Tag: iPhone

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I figured this was just, once again, an outdated tutorial that hadn’t caught up to changes Apple had made in the Settings app.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.

How to restart an iPhone without using the touch screen

Well, that was weird.

I suddenly found that my iPhone 13 mini’s touch screen was only partially responding. In particular, the upper left quadrant seemed entirely unresponsive to touch. Well, time to restart!

Except.

The only restart process I know is to hold down the Volume Up and Power buttons until the emergency call screen appears, then swipe the “Swipe to power off”… uh… swiper… thing.

No good! That was in the “dead zone” so swiping it did nothing.

Fortunately, Apple has another way. It’s pretty simple and it worked perfectly for me:

Quickly press and release the Volume Up button.
Quickly press and release the Volume Down button.
Hold down the Power button until the iPhone shuts off.
Hold down the Power button again until you see the Apple logo.

Maybe 3 and 4 can be the same motion. I just let go of the button when I could see the iPhone had shut itself off, then after a few seconds, I pressed it again to power on as usual. And I’m pleased to say, the screen seems to be working fine now.

I think I like Super Mario Run

Here’s my early review of Super Mario Run, less than a day after it was released.

I think I like it.

I have been waiting forever for Nintendo to finally accept the reality of modern mobile devices and make games for the iPhone. (No, Miitomo doesn’t count. And Pokémon Go doesn’t really, either, especially since Nintendo didn’t actually make it.)

There have been a ton of Mario-inspired platform games for iOS over the years, and while many have been of very high quality and creativity, none has stuck for me.

What makes the top-tier Nintendo franchises (and here I am thinking Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and maybe Pokémon) so great? These are the criteria:

Engaging concept
Attention to detail
Playability
Platform-optimized experience

Every would-be Mario surrogate on iOS has failed at least one of these criteria. And I expected that, if Nintendo ever did make an iOS game, especially a Mario game, when it finally did arrive it would be an unmistakably “Nintendo” experience because it would nail them all… and most likely differ from what I thought I wanted about the experience, because what I thought I wanted wouldn’t really work, and what I actually wanted was something I couldn’t quite imagine.

People have been saying it for years, but yes: this is how Nintendo and Apple are alike, and why I expected to be surprised, if not amazed, by what Nintendo came up with, even if it didn’t seem at first glance like it would be successful.

The biggest surprises for me about Super Mario Run when it was announced were a) how slow Mario seems to run, and b) that it’s essentially an endless runner with one control: tap-to-jump. It’s like the old joke before the iPhone came out that, if Apple ever released a phone, it would only have one button. Guess what: it did, and it changed everything.

Let’s explore the criteria, one by one:

Engaging concept. It’s classic Mario. The basic formula that has existed since Super Mario Bros. in 1985. More specifically, this game, visually and structurally, fits very much into the mold of the New Super Mario Bros. series that debuted about a decade ago on the Nintendo DS. Check.

Attention to detail. This feels like a Nintendo game, in all of ways, both good and bad. The good is where it counts — the actual game experience. The bad is the surrounding stuff, showing that Nintendo is still out-of-step in the online world. First, the bad: this game requires an always-on Internet connection, which seems a bit ludicrous. Apparently the primary reason is to prevent piracy, which I really don’t get. The only way to pirate iOS games is to jailbreak the device, and it seems like there would be easy enough ways for the game to detect that without an Internet connection.

Besides the Internet connection issue, there’s also the fact that the initial setup process requires selecting your country from a huge list (again, this is something the game should be able to detect automatically, especially since it has to be online to function) and a distracting Nintendo Account step. Then after a brief gameplay tutorial, you’re thrust into a black screen with a progress bar as the full game content is downloaded. I’m not sure if my experience was just due to peak interest at the launch, but it took forever to download… in fact, I tried over four sessions as I was out-and-about, jumping between LTE and WiFi in various locations, until I finally got the last 5% to download when I was at home several hours later.

So, that’s the bad, and it really kind of sucks. But the good is, once the game is actually loaded up on your device, it has all of the polish you expect in a top-tier Nintendo title. The design is flawless, the UI interactions are smooth as can be, and everything about it shows the same level of care that Nintendo puts into the best Mario games for their own systems. And because the iPhone screen resolution is so much better than on a DS/3DS, this looks much more like a Wii U game than a mobile game.

Playability. This is where I was really surprised. At first I was disappointed. Mario runs continuously, which makes sense for the one-hand — really, one-finger — control scheme, but he seems slow. This is not the “hold down the B button” running we’re used to in a Mario game. It’s about halfway between his usual walking and running speeds. But you quickly realize the speed was carefully calibrated for optimal playability. When you don’t have the ability to make Mario stop, you need just a fraction of a second longer to figure out how best to react to what’s going on in his environment. Before long you realize this speed feels perfect in conjunction with timing jumps, interacting with special blocks and avoiding enemies.

Speaking of enemies, when Mario is running and approaches an enemy, he automatically vaults over it. It’s a cute effect, but initially it made me wonder… is there any way to die in this game? Especially since it seems like even when Mario would die, such as falling down a hole, he instead goes into a bubble (as in New Super Mario Bros. U) and gradually floats backwards on the course? Well, yes. I didn’t immediately realize that you have to earn those bubbles, and they eventually run out. Plus, Mario only vaults over enemies if he’s running. If you’re mid-jump and he touches an enemy (other than landing square on its head), he dies just like in any other Mario game.

After a couple of easy screens, the complexity of the courses quickly catches up with you, and before you know it you feel like you’re just playing a regular Super Mario title, not a streamlined “endless runner” version.

Platform-optimized experience. Speaking of that streamlined “one-finger” control: one of the most irritating problems with any iOS game, aside from the difficulty of using a simulated, on-screen D-pad for movement, is the fact that your fingers obscure part of the screen. Nintendo, of course, solved this perfectly. When you’re navigating the game interface, the full screen is used as in any other game. But during a run, the bottom 1/4 or so of the screen has no action… only a generic background design matching the style of the current course. That way, you can keep your thumb poised at the bottom of the screen ready to tap (or tap-and-hold for a longer jump) without covering up any of the action.

I would never have expected a one-control, endless-runner style Mario game to work as a real Mario game, but it does, and is probably the only way to make this work on an iOS device. But Nintendo not only defied most fans’ logic with this control scheme, they perfectly tailored the elements of the game to work with it. They removed standard elements of Super Mario games (like Fire Flowers) that simply wouldn’t work with this control scheme, and they added things that — while they maybe would work with a traditional control scheme — are only logical with an endless runner, like special blocks that make you change direction when you jump on them, and others that pause the action to give you an extra moment to decide how to proceed.

A couple of other realities of mobile devices that Nintendo acknowledged with this game’s design are the brevity of play sessions and the interest in online competitive play. The levels here are shorter than typical Mario levels, although they don’t feel especially short, but they work well if you only have a minute or two to play. And the Toad Rally mode is a great way to do online competitive play. You’re not actually competing in real time, but the game makes it feel like you are, by matching you up with actual previous runs by other players.

There’s also a reward system for daily play, unlocking both useful features like additional playable characters as well as more frivolous prizes like decorations for your Mushroom Kingdom, similar to some of the features in Miitomo. And of course, you can tie in your Nintendo Account so your Mii shows up throughout the game. (I assume some of what you do here feeds back into the Miitomo experience as well, but to be honest I deleted Miitomo off my iPhone months ago.)

Overall… yes, I do think I like it. This is not the perfect classic Super Mario experience I always thought I wanted on my iPhone, but… let’s be honest. There are enough other, really well-done iOS platform games out there that I have tried for a day or two and then abandoned that I realize a perfect classic Super Mario experience is impossible on a touchscreen device with no physical controls. What Nintendo has delivered is a new kind of Super Mario experience that feels 100% “Mario” but actually works on an iPhone.

Now, what I really want them to do is an iOS Zelda game. There are Zelda DS games that rely almost entirely on the touchscreen and stylus for all movement and action. It seems like a no-brainer that this experience would translate well to a mobile phone. But then, what do I know?

Just remember… If you see a stylus, they blew it.