I forwarded a link to a contact via iMessage yesterday and it never got to him, though it gave me a status message I’d never seen before: Sent to Email Address.
iMessage screen capture
I’d last texted this contact three years ago, and the history of that message is a blue bubble. I’ve migrated everything from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 14 since the original message was sent, so it looks like the history made the assumption it was pure iMessage. The picture I sent this morning went through properly as a text message. The contact information knows his phone number and his email.
I’m traveling in an area where I’m going in and out of cell coverage and may be on WiFi at times, or may be completely disconnected with my phone telling me it’s in S.O.S. Mode.
I wouldn’t have minded iMessage telling me that the message could not be delivered. I wouldn’t mind the message being delivered to his email address. I don’t like being told it was delivered and it not being so.
I hate change for change sake. Apple seems to have modified the volume control for music playing on the Lock Screen and I can’t see a good reason for the change.
Music playing via AirPods
While listening to music via AirPods it seems the only way to adjust the volume is to press the physical up/down buttons on the phone.
Music playing via AirPlay on speakers
When music is playing on external speakers the volume control line is visible below the play control.
My cardio workout has me using AirPods with the phone resting horizontally on the machine in front of me. In the past if I needed to adjust the volume I could tap the screen to wake it up, then adjust the volume with the slider. I also had visual feedback as to where the volume was set. With the new layout I have to pick up the phone, press the volume button, and return the phone to its resting location. It may sound like a minimal change but has to do a lot with balance and cadence, plus a much larger chance of dropping the phone.
Yesterday I noticed the nice cover art display on the lock screen of my upgraded iPhone. Today while working out I noticed it was working differently, much closer to the old style.
I couldn’t think of what might have caused the change. I scrolled up and there were some older notifications. I deleted all of them, but still no change. Then it occurred to me to tap the thumbnail of the cover art.
I have no idea why it was defaulting to the thumbnail today after defaulting to full screen yesterday.
I haven’t found anything that significantly annoyed me yet.
When I’m playing music and there’s cover art, it’s now displayed on the Lock Screen, which is nice.
When the cover art is missing, the controls are now at the bottom of the screen. Each time I see them there I start to rotate my phone, thinking I’ve picked it up upside down.
I’m sure I’ll get used to the new layout. I find this problem funny, at least today.
Tuesday July 20th I had a shock after upgrading my iPhone with the latest iOS.
I went digging around in my email for records of apple communications. I’d cancelled Apple TV+ before I had to start paying for it on July 1st. I was hoping that I’d not mistakenly cancelled multiple subscriptions. I know that I’d purchased my iPhone about two years ago, but knowing Apple’s release schedule, wouldn’t have bought it until after September.
I found the email invoice from June 20th, 2021, paying for the monthly update, as well as the 20th of each month, going back until I had initiated AppleCare on December 20th, 2019.
I had a conversation with a friend via texts about AppleCare in which he checked the situation on his sons iPad and recognized that it would end coverage at 24 months fairly soon. My conclusion was that I’d probably purchased my phone 90 days before I purchased the AppleCare subscription. I didn’t like the fact that it was currently showing coverage expired in the phone, but didn’t want to deal with apple to find out what was going on, hoping that this was simply a bug in the interface on the monthly renewal date.
At nearly 8:30pm on July 21st I got an invoice for the next month’s AppleCare in my email, and went and checked the about box. Now it’s correctly showing my coverage. I’m glad that it resolved itself without my intervention, but I think it’s a bad bug in the system that shows coverage expired on the regular monthly renewal date. I wonder what would happen if I were to lose my phone on the 20th of any particular month?
One of the things that’s still unknown is if I’ll be able to maintain this coverage past the 24 month period. AppleCare can be purchased up front as a fixed cost, or spread over monthly fees. One of the benefits of the monthly mode is that you can cancel at any time. The small print makes it slightly ambiguous if the recurring cost will continue indefinitely, or if it will automatically end after 24 months of phone ownership. I’m hoping for the former, because I’ve usually kept my phones for three years instead of two. I’ve never needed to use the phone insurance, but liked the idea of dealing directly with Apple if I needed to get anything fixed with the phone.
In my recent GoveeBTTempLogger Project I’ve been writing SVG files as temperature graphs. I realized I could organize the color combinations with CSS Style descriptions inside the SVG instead of fully describing each element of the graphic. I am using transparent backgrounds by default, and loading the SVG files in a simple index html file like any other image.
Playing with CSS in the HTML, I came across the ability to support dark-mode. I thought that this would be really nice for when I bring up the graphs on my phone late at night, not having everything being in a bright white background.
@media screen and (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
body {
background-color: black;
color: grey;
}
}
I added the previous block to my style in the index.html file, which overrides the default body style of background-color: white and color: black. It works nicely at the top level, but now the black lines and text in my SVG became invisible, since now they match the background.
I tried something similar in the style for my SVG and it was working great in Chrome or Microsoft Edge. But then I realized that it doesn’t work on my phone. After realizing that it wasn’t working correctly on the phone, I decided to try switching the defaults so my default used grey, and if light mode was selected it would use black. It still didn’t work! It seems that apple is paying attention to my color-scheme selection, but doing something different from any other browser.
<style>
text { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; fill: grey; }
line { stroke: grey; }
polygon { fill-opacity: 0.5; }
@media screen and (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
text { fill: black; }
line { stroke: black; }
}
</style>
I had a friend who works primarily on a Mac test to see if the problem was specific to the iPhone, or if it occurred in Safari on the desktop as well. Yes. Apple is handling my styles differently from the other browsers I tried.
Safari on MacChrome on MacFirefox on Mac
You can see my choices displaying the way I want on Chrome and Firefox, with grey lines and text on a black background, while Safari isn’t showing the grey. Am I doing something explicitly wrong in my style that Chrome and Firefox are forgiving? Or is Apple not supporting the feature properly?
The frustrating thing is that all browsers on iPhones use the Apple rendering engine. That means there’s no way I know to get the functionality I want on my phone, where the phone uses dark mode overnight, but light mode during the day.
I upgraded to iOS14 as soon as it was released just because I almost always keep my devices running the most up to date software I can. I don’t care about the widgets or interface customization options that were introduced with iOS14. I think much of that customization is actually what has kept me away from running Android.
The one thing that I really hate that was introduced was the date time picker in iOS14. I’ve included screenshots from my iPhone 11 Pro Max running the new version and my iPhone 7 running the old version.
The old version had the issue that it was not intuitive to be able to pick a minute that didn’t align to five minute increments, but was very easy to select the day, hour, or minute individually and scroll to a reasonable number for the start time, then switch the the end time and do the same. The keyboard was only shown when I was typing the name of the appointment or the location.
The new one uses half of the screen to pick just the day, as well as displaying the keyboard, which does not seem to affect the time. I touch the tiny display with the time, and if I can select the hour, I can scroll my finger up and down over the entire screen to scroll the number. If I miss the number slightly, the screen moves to show my another part of the entry field. Then I have to repeat the same solution with the minute. When I’m trying to hit the hour, I hit the minute, and vice versa.
Because of the size of the calendar entry, I have to scroll the entire screen to find where the end time might be.
This change just feels like change for change sake, and poorly implemented. I wonder if it’s even worse on a smaller screen.
iOS14.1 was released today, and I’ve already upgraded to it, but don’t see anything I’d consider an improvement to this issue.
I have IPv6 set up and running on my home network, but there was some testing I wanted to run remotely. My local Starbucks WiFi isn’t running IPv6 according to my quick test with https://test-ipv6.com/
The same test from my iPhone on TMobile shows it’s running IPv6 by default.
I had read somewhere that Apple supported IPv6 on the personal hotspot through a loophole in the netmask routing algorithms used by most providers..
When I tested the local network connection on my computer while connected to the Apple Personal Hotspot, it appeared to be running IPv6.
Unfortunately when I connected to my phone from my computer via the personal hotspot, I wasn’t able to get positive IPv6 results. Obviously the hotspot was working since I was able to get to the test site via IPv4 without issues.
Several years ago I’d written a program to manipulate data in the iTunes library using the approved Apple COM API. Part of the way this works in a C program is to include a type library in the headers defining all of the function calls. When iTunes is installed in the traditional way, Apple embedded the type library in the executable, and the executable was installed in a traditional location.
#import "C:/Program Files (x86)/iTunes/iTunes.exe"
using namespace iTunesLib;
With the installation of iTunes from the Microsoft store, the iTunes executable no longer lives in that location. Today my application builds properly with the following import command, but it may change mysteriously with version changes and automatic updates via the store.
#import "C:/Program Files/WindowsApps/AppleInc.iTunes_12093.3.37141.0_x64__nzyj5cx40ttqa/iTunes.exe"
using namespace iTunesLib;
My program builds and runs more reliably than it used to, which I’m assuming is in part due to the fact that I appear to now be using a 64 bit version of iTunes, and all the extra work Apple put in to make iTunes more reliable on windows in general.
Finding the iTunes application itself was the hardest part of the transition. I’m happy the API still exists because Apple no longer hosts easy access to the documentation for the API, and http://www.joshkunz.com/iTunesControl/ seems to be the most complete and searchable information.
WimsWorld 