Who are the changes in Mac OS X El Capitan for? Not for me, apparently

Over at The Loop, Dave Mark commented on Apple’s list of enhancements in El Capitan.

It’s an impressive list. I guess. But it really brought something into sharp relief for me: I don’t use any of the new features in recent Mac OS X updates. I was really tired of Lucida Grande and I prefer flatter design, so the interface improvements in Yosemite and now El Capitan are worth the update alone, as far as I’m concerned.

But it’s kind of sad for me. I’ve realized that my passion for computers and technology has really moved past the “computers” part. I am still a loyal Mac user, and will continue to be for the following reasons:

1. I’m heavily invested in Apple’s “ecosystem” by this point, which is fine with me.

2. Windows sucks. As much as I think Microsoft is trying to improve, and as much as I appreciate Microsoft’s newfound scrappiness as the underdog, Windows still sucks. Especially the licensing process that assumes everyone is a criminal.

3. Linux on the desktop is still half baked, and if anything seems to be getting worse as it becomes clear that it’s never really going to catch on. (That said, I am as devoted to Linux on servers as I am to the Mac on the desktop. But it’s all command line for me.)

As iOS has taken over, I find my Mac is more and more relegated to its “truck” role for me. I still use my Mac almost every day, but only for two things:

1. Work.

2. Music production.

I never play games on my Mac. (Though that might change.) I no longer browse the web on my Mac, except at work. As much as I love the portability of my 11-inch MacBook Air, I might as well just have an iMac at my desk at work, for how often my MacBook Air is ever out of its bag at home.

I no longer even bring my Mac along when I travel for “emergencies”, because there are no work-related emergencies I can’t fix with my iPad, thanks to a trio of awesome apps from Panic. And using the iPad for work is just awkward enough to ensure that I only use it in emergencies, which improves my travel experience.

And at work, I’m set in my ways. I use the Adobe apps, because I have to. I use BBEdit and Transmit. I use Pages and Numbers for documents and spreadsheets, about once a week each. And I use web browsers, for testing my work. I don’t even listen to music on my computer anymore, because I have a Raspberry Pi at the studio running as a “jukebox”.

I hate almost every email interface. They’re so ugly and confusing and useless. I’ve actually taken to using the iPad interface for Gmail in a web browser to check my email, because it’s the least awful. (Want to do that too? Here’s the “secret” link.)

The only built-in features of Mac OS X that I actually use on a regular basis are Safari, Calendar, and Notes. Ah, my beloved Notes. More on that in a minute.

OK, so that brings me back to Apple’s big list of enhancements in El Capitan. Let’s take a look:

Automation
I like Automation in principle, and have used it once or twice, but honestly either I’m just clueless or too limited in my use of the computer, but I don’t really see anything I do on a regular basis that could be improved by Automation.

Calendar
Yeah, I use this, but the new features they’re promoting are really not interesting to me. I guess I lead a boring life. The one thing I do want in Calendar is something they took away… an easy way to enter the time on a new event without having to use the mouse! [Update (10/2/2015): I’ve just discovered the final release version of Calendar does support entering the time when you’re typing the name of the event, the way earlier versions did. Strike this complaint from the record!]

Chinese Features
International
Japanese Features
Nope. I can respect why these are in the OS and I think they’re important, but they are not applicable to me.

Mail
I used the Mac Mail app for years, until it finally got too buggy for me to tolerate anymore a few versions back. Maybe it’s fixed now. I may never find out, because I’m satisfied enough that the iPad interface for Gmail I mentioned above is the least-sucky option available.

Maps
Seriously? I tell you what: try printing out a map this app generates. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

…

See what I mean? Seriously?

Hey, you didn’t actually do it, did you? OK, I’ll show you. If you’re looking at this (already sparsely marked) map on your screen and you hit Print, this PDF shows the absolute non-existent level of detail you get in the printed version. (I especially like the label at the top: “near United States”. Thanks.)

Maybe you’re saying, “That’s not the point… why would you even print maps anymore?” Well, by that reasoning, why would you even look at maps on your computer anymore? As it happens, I had a very specific reason for printing maps. I’m going on a road trip to Utah next week, and I learned the last time I was there that there are huge swaths of the state where you can’t get a data signal. And I didn’t have any printed maps.

This time I want to be prepared. So I was printing out several maps from Google Maps, but their text was small, and the thin gray lines they use for minor highways almost completely vanish when printed. So I thought I would at least try Apple’s Maps app instead. Not only are they inferior, the printed version you get is completely different from what you’re looking at on the screen, with the majority of the text labels entirely missing. What the hell, Apple?! How is this useful to anyone except a 4th grade geography student? (Come to think of it, I have a 4th grade geography student living in my house. Maybe she can fill it in for me.)

Mission Control
I haven’t even taken the time to figure out what this is. I’ll admit I’m still stuck in System 7 when it comes to my approach to window management, but I just can’t fathom why I would need this. It would just add confusion.

Notes
Now we’re talking. OK, Notes is one app I genuinely love from Apple. Don’t laugh. I tried Evernote. I tried it for nearly a year. I found it over-designed and slow compared to Notes. I just need a place where I can store whatever random pieces of information come along, and an easy way to search through them to find what I need. Notes does that perfectly. And what’s even better, it syncs flawlessly between my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad. Apple can do whatever other weird crap they want to Mac OS X, just please don’t take away Notes.

Photos
I use this to store my photos, by default. But I hate using the app. It seems to be designed for people who have taken less than 100 photos and never plan to take more. Same goes for iCloud Photo Library or whatever it’s called. I find both cumbersome and unusable given that I take probably a dozen photos a day. I just want a place off my iPhone where I can keep my photos, so I can clear room on it for more photos. Now I can’t seem to do that anymore. It sucks.

I realize I’m an edge case here. Any photo I take that I think is worth remembering, I post to Instagram. The rest, I don’t want to trash, but I will probably never look at again. So I don’t need a photo feed on my devices. That’s Instagram. Just take all of the rest away and store them in the vault, please. I have a feeling this is something where I should really seek out an alternative solution, but I haven’t found the time. Suggestions are welcome, but it has to be drop-dead simple or I won’t bother with it.

Reminders
Ack. I wanted to like Reminders when it was first introduced, but I found it unreliable and more effort than just sending myself an email. I hate email too, but it’s a reliable catch-all place to dump any “action items” that are in front of me. Having to put those into Reminders is extra work, and if Reminders doesn’t reliably, you know, remind me, then what’s the point?

Safari
I like Safari. I go back and forth between using it and Chrome as my default browser. Presently I’m in a “Safari phase.” I suppose some of these new features are nice, but honestly it’s only the developer tools I really care about. Fortunately, those are pretty good and getting better.

Split View
This is a new feature that, in theory, I like. But I’m not yet convinced I’ll actually like the implementation, or ever really use it on a regular basis.

Spotlight
Ack. Again. Get this away from me. I never use it. The only times I even interact with it are by accident. I finally took the time to figure out how to disable the keyboard shortcut so I’d stop accidentally calling it up by pressing Command-Space when I’m typing too fast (like right now).

Worse, I have a Mac mini at the studio that is kind of the hub of our network. It’s a file server, VPN server, powers our projector for client meetings, and also runs Parallels Desktop for Windows testing. And it is slow. Really. Unbearably. Slow. I have tried several times to diagnose the problem, without success, until yesterday, I think. It seems the culprit was the system process that scans and indexes file contents for Spotlight. I’m not sure if it was the huge number of files, the handful of huge individual files (Parallels disk images), the server’s Time Machine backup drive, the slow processor, or some kind of genuine hardware defect at work, but so far the system seems much faster since I completely disabled Spotlight on it yesterday.

Which is not straightforward in any way.

Other
OK, so now that I’ve largely crapped all over El Capitan’s marquee features, let’s see if there’s anything interesting left in the grab bag.

New system font: I do like the new system font, a lot.

Find your cursor: this is a great idea, but I find it’s a little inconsistent.

AirPlay video from QuickTime Player: not interested.

Peer-to-peer migration: meh.

Rename from context menu: great, a harder way to do something that’s been around for as long as I’ve used a Mac.

Auto-hide menu bar: do not want.

Copy file path in Finder: oh… hmmm… yeah, I suppose this will be helpful. If I can ever remember that it exists and how to do it. (Hold down Option after opening the context menu? How intuitive!)

Redesigned Disk Utility: sounds good. I’ll have to check it out. Which I will do the next time I am panicked about a hard drive dying and then I’ll hate it because I’m already frustrated about something and I’m not expecting something else new.

Color picker: I suppose.

Rotate annotations: ???

Find My Friends widget: I may use this, but I’m not sure why I’d need to have it on my computer vs. just taking out my phone. The same could be said of Messages, I suppose, but I can type way faster on a real keyboard, so it’s actually useful to get those on my Mac. What benefit does Find My Friends on a Mac offer over the iPhone version?

While we’re on this topic, I’m sure I was not alone when Find My Friends was introduced in saying, “What’s with the rich Corintian leather?” I mean, “When would I ever use this?” I think it’s really the name. Change it to “Find My Family” and suddenly it makes perfect sense. I don’t use it daily, but I do use it at least once or twice a week, and it has proven incredibly handy.

So that brings us to the end of the list, and of my rant. Maybe this has ended up being more of a psychological profile of me than a valuable assessment of the state of the Mac in 2015. OK, it’s definitely that. But I wonder how common I am as a long-time Mac user (bought my first Mac in 1994) who has mostly become disillusioned with the direction of Apple’s software.

Full disclosure: I own a small amount of Apple stock as part of a retirement account I can’t touch until I’m in my 60s. Clearly I am trying to drive up their stock price.

A few thoughts from a nerd who actually DOES care about politics

Jason Kottke linked to a post by David Roberts on Vox today:

Tech nerds are smart. But they can’t seem to get their heads around politics.

This is a great article on nerds and politics, or their lack of interest therein. It addresses a lot of the misconceptions that cloud our understanding of the political landscape in America.

But even as it tears apart the false dichotomy between the two major parties (i.e. they are not “mirror images” of each other), it falls prey to that exact line of thinking with one example it gives.

A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate.

OK, that’s a helpful illustration. Except. There really are people on the right (*ah-hem* Donald Trump) saying we should round up and expel all “illegal immigrants” (don’t use that term) immediately. But there is no one on the left proposing anything even close to a 100% tax on wealth over a million dollars.

It’s hard, even for people trying to expose the lack of a parallel on the left to the extremism on the far-right, to avoid thinking the far-left is populated by crackpots with ludicrously draconian, totalitarian ambitions. But those people do not exist. There is no “far-left” in American politics, equivalent to the far-right.

Even Bernie Sanders, who self-identifies as a socialist — in America! gasp! get me my clutchin’ pearls! — isn’t proposing things like that. The ideas coming out of the left are reasonable and rational, benefitting the vast majority of Americans (at the expense only of those who can easily afford it) while pursuing a progressive goal of greater equality and opportunity for all. They only seem “extreme” because they are so radically different from the course we’ve been traveling on for the past 30ish years.

The real fault of logic here is in assuming that the “center” of current American political thinking is anywhere near the true center of the spectrum of possibilities.

Confession: I wrote this as soon as I hit that “100% tax” line because it aggravated me so much. The rest of the article furthers most of the ideas I’m expressing here, and is far more detailed and well-researched. It is absolutely worth reading, above my rants, but I still think it’s worth calling out this particular example.

In a future post I’ll take on the other big issue I see with nerds and politics: that nerds’ general disdain for politics leads them into a superficial alignment with libertarianism. But that very disdain is also the reason why they don’t explore deeply enough to realize how problematic libertarianism is, and how much it really doesn’t represent their values.

Hey look, new fonts

I’m sure by the time you read this, 5 years from now, I will have changed things 8 to 10 times since writing this, but as of right now… hey, look. Same old site design, but with new fonts!

One new font, actually: Work Sans, in three weights. It’s a great new, no-nonsense but aesthetically pleasing sans serif font that is free which makes it extra nice. (Though I do not begrudge font designers the right to compensation for their work.)

This one initially got my attention by way of a blog post by the great Khoi Vinh. I figured, if he likes it, it’s worth noting.

Album Review: Joe Satriani, Shockwave Supernova

JS_SS_COVER_FINAL_12.75x12.75_rgbJoe Satriani is one of those musicians I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I like. It’s not “cool” to be a Joe Satriani fan. And sometimes when I am listening to his music I cringe a bit myself.

That’s usually why I am embarrassed to like certain music… because at times it’s worth being embarrassed about. Musicians like “Satch” (also embarrassing) generally veer into cheezball territory at least once per album. But in general, people who aren’t music geeks tend to look down on instrumental rock albums and “guitar hero” musicians like Joe Satriani.

But Satch differs from a lot of these “guitar hero” types, in that his songs aren’t just scaffolds draped in virtuosic shredding wankery. He has a great sense of melody and works hard to develop songs with a proper structure. There’s plenty of shredding, of course, but it’s confined to solo breaks in songs that are remarkably “song-like,” despite the lack of singing. (Well, most of the time. He does sometimes sing. But most of his albums are completely instrumental.)

Another big problem I have with guitar hero albums is that there’s usually a colossal ego involved. It’s all about the guitar, and the other instruments are confined to very basic supporting roles. I feel like that’s often the case with Satch too, and to be honest the bass is mostly relegated to the background on this new album, Shockwave Supernova, but the outstanding drumming of Marco Minnemann and Vinnie Colaiuta — two of the best session drummers around — gets almost equal spotlight with the guitar.

Satch sounds amazing, as always. Even better than usual, I think. His precision is unmatched, and he demonstrates a remarkable diversity of techniques and tones. And with this album he even managed — I think — not to produce one single “cringe ballad” that I find myself skipping over. The day I got it, I listened to the album straight through four times and never got tired of it. Even the songs I don’t love have parts I really like, and no song wears out its welcome.

Apparently this is a concept album. As someone who has recorded plenty of instrumental concept albums myself, I can see how it may be hard for anyone other than the musicians themselves to get the concept when there are no lyrics. But then again, the concept is basically an exploration of the stage persona Satch takes on when he performs. So… yeah.

Joe Satriani’s picture is on the cover of every album he has released. I guess that’s commonplace with solo musicians, but it still seems pretty egotistical. And often the cover art just really isn’t very good. But I love the cover of this album, and it’s even cooler when you have the physical CD, because the letters are die-cut out of the cardboard. It becomes an interesting object that is worth owning, instead of another ordinary paper booklet inside a plastic jewel case. Of course I just ripped the CD and filed it away, but I took a few moments to admire it first, which doesn’t happen very often anymore.

Is this Satch’s best album? I’m not sure. There’s a certain sameness to this kind of music, and it definitely is immediately recognizable as yet another Joe Satriani album. But the quality is there. I’d put it in his top 3, and if you’re someone who might be inclined to check out his music (and somehow haven’t already), I think it’s a great place to start.

Custom-designed <select> menus without a wrapper <div>

Most of the time I tell clients we can’t customize the appearance of <select> menus (a.k.a. “dropdowns”), along with checkboxes and radio buttons. I lay out a whole rationale on the part of OS and browser developers for why these elements can’t be customized, which is perhaps marginally factual. I do think these elements are, by intention, difficult to customize, in order to avoid confusing users. But designers want to design and, to be honest, the browser defaults for these elements are pretty freaking ugly.

Often there are complicating factors that really do make it effectively impossible to customize these elements. And so far I have not found any way to customize radio buttons and checkboxes that don’t involve “faking” them with images and hidden inputs. Solutions that may achieve the desired appearance but that are oh so ugly on the inside.

I’ll also admit that I am usually the developer on a project, not the designer. But at the moment I am working on a project where, OK, I’m still not the designer, but I have taken responsibility for extending the design, which affords/requires of me making some design decisions. And when I’m the one designing things, I care a lot more about finding a way to make them look exactly like what I’ve envisioned.

So, we come to <select> menus. While it’s not really possible to do much with radio buttons and checkboxes, there at least are some CSS properties that these menus will take. Unfortunately they vary a lot between browsers and don’t solve every problem.

Most solutions I’ve seen for modifying the appearance of <select> menus involve wrapping the menu in a container <div> or <span> tag, essentially removing all of the CSS properties from the menu element itself, and then styling the container as desired.

I hate this solution. I want to be able to style the <select> itself, and be done with it. And at last I have found a solution that mostly accomplishes this, with the caveat that it does not work in Internet Explorer before version 10. But I have a fallback for IE 9 and earlier that does almost everything. And I haven’t tested in Opera because… come on. (OK, I’ve heard Opera is popular in Europe, but to be honest all of my clients are in the United States and do not do business in Europe, so it doesn’t matter. No one I have dealt with has ever cared if their site worked in Opera. Or probably even known it exists.) I should also probably just note that my company no longer supports Internet Explorer 7 or earlier, so we’re only concerning ourselves here with making sure it at least looks OK in IE 8.

OK, so how does this work?

Pretty much every browser supports some basic customizations of the <select> menu with CSS, like changing the background color, font, text color, size, etc. But there’s extra browser “appearance” junk we need to get rid of. Mostly the little up/down arrow at the right end of the menu that is the visual cue to users that it is a menu. That’s an important thing… we need to still provide some visual cue that it’s a menu. But I want to make it look the way I want to make it look.

Let’s start by getting rid of the browser junk.

select {
  -moz-appearance: none;
  -webkit-appearance: none;
  appearance: none;
}

That removes all of the standard browser styling from Mozilla (Firefox) and WebKit (Chrome and Safari). I’m not sure we really need appearance or if it actually does anything in any known browser, but I saw it in an example somewhere and I hate using vendor prefixes without also including the non-prefixed version of the same property, so there it is.

So that covers three of the four major browsers. But what about Internet Explorer? There’s a tidy solution that works in IE 10 and later:

select::-ms-expand {
  display: none;
}

Now we have a <select> menu with none of the standard browser junk, and we can apply our styles as needed. As for Internet Explorer 9 and earlier, you’ll just have to live with the arrow thing at the right end of the menu. I’ll explain in a bit the way to add separate styles just for those earlier versions of IE, using conditional comments, in case you’re not familiar.

I do recommend designing your own “arrow thingy” icon for the right side of the menu, so users can still tell it’s a menu. Here’s an example of how your full <select> CSS might look. (This is fairly close to what I am using in the site I’m actually working on, although the colors, fonts and padding differ slightly.)

select {
  -moz-appearance: none;
  -webkit-appearance: none;
  appearance: none;
  background: rgb(238,238,238) url('images/select.png') right 5px center no-repeat;
  background-size: 9px 15px;
  border: 1px solid rgb(221,221,221);
  border-radius: 0;
  color: rgb(34,34,34);
  font-family: ‘Proxima Nova’, sans-serif;
  font-size: 100%;
  height: 2em;
  line-height: 2em;
  min-width: 60%;
  padding: 0 25px 0 10px;
  width: auto;
}
select::-ms-expand {
  display: none;
}

Here’s what the results look like in different browsers.

custom_select_browser_samples

So, there’s an issue with the text alignment in Internet Explorer. As of this writing I’m working on resolving that. There are also some more minor variations between browsers in size and alignment, but that’s the nature of this business. Firefox also antialiases differently than Chrome and Safari, and I (usually) don’t bother trying to compensate for that. (The significant size difference in the IE sample is due to scaling at different breakpoints in my responsive layout… just a side effect of how I took the screenshots.)

That just leaves IE 9 and earlier. As I said, there’s no equivalent to select::-ms-expand before IE 10, so while we can change many aspects of the appearance of the menu, we can’t get rid of the standard arrow button thing. Unfortunately, if we implement the code above, we end up with both our custom arrows and the default ones, side-by-side. The only solution here is to get rid of ours, and remove the extra padding we gave it. This is where conditional comments come in. They’re well named: conditionals within HTML comments, recognized only by Internet Explorer. You can even target specific versions of IE with them. In this case, we just need to target versions before 10.

One common convention for conditional comments has you wrap the <html> tag itself in them, applying a class (e.g. ie8 that can then be used throughout your HTML everywhere else to target that browser. That’s great, but I never use it myself because I’ve gotten to a point where I rarely need to write any IE-specific CSS. So I just use the conditionals to load a separate ie.css file when I need it.

Here’s an example of how this might look. It should go in your <head> section, after you’ve included the main CSS file:

<!–[if lt IE 10]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie.css" />
<![endif]–>

And then in your ie.css file, you’ll need to override the background and padding:

select {
  background-image: none;
  padding-right: 0;
}

…and this is what it looks like in IE9 (and, just for fun, IE8 as well):

custom_select_browser_samples_ie

Obviously my styles are extremely basic — not really that different from what older versions of IE show anyway — but this does the job. As a test, I made the background bright red to prove it worked across the board. It does. But the results made my eyeballs bleed, so I’ll spare you.

But here’s something fun… how it looks on an iPhone with high resolution.

custom_select_browser_samples_ios

The arrow graphic is replaced with a high-res version using CSS3 media queries.

@media only screen and (-moz-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
  only screen and (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 3/2),
  only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
  only screen and (min-devicepixel-ratio: 1.5),
  only screen and (min-resolution: 1.5dppx)
{
  select { background-image: url('images/select_x2.png'); }
}

(Yes, there’s an Opera vendor prefix in there. Forget about what I said earlier. Or not. This is just a standard block of code I always use for high-res images in my media queries.)

Depending on the complexity of your design, this approach may not offer quite as much control as you need, compared to the <div> wrapper approach, but if you’re just trying to get something clean and simple, with customized colors and fonts and without the outdated 3D styles most browsers stick you with, this should do the trick.