Posts in the “apple” category

I live in Colorado, where cellular reception can be very hit or miss because of the mountains and rolling hills. As just one example there are only two spots in my apartment where I can make a phone call. So when I’m at home trying to view a website using Safari on my iPhone and the page is loading really slow, I find it really annoying that my iPhone is trying to use my cellular data rather than my home wireless network (WiFi).

Note: Apple implies that the cellular data is “assisting” the WiFi, but with the poor cell reception here, I can confirm that this feature just slows down my iPhone internet speed.

Solution: How to turn off cellular data access when on WiFi

Fortunately there’s a way with an iPhone and iOS to turn off this annoying feature. Apple calls this technique “Wi-Fi Assist,” and you can disable it by:

• Go to Settings on your iPhone
• Tap Cellular
• Scroll down (way down) on that screen until you see the Wi-Fi Assist setting. Disable it.

This is what that cellular setting looks like on my iPhone running iOS 10.2:

If the button background is green (as shown), tap it once to turn off this feature. After you do this your iPhone should just use WiFi data.

Note: It would be nice if you could turn this feature on for poor networks (like when you’re sitting at Starbucks, Panera Bread, etc.) but off for your home network, but unfortunately Apple doesn’t let you do that.

Summary

If, like me, you have a good home WiFi network and poor cellular reception, I think you’ll find that this tip will speed up your iPhone internet access speed. It can also save you money on your cellular data plan.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

~ Steve Jobs, as heard in this 1997 video

Kudos to Samuel Axon of Ars Technica for writing a very good tech review of the hardware behind Apple’s new iPad Pro (2018). As I was reading it, it reminded me of the old style of solid writing that I used to get when I bought print copies of magazines.

One of the nuggets of the article is shown in the image I’ve attached here, where you can see that the 2018 iPad Pro is faster than every MacBook Pro in existence other than its 2018 model, at least in terms of the Geekbench multi-core performance tests. If you dig through the images in the article you’ll see that the story isn’t quite as powerful in the single-core benchmark, where the iPad Pro lags the 2018 MacBook Pro by up to 16%. But in those tests the iPad Pro is roughly the equivalent of a 2018 Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 model. (The older Macs use Intel Core i7 and Xeon W processors, and the Dell model uses an Intel Core i7. The 2018 MacBook Pro uses an Intel Core i9.)

These numbers — comparing a tablet to i7 and i9 processors — make one think that Apple will be using their own chips inside Mac computer systems some time soon.

cake.co has a good story about getting Steve Jobs to speak at Unix Expo.

If you like computer history, cake.co has an interesting article by Chris MacAskill titled, The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT.

In this post I share the contents of a custom TextMate command I just created that uses pandoc and sed to convert markdown content in the TextMate editor to a “pretty printer” version of HTML:

#!/bin/sh

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

# note: 'sed -E' gives you the advanced regex's

# use pandoc to convert from markdown to html,
# then use sed to clean up the resulting html
pandoc -f markdown -t html |\
sed -Ee "/<p|<h2|<h3|<h4|<aside|<div|<ul|<ol/i\\
\\"

You can try to use a command like tidy to clean the HTML, but the version of tidy I have does not know about HTML5 tags. The TextMate Markdown plugin also doesn’t work the way I want it. Besides that, I’m trying to learn more about writing TextMate commands anyway.

As an important note, when you set this up as a TextMate command and then run it, it will convert the TextMate editor contents from markdown to HTML.

(In a related note, serenity.de is also a good resource for TextMate command and bundle documentation.)

In summary, this code shows:

* How to execute a Unix shell command from TextMate
* Specifically, how to execute a sed command from TextMate
* How to use modern regular expressions with sed (the -E option)
* How to search for multiple regex search patterns with sed

Back in June, 1997, Wired magazine wrote an article titled, 101 Ways to Save Apple. These days it looks like Apple might end up owning Wired.

Steven Sinofsky has this series of 30+ tweets about Apple software quality.

If Apple’s “Upgrade your OS” notifications are driving you insane, osxdaily.com has an article on How to Stop “Upgrade to MacOS High Sierra” Notifications Completely on a Mac.

So on page 51 of Apple’s iPhone Terms and Conditions it clearly states, “We may slow down your iPhone to increase the sales of new iPhones.”

(It may say that, who knows. Having just updated iOS, I wouldn’t mind if they get sued over the ridiculous length of that doc.)

Apple is getting sued — and rightfully so — for intentionally slowing down iPhones with older batteries. The ironic things are a) if they let people easily change the batteries, or b) made this a software setting, people would be happy with them. Their own pride (ego) created this problem.

Apple’s Jonathan Ive just gave a new interview at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. fastcodesign.com has quotes from the interview.

As I’ve written about before, I assumed that Apple’s Jonathan Ive had his hands full with the completion of the design of Apple Park, and that was affecting the design and quality of Apple’s recent product offerings. This quote comes from bloomberg.com: “With the completion of Apple Park, Apple’s design leaders and teams are again reporting directly to Jony Ive, who remains focused purely on design,” Amy Bessette, a company spokeswoman, said Friday in a statement.

I used Scrivener 2 in the process of writing Functional Programming, Simplified, and Scrivener 3 is now out. macstories.net has a review of it.

time.com has this article about the iPhone X and a few quotes from Jonathan Ive.

Summary: An Apple design secret - the connection between attitude and productivity.

Unfortunately you need a subscription to read the content over at technologyreview.com, but they had a nice article a while ago on "The Secret of Apple Design." I really like a quote they had about a person's attitude, and the relationship of that attitude and the impact on their work:

wallpaper.com has a good story about Jonathan Ive and Apple’s new campus.

Multiple sources, including AppleInsider.com, are reporting that Walmart plans to deploy 100,000 Mac computers to save on employee PC costs. From that article: “IBM noted that PC users drive twice the number of support calls compared to Mac users, and that PC support tickets require desk side support by IT personnel five times as often. The company's own analysis showed that each Mac deployed saves the company $270 in support costs compared to a Windows PC.”

Bloomberg has a good story on Apple’s struggle to get the iPhone X to market on time.

If you’re interested in music, Billboard has a good interview with Apple’s Jimmy Iovine and Zane Lowe.