Rolandt

The newest release of Wikity is up on GitHub. There are a few bugs knocked out, but the major change is a shift from “Path” functionality to “Cardbox” functionality. This shift is partial — mostly about terminology at the moment — but will eventually work a bit different as well.

Paths in Wikity were sort of Bushian (Vannevar, not G. W.). Different cards could be put together in a sequence, and then you could walk through that sequence in a forward/next sort of way.

I found that how I was using Wikity cards in paths really didn’t match that. I was really putting together a set of resources that could be hopped and skipped around. Sequence was less about reading things in the right order than putting things in sort of rough clusters; general stuff first, more niche and tangential stuff at the bottom. “Path” started to feel to me like the “Unread” folder in the old Goggle Reader: it was a term that made me feel like I had to read everything, and that was a drag.

So I decided to move away from the “path” term and move towards the less sequential “card box” term. I think of it like these little boxes my youngest daughter uses to store her index cards:

That is the stuff in it might be ordered, and even tabbed, but it’s not really asking you to read it in sequence. (This, incidentally, was also the metaphor of “fileboxes” in Xerox PARC’s NoteCards project).

So that’s the shift in metaphor. Here’s what we are probably going with it, eventually.

Cardboxes as Choral Frameworks

A lot of people think that Wikity is how one can do Choral Explanations. After all, that’s my big deal of the moment, surely the software I write has implemented it, right?

Nope. Wikity was built not for Choral Explanations, but as a Personal Learning Environment. You can’t currently do Choral Explanations in Wikity.

Yet every time I write about Choral Explanations, someone writes me and says — I love this idea, I have to download Wikity! It gets embarrassing.

So we’d like people to be able to at least hack CEs together in Wikity. One thing I’m going to work on is setting up cardboxes as a framework for CE. So, for example, you set up a CardBox called “How do sunflowers follow the sun?” and various people can add their own explanations to the Cardbox. Instead of “previous/next” navigation we’ll just feature these as a large ordered scrollable page.

It’s not perfect, but at least it will be the end of people downloading Wikity to do choral explanations and finding they can’t.

Cardboxes as Workspaces

A little more involved, but worth it: I’d like to create an option where you can pull all the items in a cardbox into catalog view.

This would allow you to edit your entire cardbox at once, getting a sense of what’s there and what’s not, clicking in and editing on card while reading the synopsis of others. This catalog layout has been one of the surprisingly effective things about Wikity, but there’s no way to define a workspace that you can pull up later. Cardboxes might be a solution, a way to save a workspace.

Cardboxes as Feeds

Ward Cunningham had the idea a while ago to make a “feed plugin” for Federated Wiki. The idea (somewhat counterintuitive to bloggers) is that you manually add links to the material you want in the feed. The plugin then fetches page links, descriptions, and whatnot and outputs well-formed RSS when called.

As weird as this may sound, it actually makes sense. Wiki is an iterative process, there’s no way an algorithm can tell when something should be pushed out to others. Manually adding items to feeds makes sense. You decide when the article is ready for a certain group, and push it to that feed. You decide if you made a big enough change you want to push it again. You can create multiple feeds for multiple audiences.

My thought is that Cardboxes might output RSS as well. Add new items to the cardbox, and they appear at the top of the Cardbox feed.This will also allow the works to flow into RSS syndication hubs.

Cardboxes as Trusted Subscriptions

Unlike federated wiki, Wikity is lacking a coherent community model. I’ve played around with the idea of allowing cards from other trusted sites to flow to your own, so we get content duplicated across many sites.

It occurs to me a Cardbox could be a way of doing that. Everyone subscribes to each other’s Cardboxes, and automatically forks copies of items dropped in the cardbox. People build out the wiki, and at the end, everyone walks away with the full version of the wiki. This seems to me a good solution to class activities as well — as a student you make as many pages as you want, but you share your best ones to the cardbox.

Anyways….

Anyway, these are some of the ideas I’m playing with. For now it’s just playing with new language,  but pretty soon we hope to build out some of this functionality. For now, you’re welcome to download it from Github and install it on your own server as a theme. It’s super simple and the instructions are in the distribution readme.

It’s getting confusing, all the new housing taxes popping up here and there. Hope to help you keep it straight, especially since some cases will fall under multiple taxes and regulatory regimes.

(Just imagine a foreign investor who buys a unit in Vancouver and decideds to rent it out only through Airbnb. Three new laws may apply: provincial tax on foreign investors; empty-homes tax on the unit because something rented out as Airbnb doesn’t count as occupancy; and then whatever regs come in for Airbnb.)

Anyhoo, back to the subject at hand. So the city will be proposing some kind of regulatory system for short-term rentals in a report out next week. Details are still being worked out, but from everything I can gather, in my story here, the proposal will restrict any rentals to people who are renting out their primary residences (either a spare room in there or the whole house when they’re out of town.)

Vancouver councillors debated the proposed empty-homes tax this morning, with some unexpected results. (Well, at least to me, so perhaps I’m clueless.)

The NPA councillors came out AGAINST the tax, which I thought would have been seen as very popular with their base. (See my story for their various reasons.)

And then Vision councillors started making noises about considering an even higher rate for the empty-homes tax than the max two per cent of assessed value that staff had recommended. Plus penalties higher than the current $10,000 that is the most Vancouver can charge anyone for any bylaw violation.

Things continue to evolve.

Along with all that, many more questions and unique scenarios continued to arise. Just to take you through various bits and pieces I’ve now learned:

• Airbnb doesn’t count as occupancy. So if someone gets audited and they’re not living at the unit, they need to prove they’re renting it out to avoid the tax. And showing revenue from Airbnb rentals won’t count.
• As long as one unit on a residential (single-family-house-type) property is occupied, the others can be vacant. So someone could live in a laneway house and leave the main house empty and not be charged the tax. An owner who decides to leave a basement suite or laneway house empty won’t be charged.
• Not decided yet how many months someone will have to occupy a unit to avoid the tax. Kathleen Llewellyn-Thomas, the new general manager of community services, was suggesting nine months might be the cut-off.

Happy to try to answer other questions you might come up with about unique scenarios.

Bombs went off in New York and New Jersey. This has become an occasion for our leaders and candidates to say what they are going to do to keep us safe. The thing is, there is no way for them to keep us safe. That’s scary as hell, but it’s incontrovertibly true. Here’s what kept … Continued

The post No one will keep you safe. Not Trump. Not Clinton. No one. appeared first on without bullshit.

Your community was likely created to achieve a single, major, goal.

You’re likely pursuing that goal as effectively as possible.

The danger is ignoring secondary benefits. These can add up to a significant amount. On some occasions, they surpass the main benefit of the community.

Very often when we need examples, we’re stuck on a problem, or looking for inspiration we might ask the question in our community. This might save us an hour or more of searching online. If we do this 2 to 3 times per week and estimate an average staff cost of $100, that’s $300 per week in time saved (or $15,600 per year).

A few months ago, we tested LinkedIn ads for recruiting a staff member. The cost was around $1.5k to put together a list of 60+ applicants. This week we published a job advert here. We also posted it in our community and via a few social networking channels. We’ve now found some very strong applicants. I imagine we recruit a few staff members per year (say 3 to 4). This could be a cost saving of $4.5k to $6k per year.

When a prospective client contacts us, we usually invite them to our community to prove our methods work. I’d imagine this has helped us assure an extra 1 or 2 clients per year. The profit from these might range from $40k to $150k. Let’s assume a low-end return of $80k per year.

Our community is built on Discourse and involved a tricky migration. We often field requests from organizations looking for help to move to a Discourse community. I’d attribute around $10k in revenue from Discourse-related requests per year .

We might see a complex problem shared in our community we believe we can solve. If this turns into a client who wouldn’t otherwise have hired us, this might add another few consultancy projects per year. Let’s estimate a low-end value of $120k per year.

The community also exposes us to challenges our audience faces. We can see what people talk about without us prompting them. We often identify challenges people face. Some are quite common others are unique and complex. This changes our focus for training programs, consultancy projects, and topics of future events.

If we’re launching a new course, we can solicit the feedback of members early on to improve the course. We can collect useful testimonials from members. We can share information about the program in the community, provide discounts to members to incentivize signing up etc…

We could also calculate the value of first-time traffic generated via increased search results, or have the ability to test research and new ideas in the community to determine what really works. We could calculate the value of answers to questions from course participants in the community (and involving others).

All things considered, we might be able to conservatively attribute some $250k+ in value per year to the community.

None of the above was the reason we created the community, they are all secondary benefits.

But the thing about secondary benefits is you need to proactively pursue them. You need to use the community for recruitment, save on research time, generate more traffic, identify more leads, convert leads to clients, identify opportunities etc…

If you are considering buying an Apple Watch Series 2, I have a recommendation. After wearing the original Apple Watch for a year, I just switched to the new model. And with that switch I went from a Stainless Steel watch to what was previously an Apple Watch Sport. Apple no longer makes that distinction. It's just "Apple Watch".

The biggest difference that I noticed immediately is how much lighter the aluminium body is. You have to see this in numbers:

I am used to wearing 82g to 91g on the wrist, now it's only 46g. That makes a tremendous difference. And while "heavier" feels more expensive and more substantial, having a light watch is much better.

Good news: my recommendation is the cheapest Apple Watch you can get. Actually, not the cheapest. I would get a Series 2 and not the (updated) Series 1. It adds three features: brighter display, GPS, swim-proof (and swim exercise). To me the brighter display seals the deal.

Reply to this post

 

 

 

 

 

Chinese automakers give away a crown jewel. 

• The willingness of the Chinese automakers to give away digital differentiation to the BATmen (see here) clearly indicates they do not understand how important digital will probably become.
• SAIC was the first to move (see here) in launching a car with the entire head unit powered by Yun OS (Alibaba) while eight other companies including BYD and Chiang are already intending to use Baidu’s CarLife.
• The multinationals are also getting in on the act with Audi recently signing a deal with all three of the BATmen to add their services to the cars that it ships in China.
• I am pretty certain that others will follow.
• From a digital perspective, it makes no sense whatsoever for the foreign car companies to try and create digital experiences for their Chinese customers.
• This is because like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and so on the environment will make it almost impossible for them to succeed especially where their services compete against those of Chinese companies.
• However, the Chinese car companies have no such limitation.
• Hence, they are potentially giving away one of the big long-term differentiators and I am far from convinced that they have any understanding of the implications of what they are doing.
• Fast forward 15 years to a world where autonomous vehicles are everywhere, it will be the brains of the vehicle that largely differentiates it from its competitors.
• If the brains of that vehicle come from one of the BATmen then all vehicles will have access to those brains as it is in the BATmen’s interest to ensure as wide a distribution of their services as possible.
• This could leave the Chinese car makers as commodities with all of the value accruing to the ecosystem owners, just as it does in the handset industry.
• This just one facet of a huge problem that I see in China.
• Outside of the internet industry, there is precious little understanding of how important software and services are becoming and so very little is being done to effectively combat commoditisation.
• Many Chinese companies believe that they will be able to differentiate in hardware but the example of Android shows that any hardware innovation is rapidly copied failing to alleviate the problem.
• There are a few exceptions to this but unless Chinese device makers really begin to internalise the importance of the user experience, a very bleak future awaits them.
• This is how many industries in China remain wide open to the BATmen as the existing players have very little understanding of the threat that the BATmen represent to their long term livelihoods.
• Consequently, in China Baidu and Tencent are the only place where I would feel comfortable for the long term.

Style guides define the standard against which we determine a translation’s quality. They contain rules that are both defined by Mozilla and by Mozilla’s localization communities on how to best translate text in Mozilla products, websites, and other projects. Style guides are used to both translate and evaluate a translation’s quality. By following these rules, a translator has a better chance of producing a high quality translation that represents Mozilla values and culture. During the recently concluded Asian Localization Hackathon… Read the rest

The Pixel, Google and HTC’s upcoming Nexus 5X replacement, will cost $650 in the U.S., according to a new report from Android Police.

Based on the current exchange rate, that means Canadians can expect to pay about $860 for the base model Pixel should the rumoured prove to be true. For comparison sake, the company’s current flagship device, the Nexus 6P, starts at a more affordable $699.

The Pixel XL, which is rumoured to feature a larger screen, will cost about $70 more in the U.S., adds Android Police.

In the U.S., Google reportedly plans to subsidize the devices through carrier financing plans. It’s unclear if Canadian carriers will follow suit.

Within the context of Google’s Pixel’s brand, those prices make sense, but they will still likely be a disappointment for Canadian Nexus fans.

Of course, we will have to wait until October 4 to find out exactly how much . The one upside is that Android Police admits it wasn’t able to corroborate its report — however, it did note its source has been reliable in the past.

Related: Google to announce new smartphones October 4th

Apple has reportedly hired Toronto doctor Mike Evans to expand its digital healthcare footprint.

A former staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, Evans was also known for his YouTube channel, “DocMikeEvans,” which has amassed over 70 thousand subscribers.

His YouTube videos apparently caught the eye of the tech giant, which feature Evans as a cartoon doctor explaining common medical problems while using a whiteboard.

 

CBC reports that Evans began this series about five years ago beginning with the question “What is the single best thing we can do for our health?”

This video has been up since the launch of the site, and has received over 5 million views. His last video was uploaded one month ago and is entitled “The Science of making us happy.”

 

His Evans has said in the past that the future of health will be a combination of face time with physicians and advanced technology. He turned down Apple’s first job offer, though he and the company kept in touch.

Evans has already started his new role with Apple and commutes between Toronto and Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino while his oldest son finishes high school. His new job revolves around global healthcare innovation.

You know him from Youtube and @cbcfreshair, hear about @docmikeevans new gig with Apple. See clip I talked about:https://t.co/U58CSZj8X9

— OntarioMorning (@CBCOntMorning) September 19, 2016

In addition to his role at St. Michael’s Hospital, Evans is the lead of digital preventative medicine at Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute as well as an associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto. Evans launched his “YouTube Med School for the Public” in 2011, which has garnered over 70 thousand subscribers and 14 million views. 

This announcement makes sense alongside Apple’s recent focus on healthcare initiatives, which can be even be seen through the fitness-focused direction of the Apple Watch Series 2. Currently, Apple’s main investment in healthcare comes through its HealthKit platform, though there’s been talk of the company expanding their services.

Related: Sun life Financial launches new division to expand digital health coverage

Perhaps the future is modular.

Facebook recently announced its acquisition of a California startup which focuses on modular devices. Nascent Objects was founded by Baback Elmieh in 2014 with the intention of creating a modular electronics system that consumers can use to build gadgets.

Nascent went on to develop “world’s first modular consumer electronics platform,” as CEO Elmieh wrote in a post on the company’s blog today. He goes on to say that the intention behind such a development was to make product development easy for consumers.

“By combining hardware design, circuitry, 3D printing and modular electronics, our technology allows developers to go from concept to product in just weeks, much faster and less expensive than traditional methods,” read the company’s announcement. 

Nascent will join Facebook’s Building 8 lab, which focuses on quickly moving products from concept to shipping state. TechCrunch reports that Nascent is probably a good fit for Facebook’s ‘rapid prototyping’ segment.

Modular efforts are beginning to spring up across the tech space, such as Motorola’s Moto Z and Google’s recently suspended Project Ara.

Elmieh concluded that, “people have become used to the idea that with software, you can have whatever you want, whenever you want it. We want to make this happen with hardware — and we think Facebook is the best place to make this a reality.” 

Related reading: Google has reportedly canned Project Ara, it’s plan to build a modular smartphone

We're thrilled to announce our newest release, Postbox 5, now available for Windows and macOS (including macOS Sierra 10.12). This is our best release yet, filled with powerful features that will help you manage mountains of messages in no time.

Here's what's new in Postbox 5:

A Fresh New Look

We've updated Postbox with new styling and High-DPI support on Windows.

Placeholder Data in Responses and Templates

Now you can add dynamic data to your responses and templates. Placeholders automatically populate with message data, or your own data through the custom fields you create.

Simply TAB to a Placeholder, enter a value, and send -- that's it! Saving time and effort on repetitive emails couldn't be easier!

70 Email Templates to Drive Your Business

Placeholders are so powerful that we're including 70 professionally written email templates that you can customize and use -- and they all have Placeholders built right in.

Anti-Tracking Alerts

To provide you with more privacy, Postbox 5 has a new "Anti-Tracking" feature that will alert you when tracking tools are used within a message. Use Anti-Tracking to prevent pesky salespeople from knowing if, and when, you open a message.

Quick Post

Automate your world! Use Quick Post to more easily forward email content to hundreds of applications and services, like Zapier, IFTTT, Evernote and many more!

25 Email Signatures to Brand Yourself

As an added bonus, Postbox now includes 25 professionally designed email signatures that will present you in the best light possible. We've included designs of all shapes, colors and sizes.

Each signature is fully customizable, and contains all the code examples you need to make a big impression.

There's More...

Global filters, image resizing, Emojis, new international character input mechanism... You'll be blown away by what Postbox 5 can do.

Learn more about what's new on our Features page or download Postbox 5 today!

How to Purchase

Postbox is now on sale at our online Store. If you are a previous Postbox customer, full details on how to upgrade can be found on our Upgrade page.

Happy Emailing!

Lightroom CC (2015.7) and Lightroom 6.7 are now available.  The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support and lens profile support, and to address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom.

Please note that this version of Lightroom contains compatibility fixes for macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and also requires macOS 10.10 and greater.

We recommend you update to Lightroom CC (2015.7) and Lightroom 6.7 prior to updating to macOS 10.12 (Sierra).

Publish to Adobe Stock Contributor Site

You can now submit images directly from Lightroom CC to the brand new Adobe Stock Contributor Site using the included Adobe Stock Publish Service.  By contributing to Adobe Stock, you have the opportunity to showcase your work to millions of customers directly inside Creative Cloud applications.

Updates to “All Synced Photos”

We’ve made it easier to access your Lightroom CC images on the go with Lightroom for mobile and Lightroom for web.

You can now drag images directly to the “All Synced Photographs” collection in the Catalog panel.  By doing so, the image syncs with the Creative Cloud, and ensures that you’ll be able to edit, organize, or share the photo on the go with Lightroom across your devices.

Smart Previews for Faster Performance

You’ve always been able to use Smart Previews in the Develop Module as a way to edit photos without having access to the original images on disk.  Astute customers reported faster performance in the Develop Module when using Smart Previews and keeping their original images disconnected from their computer.  Now, you can set a Preference in the Performance tab so that Lightroom will always use Smart Previews in the Develop Module, if they are available, even when the original files are also available.

To do so,

1. Choose Edit > Preferences.
2. In the Preferences dialog, select the Performance tab.
3. In the Develop section, select Use Smart Previews Instead Of Originals For Image Editing.
4. Click OK and then restart Lightroom.

New Camera Support in Lightroom CC (2015.7) / 6.7

• Apple iPad Pro 9.7″ (wifi and cellular)
• Apple iPhone 6s Plus
• Apple iPhone 6s
• Apple iPhone 7
• Apple iPhone 7 Plus
• Apple iPhone SE
• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV*
• Casio EX-ZR4000 (EX-ZR5000)
• GoPro HERO5 Black
• Hasselblad H6D-100c
• Nikon D3400
• Panasonic DMC-G8 (DMC-G80, DMC-G81, DMC-G85)
• Panasonic DMC-LX9 (DMC-LX10, DMC-LX15)

*Please note that we support the import and editing of jpegs, raw files and dual pixel raw files from this camera model.  We do not support any specific dual pixel raw functionality.  If you are planning to use Dual Pixel raw files, please read Limitations with Canon Dual Pixel raw files in Camera Raw and Lightroom. 

**We added new versions of Adobe Standard color profiles for the Canon EOS 5DS and Canon EOS 5DS R cameras. These versions are denoted as V2, and the v2 profiles have lower contrast than the original Adobe Standard (v1) camera profiles.

New Tethered Shooting Support in Lightroom CC (2015.7) / 6.7

• Nikon D5
• Nikon D500

New Lens Profile Support in Lightroom CC (2015.7) / 6.7

Mount	Name
Apple	iPhone 6s back camera 4.15mm f/2.2 (DNG)
Apple	iPhone 6s Plus back camera 4.15mm f/2.2 (DNG)
Apple	iPad Pro back camera 4.15mm f/2.2 (DNG + JPEG)
Apple	iPhone 7 back camera 3.99mm f/1.8 (DNG + JPEG)
Apple	iPhone 7 front camera 2.87mm f/2.2
Apple	iPhone 7 Plus back camera 3.99mm f/1.8 (DNG + JPEG)
Apple	iPhone 7 Plus back camera 6.6mm f/2.8 (DNG + JPEG)
Apple	iPhone 7 Plus back iSight Duo camera 3.99mm f/1.8
Apple	iPhone 7 Plus back iSight Duo camera 6.6mm f/2.8
Apple	iPhone 7 Plus front camera 2.87mm f/2.2
Apple	iPhone SE back camera 4.15mm f/2.2 (DNG + JPEG)
Canon EF	Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM +1.4x
Canon EF	Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM +2.0x
Canon EF	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Canon EF	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Canon EF	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Canon EF	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Canon EF	Venus Optics Laowa 105mm f2 (T3.2) Smooth Trans Focus
Leica S	Leica ELMARIT-S 1:2.8/45mm ASPH. CS
Nikon F	Nikon AF VR Zoom-NIKKOR 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED
Nikon F	Nikon AF-P NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-6.3G ED
Nikon F	Nikon AF-P NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-6.3G ED VR
Nikon F	Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 105mm f/1.4E ED
Nikon F	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Nikon F	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Nikon F	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Nikon F	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Nikon F	Venus Optics Laowa 105mm f2 (T3.2) Smooth Trans Focus
Olympus	Bower 7.5mm f/3.5 Fish-eye
Olympus	Rokinon 7.5mm f/3.5 Fish-eye
Olympus	Samyang 7.5mm f/3.5 Fish-eye
Panasonic	Bower 7.5mm f/3.5 Fish-eye
Panasonic	Rokinon 7.5mm f/3.5 Fish-eye
Panasonic	Samyang 7.5mm f/3.5 Fish-eye
Pentax K	PENTAX HD PENTAX-DA 15mm F4 ED AL Limited
Pentax K	PENTAX HD PENTAX-DA 21mm F3.2 ED AL Limited
Pentax K	PENTAX HD PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.8 Macro Limited
Pentax K	PENTAX HD PENTAX-DA 40mm F2.8 Limited
Pentax K	PENTAX HD PENTAX-DA 55-300mm F4.5-6.3 ED PLM WR RE
Pentax K	PENTAX HD PENTAX-DA 70mm F2.4 Limited
Pentax K	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Pentax K	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Pentax K	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Pentax K	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Pentax Q	PENTAX 08 WIDE ZOOM
Ricoh	Ricoh GR 18.3mm f/2.8
Ricoh	Ricoh GR II 18.3mm f/2.8
Sony A	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Sony A	Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Sony A	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS
Sony A	Samyang 8mm f/3.5 UMC Fish-Eye CS II
Sony E	Rokinon 12mm f/7.4 RMC Fisheye
Sony FE	Rokinon 50mm AF F1.4 FE
Sony FE	Samyang 50mm AF F1.4 FE
Sony FE	Sony FE 50mm F1.4 ZA
Sony FE	Sony FE 50mm F2.8 Macro
Sony FE	Venus Optics Laowa 105mm f2 (T3.2) Smooth Trans Focus
Sony FE	Voigtlander HELIAR-HYPER WIDE 10mm F5.6
Sony FE	ZY Optics Mitakon SpeedMaster 85mm f/1.2

Customer reported issues resolved

• Selected Published Folder or Collection is not deselected if a folder is selected
• Adjustment brush stops working after deleting photo
• Collections with counts greater than 5 digits are truncated
• Exporting with a watermark changes white point.
• White Balance Loupe displays incorrect RGB values
• Error message about not being able to import photos when in fact the issue is due to the destination folder is read only
• Fuji E X2 file imported as DNG is unreadable “The File Appears to be unsupported or damaged”
• Keyword suggestion for a word having &(ampersand) is incorrect
• Vignette correction for Zeiss Batis 25mm f2 too aggressive
• Improved performance when using the Temperature and Tint slides for adjusting White Balance
• Fixed issue where Panorama merge failed when using source files from a Leica M Monochrom (Typ 246)
• Fixed issue where the SIGMA 10-20mm F3.5 EX DC HSM lens for Pentax mount was not being auto recognized

Installation Instructions

Please select Help > Updates to use the update mechanism in the Creative Cloud app.

Give us feedback

Once you’ve updated to the latest version of Lightroom, don’t forget to leave us feedback about your experiences. Lightroom wouldn’t be what it is today without our passionate and loyal customers around the world. Giving us regular feedback helps us to find and fix issues that we may otherwise not know about. We are listening.

Here are a few ways that you can send us feedback:

Report bugs and suggest features

Discuss workflow and get help with how-to questions or basic troubleshooting 

Thanks!

Slack @SlackHQ
Are you a Canadian curious about working at Slack? What luck! Our lovely Vancouver office is part of this: startupopenhouse.com/event/vancouve… #SlackSOH

Cecily Walker ✨ @skeskali
My Distraction Sickness cecily.info/2016/09/19/my-…

John Gruber @gruber
Apple should make a MacBook Pro with the same black finish as iPhone 7, right?

The first thing that may catch the eye of many looking to upgrade their Mac this year is the demise of the classic 'OS X' moniker. The end of OS X has been long rumored, and the expectation has often been for the Mac to move to whatever Apple chooses to name their OS 11. This would of course be a change on a massive scale, such as that between OS 9 and OS X was over a decade ago.

This year, with OS X finally seeing the end of its reign, will we be seeing another epochal change in Mac history?

Nope.

After a decade of mispronounced Roman numerals, Apple is ready to let go of the name, but not the number. The full title for the 2016 iteration of the Mac operating system: macOS 10.12 Sierra. OS X may be gone, but OS 10 survives.

Since the mystical OS 11 didn’t come in the aftermath of the last big cat, didn’t come on the heels of version 10.9, and now again hasn’t come to usher out OS X, it’s starting to look like it may never come at all. Let’s all cross our fingers and hope that that’s true, because the bottom line is that OS 11 isn’t needed anymore.

These days, Apple is a very different company than it was when OS X made its debut. The Mac is no longer Apple’s darling. It was long ago pushed aside by the iPod, then the iPhone and iPad, and now even a watch and a TV box. Each of these is its own platform, running its own operating system. Each of these has its place in the new age Apple ecosystem.

With iOS, watchOS, and tvOS all around, the freshly renamed macOS no longer serves the role of scrappy upstart. Today, the Mac is the eldest platform, and macOS needs to focus on stability and productivity. Leave the epochal changes to the young guys.

With this year’s update, named after California’s Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, macOS builds once more upon the strong base of its many predecessors. Trenchant in its restraint, 10.12 shirks sweeping changes in favor of iterative improvements. A perfect example of an update to a mature operating system done right.

Table of Contents

• Siri
• Universal Clipboard
• Auto Unlock with Apple Watch
• iCloud Drive
• Apple Pay
• Optimized Storage
• Photos
  • Memories
  • People
  • Places
  • Search
• Messages
• iTunes
• Tabs
• Picture in Picture
• Conclusion

Siri

I’m not sure that Siri has ever been particularly high on anybody’s wish list for a macOS (or OS X) update. And yet, it’s always just felt obvious that it would only be so long until Apple’s intelligent assistant made its way to their desktop operating system. This year, Siri has finally made the leap.

Siri on the Mac is focused mostly on multitasking. This is a big digression from the iOS version of Siri, which consumes the entire interface and does not allow you to do anything else until an interaction is finished. Despite this fundamental change, macOS Siri is more or less just a port of its iOS version, with only a few new tricks and special features.

Apple thinks Siri on the Mac will be useful when you want to take care of something quickly while you’re still in the middle of something else. The example they use on their website shows a user asking Siri to look up nearby restaurants while they are in the midst of messaging with their friends.

On the Mac, where opening an app feels like a lot more overhead than it does in iOS, I do see uses for Siri in situations similar to the above example. The intelligent assistant’s interface is light and fast. It can search Maps quickly without opening the Maps app (until you need to), it can rapidly get a certain playlist going without requiring you to navigate the iTunes interface, and it can easily send texts without you context switching to the Messages app.

Siri does more than this, too. The assistant on the Mac is very into files. You can ask Siri to show you all the files you’ve worked on in the past day or week, or show you the contents of a certain folder. You can then refine results based on data in the titles.

Once you have a certain search that you’d like to save, you can pin it to Notification Center for easy access. This can be a certain folder of files on your computer, or it can be something like sports scores or nearby restaurants. Any query that Siri for Mac returns shows up as a card that can then be pinned. Pinning cards simply requires clicking the + button in their upper right corner, and to remove them later just hit the x button in the card’s upper right corner in Notification Center.

The contents of Siri searches can also be manipulated via drag & drop. If you drag the border of a Siri card, you will pull a PNG screenshot of the results which you can drop in a folder or app. If the contents of the card are draggable, such as images that show up when you ask Siri to do a web search, then you can drag those around like standard files too.

Some other useful options: ask Siri to find certain photos in your Photos library, how to spell certain words, or how much free space is currently on your Mac. All of these will return results as cards.

Siri can be activated in several different ways on the Mac. There’s a new menu bar item to the left of Notification Center which will activate Siri, and there’s also a new Dock icon to call on the assistant. Finally, you can hold a key command. The command defaults to holding Option-Space, but can be changed to holding Command-Space or pressing Fn-Space, or to a custom shortcut of your choosing.

The shortcut can be edited in the new Siri section of System Preferences. This is also where you can go to change the language and voice of Siri. You can even pick which microphone you want Siri to listen from, and whether or not you want Siri to give voice feedback in response to commands. Finally, you can disable the menu bar button or disable Siri entirely from this preference pane.

---

I enjoy the idea of Siri on the Mac in the same way I enjoy the idea of Siri on the iPhone. The ideal of having an intelligent assistant to quickly help out with various tasks is a great one. In practice, however, I find I use Siri on the Mac even less than I do on iOS (and I rarely use Siri on iOS).

While I think that a lot of the features Apple has built for the macOS version of Siri sound useful, the reality is that talking to your computer just isn’t all that practical in most situations. I’m usually at my Mac in the office where I work or in a coffee shop. Neither of these places are great for talking out loud to a computer. When I am on my Mac at home, I’ve still found that it’s easier to just take care of most things manually. I move fast on the system, often faster than Siri would be able to anyway — particularly for file-related functions.

Ultimately, I’ve found Siri on the Mac useful a few times to run a quick search in Maps or start a certain playlist. I think the assistant could have had more to offer if Apple had given it a textual interface so I didn’t have to talk out loud to my computer. Even then I might find manual methods more natural.

I’m glad Siri is on the Mac; it seems like it should be since it’s on all of Apple’s other platforms. Despite that, though, I don’t think I’ll use Siri very often, if at all.

Universal Clipboard

The new Universal Clipboard is probably one of my favorite features of the macOS Sierra update. The feature uses Apple’s Handoff framework to sync the clipboards of all of your Apple devices together. Copy some text on your iPhone while you have your Mac open, and you can paste it on your Mac. The same thing works from Mac to iPhone, from iPhone to iPad, etc.

When I first heard about this feature, while I was excited for the utility, I was also a bit apprehensive about my devices overwriting each others’ clipboards. Data loss is never fun, even on the (generally) small level of what’s on your clipboard. Sometimes I will copy something important on my Mac, particularly while at work, and I’ll want access to that a bit later. If I pause for a moment to do something unrelated on my iPhone, and happen to copy something while I’m doing so, I wouldn’t want to lose my Mac’s clipboard. Thankfully, after three months of testing macOS Sierra and iOS 10, I’m happy to report that I have never had a single issue of that nature with the Universal Clipboard feature.

“Universal Clipboard” is a somewhat misleading name. It sounds great as a marketing term, but it implies that all of your devices are now going to have one single clipboard, probably held in the cloud, which they all constantly write to and read from. Thankfully, this is not how the feature works.

All of your devices continue to have their own independent clipboards, and in day to day activity on any one device it will work exactly as it always has. The change comes along only when all of the following points are true:

1. You have more than one device unlocked and on at the same time
2. You have recently copied something on one of the devices
3. You paste on a different device shortly after copying on the other

At this point, the device that you have pasted with will reach out via Handoff to get the data that you copied on the other device. It is only doing this because the other device is unlocked, in range of Handoff, and has recently copied something onto its clipboard. Once it has transferred the data, which can sometimes take several seconds, it will paste it for you.

If you copy something on one device, then lock that device, then paste on a different device, nothing special will happen. Universal Clipboard only works when Handoff has an active connection between devices (and a device has copied recently before another pastes).

I’m not certain if there’s an exact timeout on when one device stops broadcasting that it has something to paste over Handoff, but if you lock a device and then unlock it, it will no longer present its clipboard to be pasted from, even if the Handoff connection is active.

We can go over the technicalities and specifics all we want, but when it comes down to it, Apple seems to have nailed down the user behavior for this feature. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve been testing these systems on my main devices for three months now, and not once have I had the Universal Clipboard feature cause an unintended paste from another device, or overwrite a clipboard that I wasn’t intending it to overwrite.

I’m often bothered by Apple’s determination to take on complex features without presenting an actual interface. For instance, I never generate passwords via the Safari password suggestion feature because there’s no easy way to then see that password if I ever need it on a non-Apple system. Instead, I use 1Password, which has a fantastic interface to easily get my passwords if I ever need them.

Clipboard sync services and clipboard managers are not new concepts, and every one I’m aware of has an interface of some sort. Apple’s, like their password system, has no interface whatsoever. Apple wants Universal Clipboard to be completely invisible and “just work”. I don’t say this often about these kinds of cloud-controlled software initiatives from Apple, but in this case, I think they’ve gotten it right.

Universal Clipboard isn’t perfect. It could stand to be faster (if you tap on an iOS device and don’t see the Copy/Paste/Look Up menu come up right away, that delay might be from Universal Clipboard), and I wouldn’t complain about some sort of way to re-summon overwritten clipboards on those rare occasions when it might go wrong. Overall, the feature has provided me with nothing other than convenience.

I now have an answer to the “what’s the best way to get this text from my iPhone to my iPad immediately” problem. I just copy it on my iPhone and paste it on my iPad. No more texting or emailing myself things, and that’s fantastic. Universal Clipboard even works with photos and other types of media, although you’ll have to give it a bit longer to transfer the data between devices.

In an OS update that is made up mostly of small-but-nice improvements, I think Universal Clipboard is the best of them all. It’s not a total game-changer, but it’s a seemingly little thing which greatly speeds up a task I have to do on a regular basis. It brings the Apple ecosystem in closer, and blurs even further the lines of the differences between individual devices.

Auto Unlock with Apple Watch

I covered this feature on my watchOS 3 review already, but suffice to say, I didn’t find Auto Unlock with Apple Watch to be quite as exciting as I was hoping. When I first heard the new feature announced at this year’s WWDC keynote, I think my mind ran away from me a bit. I was envisioning a Mac that no longer had the burden of a login screen. Instead, it would be unlocked automatically based on the presence of my Apple Watch before I even got to it, and when I walked away it would also automatically lock.

In reality, this isn’t quite the way it works. In my testing, the speed of connection between my Apple Watch and my Mac weren’t fast enough to make the feature very useful. At the login screen I’ll get a spinner telling me the computer is unlocking, and a second or two later it will unlock. As I wrote in my watchOS review, a second or two of doing nothing but waiting is even worst than the time it takes to manually type in your password to get logged in (which would probably take barely longer than this anyway).

Further promoting my disappointment in this feature is that the Mac does not auto lock when the Apple Watch leaves the area. I’m not sure why this isn’t an option, as it seems almost more useful to me than using the Watch to unlock the Mac. I love the idea of no longer having to worry about whether I forgot to lock my Mac when I walk away because I know my Apple Watch will have taken care of it.

Sadly, auto lock is not in the cards this time around, and auto unlock does not yet have the speed it needs. I’ll keep hoping for a future update with auto lock, and I’ll be looking out for these rumored new MacBook Pros with Touch ID to take care of the inconvenience of unlocking my Mac.

iCloud Drive

With macOS Sierra, Apple is expanding iCloud Drive syncing from a single folder to three different folders. Alongside the iCloud Drive folder, the new update will now sync the Desktop and Documents folders from your Mac into iCloud as well.

This has some fairly wide-reaching benefits. According to Apple — as well as all the anecdotal evidence I’ve ever known — people store most projects that they are currently working on either on their Desktop or in their Documents folder. Thus, by syncing these folders into the cloud, Apple is allowing access to your current important projects from all of your devices. Furthermore, iCloud now provides an automatic offsite backup to these important files by holding copies of them beyond the local ones on your computer.

This is a pretty simple and straightforward feature with clear benefits. The only downside is that if you are still holding onto that 5 GB free iCloud tier, you’ve almost certainly got a decision to make now. Personally, I think it’s worth it just to get another backup of my most important files, and with the added bonus of having access to them everywhere.

In classic Apple style, there’s no real interface to these new iCloud Drive features. I think it would be very nice to be able to specify exactly which folders on my Desktop should be stored in the cloud and which shouldn’t, but there is of course no such option. The only choice that you have here is to turn Desktop and Documents syncing on or off, which can be done through System Preferences -> iCloud -> “Options” on the iCloud Drive row. The setting is on by default.

Apple Pay

With macOS Sierra, Apple Pay is finally coming to the Mac! ...Sort of. In the absence of a proper way of ensuring your identity via your Mac, Apple Pay for Mac just initiates payments and then kicks them off to your iPhone to get validated via Touch ID. With that in mind, the real feature here is less Apple Pay for Mac, and more Apple Pay for the web.

Websites can now integrate Apple Pay as an option for checkout in their online stores. If you are checking out of such a store and your Mac is aware that your iPhone is nearby, it will notify the website that Apple Pay is an option. In turn, the website can display the Apple Pay button to the customer, and tapping that button will initiate the payment on their iPhone.

Websites with Apple Pay integrations have been tough to find prior to launch day, so I’ve thus far been unable to test how functional this exchange is. I’m not sure if it works over Handoff, which would require your iPhone screen to be on in order for the communication to work; or some sort of push notification process, which seems like the best option since it would work regardless of your phone’s screen being on. It could be a combination too, using a push notification to ping the phone, then handling the transaction via Handoff once the phone is on and the customer has accepted it.

I’m sure we’ll find out soon once websites start to release support for the new feature. Personally, I think it will be a fantastic boost in website checkout experiences. Even with Auto Fill handling most of the information fill-ins these days, it’s still a pain to have to double check things and fix mistakes caused by poorly coded forms. Being able to just hand this off to Apple Pay, where I know the transaction will be secure and I know my information is correct, is something I’m very excited about.

The last aspect to touch on here is that it’s hard to think about this feature and not feel like those rumors about Touch ID on the Mac are vindicated. Passing the process off to the iPhone is fine, but its certainly not the best process. It precludes any Mac users who are not iPhone owners from having access to a great feature, and it complicates the process of making the payment by involving wireless technologies that are not 100% reliable. We’ve all had the experience of trying to AirDrop between our Macs and our iPhones and having them inexplicably be unable to see each other. If they’re using a similar technology (if not the very same one) to determine when the iPhone is in range, the feature may end up not being enabled at certain times when it should be. All of these problems could be immediately relieved if the Mac could just handle the identity validation on-device.

Optimized Storage

Optimized Storage is a new feature that makes some people nervous, but I personally am a big fan. In macOS Sierra, Apple scans the data on your computer and determines which files you don’t need locally on the machine when you run low on space. Mostly, this consists of large old files which you haven’t touched in quite a while.

When space is needed, macOS Sierra will automatically offload these old files to iCloud. This clears room on your hard drive without requiring you to delete any of your files.

The obvious caveat here is that if you ever do need the file, you now have to download it back to your machine before you’ll have access to it. This means that if you don’t have an Internet connection when you need the file, you won’t be able to get it. Similarly, if the Internet connection you are on is not very fast, it could take a very long time for a large file to redownload to your computer.

I think this is a case where everyone will need to evaluate their own use cases before deciding on this feature. Personally, I know I have a lot of big old files on my computer, none of which I really want to delete, but also none of which I ever really use. In the past, I’d offload some of these to an external drive, but to me, this new Optimized Storage features sounds perfect. Rather than removing the files completely, I can still have them pretending to be there, but they won’t take up space unless I ever need them again. Furthermore, I will then be able to get them no matter where I’m at, rather than needing to retrieve my external drive in order to transfer them back to my machine.

If you compare the Optimized Storage feature to moving things to an external drive, I think it makes a lot of sense. If you’re only comparing things being on your computer vs things not being on it, then obviously things being on it is better. The main thing to keep in mind, though, is that Optimized Storage will only remove files if you run low on space. In other words, when Optimized Storage starts removing files is when you would have had to start finding things to delete anyway.

Once again, Apple makes their feature a little less useful by refusing to provide an interface for it. I think there would be a lot less trepidation about this feature if we had the ability to choose exactly the files that are transferred. Unfortunately, we (mostly) do not.

I say mostly there because it is possible to manually retrieve files which have already been transferred to the cloud. Any files that have been moved from your computer to the cloud will include a small download icon on their right side when you look at them in Finder. Just click the download button to redownload a file to your machine. Beyond that, there’s not really any other interface for the Optimized Storage feature. You can’t pick the files to offload for it – it just takes care of this by itself.

For my situation, I think Optimized Storage is exactly what I’ve been wanting. I have old files on my Mac, but I rarely need to access any of them. Furthermore, 99% of my Mac usage is done while on a decent Internet connection, so I don’t think downloading something that I suddenly need would ever be much of a problem. With this in mind, if Sierra wants to take over the task of having to figure out which files should stay and which should go, I’m all for it.

I think it’s important to note that Optimized Storage is on by default when you install macOS Sierra. On the one hand, if Apple is confident enough in the feature to enable it by default, I would expect it to be quite solid and not cause problems for the great majority of users. On the other hand, if you read all of the above and still feel that you don’t want the feature messing with your storage, then you should probably turn it off. You can do so from System Preferences -> iCloud -> “Options” in the iCloud Drive row -> uncheck Optimize Mac Storage.

Photos

The Photos app in macOS Sierra has received a nice new set of features. Most of these are making use of what Apple is calling “computer vision technology” to run powerful object and scene recognition on your photo library. The results are impressive, and are being used in a few of the new features that have been added to Photos.

Memories

The biggest new addition, based on Apple’s announcement of the update at WWDC, is Memories. Memories is an attempt to intelligently gather together groups of related photos and videos into a “memory”. The goal is to allow you to relive certain events or periods in your life through the photos and videos you took of them.

Each “memory” will have a label such as ‘Best of Last Month’, and consists of a slideshow and a set of photos and videos. Double-clicking a memory will open it, showing the slideshow at the top and a summary of the photos making up the memory below. Memories will try to pick the “best” of all the photos that are drawn into the period. A Show All button will allow you to expand the summary of the memory to show all of the photos and videos included in it.

Underneath the photos and videos of the memory, you’ll find a ‘People’ section, which includes any people that Memories has determined to be in the photos above. The people displayed come from the new People feature in the app, which I’ll discuss below. If Photos has not identified anyone, this section won’t be present.

Below the People section you’ll find a map showing all the places where photos and videos from the memory were taken. Below that is a “related” section, which will show even more memories that you can look at.

At the very bottom of the page you’ll find options to delete a memory completely or add it to your “favorite memories”. The latter will create (or add to if you’ve already created it) a new “Favorite Memories” album, where you can see all the memories you’ve marked as favorites.

While Memories isn’t a feature that I use very often, I’ve been impressed by what it has surfaced over the last few months. Memories seems to generate new content sporadically, so if you check in every couple of weeks you will likely see new entries popping up (depending on how often you take pictures). I haven’t found the slideshows particularly compelling, but the groupings of photos and videos have been a fun way to look back on old times when I’m in the mood for that kind of thing.

People

The next “new” feature of the Photos app is the People section. While Apple is billing this as new, it’s really just an updated version of the Faces feature which has been in Photos since its beginning. If you have ever done any work to categorize pictures in Faces in the past, those have all been moved to here.

At the top of the People interface you’ll find a grid of people you’ve marked as “favorites”, and below those is the grid of the rest of the people that you’ve defined. When you double-click a person’s entry, you’ll open up an interface similar to Memories, showing all the photos of the person at the top. Below these will be a section showing other People present in the photos, below that a Places section showing where the photos were taken, and below that a Related section showing more Memories.

At the very bottom of the page are options to confirm additional photos of this person, favorite or unfavorite them, or add the entire group of photos of them as a memory. That last option will create a new entry in the Memories section of the app which is titled by the name you gave the person in the People section, and opens to the People interface.

If you select the ‘Confirm Additional Photos’ option, Photos will initiate a search of all of your photos looking for the person in question. This shouldn't take more than a minute or two, but I’ve seen it get stuck a few times. If it takes longer than that to display the first photo, try hitting ‘Done’ in the top right and then hitting the button again.

Once it works, you’ll see photos show up one at a time, with a highlight circle around one of the faces in the photo. You can confirm whether the face has been correctly recognized by choosing Yes or No at the top. Keep choosing until you’ve gone through all the photos the app has recognized, or hit Done whenever you want. Also of note is that if the app gets a face wrong but you click Yes or hit return before you realize it, you can just hit Undo to go back to the previous photo and fix the mistake.

Adding new faces to the People interface is done at the bottom of the main interface, underneath the grid of current People. Clicking the plus button there will display a grid of recognized, but not yet categorized faces. You can then select one face and choose ‘Add’ to create a new Person based on that face, or select multiple faces and choose ‘Merge & Add’ to combine all of them into one new person. Once you’ve added a new person you’ll be back on the main People interface, and can then click underneath the new addition to add a name. If you already have another entry for the person you’ve added, just give them the same name (it should appear in a drop down as you type) and Photos will ask you if you’d like to merge the new photos into the existing Person entry.

Photos will automatically select a group of photos that it thinks is of the person in question when you create an entry for them. The more Photos you manually select when you add the original entry, the more photos the app will connect to that Person. Similarly, when you confirm a batch of photos of someone within the Confirm Additional Photos interface, the app will connect more photos than just the ones you confirmed. Every photo added increases Photos’ knowledge and ability to accurately add even more.

In playing with the interface, I’ve found that Photos seems to be fairly conservative with its guesses for confirming additional photos of people. It rarely proposes a photo that is not of the person in question, but because of this it also seems to miss a lot of photos of that person that it isn’t sure enough about. The best way I’ve found to get through this block is by adding another batch of photos that you select manually of the person, then merging those into the existing entry. This gives Photos more data to work with, and in turn it will start proposing more photos for you to confirm.

Overall, I’m not sure whether the facial recognition algorithm behind the People feature is any better or worse than the one behind the Faces feature last year (I’m pretty sure it’s at least somewhat different due to Apple’s computer vision technology being a brand new thing, but it’s hard to know for sure without someone in Apple telling us). At the very least it is comparable. Still, the interface for the People feature is a significant improvement over the clunky Faces interface from last year, and makes adding and merging new batches of photos for the same person far easier. Since compiling as many faces as possible for each person is pretty much the whole point of the interface, I give this section of Photos a big thumbs up compared to its old implementation.

Places

The new Places feature has been mentioned several times above, but basically consists of a new map interface that can now be found all throughout Photos. The Places map exists within the Memories and People interfaces, and will display the locations on a map of every photo in the selected memory or of the selected person, respectively.

If you open up any particular photo from anywhere in the app, you’ll see a Details button in the top right corner, and clicking on this button will show all the data about the photo. This includes which People the photo has been found to contain, as well as the Places map that will show where it was taken. In the top right above the map will also be a Show Nearby Photos button, which will inflate the map interface to fill the Photos screen and display all the pictures taken nearby to the photo that was selected.

Places is not really a new feature for Photos, as previous versions did separate groups of pictures by location as you scrolled down through your All Photos view. The utility of Places, however, is in exposing that location data in a far more prominent way than it was before. Now you can much more easily see a great visual representation of where your photos were taken, and it is more or less ubiquitous throughout the app.

Search

The final feature of Photos is the one I find to be the most useful. The search functionality of the app has been greatly improved in quality as well as in scope. This is where that fancy “computer vision technology” is truly coming into play.

The new search in Photos for macOS Sierra allows you to search for the content of your photos rather than just the metadata about them. For instance, if you want to see all of your photos that include trees, just search for ‘Trees’ and you’ll get them. This kind of computer vision is extremely difficult to pull off, but Apple has done a fairly decent job of it here.

When you first install macOS Sierra and open up the Photos app, it will scan your entire Photos library and start running algorithms and calculations to parse the objects within all of your photos. You should note that this process can take quite a while (hours or even days, depending on the size of your library), and these features will not be functional until it has been completed.

Once the process finishes and your pictures are ready to search, it’s worth noting that you can’t search completely freely. Rather, your searches are limited in scope to the categories that Apple’s scanning has identified within your photos. By extension, any categories that Apple does not scan for simply will not exist.

When you type in a search term, Photos will start showing suggestions for what you might be typing. If you type something that doesn’t exist as a category, you’ll get “no results” and be unable to run the search at all. When you do search for something that Apple has scanned for and found, you’ll see all of the photos that match the term shown in the window below. Unfortunately, there’s no way to see a list of all of the available search terms for your photos. As such, you just have to guess and check and see if the term is there.

In real world usage, search is at its most useful when there’s a specific photo that you’re trying to find. The hard part now is training yourself to remember that the feature is available. I’ve had multiple times over the last few months where I want to find an old photo and I spend forever looking for it manually, only to remember at some point after I’ve found it that I could probably have just run a search and surfaced it in seconds. If you think of search first and the photo isn’t categorized by anything you search for, you’ve only really lost a few seconds. If the photo does show up from the search, you may have just saved yourself several minutes of time for that single task. It’s a very powerful tool when it works right. Based on my own personal library, while it isn’t 100% accurate — or really even close to that — it’s accurate enough as to be a very useful tool.

---

Overall, Photos for macOS Sierra packs some interesting new features which push the application forward. This year’s update to the app focuses strongly on surfacing new data from our photos that was previously much more difficult to find. We can discover old memories, more easily compile photos of particular friends and family, and see exactly where we’ve taken our photos. We can even search for objects within them. As far as year-over-year updates go, this one seems like about as much as we could ask for.

Messages

Messages in macOS Sierra did not get nearly the overhaul that its iOS counterpart did this year. In fact, the only changes that the messaging app received were the bare minimum amount to keep it capable of understanding messages sent from iOS users.

The updated Messages app is capable of receiving sticker messages coming from iOS devices, and it does its best to place them in the same way that they were placed by the sender. In my experience, between my iPhone, iPad Pro, and MacBook Pro, the MacBook has been the only one to sometimes have issues with misplacing stickers by short distances. Even a short distance can completely change the purpose of the sticker, so that aspect is a bit disappointing. I hope future updates will get the scaling worked out to place stickers with higher accuracy.

Sadly, Messages for Mac has no support at all for placing stickers on Messages. It’s not surprising that iMessage Apps aren’t going to run in the Mac version of Messages, but I see no reason why sticker placement should not have been built-in.

Speaking of features missing despite no technical limitations, Messages for macOS neither has support for sending nor even viewing messages sent with bubble or screen effects. The Messages app in iOS 10 has a whole set of effects that can be applied to sending messages, such as having them appear with lasers or balloons behind them, or having them “slam” into place when they’re received. Messages for macOS has no support for sending messages with these effects, but even weirder than that is the way the app receives them. Messages knows when it has received a message sent with a bubble or a screen effect, but rather than displaying the animation, the app instead just shows the message regularly and then adds a parenthetical underneath it describing what effect it was sent with. “(sent with Lasers.)” or “(sent with Slam Effect)” are examples of what it might say, but it varies based on the effect that was used.

The only effect that does work on Messages for macOS is the “invisible ink” effect, which obscures the text with sparkles that can then be moved out of the way to read it. On iOS, you clear the way by swiping across the message or tapping within it. On macOS your mouse just acts like a finger, and sliding over the message will reveal its contents.

The final new feature of Messages is the only one that works for sending as well as receiving: expanding links inline. If you send or receive a URL in Messages for macOS, the OS will grab the contents of the website or video behind the URL and expand a preview of the page’s content inline right in the app. If the link is to a video from a supported website, such as YouTube, the video will be available to watch directly within the confines of the Messages app. This is a great feature which other messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and Slack have had for a long time. It’s great to see it finally make its way to Apple’s messaging platform as well.

That’s it for Messages for macOS Sierra. With all of the fanfare and excitement over Messages for iOS 10, I was expecting quite a bit more from the desktop version. At the very least, the app should be able to play screen and bubble effects, but I think that the Mac should also get access to sticker packs and be capable of placing stickers. I hope Apple brings Messages for macOS back up to date quickly. I would hate to see their messaging platforms diverge when one of their greatest strengths has always been the availability of the same features across all Apple product lines.

iTunes

At this point, it’s starting to seem like no major update of Apple’s desktop operating system will be complete without iTunes getting some sort of slight design refresh. macOS Sierra is no different, marking another year in which the behemoth of an application continues to drag along, devoid of the disassembly that it sorely needs. For this year’s new paint job and minor feature bump, Apple has placed the spotlight on the Apple Music section of the app.

iTunes works more or less the same as it did last year, but now the For You, Browse, and Radio sections of the app have been updated to reflect the same new design language as the iOS 10 Music app. Mainly, this consists of extra bold headlines and large artwork.

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber, the For You tab has two interesting new playlists now placed prominently at the top of the screen: My New Music Mix and My Favorites Mix. As a whole, I haven’t been particularly impressed by Apple Music’s algorithmic and curated “for me” content over the last year. These two new algorithms, however, are a different story.

The My Favorites Mix seems to pick very close to the standard set of favorite songs that you listen to. In my experience, it’s been including about 60-70% songs that I listen to on a regular basis. The rest are all songs I do not listen to but which are by artists that I do listen to. I’ve been very much enjoying this playlist because it stays within my comfort zone while still branching out the scope of songs I listen to by my favorite artists.

The My New Music Mix playlist also takes your favorite songs into account, but in my experience it doesn’t include any of those songs themselves. Instead, it clearly tries to branch out a bit further than the My Favorites Mix. In the last few weeks of using this playlist, I’ve found that it generally contains about 25% artists that I listen to (although always different songs from them than I generally listen to) and 75% completely new music. It doesn’t hit the sweet spot quite as directly as the My Favorites Mix for me, but it’s not supposed to. By definition, this mix is supposed to help us find new music, and it’s not going to be able to do that without sometimes picking songs that we don’t enjoy. That’s what the skip button is for.

Back to iTunes, below the two new Mix playlists you’ll find recently played albums, followed by daily featured playlists and albums, then artist spotlights, and finally new releases at the very bottom. Overall, I like the new For You interface: it’s a lot more straightforward and less cluttered than the previous version. I’ve found myself going to use it more in this new update than I did throughout most of last year (on my Mac and on iOS).

If you’re wondering what happened to the Connect tab, it isn’t gone entirely. It has simply been demoted to a sub-section of the For You interface. At the very top of For You there are two tabs now. The default Recommendations tab has all of the above which I already touched on. Next to it is the Connect tab, which contains a grid of cards making up posts from any artists you follow.

Beyond For You, the Browse tab does what its name suggests. It has five tabs itself: New Music, Curated Playlists, Videos, Top Charts, and Genres. All of these are more or less self-explanatory, and nothing has changed since last year except for the bolder design that is seen across the Apple Music UI. The same can be said for the Radio section of the app.

Overall, the most interesting aspect of the changes to the Apple Music sections of iTunes are the introduction of the Mix playlists. If you check out nothing else about the new iTunes refresh (and you’re an Apple Music subscriber), make it those two weekly playlists. I’ve already found several great new songs and artists that I hadn’t known about in just a few weeks of the playlists being out.

Beyond Apple Music, the other big new feature of iTunes in macOS Sierra is the addition of official lyric support in the interface. Lyrics can be found via the Up Next/History button, which now has a new tab added for them. While iTunes will not be able to identify lyrics for every song, when it can find them it shows them in the popover window.

If you’re controlling your music via the iTunes MiniPlayer, you can see lyrics there too, although they’re a bit hidden. First, you’ll need to click the “...” button to open the dropdown menu, then from there choose ‘Show Up Next’. This will expand the MiniPlayer downward to display the songs coming up next, and you can then click the dropdown arrow next to ‘Up Next’ and change it to ‘Lyrics’.

The last step there might not be necessary, because the MiniPlayer’s selection will mimic that of the main iTunes window selection for Up Next, History, or Lyrics. However, regardless of which is shown or hidden, the button in the dropdown menu will always read ‘Show/Hide Up Next’.

iTunes does not have any fancy features for their lyric integration, such as highlighting which line is currently playing in a song as it goes. This is one advantage that user-driven services such as Musixmatch have over the first-party lyric features. In my personal experience, Musixmatch also seems to have a more comprehensive library of lyrics than iTunes does at this time.

Regardless, it’s great to have official lyric support in iTunes. I’m sure Apple will improve their database over time, and maybe at some point we’ll start to get more advanced features like those offered by other services.

---

The new iTunes update in macOS Sierra is fairly minor overall, but still manages to bring some nice improvements. Lyric integration is great to have in the official music app for macOS, and the new Mix playlists are fantastic additions for Apple Music subscribers. The new For You section in general is a bit more coherent too, which I appreciate.

At some point in the future, it feels like Apple will have to handle the unbundling of iTunes’ myriad of parts. The application now contains the interfaces for on-device music, Apple Music, iOS device syncing and management, the iTunes Music Store, the iTunes movie and TV show stores, Apple’s podcasts directory, the iOS App Store (yeah, that’s still embedded in iTunes, too), burning music onto discs, iTunes U... I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The application is very good at hiding all of these parts so that it doesn’t look as complex as it is, but all that really does is make it harder for people to find other features when they need them.

Someday, I will feel great satisfaction and joy as I finally get to write the story of The Great iTunes Deconstruction. Today is not that day.

Tabs

Here’s a new feature which will bring enjoyment to any tab lovers out there. In macOS Sierra, most document-based applications which have the ability to open new windows will now also have the ability to open those windows as tabs. Interestingly, the feature is going to work automatically for many third-party apps, requiring no work from their developers at all.

To control the tabs feature, there is a new setting in the Dock section of System Preferences. The default is to always open new windows as tabs when apps are running in Full Screen mode. You can choose instead to always open new windows as tabs (where possible) even when not in Full Screen, or to only ever do it manually. Most apps will allow this manual behavior through the familiar Command-T command, or if not then through the File menu. If it isn’t an option in the File menu, the app likely does not support the new behavior.

This isn’t a particularly far-reaching feature, but it’s nice to have choice for anyone who prefers the interface of tabs over that of new windows. Personally, while I think tabs are great for web browsers, I prefer separate windows most of the time for other apps. That said, if I ever do run an app in Full Screen mode, creating new windows as tabs is a far better experience than the alternative, which will create an entirely new Desktop for the window and then show a slow Desktop sliding animation as you transition over to it.

The actual interface of tabs in these apps is exactly what you’d expect from Safari, Terminal, and other apps that already had tabs. Most of the time, the standard key commands for moving amongst tabs still work (this may not be true in third-party apps which have assigned those key commands to other features), and dragging tabs around to reorder or create new windows from them has the same behavior as you'd expect.

Picture in Picture

Picture in Picture is an extremely welcome new feature in macOS Sierra. It comes in the form of a new button which shows up in the bottom right corner of supported video players.

Clicking on the button causes the video to pop out of its window into a smaller rectangle, which then floats on top of other content. The rectangle’s size can be adjusted manually to a maximum of a little less than 1/4 the size of the screen (on a 13” MacBook Pro). Moving the box around will cause it to snap to one of the four corners of the screen. If you want it to stay exactly where you place it without snapping, you just have to hold down the Command key as you move it.

There’s not much else to Picture in Picture. It is a simple feature that gets its job done well, and I’m excited to have it coming to macOS. I’ve been using Picture in Picture on my iPad Pro for nearly a year now, and it’s a great way to watch video while doing other tasks.

The last thing to discuss here is compatibility. While many websites will have the Picture in Picture button inserted by default into their video players, others will not. Unfortunately, websites which use customized video players, such as Netflix, are not going to have the Picture in Picture option without building support for it themselves ¹. This means that we’ll have to rely on the developers of these websites to put in extra work in order to support the feature. Based on how long it has taken for iPad Picture in Picture support to be built into many apps, I wouldn’t expect these companies to move quickly here either.

Conclusion

macOS Sierra is not a game-changing update. It is an iterative improvement to the solid structure that is Apple’s desktop operating system. This is an operating system that is mature enough to only need such iterative improvements from here on out, building slowly on what came before and choosing carefully where it wants to go next.

Sierra proposes several brand new routes for the next steps of this operating system. The iCloud Drive improvements show Apple’s first moves toward a possible future where Macs can be backed up to and restored from iCloud as easily as iOS Devices. Optimized Storage is a glance in the direction of the idea of Macs with “boundless” memory; where data’s presence on the machine is fluid, and unnecessary for the the user to worry about.

Apple’s work on search in Photos could open many doors through the use of advanced computer vision and machine learning. Apple Pay on the web imagines a future without worrying about entering credit card information into insecure web pages. Nearly every aspect of Sierra is looking to the future.

Time will tell which of these new directions will pay off. We’ll revisit them next year for macOS 10.13, and see where Apple has continued to take them. While future updates may hold more excitement, macOS Sierra brings improvements without compromise. It is a solid addition to the foundation of macOS, and both the system and its users are better off because of it.

---

Like MacStories? Become a Member.

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

Join Now

Apple Pay started with point of sale terminals and iOS apps. With iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, Apple has extended Apple Pay to include web-based purchases made with its Safari browser. Despite being limited to Safari, Apple Pay's combination of simplicity and security has the potential to make it a de facto requirement for online retailers.

On iOS, Apple Pay works in Safari and the Safari View Controller that can be displayed inside other apps. Apple Pay also works in Safari on Macs running macOS Sierra, which was released earlier today. If you already have Apple Pay set up on an iPhone or Apple Watch, there is nothing new you need to do to use Apple Pay on the web. The only difference is in the way you authorize a transaction on the Mac.

On iOS and Mac, Apple Pay buttons can appear during the checkout process, but can also be placed on product pages as a way to bypass traditional checkout processes entirely. One nice touch is that the Apple Pay API can query whether there is an Apple Pay account set up for the device being used. If not, Apple Pay buttons can be hidden.

On iOS after you tap on an Apple Pay button, a sheet slides up with the billing and shipping information stored in your Apple Pay account, which can be edited before completing your purchase. The only other step is to place your finger on the Touch ID sensor to authenticate and complete the transaction.

On the Mac, the process is a little different. Because Macs don’t have Touch ID sensors,¹ payment authorization can't take place using Mac hardware. Instead, using the Apple Pay API, the merchant can check if there is an iPhone or Apple Watch that can be used to authenticate the sale. This all happens quickly and seamlessly for users who see a momentary spinner and are then asked to complete the sale using an iPhone or Apple Watch if a device is available.

In addition to being convenient, Apple Pay is more secure than a credit or debit card because it uses a single-use token for each transaction instead of transmitting credit card information as part of the sale. The Apple Pay API also requires that the merchant site use https. Here are the security details as described by Apple:

To securely transmit your payment information when you pay in apps and websites, Apple Pay receives your encrypted transaction and re-encrypts it with a developer-specific key before the transaction information is sent to the developer or payment processor. This key helps ensure that only the app or website you’re purchasing from can access your encrypted payment information. Every website offering Apple Pay must also verify their domain every time Apple Pay is offered as a payment option. As with in-store payments, Apple sends your Device Account Number to the app or website along with the dynamic security code. So neither Apple nor your device sends your actual credit or debit card numbers to the app.

When you use Apple Pay to make a purchase on your Mac in Safari, Apple Pay transfers purchase information in an encrypted format between your Mac and your iOS device or Apple Watch to complete your transaction.

Merchants that want to deploy Apple Pay on their sites can do so by signing up for an Apple Developer account and getting the necessary encryption certificates. The process is relatively simple, but there is an even simpler path. Online commerce companies like Shopify have announced support for Apple Pay on the web and can handle the certificates and developer accounts for merchants who don't want to deal with that.

The number of sites that currently accept Apple Pay is limited, but the promise of a single, secure process for purchasing things in person, in apps, and online should be attractive to consumers and retailers. For consumers, simplicity and convenience are paramount. For them, Apple Pay on the web is a little like Amazon's 1-Click purchase button, but instead of being limited to one site, it works across all sites that supports Apple Pay. For merchants, the convenience to customers, security, and the support of companies like Shopify and Stripe, should help turn more people into paying customers, encouraging retailers to add Apple Pay to their websites in what may be a virtuous cycle.

---

Like MacStories? Become a Member.

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

Join Now

When Twitter rolled out support for longer tweets yesterday, we mentioned that Tweetbot – the popular third-party client – would soon support the new format natively. Tapbots has released updates to the iOS and macOS apps today that let you view and create longer tweets (where media, polls, and quotes don't count against 140 characters) without having to rely on Twitter's official app. You can get the iOS update here.

→ Source: itunes.apple.com

“Our dealings with Nature are just lines in innumerable directions.”

-

William James

CouRAGE

Photo: Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive

This past week, Vancouver experienced a large convergence of urbanists from around the world - all here to attend Placemaking Week, a week-long event to promote walking, cycling and public space. It included a speaker series, plenary sessions, workshops, walking and biking tours, as well as networking parties. 

Luckily, the weather was gorgeous and many participants left the conference inspired by the great strides Vancouver has made toward becoming a walkable, bikeable place that prioritizes people and social interaction.

I attended a few events and met with many fellow urbanists because MODUS sponsored the Happy Streets Living Lab, one of the key projects during the conference. Unfortunately, halfway through the week, my son got sick and I stayed home to take care of him. In spite of this setback, I was able to enjoy one of the souvenirs left over from Placemaking Week: a big, shockingly pink, activated laneway. 

No longer a space for dumping and picking up garbage, the laneway that runs behind West Hastings Street between Seymour and Granville is now a true people place with basketball hoops, furniture, unique lighting and vibrant colours. The project More Awesome Now! is a partnership between the DVBIA, the City of Vancouver’s VIVA Vancouver program, and HCMA Architecture+Design.

“It is something new and different,” says Charles Gauthier from the DVBIA in an interview with Vancouver Magazine. “If you create opportunities for people to spend time in a space, they will do that.”

Three more alleyways will be converted to friendly public spaces. The next alley, planned for east of Granville Street between Smithe and Robson streets, will be a festival type space and is planned to open next month.The final alley, planned for south of Alberni Street between Burrard and Bute streets, is intended for independent craft-type kiosks, and is set for next spring.

With the imposition of a 15 per cent tax on sales to foreign buyers in Vancouver on August

With the change of the season, we’ve worked hard to release a new version of Firefox that delivers the best possible experience across desktop and Android.

Expanding Multiprocess Support

Last month, we began rolling out the most significant update in our history, adding multiprocess capabilities to Firefox on desktop, which means Firefox is more responsive and less likely to freeze. In fact, our initial tests show a 400% improvement in overall responsiveness.

Our first phase of the rollout included users without add-ons. In this release, we’re expanding support for a small initial set of compatible add-ons as we move toward a multiprocess experience for all Firefox users in 2017.

Desktop Improvement to Reader Mode

This update also brings two improvements to Reader Mode. This feature strips away clutter like buttons, ads and background images, and changes the page’s text size, contrast and layout for better readability. Now we’re adding the option for the text to be read aloud, which means Reader Mode will narrate your favorite articles, allowing you to listen and browse freely without any interruptions.

We also expanded the ability to customize in Reader Mode so you can adjust the text and fonts, as well as the voice. Additionally, if you’re a night owl like some of us, you can read in the dark by changing the theme from light to dark.

Offline Page Viewing on Android

On Android, we’re now making it possible to access some previously viewed pages when you’re offline or have an unstable connection. This means you can interact with much of your previously viewed content when you don’t have a connection. The feature works with many pages, though it is dependent on your specific device specs. Give it a try by opening Firefox while your phone is in airplane mode.

We’re continuing to work on updates and new features that make your Firefox experience even better. Download the latest Firefox for desktop and Android and let us know what you think.

• Download Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Release Notes for Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Download Firefox for Android
• Release Notes for Firefox for Android

Now that the iPhone 7 is out in the wild, vigilante users are beginning to run into issues with Apple’s latest smartphone.

First, we started hearing reports that some devices were suffering from a strange hissing issue. Now, it looks like some users are experiencing an inconvenient bug that affects the 7’s new lightning headphones, which are included in both the 7 and the 7 Plus.

@caseyliss @marcoarment @siracusa Here’s the issue on video. https://t.co/ZQjAMsUQZ1

— Scott O'Reilly (@scttor) September 18, 2016

According to some users, turning the iPhone 7’s display off for five minutes without music playing, while the Lightning headphones are still plugged in, will disable physical headphone controls. While most likely won’t notice this issue, because the physical controls are flipped off, this also means that voice calls will also automatically be shut off.

It’s likely that Apple intentionally included this feature to stop the new Lightning headphones from draining the iPhone 7’s battery, though the five-minute shutoff is likely a mistake.

Apple has told Business Insider that it’s aware of the problem and has plans to fix it via an upcoming software update.

Lots of interest, it seems, on this one — consultation on the temporary surface to be applied to the Greenway prior to the start of full-blown consultation on the permanent Greenway design later in the year.

City staff have added opportunities on Sept 24.

I strongly prefer that the temporary surface allows all potential Greenway users to get onto the Greenway and try it out, so that the broadest possible range of opinions can be brought forward to the final design. I’m in favour of accessibility for all; and I’m against exclusion in any form.

Come to a public workshop to learn about different temporary pathway options and share your thoughts:

• Kitsilano. September 17, 1 – 3 pm  (completed)
• Marpole. September 21, 7 – 9 pm
• Kerrisdale. September 22, 7 – 9 pm
• Kitsilano. September 24, 10 am to 12 pm.
• Kerrisdale. September 24, 3 – 5 pm

Meetings are public but space is limited. For more information and to RVSP, please visit Eventbrite. Each workshop will cover the same materials.

View the information boards  (2.4 MB)

Excerpt from the Information Boards:

Many people think about greenways in the traditional sense of nature trails or pathways through natural areas or along waterfronts.  In Vancouver, they are that and much more.

Transportation greenways are linear public corridors for pedestrians and cyclists that connect parks, nature reserves, cultural features, historic sites, neighbourhoods and retail areas.

The future Arbutus Greenway will encourage people to travel by foot and bike—and ultimately streetcar—and improve access to parks and public green space. In addition to being a transportation corridor, the future greenway will also include features such as lighting, landscaping and seating areas to create a welcoming public space.

I finally got my mitts on the iPhone 7, and I immediately set to work putting the now-infamous Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter and the new EarPods with Lightning Connector through their paces. So far the experience has been about as boring as you could hope, but I have encountered some surprising quirks you should be aware of.

The good

• The adapter has no discernible effect on audio quality. We tested several pairs of headphones with both the iPhone 6s through the internal headphone port and the iPhone 7 via the adapter. If there is any variation in quality, it’s imperceptible.
• We tested with all of our current wired-headphone picks and encountered no problems using their remote mics and controls. Any remote that worked with previous iPhones worked with the iPhone 7 through the adapter. This includes both Apple-certified and universal headphones. Android remotes that didn’t work previously won’t magically start working now, but if you have a pair that functioned well in the past, it still will.
• The crackling and Siri-triggering issues that plagued the iPhone 6 when used with third-party headphones don’t seem to carry over to the iPhone 7 and its adapter. We took two pairs of headphones that we knew caused problems on the 6s and tested them with the 7 via the adapter, and we were pleasantly surprised that they functioned perfectly. So, yes, you’ll still need an adapter, but you won’t need to use a silicone O-ring anymore.

The bad

• We followed up on some Twitter discussions of early reports that some adapter features stop working after a period of inactivity. (User Scott O’Reilly was the first person we saw mention it.) We have confirmed this issue in our own tests: If you have no music playing (or you aren’t on a phone call), and you lock the iPhone 7 and leave the adapter connected to the phone’s Lightning-connector port, after about five minutes the remote and mic on connected headphones will cease to function until you unplug and replug the headphones or the adapter—doing either will fix the problem.

  You can still play music through the headphones, but the remote and mic won’t “wake up” until you physically disconnect and then reconnect them. So far we’ve seen this behavior only with gaps in use of five minutes or more.

  This effect is especially annoying when you receive a phone call. If someone rings you up after the remote stops working, you can’t answer the call using your headphones’ remote unless you do the unplug-replug thing first.

  The issue doesn’t seem to affect Apple’s new Earpods with Lightning Connector, only the adapter. In fact, we encountered the same problem when we tested the adapter on an iPhone 6s running iOS 10: The adapter stopped working properly, but the Lightning-connector EarPods didn’t. It’s also notable that traditional headphones plugged into the iPhone 6s headphone jack (with the 6s running iOS 10) don’t have this issue. So the problem seems to be isolated to the new adapter (and possibly to the underlying software and firmware handling the interaction).

  Business Insider first reported Apple’s plans to release a software update to address the issue, and we confirmed this plan with the company ourselves. We have now tried the adapter with an iPhone 7 running iOS 10.0.2 and confirmed that the update remedies the problem.

• Although the adapter is small enough to be unobtrusive, it’s also especially easy to lose. I misplaced it no fewer than three times just in the first weekend I had it.

The indifferent

• If you like the old EarPods, you’ll like the Lightning EarPods. But if you were hoping for an upgrade via Lightning, you’ll be disappointed. The new EarPods with a Lightning cable don’t sound any better than the old EarPods do via a Lightning adapter. They still produce a slight peak in the high treble that amplifies any recording hiss, and the sound is still lacking in the low frequencies. Because of the headphones’ unsealed design, any truly deep notes are lost to the ear; all you tend to hear is overtones. However, speech is very clear for calls and podcasts, and the smooth pod fit that some fans like hasn’t changed one bit.
• I took a run with our open-backed Bluetooth sport pick, the Plantronics BackBeat Fit. As you might expect (since the iPhone 7 works fine with standard Bluetooth devices), pairing was uneventful, and connectivity was the same as usual. I also tried taking a call with the boom mic on my work headset, the Voyager Focus UC, and everything was as normal.

Watch this space

If Apple releases any info or updates to address the adapter issue, or if any other audio-related news happens, we’ll update you here. And, of course, as soon as we have the AirPods on hand to test, we’ll be sure to let you know about that, too.

Updated on September 21, 2016, with confirmation that Apple is planning a future software fix for issues affecting some adapter features.

Updated on September 23, 2016, after Apple’s release of iOS 10.0.2 corrected problems with certain adapter features.

(Photo by Lauren Dragan.)