Category: Computers & Technology

Weaning myself off Adobe

I do not like Adobe. That is probably an understatement, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

Adobe software is inextricably connected to my career throughout my adult life. When I first started to learn web design and development in college in 1994 (entirely on my own, in my spare time — this was not something one did, or even could, study at that point), the two applications I installed on my Macintosh LC475 were BBEdit and Photoshop.

I still use BBEdit every day to write code. But I stopped using Photoshop in 2016. My opinion of Adobe had long since soured, but what finally did the relationship in was their switch to a subscription model. I didn’t enjoy spending over $1000 on a Creative Suite license, but I did it, because it was what you needed to do if you were a design professional. Then came the subscriptions. They eased you in at first — $25/seat. My business was growing, so at one point I subscribed to 3 seats. $75/month seemed like a lot to pay, but I was willing to do it.

Then the introductory rates ended, and I was suddenly paying $225/month.

Then my employees moved on, and I decided not to replace them. Now I was paying $225/month just for myself.

Then, I discovered the true insidious, Comcast-esque evil of Adobe’s subscription model. Oh yes, it is extremely easy to add more seats to your business account. You can do it online, at any time. It takes less than a minute. Boom! But if you want to cancel any of those seats, you can only do it within one month of your annual subscription renewal. Otherwise, you have to pay half of the remaining annual balance for early termination. Oh, and you have to call them on the phone to cancel, so the rep can read their hard-sell script to try to persuade you to stay.

I discovered this when I had 6 months left in my 2016 subscription period. So, I could continue my subscription for those 6 months, and pay another $1350, or I could cancel now and pay $675. I chose the latter. Then I spent another $100 buying one-time licenses for Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

Eight years later, I’ve spent a total of $100 more on Affinity software, to upgrade both apps when version 2 was released.

In the meantime, I have also paid another $800 to Adobe. Because even though I canceled my Creative Cloud subscription, I still needed Typekit, since I was using their fonts all over client websites. And by that point, Typekit had become Adobe Fonts.

You can no longer just subscribe to Typekit/Adobe Fonts. But if you subscribe to any Adobe product, Adobe Fonts comes with the subscription for free. So I subscribed to Adobe XD, their cheapest annual subscription. I never use XD. I guess it’s actually related to what I do (web design), but it’s not part of my workflow at all. I think I’ve maybe opened it twice. It’s really just about the fonts.

But I really hate having to have the Creative Cloud Desktop app on my Mac. It’s constantly running in the background, using up resources for… what, exactly? Sadly, you can only install fonts from Adobe on the desktop if you have it running. If you uninstall the app, or even just quit the app, the fonts stop working.

Well, how badly do I really need those fonts? I’m about to find out. I do use some of them quite frequently, but I would consider very few of them truly essential to my work, except for Aktiv Grotesk. I use it in all of my business documents as a slightly more unique alternative to Helvetica. But a recent Linus Boman video turned me on to Rubik instead. (At the time of writing, that’s the font you’re reading these words in.)

So maybe I’ll just continue my increasing reliance on free open source fonts from Google Fonts, combined with, you know, just licensing commercial fonts from the foundries when there’s a really good one that I can only otherwise get on Adobe Fonts.

With that decision settled, I was able to make this happen:

But I’m still paying for Adobe Fonts (in the form of an XD subscription) for now. I went through my Adobe Fonts web projects yesterday and culled about 1/3 of the ones that are no longer in use, either because we redesigned the client’s site or because they’re no longer working with me. But I still have 55 web projects set up. If I were to cancel my subscription, effectively shutting off Typekit access for those sites, I suspect at least half of the clients wouldn’t even notice their sites were falling back to browser default fonts. But I’m not inclined to do that… yet.

I’m going to try living for a while without Adobe Fonts on the desktop. And if it turns out I truly no longer need them, then I will happily work out a way to phase out those fonts on my clients’ websites too, and cancel my subscription altogether. But for now I just consider it an improvement that Adobe is not sapping resources on my MacBook Pro for whatever they were doing on it.

Elementor and the popularity feedback loop

I hate Elementor.

If you don’t know what Elementor is, good. If you do, you probably either hate it too, or else you’ve never used WordPress without it. (And even if you haven’t ever used WordPress without it, you still might hate it.)

In my experience, Elementor is hot garbage, and it makes the overall WordPress experience bad.

It’s not just Elementor. There are several “page builder” plugins for WordPress, and they’re all terrible. Divi, WP Bakery, Beaver Builder, etc. They all deviate wildly from the way WordPress is intended to work. Since 2018 WordPress has had the Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) built-in, which is essentially a page builder itself. Now that Gutenberg has matured enough to be useful, those other page builders are completely unnecessary.

Among the page builders, I think Elementor is the worst. Why? Mainly because of its ubiquity.

Elementor is extremely popular, in part because there’s a companion theme/gateway drug called Hello Elementor. It is the most popular third-party WordPress theme, as evidenced by its lofty position at the top of the WordPress theme download screen, surrounded by the official annual themes and one other third-party theme, Astra. (I actually really like Astra, because for the most part, it does things the WordPress way.)

Why is Hello Elementor so popular? Presumably people do like it. But I think it is also an example of what I would call the popularity feedback loop. It’s a natural, and harmful, side effect of a page like this, also commonly seen on e-commerce sites.

If you sort things by popularity, with the most popular items at the top, those are what people are going to see first. And most people don’t want to spend a lot of time considering options. They may trust popular opinion, or they may be too impatient to consider their options carefully, or they may just not care at all. So they click on the first thing that catches their attention, thereby making the popular thing even more popular, and dooming less popular options to oblivion, regardless of their quality.

The people choosing to default these lists to ranking by popularity may think they’re making an objectively straightforward choice, but they’re not considering how the popularity feedback loop might have much more of an effect on the rankings than quality, because they’re falsely assuming that people are making careful, rational choices.

There’s another reason in this specific context why it matters. New users don’t understand the WordPress ecosystem. They don’t know about third-party themes and plugins. They don’t know what does or does not adhere to “the WordPress way.”

So, a new user comes in and wants to pick a theme for their site. Their eye is drawn to the Hello Elementor screenshot, which has been carefully designed to be attention-grabbing, especially compared to the rather pedestrian appearance of the official themes.

That’s all fine in and of itself. Third-party themes are great! But when you activate the Hello Elementor theme, it immediately starts prompting you to install the Elementor page builder plugin as well. If you’re not an experienced user, what are you supposed to do with this? You probably install it, of course. And now you’re in page builder land. It’s not WordPress anymore. The experience is completely different.

But what is it about page builders that’s so bad? (And this part really applies to Gutenberg to a large extent as well.) They’re supposed to be making it easier to design your web pages, right? Well… there’s only so much you can do to make designing a web page easier. There’s no way to deal with things like margins or padding without understanding what margins and padding are. The page builders end up being CSS GUIs. Maybe you’re not writing the code, but you still need to know the concepts to get anywhere. So you end up either creating a convoluted mess, or at best you do learn the concepts, but in a compromised way, that is inextricably tied to that page builder plugin. It’s lock-in.

I could go on, but I think there are two main ways to address the problem of the popularity feedback loop, at least as it applies specifically to WordPress themes, but also more generally:

Don’t default to a “most popular” view. I know it takes a lot more work, and is a lot more subjective, but the best default would be a “recommended” view. Some editorial decisions need to be made. Consider popularity, of course, but also consider context. Which themes are the best for a newcomer? Which ones offer the most pure WordPress experience?
Make the “most popular” list conditional. This is a more automated version of #1. Maybe you don’t have a carefully curated editorial list of recommendations, but at the very least, determine some criteria that can restrict what shows up in the list. For starters, maybe a theme cannot load with an admin notice pushing users to install a plugin. Would Hello Elementor be such a problem if it didn’t immediately lure new users into installing a page builder plugin too? Probably not.

Ultimately, I have my own selfish motivations in all of this. I develop a number of WordPress plugins myself, and I need to provide user support for them. And a significant percentage of my overall user support load — I would say it’s around 15-20% — is around conflicts with Elementor.

Why you’ve stopped receiving emails from your website

Email is terrible. Just don’t use it.

OK, that’s not realistic. Unfortunately. So I’ll address the question, and offer somewhat of an explanation.

First off, you need to understand how email works. I don’t think a lot of people do. Email doesn’t just leave your device, shoot across the Internet, and land directly in the recipient’s inbox. There are servers involved on both ends. (A server is a specialized computer sitting in a large data center that runs software for purposes like this.)

When you hit “Send,” your message goes from your device to your sending mail server. Then your sending mail server looks at the domain name on the recipient’s email address — the part after @ — and figures out where that domain’s receiving mail server is. It sends the message to that server.

Then, when the recipient wants to check their email, their device connects to their receiving mail server, which sends over the new messages. (The way this works is a lot different now than it was in the early days of the Internet, with the switch from POP3 to IMAP, but if you don’t know what those acronyms mean, just be thankful and move on. It’s not really relevant to this post.)

All of this is relatively straightforward when you’re directly creating the email message in your mail app. In most cases, your own sending and receiving server are one and the same. But it’s different when the email is coming from your website.

Next, you need to understand how email coming from a website works. When you’re getting an email such as an automated notification that someone has filled out a form on your website, who is “sending” the email? It’s not the site visitor who filled out the form. It’s the website itself. So the email doesn’t go through the visitor’s sending server. The website has to have its own sending server.

In the past (up until around early 2020), this was straightforward. Web servers — yes, another specialized computer in a data center, this time the one where your website “lives” — typically would also be running sending mail server software too. The most common early software for this purpose was called, creatively, Sendmail. But there were some serious shortcomings with Sendmail that needed to be fixed, and the replacement software was called, creatively, Postfix.

For years I would set up web servers running Postfix, and there was never any problem. A website user would submit a form, the site would generate a notification email and put it in the Postfix queue, Postfix would send it along to the recipient’s (i.e. the website administrator’s) receiving mail server, and the recipient would receive it.

So why did this stop working? In a word, spam. This kind of setup was very slick and easy to build. So easy, in fact, that hosting providers — especially the ones offering “Virtual Private Servers” where you can configure any software you want — became havens for spammers.

For years there were increasingly convoluted methods to validate these servers as legitimate senders. (Here are some more fun acronyms you don’t want to know: SPF, DKIM, DMARC.) But it was a cat-and-mouse game as spammers continually found ways around every new restriction.

Eventually, so many spammers started using hosting providers like Digital Ocean to send out their garbage, that large mail providers like Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 just decided it wasn’t worth dealing with, and started automatically flagging any email that originated anywhere on Digital Ocean’s network (to cite one example) as being spam.

Now, legitimate websites, sending only legitimate emails, are getting flagged as spam, solely because they happen to exist on the same network as spammers.

OK, so shouldn’t Digital Ocean (and other similar VPS providers) do something about this? Yes. Yes, they should. But instead they’ve decided to just throw up their hands and say, “you should not be using our network to send out email.” Other VPS providers like Linode actually just block port 25 altogether. (Again, if you don’t know what that is, just be happy and move on.)

Is there a solution? Yes. Stop using email. OK, I still know that’s not realistic. There is a solution, but it is cumbersome to set up. You need to configure your website to route outgoing emails through a real mail account on a real mail server. If you’re on WordPress, plugins like WP Mail SMTP and WPO365 can help — but bear in mind that this does mean connecting a real, actual email account to your website through these tools. (And an interesting side effect is that you’ll see these outgoing messages in the Sent folder in your mail app.)

Alternately, you can use a service like Amazon SES or Sendgrid. But however you choose to do it, there are extra configuration steps, extra technical knowledge required, and extra costs. What used to be straightforward and easy is now complicated and costly, and we have sleazy spammers and intransigent corporations to thank for it.

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!

How to transfer files over 4 GB from Android to a Mac

I had to do some fairly deep digging to get this answer, so maybe I can help someone else.

I’m an Apple guy. But lately I’ve been having to record some video with a phone on a tripod, unattended. I don’t want to risk getting my iPhone stolen, so I’ve been using my Android testing phone instead (a Google Pixel 3a). It actually shoots pretty decent video, but getting that video off the Pixel and onto my Mac has been… a challenge.

After some initial digging the first time around, I discovered Android File Transfer. It’s a Mac app that lets you access the Android file system and transfer files over a USB connection. It’s just hard to remember exactly how to get it to work, at least for someone like me who is not super familiar with Android. The short version is you have to go into the Android device’s USB settings and turn on File Transfer mode.

Today I had a new problem. Once I got connected, I started to transfer two very large video files (16 GB and 9 GB) over to my Mac. All seemed to be going well, until I hit exactly 4.00 GB in the transfer, then it just stalled. No warning, no error. It just stopped transferring. Trying to cancel the transfer also didn’t work.

It’s really stupid that the app doesn’t just tell you this up front — or, like, you know, ever — but after digging into the issue, I learned the app has a 4 GB file size limit. I didn’t investigate why, but having dealt with this kind of nonsense on the Windows FAT file system in the past, I suspect it’s a stupid legacy quirk no one has ever considered important enough to fix.

Anyway, I needed another solution, and I found it. FTP. Specifically, I chose to use the WiFi FTP Server app. I mean really, you could use an FTP client app to transfer files to an FTP server, or install an FTP server on your Mac, but it just seemed easier to me to make the Android phone the FTP server, and let my Mac connect to it with Panic’s trusty (well… it used to be trusty, but that’s another blog post) FTP client, Transmit.

The FTP transfer is over WiFi, as the name implies, so yes, it’s slower than the wired USB connection. But… and here’s the key thing… it works.

P.S. After several minutes of the transfer running, I glanced down and noticed that the WiFi FTP Server app (which, of course, like most Android apps, is free to download) has an ad bar at the bottom. I hate to break it to those advertisers, but they are not getting any kind of R.O.I.