The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. Currently they’re all but useless for something like a shared album from a vacation, because it groups photos by when family members upload them. I tend to upload photos at the end of each day, but other family members who were shooting on a normal camera waited until the end of the trip to upload their photos. The end result is that photos that should be appearing next to each other instead show up at opposite ends of the album. Infuriating.
The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album.
This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.
I remember the first time I saw Spotlight. It was magic. Then came Expose. Wireless that worked. Sleep that worked. Trivial configuration of things like sshd, apache and samba.
Amazing days.
Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.
Remap single tap CAPS to ESC and when used in combination with another key or long-pressed - CTRL. This has changed the way I use my keyboard in vim and tmux.
I'm doing this on Ubuntu, but there are ways to get it done on OSX too.
I have `jk` mapped to ESC in spacemacs, zsh and anything else I can set up to use vi keybindings. `jk` is essentially a no-op in vi, so rebinding it doesn't cause any issues while carrying the advantage that my fingers never have to leave the home row.
Copy and paste from another window? If your use of the word "Dijkstra" is frequent enough for this method to bother you, there must be other mappings that would work.
once installed, open the app, and go to the "complex modifications" tab. then click "add rule". then click "import more rules from the internet". on the web site that opens, expand "Modifier Keys". import "Change caps_lock key".
that'll give you a rule to do what you want in karabiner. (the rule is "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".)
It breaks all sorts of things, even the version of py2app that Apple themselves ship - but are too lazy to test or read bug reports about for year after year.
“All sorts of things” is a broad statement to toss around without at least some links. I primarily work in python and had never even heard of the py2app issue since it’s not an incredibly common tool and most python developers I know use newer versions of python.
That’s why I questioned the original broad claim: I know there are edge cases but most of the developers I know work on Macs and SIP just isn’t mentioned often enough for it to be anywhere near as bad in general as a few random commenters claim, not to mention that anyone I know who’s at all security savvy appreciates that it’s a trade off rather than a unilateral bad move.
I develop against the deployment environment run in virtual machines for two reasons.
1) Too many packages/servers/etc. I've tried to install under OS X over the years just didn't quite work right. That's probably not the case so much any more, but I have experienced it recently.
2) Developing against a macOS localhost can mask problems associated with my code running in the deployment environment. So to avoid those surprises, I develop against the deployment environment.
If I need root for package install or other server deployments, I log into the VM and do it there. I rarely need to install stuff on my macOS workstation.
Re: #1 that’s been generally smooth for me since Homebrew stabilized but I think your second point is key: it’s faster to develop locally but you definitely want to have some regular test that you’re in sync with the actual deployment environment. Docker has made that pretty easy now that the Mac Docker app is solid.
Brew is what I was alluding to, they have straightened out much of the package management issues. I ran into problems recently where certain CPAN modules wouldn't compile under OS X.
I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.
I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.
If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install.
Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.
If I'd like to stick with HFS+ for now, do I have the option to during the upgrade? I dual boot with Windows and I'm worried about something getting messed up and am not sure if there's a way to read APFS from Windows yet (I back up of course, but want to avoid potential issues)
Update: I upgraded, and everything happened automatically. No option to opt out of APFS conversion so yeah, if that effects your workflow you should know that. Went without a hitch for me though!
Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.
I've been finding the same with iOS updates lately. iOS 11 has some nice improvements, imho, but they're not any major advancements, just the usual incremental improvements. Could have just called it iOS 10.4 and be done with it. That wouldn't be PR-friendly enough though.
If you have an iPad the iOS 11 update is huge. Being able to run two apps side-by-side with drag and drop supported across the system is a fundamental change to how you interact with stuff.
The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.
I do have an iPad on which I've been using the 11 beta for the past few months and I love the new multitasking support, but is it really big enough to warrant a major version bump?
You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it.
The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking.
They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.
Everything Apple has done since iOS was first introduced (or arguably the initial iPad support in iOS 3.2 ) has been incremental improvements. But drag and drop is one of the bigger ones, IMO on-par with the initial multitasking support which incidentally was the update that finally convinced me to buy an iPad.
For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted.
Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file.
And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it.
If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else.
This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate.
They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS.
A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.
Addendum on spring-loaded folders, you can even swipe up from the bottom to open the dock and then spring open another app. If you open Mail you can tap the new message button while still dragging the data, and then drop it into the new message popover. So splitscreen and slide over multitasking aren't even required to use drag and drop.
Ok that's fair. I suppose the update seemed less to me because I haven't needed the drag and drop for my workflow (basically I don't find myself needing to copy files/images very much and the documents I author on iPad are typically text only), so I guess this feature kinda slipped by me a bit.
I actually haven't used half that stuff yet, just discovered the depth of spring loading and the weird objects it supports (contacts / maps) while I was writing that comment. But even for smoother handling of text, images, and PDF files I really like this feature.
As a downside, the interface for picking up multiple objects feels a bit weird and is probably one of the bigger learning curves that iOS has gotten.
Another example I just found - you can drag an email (or several) from Mail over to Documents where they're saved as .eml files. Documents doesn't know how to render these so you see the full markup, but I can imagine that would be a useful feature for something.
Maybe a utility app to view full email headers? I don't think Mail.app has a way to get into those.
I'll settle for when shared iCloud albums support a decent size and resolution.
iCloud Photos is frustratingly bad, but I don't want to buy into other cloud ecosystem, like Google's. Does anybody know if it's possible to replicate the integration with Photos on both iOS and macOS, so I could write my own sync thing?
That’s dreadful! I had assumed that iCloud (rather than Dropbox) sharing would share the original as that is already in the cloud anyway. It would just be a pointer or DB entry
I was horrified when I learned that Google wasn’t going to save full resolution by default. Had no idea Apple would do something similar.
That's what I thought myself, but then I realized pictures put into shared albums are actually copied - you can delete the original and it's still available in the shared album, at 0 cost to your iCloud storage.
It's kind of a nice feature, but at the same time it makes doing things like collecting photos from my wife for a photo book annoying.
Ugh, wasn’t aware of that. That plus my annoyances with the sorting will definitely make me reconsider using the shared albums as the primary way of sharing family photos.
Serious question: What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos, and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?
Agree with you on the time ordering. If people want a particular order, they could upload in that order. If they want time ordered, they could tap a button to refresh sort by time taken.
However, and this is a big gotcha -- you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones, or out of order by minutes for individual devices.
What Apple could do is recognize contributors and devices in a shared album and let you assign an offset to each contributor plus device pairing, then sequence these all sensibly.
What I do is have a inbox type album for everyone during and following the trip, then import, sort and select and manually fix time offsets (if I remember, I have everyone take the same photo of the same phone clock at the same moment to make this easier), then re-order and curate to taste, then re-publish.
> What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos.
100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums.
The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums.
> and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour"
It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times.
Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway.
> (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?
It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data.
I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly.
> you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones
Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything?
I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.
I attempted over the years to use the various incarnations of Google's photos but they consistently mangled pictures, canceled / renamed / migrated services, bungled who gets to see what under what Google Accounts, etc., until I was browbeaten into conceding defeat.
I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong. So unless you fix the metadata, the only sort you can have is manual.
Note: If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again? What's the use case? Throwaways? You're making on average a new album every 3 days, which still seems a little awkward. And innumerably more shared with you, means, what, 10 albums shared with you a day? It's amazing you have time for detailed and thoughtful HN comments. You should switch to pictures, they're worth a thousand words.
I am very happy to pay someone to take care of my problems and I am a big fan in general of paying for software and services. Not sure exactly how Flickr would help me though, but I will take a look at Flickr.
Does it integrate with the iOS/macOS photo library? Basically if I make an album in Photos on an iPhone, does it get synced up as an album by the flickr app, or does it just upload the pictures? Similarly, does it integrate with Photos on the mac, or do I need to use some other method to get my pictures that lives outside Apple Photos?
> I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong.
Why is the time "very probably wrong"? I don't understand this, everybody uses NTP or whatever the GSM/telecom equivalent is. I haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.
> If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again?
I rarely search for specific albums, usually I prefer to view all the pictures and search by date. Albums are just a grouping mechanism for sharing. Sometimes "an album" contains just one picture.
When I go in vacation, etc, I might create a named album that I can reference later, but other than that, yeah, albums are throwaways that are just for grouping a set of pictures at a moment in time.
> haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.
Not talking about mobile devices. Talking about cameras.
A dozen of us from work flew to have lunch at Noma in Denmark. We combined pictures after. There were nearly as many wrong times as there were people in the group. No software could have machine sorted these.
> Flickr
Flickr integrates with camera roll to upload originals in background but you manage albums and sharing in their app or web, and share via URLs or app. Only you have to be a member.
Ah, of course that cameras always have time set wrong!
Personally I use cloud services like iCloud only for my iPhone pictures. For my "real" photography I just keep files on a NFS server (and Lightroom is a pain with NFS...), I don't import then in cloud services.
> I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day).
What problems do you have with Google Photos on iOS, macOS? I use it regularly with web (windows, macOS) and my android, iOS devices and have no major complaints. For me, it's by far the best photos solution there is.
And I'm invariably the only geek whose photos are timestamped in UTC because I set devices that way (except for phones which I can't), or who knows that the metadata doesn't even record the TZ until a recent EXIF standard update, 2.31 released last fall, added support.
Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.
> Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.
Most of my friends and family take their photos with Android, iOS devices and Google Photos seems to have fixed this issue and all of my photos have a timezone field. Here is an example of a recent one: https://i.imgur.com/8AFgKs3.jpg
Not sure how it's done, but I also don't have this problem on iOS. Apple Photos seems to sort by UTC, not sure if it uses embedded TZ in photos or the GPS in EXIF, but whatever it's using, it seems to work fine for me.
> Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.
Apple Photos sorts photos by UTC, today, I assume by using the GPS information inside EXIF. There is no confusion between photos taken in different time zones.
I do a lot of photography from jets, and the photos are sorted just fine, while the time zone changes all the time.
Yeah, and it doesn't make any sense as they already have the pictures in the original quality stored on their servers already.
I think (but I am not sure) you can use iCloud Photo sharing even if you don't use iCloud Photo library, but that's a special case. Then you could limit the quality of those photos, I guess. But why degrade the quality of photos that you already have? Sharing doesn't use any extra space than non-sharing. They are in the cloud anyway.
I live in Canada and am born in the early 80s. 1 in 20 of my friends has a phone that isn't an iPhone, we often use iCloud photo sharing for albums but I don't know anyone who is using iCloud Photo Library, so not a special case in my circle
Workaround: download the photos to your local storage and create a new album with them, you can then sort them correctly by date taken. Can delete the original and reshare if others want access to the photos in chronologically taken order.
It really doesn't. I've got the XPS 15 and the camera is similarly placed. The optimal solution is to just run a USB webcam to the top of an external monitor.
On the go, you're SOL. Not only can everyone see up your nose, but don't even try typing unless you want to distract everyone with some nice finger close-ups.
I do the same - first so my clients aren't looking at the side of my face as I'm looking at them on my main monitor and second because the built in webcam quality is pretty horrible.
