Linked List: October 8, 2019

Tuesday, 8 October 2019

Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include the latest Surface hardware announcements from Microsoft, the state of the iPhone, and bulk purchases of charcoal.

Somehow, we managed to avoid talking about any sports at all.

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Andy Rubin Teases Long, Skinny Form Factor for New Essential Phone ★

The phone’s form factor and UI are certainly interesting.

Rubin, of course, left Google ignominiously but with a $90 million payout that prompted thousands of Google employees to walk out. Good to see Rubin hasn’t let that get him down.

Catalyst’s Glaring Shortcomings ★

Speaking of James Thomson, he’s written a short piece on his experience porting his Dice by PCalc app from iOS to Mac using Catalyst:

Some user interface elements like the spinning carousel pickers felt especially out-of-place, and unintuitive — you can’t click and drag on them to change the value, you have to use a scroll wheel/gesture.

The nearest equivalent on the Mac would be something like a popup menu button. But there’s no popup menu button on iOS, so I have resorted to writing my own — and that is one of the classic blunders.

It’s the kind of thing that Apple should supply as standard, but I get the feeling they just ran out of time. The OS releases don’t seem to have gone very smoothly in general, from my outside perspective.

I don’t buy the “ran out of time” excuse. Catalyst has had this particular problem — touch-based spinners in place of pop-up menus — since 10.14 Mojave last year. It’s madness. Has there ever been a GUI toolkit for any mouse-pointer-based platform that didn’t offer pop-up menus as a standard control? Mac, Windows, Motif, Amiga, all the various toolkits for Unix X11 systems — they all had pop-up menus. Catalyst is the only GUI toolkit in history that doesn’t have them. Catalyst remains woefully incomplete and woefully under-documented. (No share sheets? I get it, it would be a lot of work on Apple’s part to bridge iOS’s robust share sheets with MacOS’s rather anemic ones — but that’s Apple’s job.)

The Mac version of Dice looks like a great Mac app for dice-rolling. But it’s absurd that Thomson had to write his own pop-up menu controls to do it.

DragThing Officially End-of-Lifed ★

TLA Systems:

DragThing is written using the 32-bit Carbon APIs that Apple have now removed in macOS 10.15 Catalina. It will no longer run if you update to Catalina, and there are no plans to make a new version that will.

We are sorry to say, DragThing has launched its last app.

64-bit support would require completely rewriting the code from the ground up, a process which would take us at least a year to complete, with no guarantees we could re-implement all the existing functionality, or how much of a future it would have if we did.

James Thomson:

Updated the DragThing website with a very definitive final statement on Catalina. Goodbye, old friend.

Rich Siegel:

Pour one out for DragThing, which has had a great run.

DragThing’s heyday was back in the classic Mac OS era, but it was a very credible utility in the early days of Mac OS X as well. It was the Dock before Mac OS had a built-in dock. And TLA founder James Thomson actually worked for Apple and helped create the Dock — it’s a complicated story.

DragThing hasn’t been updated in years — it wasn’t even updated to support retina displays. It was felled not by the transition from classic Mac OS to OS X but by the gradual sunsetting of Carbon APIs. But it’s the sort of app that is going to make some users sad that MacOS 10.15 Catalina has dropped 32-bit app legacy support.

I haven’t used DragThing in many many years, but for a long time it was essential to my workflow, and I firmly believe it was a much better launcher than Apple’s own system Dock ever has been. DragThing had features — like the ability to create custom palettes that only appeared in a certain app — that I don’t know how one would replicate today.

BBEdit 13 ★

Another great update to my favorite app for the last 27 years. I still have the receipt for my student-discount purchase of BBEdit 2.5 — the first commercial release — in 1993.

Tentpole new features include Pattern Playgrounds (a great way to learn regular expressions — “grep patterns” in BBEdit parlance — and to craft complex ones), a Grep Cheatsheet, and some great improvements to Dark Mode support and text color schemes. The full release notes, as always, set the bar for completeness, clarity, and concision.

For the last few years, BBEdit has offered two modes: free and premium. The free mode is incredibly useful for many users, and completely obviates BBEdit’s retired sibling TextWrangler. If you’re still using TextWrangler, run, don’t walk, to upgrade to BBEdit 13 in free mode (and enjoy the 30-day free trial of the premium features).

Killian Bell, writing for Cult of Mac:

Apple’s All Features webpage for macOS, which lists everything that’s new in Catalina, stated earlier this week that iCloud Drive file sharing would launch before the end of this year.

The page has been updated following the public rollout of macOS Catalina on Monday, however. File sharing will now be available in spring of next year.

Disappointing to a lot of us who are looking to move away from Dropbox.

NBA Commissioner Defends Freedom of Speech as Chinese Companies Cut Ties ★

Sopan Deb, reporting for The New York Times:

In its statement, the broadcaster, China Central Television, chided Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, for expressing support for the free speech rights of Daryl Morey. Morey, the Houston Rockets general manager, posted a supportive message about protests in Hong Kong on Friday night that drew an angry response from Chinese officials and set off debate about how corporations should balance their public images with their eagerness to do business in China.

“We voice our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to Adam Silver offering as an excuse the right to freedom of expression,” CCTV said in its statement announcing the cancellation of the N.B.A. broadcasts. “We believe that no comments challenging national sovereignty and social stability fall within the scope of freedom of expression.”

NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s response was heartening:

Silver issued a new written statement on Tuesday morning which said in part: “It is inevitable that people around the world — including from America and China — will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the N.B.A. to adjudicate those differences.”

It continued, “However, the N.B.A. will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way.”

Silver was more blunt during his news conference: “We will protect our employees’ freedom of speech.”

More of this, please.

MacOS 10.15 Catalina and the 32-Bit App Reckoning ★

Jim Dalrymple, writing at The Loop:

For those that have been following along, 64-bit is not that new. Apple has been talking to developers about the 64-bit transition for several years. Chances are your apps have already been updated to take advantage of the architecture.

However, if your apps haven’t been updated, they won’t run on the new operating system. You should be aware of that before you upgrade.

In typical Apple fashion, the company has made it easy to find out if you’ll have a problem with your apps. In your current macOS, you can go to About this Mac > System Report > Applications and get a list of all applications and whether they are 64-bit or not.

If you decide not to do that and try to install macOS Catalina, the installer will post a warning that some of your apps are not compatible with the new operating system. It will also give you a list of these apps. You can decide to stop the install process and contact the developers about updates or continue, knowing those apps won’t work.

I don’t have any remaining apps of consequence that are 32-bit only, but it’s certainly worth checking before you upgrade.