Tag Archives: Apple

SMS texts not coming to your Mac? Mac sure you’re signed into the same Apple ID for both Messages and FaceTime on your iPhone. (Seriously.)

The subject line is the answer, but here’s the longer story.

I recently switched iPhones. Through a series of stupid errors, I ended up having to set it up as a totally new phone instead of transferring my old phone data over.

Ever since I did that, some conversations refused to sync between Messages on my iPhone and Messages on my Mac, even though they were both set up properly and various online tutorials didn’t help me solve the problem.

That last tutorial hung me up on one particular detail though. The Text Message Forwarding option was not appearing for me in the Messages settings on my iPhone.

I figured this was just, once again, an outdated tutorial that hadn’t caught up to changes Apple had made in the Settings app. But… those screenshots looked current. Hmm.

I don’t even remember exactly how I made this mental leap, but I found the solution not in anything to do with Messages, but rather with the FaceTime settings.

Due to the long and complicated history of Apple’s online services, I have two separate Apple IDs. One I use for App Store purchases, and a different one I use for iCloud.

Well… on both the Mac and the iPhone I had Messages logged into my iCloud account. But on my iPhone, I had FaceTime logged into my App Store account. And that’s why the Settings app wasn’t showing me Text Message Forwarding in the Messages settings.

I logged out of my App Store account for FaceTime and logged into my iCloud account, and suddenly the Text Message Forwarding option appeared under Messages. I turned on forwarding to my Mac and my iPad, and now everything is working!

The mysteries of Google Photos and what my videos are teaching its AI

For the past few years I’ve been shooting video, sometimes very long video, on my iPhone, and then transferring it to my Mac for editing.

I have two ways to get the videos to my Mac. I can use AirDrop for a direct device-to-device transfer. But the videos also automatically upload to iCloud in the background, so I can then open the Photos app on my Mac and find them there, and download them from “the cloud.”

Neither way is exceptionally fast, especially with large files, simply because they are large files, but they both have always worked seamlessly, and I can pretty much do them on-demand as soon as the videos are done recording.

Last night I recorded a performance of the big band I play in, using… gasp! …an Android phone. Specifically, a Google Pixel 3a. Yeah, it’s pretty old. But also new to me. I need an Android phone for testing my web development work, but since I don’t use it as my day-to-day phone, I didn’t want to spend a lot. I know the Pixel is a good phone, with a clean Android install, and the price was right ($150). Which is exactly why it’s the phone I chose to shoot the video with, because I was going to have to leave it unattended all night in a crowded auditorium, about 100 feet away from me. It was unlikely to be taken, but I didn’t want to risk it with my main iPhone or even a backup. (Plus, the Pixel actually does shoot pretty good video.)

Anyway… once I got home, I then had to contend with the problem I knew would be waiting for me. This is an Android phone, so there’s no iCloud. But I am also pretty heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, so I figured I’d have no issues transferring the videos to my Google Drive — or at least Google Photos — and get them that way.

There are issues.

First, I can’t find a way to just put them on my Google Drive, which is where I really wanted them. Yes, I can just jump over to photos.google.com instead of drive.google.com, without even having to log back in, but I operate frequently in Google Drive and I had never, before owning this phone, had any reason to even consider the existence of Google Photos. But, whatever.

Second, and I could be wrong about this, it seems like the files only transfer from the device to the cloud when you have the Photos app open on the phone. I have the phone running on my home wifi, which is connected to gigabit fiber, so the transfer should be about as fast as can be expected anywhere in the United States, but even though I left the app open for an extended period last night, it only uploaded one of the two videos. I gave up waiting on it and went to bed, and uploaded the second one this morning.

But here’s the real kicker: neither of the videos is “ready” yet in Google Photos, not even the one I uploaded last night. Maybe it hadn’t quite finished uploading then but still… what exactly is Google doing to get the videos “ready”? Why aren’t they “ready” the instant they’re uploaded?

I get that videos uploaded to YouTube need to go through some processing. YouTube does all kinds of crazy crap to videos. Some of it is transcoding and optimizing the files for streaming, which… yes. 100%. Please do that. Some of it is machine learning (a.k.a. “AI”) driven, analyzing the content to make smart chapters and such, as well as detecting content that is illegal or violates terms of use. I see the benefits. And some of it is for the benefit of corporate overlords, both at Alphabet and elsewhere, such as detecting copyrighted music. Well… honestly there are pros and cons to that. But it’s not the point of this post.

The point is, I get why that kind of processing is happening to YouTube videos. But none of it should be happening to private videos uploaded to your Google Photos account. I suppose I should give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s strictly doing the AI scans for illegal content. (I think you know the illegal content I am talking about so I am not going to spell it out.)

Apple’s recent efforts to implement technology to do on-device detection of that type of content recently got a lot of heat for its privacy implications — even though on-device scanning is far more private than in-the-cloud scanning. But Apple always takes the heat for things because it’s Apple, despite Google, Amazon and Facebook engaging in much more egregious versions of those things.

The thing about Google in particular is, they’re all about amassing TOTAL WORLD KNOWLEDGE. Not in an inherently nefarious way (although maybe there’s no way for that not to be inherently nefarious). But there are always nefarious implications in what they’re doing. So whatever is going on as I’m waiting for my videos to be “ready,” the one thing I know for sure is that Google’s AI is learning something from them.

Update: I realized after I posted this that maybe I should… uh… google it. Yes, Apple themselves have provided instructions on how to transfer photos and video from Android to Mac. I realized that I could maybe use this USB-C to USB-C cable I have sitting right here at my desk to make a file transfer!

Sometimes I wonder if anyone at Apple actually uses their products in the real world, episode #532,464: the iPhone QR Code Scanner app

QR codes are a convenient way to open a URL with your phone without having to type a long string of text (especially since it’s hard to avoid typos in a URL on a phone touchscreen).

But.

The iPhone’s QR Code Scanner app in the Control Center has a really annoying feature: It doesn’t open URLs in the Safari app; it opens them in its own embedded browser.

I’m not really sure why Apple chose to do this, or why they don’t realize what an issue it can create for users. What is that issue?

If you leave the app, when you go back to it, you’re back to the camera view for scanning a new QR code, rather than whatever web page you were interacting with.

There is no “history” in Code Scanner. No “back” button on the camera screen.

Sometimes this can be trivial. Sometimes not. Here’s a scenario I just went through that turned out not to be an issue, but it very well could have been.

It was time to renew the vehicle registration on my car with Minnesota Driver and Vehicle Services. (Yes, in most states we’re talking about the DMV, but since Minnesota always has to be different, here it’s DVS.) DVS is getting into the 21st century, and they’ve started emailing out the renewal notices instead of sending paper copies. And, the email included a QR code for me to jump-start the renewal process. Cool!

So, I scanned the code (off my Mac screen) with my iPhone, and started the process. (Maybe it’s possible for the Mac to read QR codes out of an on-screen PDF… I should investigate that.)

At the end of the process, since I was paying with my debit card, I got a pop-up alert from my bank’s app about the transaction. I would have ignored that, but I got two alerts from the bank. Worried I had double-submitted, I jumped over to the bank app. No, it was fine; the second charge was just the 2.15% credit card processing fee the DVS website had warned me about.

But now… oh no! I had been completing all of the process in the Code Scanner app, so the little “back” link at the top left of my iPhone screen took me back there, which of course forgot about that complex series of web form screens I had just stepped through, and blithely displayed the camera again for me to scan a new code. Damn! Was the process complete? Probably. I hope so. I opened up my email and saw a confirmation from DVS, so presumably everything was finished. But I won’t know for sure until I get my tabs in the mail. Ugh.

Now see, here’s the thing I keep forgetting in the moment. When you scan a QR code with Code Scanner, and that QR code is a web URL, Code Scanner opens the page in its own embedded browser. But there’s a little button at the bottom right to open the page in Safari.

If you have the foresight (or memory) to tap on that little Safari compass icon as soon as you’ve scanned a QR code, all will be well with the world. But if you’re just focused on whatever you’re trying to do with the web page you’ve just opened, it’s really easy to ignore the subtle interface differences between the two apps.

I shouldn’t have to play “Can you spot the differences?” like this is a kids’ placemat at a family restaurant in the 1980s. I shouldn’t have to remember to tap the Safari icon if I’m about to embark on a seven-part journey through the minds of the lowest-bid contractors who won the job to develop a government website.

Apple needs to understand how its products are used in the real world.

A reason to install Microsoft Edge on your Mac: viewing cookies

As a web developer, I actually don’t use cookies that often (mainly because I’m not interested in tracking users’ behavior). But I do need to use them occasionally, such as to remember when they’ve clicked the “X” to close a modal alert, so I don’t keep showing it to them on each new page they visit.

That’s what led me to today’s surprising discovery. My cookie wasn’t working properly, so I wanted to investigate a) whether or not it was actually being saved, and b) what data it was saving.

I work on a Mac, and Safari is my primary browser. But I already knew Safari doesn’t let you inspect the contents of cookies, so I fired up Chrome, which is my go-to for testing anything that I can’t test with Safari. I know Chrome always used to let you inspect the contents of cookies, so imagine my surprise today when I discovered that, at some point fairly recently, Chrome apparently removed that capability. You can still see which sites have stored cookies, and how many, but you can’t investigate the details any further than that. Seriously??

Next I tried Firefox. Nope, same.

At this point I was highly dubious that the fourth browser in my testing queue would handle things any differently, but I had no alternative, so I reached for that rarely-clicked-upon blue-green swirl icon in my Dock, loaded my page in Microsoft Edge, and… what do you know, Edge does still let you inspect the exact contents of stored cookies.

But for how long?

Anyway… for now, I have a justification for keeping Edge installed on my Mac.

I think I just had my first encounter with web push notifications and I HATE IT

What. The. F&#*.

I’ve just spent the past few minutes looking at several restaurants’ pages on OpenTable — because the restaurant company is one of my clients and I’m in the process of updating OpenTable links on their websites.

Each time I kept one of their OpenTable pages open for a minute or so, on my Mac, I would get a “Time Sensitive” notification pop-up on my iPad and my Apple Watch. I realized after the second or third time that some system had determined that it was time for me to leave if I was going to get to the restaurant in time for the reservation I hadn’t even made.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.

I would get it if I was heavily into the OpenTable “ecosystem,” but I don’t even have their app installed on any of my devices. I’m guessing it’s this new web push notifications thing. But… GAAAH!! I’m not even logged into OpenTable in my browser on any of these devices, or on my computer. Somehow Safari itself must be pushing these notifications to my devices.

DO NOT WANT.

Gruber thinks Apple is doing this to comply with increased regulatory scrutiny in the E.U. If that’s the case, it just once again proves that the only times governments seem to get involved in the dealings of tech companies is to make things worse, mainly because the people in government making these decisions don’t understand what the problem is, and they understand even less how to fix it. And don’t get me wrong, I am not some kind of techno-libertarian. I think tech companies do a lot of bad things that the government needs to regulate. But the people in government trying to do that just don’t get it.

I can tell you one thing. I absolutely do not want any website I visit, ever, to be able to send push notifications to my f&#*ing devices. Stop. Just stop.