Linked List: September 23, 2020

Wednesday, 23 September 2020

Chatology Bites the Dust With Big Sur ★

Speaking of Flexibits, some sad news:

After more than 7 years, Chatology is being discontinued due to major changes with Messages in the upcoming release of macOS Big Sur.

Chatology is no longer available for purchase but should continue to work on macOS Catalina and earlier.

The “major changes” are the rewrite of Apple’s Messages app in Catalyst. From the Mac’s perspective, it really is an all-new version of Messages. Messages has been through a lot of changes over the years — longtime Mac users will recall that it started life as iChat all the way back in August 2002^* — a most excellent client for AIM and other instant messaging platforms. One thing iChat was never good at, though, was search, and that’s the gap Chatology filled — and in fact continues to fill for anyone not yet using Big Sur.

Search still isn’t great in Messages, but it’s a lot better than it used to be, and for me at least works pretty reliably with Messages in the Cloud. My big problem with search in Messages isn’t about finding a needle in the haystack that is one’s Messages history, it’s about the UI of the search results when it finds a lot of needles and I’m looking for one in particular. As a dedicated search tool, Chatology excelled at that sort of winnowing of results — of search within search, if you will. Messages’s built-in search doesn’t even try to be good at it.

* A good month for debuts.

Fantastical’s iOS 14 Widgets ★

Speaking of MacStories, here’s Ryan Christoffel on the latest update to Fantastical:

As you can see, there’s an option here for everyone. Additionally, all widgets can be configured to show the exact data you want, in many cases taking advantage of Fantastical 3’s calendar set feature, by which the app lets you group together sets of calendars and/or task management accounts. Widgets containing events or tasks can be tied to your preferred calendar set, and you can optionally have them show or hide events, tasks, and the weather. Widgets containing a month view can have a heat map activated to show at a glance which days on the calendar are busier or more free; this heat map is additionally tied to a specific calendar set. Finally, even the simple Icon and Date widgets can be configured to show or hide the month and today’s weather.

It’s a lot of style, size, and content options, but when you go configure them, it’s all very sensible. Fantastical’s debut widget support feels like a nice set of calendaring-oriented Lego bricks. At their best, iOS 14 widgets are at the intersection of usefulness and tinkering fun. The widgets for Apple’s own built-in apps are like pre-built toys, but the good third-party widgets let you customize your own out of sensible pre-built pieces, and Fantastical’s exemplify that mindset.

Latest AirPods Pro Firmware Includes Support for Spatial Audio ★

John Voorhees, writing last week for MacStories:

AirPods Pro firmware version 3A283 is currently rolling out to users with two new features: spatial audio and automatic device switching. […]

I tested the feature with my iPhone 11 Pro Max and 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and it worked with both, even though Apple only mentions iPhone models on its iOS 14 preview page. In my tests, I played the latest episode of Ted Lasso, a TV+ show that supports multi-channel audio. I also tried HBO’s Game of Thrones. It’s going to require more testing, but the feature seems to support any multi-channel audio source, regardless of the video streaming provider.

As Ted Lasso played, I turned in my chair and got up, and walked around my office. With spatial audio turned on, which you can do by long-pressing the volume slider in Control Center in the iOS or iPadOS 14 betas, the source of the sound seemed to come directly from my iPad that was sitting on my desk. Next, I switched to watching on my iPhone and moved it as I walked around my office. The entire time the sound seemed to be coming directly from the iPhone.

Very cool, very fun, and in my testing — also against an episode of Ted Lasso, which, if you haven’t watched it yet, is one of the best new TV shows in years — it feels very natural, not gimmicky or distracting. The spatiality just feels right.

Also, is it just the placebo effect, or did Apple greatly improve Transparency mode in this latest firmware? I typically wear my AirPods Pro while I’m out walking around town, and I prefer Transparency mode to Noise Cancellation while I’m perambulating so I can hear what’s going on around me. It could be my imagination, but it seems to me that with this latest firmware Transparency mode is magically better — a lot less white noise from wind. There used to be a baseline background whooshiness that is now just gone. When I pause my podcast or music, it’s like I don’t even have earbuds in at all. I just … hear.

If anyone knows whether this is actually new and improved, let me know.

Rogue Ads From Google Prompt You to Download a Spurious Text File ★

Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5Mac:

An increasing number of people are finding a wide range of websites — including ours — are asking permission to allow downloads to your Mac from googlesyndication.com …

The problem is a rogue ad that has made it through to the Google ad network, which is used by a great many websites. If you do allow the download, it’s just a harmless text file, but it’s annoying to have to keep hitting Cancel to block it.

This should not just never happen, it should not be possible to happen. If your ad network can foist a “harmless text file” download, it can foist any sort of file download.

PRC State Newspaper China Daily: ‘Proposed TikTok Deal Is a Dirty and Underhanded Trick’ ★

China Daily, an English-language arm of Chinese state media:

What the United States has done to TikTok is almost the same as a gangster forcing an unreasonable and unfair business deal on a legitimate company. […]

China has no reason to give the green light to such a deal, which is dirty and unfair and based on bullying and extortion. If the US gets its way, it will continue to do the same with other foreign companies. Giving in to the unreasonable demands of the US would mean the doom of the Chinese company ByteDance.

Effectively, it sounds like they’re telling Trump to go pound sand.

How ‘Naked Ballots’ Could Become Pennsylvania’s ‘Hanging Chads’ ★

Jonathan Lai, reporting for The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The state Supreme Court in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state that’s seen as increasingly likely to determine who wins the White House, last week ordered officials to throw out “naked ballots” — mail ballots that arrive without inner “secrecy envelopes.” Pennsylvania uses a two-envelope mail ballot system: A completed ballot goes into a “secrecy envelope” that has no identifying information, and then into a larger mailing envelope that the voter signs.

It’s unclear how many naked ballots there will be, because this is the first year any Pennsylvania voter can vote by mail, and most counties counted them in the June primary without tracking how many there were.

“Naked ballots” sound like fun in general, but in this case, they sound like a hold-your-breath potential nightmare in the making. This is seen as a potential problem for Democrats because, thanks to you-know-whose drumbeat of anti-mail-voting nonsense, there’s a huge partisan split in Pennsylvania regarding who plans to vote by mail. I voted by mail in the primary in June, and the instructions are pretty clear about putting your ballot in the unmarked secret envelope, which in turn goes into the outer envelope that you sign and return. But it would be a lot simpler and inherently more error proof if there were just one envelope — or if ballots were counted regardless of whether they were placed in the “secrecy envelope”. It’s really a privacy envelope for the voter, so the fact that they voted can be verified by someone who doesn’t get to see who they voted for, not a measure of election integrity.

Anyway, spread the word about these “secrecy envelopes” to anyone you know in Pennsylvania. Mail voting is new here, so it’s best to make people widely aware of this rule. The other election-related rulings from our state supreme court were good news for the franchise, though:

The decision ordering them thrown out was part of a trio of rulings Thursday that, among other things, extended the deadline for voters to send mail ballots back, permitted the use of drop boxes for voters to return them, and removed the Green Party’s presidential ticket from the ballot.