, same as the big iPad.
A7 processor
- Up to 4x faster on CPU, 8x faster graphics.
M7 motion coprocessor
A bit thicker and heavier then the last gen.
10-hour battery
2x faster Wi-Fi, expanded LTE support.
Starts at $399 with Wi-Fi, $529 with mobile data.
Also still iPad at $299

Smart Covers and Smart Cases

New colors for $39 for Smart covers and $79 for full wrap Smart Cases.

What was not there?

iPads don’t get the burst or slo-motion video of the iPhone 5s
- Must be related to the sensor as the GPU and image processors should be the same.
Apple TV updates
4K Thunderbolt displays
Touch ID on iPads

iOS 7.0.3

This update contains improvements and bug fixes, including:
- Adds iCloud Keychain to keep track of your account names, passwords, and credit card numbers across all your approved devices
- Adds Password Generator so Safari can suggest unique, hard-to-guess passwords for your online accounts
- Updates lock screen to delay display of “slide to unlock” when Touch ID is in use
- Adds back the ability to search the web and Wikipedia from Spotlight search
- Fixes an issue where iMessage failed to send for some users
- Fixes a bug that could prevent iMessage from activating
- Improves system stability when using iWork apps
- Fixes an accelerometer calibration issue * Sensorgate is dead.
- Addresses an issue that could cause Siri and VoiceOver to use a lower quality voice
- Fixes a bug that could allow someone to bypass the Lock screen passcode
- Enhances the Reduce Motion setting to minimize both motion and animation
- Fixes an issue that could cause VoiceOver input to be too sensitive
- Updates the Bold Text setting to also change dial pad text
- Fixes an issue that could cause supervised devices to become un-supervised when updating software

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Tips and Other Stuff

Warning about Mavericks fever

Maccast friend and active community member John Foster reminded me of some sagely advice to stop some of us from wiping out in the OS X Mavericks upgrade wave
Free is very tempting and a shiny new OS with some killer new features even more so, but if your Mac is mission critical to what you do you may wish to hold off upgrading
Any time a major OS update is released there is potential for bugs, we already know of a few, and for things to break
- Apps you need might not be up to date
- Drivers for printers, scanners, and other connected devices
- People you exchange files and data with might not be ready to update too.
Consider waiting to hear the fall out and for one or two of the updates to arrive before you jump in to OS X “SeaLion” as John calls it.
If you must play and are in the middle of other things consider using another Mac that is not mission critical. Or clone to an external bootable drive, boot from and update that.

Make a bootable OS X Mavericks USB

I like to create an emergency boot USB stick
You’ll need at least an 8 GB USB
I found these instructions over on Lifehacker
You’ll need to run a Terminal command, so it’s not for the faint of heart
You’ll first need to download OS X Mavericks from the Mac App Store
- When the download finishes and it launches the installer quit the installer
- This will leave a file called ‘Install OS X Mavericks.app’ in your Application folder
Also make sure you follow the instructions EXACTLY and stick to the exact naming they mention
- You’ll need to format the USB stick with Disk Utility as Mac OS X Extended Journaled
- Give it the name ‘Untitled’ and format the drive
- Then you’ll need to launch Terminal and copy and paste the commend linked to in the Lifehacker piece
- Basically it runs a ‘createinstallmedia’ Terminal command on your formatted USB drive. Copyingover the installer stuff and making it bootable
- The script will take about 20 minutes to run and you’ll get little feedback.
- When it says ‘Done’ the disk should be ready and you can verify it worked by restarting and holding down the option key to boot from the USB installe disk.
- The old method of opening up the installer package and copying out the .ESD image file no longer works.
Apple has their OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0 tool, but I’m not positive it’s been updated to support OS X Mavericks yet

New iLife & iWork Apps

There is some confusion about who is eligible for the free apps and free app updates and some confusion on how to get the apps.
- All done via the App Store
- As near as I can tell if you buy a new Mac or iOS device you’ll get the free apps
- If you purchased the apps on the App stores you’ll get free updates
- If you bought the boxed versions, physical copies, you may or may not see the free updates, but it sounds like you should be eligible
  - Some folks have reported not seeing the updates
  - Apple seems to have been aware of the issue for some and got it fixed pretty quickly, but some are still reporting trouble.
  - John Martellaro from The Mac Observer mentioned that he couldn’t see the updates under his main user account, but when logging into the same Mac with a different admin level user account and accessing the App Store with his own iTunes Apple ID the apps did show up in updates
- Under Mountain Lion I wasn’t seeing the new versions in the ‘Updates’ tab.
  - There was a ‘Show Incompatible App Updates’ link at the bottom
  - In there I saw iPhoto and iMovie’, but not Garageband nor the iWork Apps
- Under OS X Mavericks I saw them all except GarageBand, but I could install that for free after searching for it on the AppStore
- Apparently Apple’s “fix” for boxed version might have been too good.
  - Reports that users who have previously downloaded the free 30-day iWork trial and kept it on their systems are also now reporting seeing the free updates.
- After installing iWork under OS X Mavericks I had an ‘iWork’ folder with all the iWork ’09 (old) versions of my apps. The new ones were in the Applications folder
  - Once a file has been opened in the new version, at least for Pages, it seems to be converted and can only open in that version.
  - You can export Pages ’09 versions.
Not sure how I feel about the new App icons on iOS or the desktop. I’m pretty sure I don’t really like the iOS ones.
Apple made the “huge” statement that all the versions of iWork now have feature parity from desktop to iOS to web
- If true that is a big achievement
- I had a feeling during the keynote that Apple likely achieved that feat by adding new features to the iOS and Web versions, but also removing features too. Looks like I was correct
- For sure we are hearing that AppleScript support (dictionaries) have been stripped down severely in Pages and are non-existent for Numbers in OS X Mavericks. If your iWork workflows rely on Applescript you’ll likely want to avoid Mavericks.
iMovie (iOS)
- Adds split-screen, picture-in-picture and slow-motion controls in iOS
- New audio controls to cut and edit audio, duplicate audio clips and replace audio from one clip with audio from another (and more).
- Sharing with new iCloud iMovie Theater option. There is even an iMovie Theater app now on Apple TV.
iMovie (Mac)
- Color-matching between two different clips
- Adjust highlights, shadows and color temperature
- Improved stabilization
- Adjust playback speed in timeline
- Still no video effects in iMovie. Apple’s added filters to iPhoto, so why not stuff for video?
iWork (Mac)
- In general the new UI takes on a iLife app feel
- Inspectors are no longer in floating windows, but in sidebars attached to a single window
- The inspectors also change, at least in Pages, in context to what you are working with.
Pages (Mac)
- Fonts seems to all be there, although when I first opened a doc with the font Lucida Grande in Pages for iOS it warned it didn’t;t have the font and substituted ‘Helvetica’.
  - After I made some changes and changed the font back to Lucida Grande in iCould the iOS version eventually had the font.
  - That font was available in that document only though. I could not create a new document and use Lucida Grande on iOS.
- Several folks have written to let me know that the Contact Merge feature is gone in Pages
  - Worse it appears that it also, in Mavericks, breaks the functionality in Pages ’09 too.
- Duplicate a Page is gone
GarageBand (Mac)
- Support for Podcasting has been removed
  - When trying to open my old projects I got the message: “Podcasting features are not supported in this version of GarageBand. To continue working with Podcasting features, open the project in GarageBand 6.0.5 or earlier. Click OK to open a new copy of the project in GarageBand, or click Cancel to return to the Project Chooser”.
- Export to disk now has pre-set values
  - Seems to offer AAC and AIFF options and that’s it. No custom control
  - Bug? The progress dialog floats on top of ALL windows, i.e. over the Finder and other apps.

Concerning trends with Apps

There was a video shown by Tim Cook when he talked about how customers use their iPads in amazing creative ways.
- It showed all kinds of apps and people using them
- At about 01:03:43 seconds in, I got excited because it looked like they showed one of my favorite apps, iStopMotion for iPad, from Boinx software
- I even paused the video to get a closer look at the UI and confirm it was the app. I was so excited I tweeted about it.
- Then I got a reply from Boinx. It wasn’t their app. Just a clone-a-like that had borrowed heavily (stolen) elements from their UI
- Not only that, I downloaded that rip-off app and they obviously stole UI elements from a number of apps, including Paper by 53 and Apple’s own Camera app
- To make things worse Apple had featured the App at one point and now it was in their own keynote video.
- I looked at some of this developers other apps and a lot of it looks like crap clone-ware.
- Their stop motion app seemed to have some unique functionality, but that doesn’t excuse stealing UI and design.
- For a company who has aggressively sued their competitors over design patents, Apple doesn’t seem to be doing much to protect their developers from having their ideas stolen.
  - You could argue that they don’t have to and you’d be right.
  - But their is a principle and ethic here that Apple shows themselves to care about and you’d think they would want to extend that ethic across all aspects of their business.
- A long time ago I expressed concerns that with popularity iOS could become our version of the Windows application market of the 90’s. A billion apps, but most of it garbage. I think we are there or getting there fast.
Apple also made all their consumer apps ‘Free’
- That is awesome for consumers
- It’s awesome for Apple.
- It’s concerning if you’re a developer
- I still worry that Apple is giving consumers the impression that the price for quality software is “Free”.
- The App ecosystem as it is today is quickly becoming unsustainable using old models.
- That’s fine, we are adopting new models
  - Adware
  - Freemium
  - Subscription
  - Frankly, I don’t like any of it and I’m not sure in the long run those new model will prove to be sustainable. Time will tell.
- The “new app order” seems to cater to the one-hit-wonder, the build and sell out model, the part time garage developer, and the rip off developers. Is that really what we want?
- Seriously, talk to some of the most successful developers, even in the new model system and I think you’ll here they’re concerned too.

Safari won’t generate iCloud Keychain password

Safari in iOS 7.0.3 added the ability, along with iCloud Keychain, to auto generate passwords for you.
- If you’re on a registration page and tap the ‘password’ field it will as if you’d like Safari to “Suggest a password”.
- There is also a ‘Suggest Password’ link at the top of the keyboard
- There is no way in Safari to control the formula. It just presents the password and gives the option to ‘Use Suggested Password’
When I tried using the feature on Google I got a message saying: ‘Safari Will Not Suggest a Password Because “google.com” Requested Passwords Not Be Saved’.
Apparently there is some way for a web developer or site to block the ability this feature to work.
It seems to be related to blocking browser ‘auto-fill’ in a form. One listener tweeted me and said that if you go into Settings > Safari > Passwords & Autofill and toggle ON the ‘Always Allow’ option it would fix the trouble.
- This supposedly allows autofill even for websites that request passwords not be saved.
I tried it and at least for Google, it didn’t seem to restore the feature for me.
Apple has a Troubleshooting iCloud Keychain support articles that also mentions the fix under the title, “I get a message saying that Safari will not save the password on one of the web sites I’m using.” and offers fixes for both iOS 7.0.3 and 10.9 Mavericks
- Devices using iOS 7.0.3 or later:
  - Tap Settings> Safari> Passwords & Autofill.
  - Turn on Always Allow.
  - Note that you will need to have a passcode lock on your device to enable this feature
- Macs using OS X Mavericks v10.9 or later:
  - Go to Safari > Preferences.
  - Click Passwords.
  - Select “Allow AutoFill even for websites that request passwords not be saved.”
  - Note that you will be required to set a screen lock for your Mac to use this feature.

Get the Library back in OS X Mavericks

Tip of the hat to Jim Tanous from Tekrevue who found this trick via Dan Frakes at Macworld on Twitter
- In Finder go to View > Show View Options (Command+J)
- At the bottom of the window is a new option: “Show Library folder.”
- Check it, and your user Library folder will reappear in all Finder windows
- It is still hidden in the “Go” menu, the old press and hold the Option key to see it there still works.

Getting TextExpander back in Mavericks

They are a sponsor, but I LOVE, and use the Smile Apps
To do it’s think TextExpander needs to have the ‘allow access to assistive devices’ option turned on.
Prior to Mavericks this was controlled in the Accessibility System Preferences pane.
After installing OS X Mavericks with TextExpander it will pop-up and tell you you need to enable the access for Assistive devices and then link you to the Accessibility pref pane and select the “Zoom” tab.
The trouble is there is no relevant setting there because Mavericks completely moved the option.
You’ll now find it in: Settings > Security & Privacy. Choose Accessibility and you should see Text Expander listed in the panel. You need to check it on to give it access. If it’s greyed out you need to click the “lock” icon and enter an admin account username and password to access the setting.