MyAppleMenu - Fri, May 22, 2015

Fri, May 22, 2015The Throttle-The-Cloud Edition

A Better Way To Upload Your Photos

How To Throttle iCloud Photo Library Uploads, by Adam C. Engst, TidBITS

Will’s solution revolves around Network Link Conditioner, a preference pane Apple provides to developers to test their apps under simulated poor network conditions. An iPhone app, for instance, has to work properly even if the cellular data connection provides only a few hundred Kbps.

You've migrated your photo library from iPhoto to Photos app, and now your Mac has taken over all your internet bandwidth for the sole purpose of uploading all your photos to the iCloud. You can pause the uploading for one day to get on with your work, but you know tomorrow you will face the same problem again. At this rate, the photo uploading will never complete.

So, here's an interesting solution of forcing Photos to do the uploading without taking over all your bandwidth. The solution is not trivial to do, but at least, it is something you can apply before Apple fixes the problem.

Reviewing Reviews

Product Reviews Will Never Be Perfect, But They're Still Better Than Ever, by Jason Snell, Macworld

A review that shows off the voice and experience of the writer is more truthful and more valuable that one of those old-school “impartial” reviews. When I write a review today, I bring two decades of history and a whole lot of consideration with me, but in the end, a review is still my opinion. It’s based on my experiences and biases and readers should know that.

Cool Stand

My niece made me a Watch stand. pic.twitter.com/xF7FNl6WNi

— Drew Zhang (@ThorChow) May 22, 2015

Stuff.

Apple Watch Bands Show Up In Apple Retail Stores, by Darrell Etherington, TechCrunch

Suicide Safe App Packages Static Web Content To Educate Providers, by Steven Chan, iMedicalApps

Geared towards providers, Suicide Safe helps teach providers and their families about discussing suicidal ideation, with conversation starters.

The app also provides a referral finding tool that can use your device’s current location, plugging the provider in with community resources. This includes crisis phone numbers, downloadable patient materials, and finding behavioral health clinics in the area.

Snap Photos, Make Lists With iPhone App Nine, by Matt Elliott, CNET

If you take photos with your iPhone to help you remember things like to read a book you stumbled across at a friend's house, Nine can help you keep track of your reminders.

Apple Promotes Accessibility Awareness Day With Curated App Section, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

Spotify Review: Here Comes The All-Around Entertaining App, by Nathan Olivarez-Giles, Wall Street Journal

I’ve been using the updated iPhone app since it debuted earlier this week, and it succeeds in making Spotify more entertaining. In many ways, it now feels like an app built for people like me: news-hungry music lovers who get nearly all their info and entertainment from a smartphone.

Apple Store App Snags Support For Touch ID And Two-step Verification, by Dan Thorp-lancaster, iMore

Rewind: Location-Based Time Tracker For iPhone, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

Through location tracking and an elegant breakdown of statistics, Rewind does exactly what I want from a mobile time tracker: it tracks where I spend my time automatically in the background, every single day.

Google Makes A Hangouts Mac App You'll Want To Use, by Timothy J. Seppala, Engadget

Three Of Apple And IBM's Mobilefirst Apps Gain Apple Watch Support, by Joseph Keller, iMore

Mac 911: Using Old Versions Of iWork Alongside The New Pages, Keynote, And Numbers, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

FreeFileSync For Mac OS X Revved To Version 7, by MacTech

Develop.

How Not to Crash #3: NSNotification, by Brent Simmons, Inessential

When an object registers for a notification, and then is deallocated without unregistering, then the app will crash if that notification is posted. That’s the thing you need to avoid. The rest of this article describes how to do that.

Swift and Visual Studio Code, by David Owens II

So… is it really just for web development? Honestly, it doesn’t matter if it starts out that way because the thing that Microsoft tends to always get right is extensibility. We’ll be able to start building plug-ins as the product matures to enable all sorts of development, including Swift!

Notes.

Adobe Discontinues Photoshop Touch, Offers Video Glimpse Of Future Replacement Tech, by Roger Fingas, AppleInsider

While the app is still available on the iOS App Store and Google Play, Adobe said that it will remove Touch on May 28. The app will continue to work as long as it's downloaded and installed, but no more updates will be produced, and it will no longer be for sale.

The company is however working on one or more replacement apps. In a new demonstration video, prototype software is capable of loading and editing a 50-megapixel image on an iPad at speeds comparable to a desktop computer. The video also shows off options like selective object removal, color swapping, and image warping.

Update To Apple Watch OS 1.0.1 Leading To Less Frequent Heart Rate Monitoring, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

Instead of the Apple Watch recording your heart rate every ten minutes, many users – including myself – are seeing large gaps in the data.

Apple Restores iCloud After Outage Impacts 200 Million People, by Samantha Murphy Kelly, Mashable

What If The iPad Ran iPad OS?, by Rene Ritchie, iMore

The iPad running iPhone OS made sense in a world before iCloud and Continuity, before Yosemite and Apple Watch. It kept everything compatible and consistent across mobile. Now, however, we have all those things. Compatibility and consistency have, in large part, been abstracted. Mobile can now be more than one thing.

Alas, Only Apple, by Patrick Smith, Medium

I think one way of interpreting ‘only Apple’ is to hear ‘only Apple can create products that achieve this success.’

What really needs to be heard is ‘only Apple can create compelling products that aren’t compromised by detrimental agendas.’

The Joy Of Slow Computing, by Nathan Schneider, New Republic

The software I use now lacks the veneer of flawlessness that Apple products provide; it is quite clearly a work in progress, forever under construction by programmers who notice a need and share their fixes with everyone. But early on, I noticed that the glitches started to feel different than they used to. Stuff that would have driven me crazy on a MacBook didn’t upset me anymore. No longer could I curse some abstract corporation somewhere. As in Slow Food—with its unhygienic soil, disorderly farmers’ markets, and inconvenient seasons—the annoyances of Slow Computing have become pleasures. With community-made software, there’s no one to blame but us, the community. We’re not perfect, but we’re working on it. I gave away my MacBook.

Streams.

I envy the physical Play/Pause button on the iPod Nano, and wish that the iPhone has a similar button.

Parting Words

🎶 Won't you push me to / Funkytown 🎶 pic.twitter.com/UFU8jAkfCz

— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) May 22, 2015

Thanks for reading.