Linked List: December 7, 2015

Monday, 7 December 2015

The Talk Show: ‘I’ve Been Using Mine More in Bed’ 

Joanna Stern returns to the show to talk about the iPad Pro, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, what’s going on with Yahoo (spoiler: not much), how best to sell old iPhones when upgrading, and Mark Zuckerberg promising to donate 99 percent of his fortune to charitable causes.

Brought to you by:

  • Wealthfront: A low-cost, automated investment service that makes it easy to invest your money the right way.
  • MailRoute: A secure, hosted email filtering service that you can have up and running in minutes. Use this link and you’ll save 10 percent for the lifetime of your account.
  • Backblaze: Unlimited, unthrottled online back up for your Mac.
  • Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code “GRUBER” for 10 percent off your first order.
Low-Hanging Fruit 

Brent Simmons:

I got email from my Dad where he describes a bug in Mail on El Capitan and how he solved it by going back to Yosemite.

I was never able to get Mail to work. In the end, it was a resource hog. Somehow between Yosemite on September 28 and yesterday, my available storage space went from 71GB to 3GB (on a 320GB hard drive). For the last week and a half, I could not even open mail with El Capitan. Even in “safe” mode, I could not get Mail to work.

…So, I am living with Yosemite, and it works fine.

Last night I edited the Safari bookmarks on my development machine. The changes didn’t sync to my laptop.

I gave it overnight — they still haven’t synced. I tried turning Safari syncing on and off, on both machines, and that didn’t help. I ended up making the changes manually on my laptop to match my development machine.

I waited until last week to upgrade my iMac to El Capitan. (I’m usually pretty reckless about upgrading my MacBook to new OS versions, including betas. I’m usually pretty conservative about upgrading my desktop.) This is a relatively new iMac with 5K Retina Display — when I bought it last year, it started with a clean installation of Yosemite. I didn’t use Migration Assistant to move over anything from an older Mac.

When the upgrade to El Capitan finished on my iMac, three of my email accounts in Mail were missing. They happened to be the accounts for my three most important email addresses. Two of them were still configured in Mail’s settings, but had been disabled — I just needed to toggle the “Enable this account” checkbox for each of them. The third account I had to reconfigure from scratch. All three accounts needed to re-download all of my mail — about 280,000 messages all told. These are IMAP accounts, so the mail was (and remains) on the server. I sure hope this bug doesn’t affect POP accounts (where the mail is only stored locally). This sort of bug would be terrifying for normal people, who don’t understand how IMAP works. If this happened to my parents, I’m certain they would just assume their email was gone, forever.

Also: Here’s a screenshot of my text replacements shortcuts (System Prefs: Keyboard: Text) after the upgrade to El Capitan. This I “fixed” by restarting the Mac.

Brent:

What I’m hoping for — what I’m nearly begging for, more as a user than as developer — is that Apple spend a year making things better. Nothing new. Just make things work better.

Spark 

Mailbox users looking for a new alternative to Apple’s built-in Mail app ought to take a look at Spark, from Readdle. Really interesting, well-done email client.

Apps Don’t Last 

Mailbox:

When the Mailbox team joined Dropbox in 2013, we shared a passion for simplifying the way people work together. And solving the email problem seemed like a strong complement to the challenges Dropbox was already tackling.

But as we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email. We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place.

Carousel:

When we introduced Carousel in April 2014, we believed a standalone app would be a better way to experience photos. We’re proud to have created a photo app that many of you use and love. However, over the past year and a half, we’ve learned the vast majority of our users prefer the convenience and simplicity of interacting with their photos directly inside of Dropbox. With this in mind, we’ve had to make a difficult decision.

On March 31st, we’re shutting down Carousel as a standalone app and returning to a single Dropbox photo experience.

Brent Simmons:

Apps that get acquired don’t last. Apps that don’t get acquired also don’t last. (Exceptions are rare.)