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I'm having an odd issue, and I wonder whether anyone else has seen anything like this.

I have a headless Mac mini¹, named "cooper" for reasons that should be obvious. The mini lives in a cupboard (not under the stairs), and its main job is to run iTunes and feed the AppleTV, as well as any other long-duration tasks. It also occasionally acts as a test bed for my projects, but those have been few and far between lately. Surprise! It turns out that having kids takes up a bunch of time that would otherwise be available for projects, and once they're in bed I'm usually too shattered to do anything very serious.

Because it's headless, the main way I interact with it is via Share Screen from my MacBook Air. The problem is that the mini occasionally loses the ability to advertise itself as a Shared device in the Finder sidebar.

In this screenshot, I only see the NAS. There should be another entry above that, like so:

The thing is, the mini is still reachable via VNC - just not from the Finder, because the Finder in its wisdom only allows you to Share Screen from a machine that is visible under Shared. Using the "Connect to" menu action, or for that matter iSSH on the iPad, however, I can still VNC in and see that everything is running fine.

The only fix to this issue that I have found is to reboot the mini. Since I can get in both via VNC and via SSH, this isn't a huge issue, because I can shut things down and make it a clean reboot, but it's still annoying. I haven't been able to figure out a cause, either; sometimes it happens while I'm connected via Share Screen if the Air goes to sleep, while at other times it happens if the mini is asleep - it wakes up but doesn't advertise itself in the Finder sidebar.

Both the Air and the mini are running Yosemite. Any suggestions?

UPDATE: Ars Technica did publish a deeper investigation than I got into. It seems that the root of the problem is indeed in discovery, as I had surmised. With Yosemite, Apple switched from mDNSResponder to discoveryd, and it looks like the latter has some issues.

That said, the Ars suggestion of restoring mDNSResponder seems insane to me. I guess I will just muddle through until Apple fixes discoveryd.

There's this hilarious image going around, welcoming Apple to 2012 or something. It's a "humorous" play on the screen size of the iPhone 6 - and of course the 6 Plus "catches up" to monsters like the Samsung Galaxy Note.

It's okay, Android users, we get it.

I'm not going to pick this apart (not even the really really ridiculous parts - "Battery stats"? "IR blasters"? really? you're going with that?). I'm just going to point out that in the Android world, "innovation" apparently means "made the screen a bit bigger". "Not making the user's eyes bleed" is apparently not a factor.

Let's not kid ourselves: phones used to look like all sorts of things, and now they all look like iPhones.¹

What drives Android fans crazy is that almost everyone - including most Android users! - sees Android phones as a cheap alternative to an iPhone, not anything to desire in their own right. Sure, there are exceptions - until now, if you wanted a big-screen phone, you had to have Android - but that loophole has now been closed.

Wait till people start asking if their Galaxy Gear or whatever is an old Watch…

If you are wondering how to type the name of the Watch from your iOS device, wonder no longer.

It may seem odd, but that character is not part of the standard iOS keyboard - at least, not up to iOS 7. You can type it from a Mac (Shift-Option-8), but not from an iPhone or iPad.

Luckily, there is a fix.

From your iDevice, go to mrgan.com/gb.

Voilà! Now you can copy the  character (or any other useful character) from Glyphboard into your review or tweet.

If this is a one-shot, you can use Glyphboard directly from Safari, but if you expect to be discussing the Watch regularly, you can save it to your home screen.

Hope this helps!

Apple has always made beta version of its operating systems (both MacOS and iOS) available to registered developers. What was not widely known is that there was also an invitation-only programme for non-developers to get access to pre-release versions of the OSen. This programme has now been opened up for anyone to join.

Here is the link - but I hope you won’t sign up.

Why?

Remember iOS 7? Before the thing was even out, it was being lambasted in the press - including the mainstream press - for being buggy and even bricking people’s phones. It turned out that the "bricking" was simply the built-in auto-expiry of the beta versions. Non-developers who had somehow got hold of an early beta but had not kept up with newer version found out the hard way that betas expire after some time. Also, being beta versions, the quality of the software was - guess what? - not up to release standard yet.

In light of that experience, I do wonder whether opening up OS X even further is a wise move on Apple’s part. I really hope that I don’t have to read on the BBC next week that OS X 10.9.9 is really buggy and unstable, or something equally inane.

CNET reports that Nike are getting out of the wearable market.

Best comment:

Uh oh, it looks like your embed code is broken.

But seriously.

The tech commentariat is going crazy, passing around the conspiracy theory that Tim Cook, who sits on Nike’s board, killed the FuelBand effort.

M. G. Siegler:

> I’ve been saying

this

for a while

Tim Cook remaining on Nike’s board while Apple readies its own health/fitness-focused device was
awkward at best
.

[John Gruber](

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/04/18/nike-fuelband "CNet: Nike Fires FuelBand Engineering Team; Set to Exit Wearable Hardware Market" )

Interesting, particularly when you consider that Tim Cook sits on the Nike board.

Nick Heer
:

It’s worth remembering that Tim Cook is on Nike’s board, and that Nike and Apple have long collaborated on fitness.

I don’t think that Tim Cook strong-armed Nike into dropping the FuelBand to favour Apple’s own iWatch. It’s simply that "wearable tech" is not a discrete device. I wore a Jawbone Up! band for more than a year, but when I somehow ripped off the button end against a door frame, I couldn’t be bothered to replace it, and I don’t miss it. The only thing that class of wearables - Fitbit, FuelBand, Up!, they’re all interchangeable for the purpose of this discussion - is generating moderately interesting stats on your everyday level of activity. Sure, it was mildly amusing to get back to the hotel at the end of a long day wandering around Manhattan and upload that I had walked thirty thousand steps, but I knew already that I had done a ton of walking simply by the feel of my legs and feet! When I took actual exercise, the Up! didn’t track it very well, because a wrist-mounted sensor isn’t very good at working out how hard you are cycling or snowboarding.

Instead, I use an app on my iPhone, which does GPS tracking. I still have an ancient - I mean, vintage - 4S, so I don’t have any of the fancy-schmancy M7 sensors in the 5S, but even so, it’s much better at actually tracking exercise than the dedicated devices.

Sure, I could go all in and get one of those heartbeat monitors and what-not, but quite frankly I can’t be bothered. I don’t exercise to beat some abstract number, although I admit to keeping an eye on my average speed on the bicycle. Given the low frequency of my outings (surprise! two kids take up a whole bunch of your free time), I’m quite happy with my 30 km/h average, without needing to plot heartbeat, hydration, etc.

It is looking more and more like Apple is not building a watch at all, and I think that’s exactly the right move. We have spent the last twenty years or so reducing the amount of devices we carry.
Why reverse that trend now?

Nike just saw which way the wind was blowing - maybe with a little help from Tim Cook.

John Moltz points out that Apple has been doing wearables for over a decade:

Apple press release from Macworld 2003:

Burton Snowboards and Apple® today unveiled the limited-edition Burton Amp, the world’s first and only wearable electronic jacket with an integrated iPod™ control system.

Much like today’s wearables, it was a huge success. They sold literally dozens of them.

This wasn

’

t a one-off, either: [Ermenegildo Zegna did their own version](

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/13/ermenegildo-zegnas-ipod-ready-ijacket/ "
Ermenegildo Zegna's iPod-ready iJacket
" ), much better looking and of course at eye-watering cost. I saw one of these in a shop, and it did look very good, but it cost more than my first car, so I passed.

Apple and their partners have had actual products in the market for a decade. Google shows a bunch of vapourware, and they get all the press without having to deliver anything…

All this is to say: wearable tech isn’t exactly new. My own experience: after spending a couple of years with activity trackers on my wrist, I have reverted to using my iPhone for that. I also like nice watches - almost the only form of jewellery men can wear - and don’t plan on giving up any of mine just to get notifications on yet another screen. I may be wrong, but in a world where watches and even jackets last longer than smartphones, I can’t see any reason for wearables to take off.

If you follow tech news at all - and if not, why are you here, Mum? - you know that Microsoft finally got around to releasing Office for iPad.

Within hours of the launch, Word became the most downloaded application for iPads in Apple's app store.

The Excel and Powerpoint apps were the third and fourth most popular free app downloads, respectively, in the store.

Note that the apps themselves are free, but advanced functionalities - such as, for instance, editing a document - require an Office 365 subscription. A Home Premium subscription to Office 365 is $99 / £80 per year, which is a lot for home users. Fair enough, many Office users will presumably get the subscription through their employer, but many companies still don’t have subscriptions, so that is hardly a universal solution.¹

In contrast, new iPads get the iWork apps for free, and even for older ones the price was hardly prohibitive - I think it was less than $10 per app when I bought them. Lest you think that the iWork apps are limited, I have successfully used Pages to exchange documents with Word, with change tracking too. Numbers also works well with Excel files, including some pretty detailed models. Keynote falls down a bit, mainly because the iPad is lacking some fonts, but a small amount of fiddling can usually sort that out too. I would assume that the fonts issue will bite PowerPoint on the iPad too, anyway.

The main thing though is that Office on the iPad is just too little, too late. Microsoft should have released this at least two years ago. By then it was clear that the iPad was the tablet in business. Far from the lack of Office killing the iPad, the lack of iPad support seriously undermined Office!

Anyway, I will probably never even download it, despite being an Office power user² on my Mac. I think it will do okay, simply because of the critical mass of Office users that still exists, but Microsoft missed their chance to own the iOS productivity market the way they own that market on PCs.

A more detailed treatment of the pricing issue:

Apple makes their money on hardware sales. Therefore, they can give away iWork for iOS by baking its development costs into the overall iOS development costs.

Google makes their money on targeted advertising. Therefore, they can give away Google Drive because they’re scraping documents and tailoring ad content as a result. That’s pretty creepy, and might be against your employer’s best practices for confidentiality of information.

Microsoft doesn’t make money on iPad hardware sales, nor do they scrape Office documents for ads. Therefore, they charge you money to use their software beyond the basics. Makes sense to me.

Makes sense to me too.

Today at the Geneva International Motor Show, Apple announced CarPlay, with is the new name for "iOS in the car". It looks great!

They are pitching it as "a Smarter, Safer & More Fun Way to Use iPhone in the Car", and I love the concept. We upgrade our phones every year or two, but our cars much less frequently than that. In-car entertainment systems are limited by the automotive industry’s product cycles, so they are basically already obsolete (in consumer terms) by the time the car hits the showroom. Enabling cars to piggy-back on the smart, GPS-navigating, voice-recognising, music-playing computers that we already carry in our pockets can only be a good thing.

If you take a look at a video of CarPlay in action, though, I see one huge issue.

Touchscreens in cars are a terrible idea. Old-school controls gave drivers haptic feedback: if you turn the dial one notch, you feel the click, and you get the next radio station, or one increment of temperature, or whatever it is. This is something drivers can do completely blind, without taking their eyes off the road.

It’s been at least a decade since cars could accommodate physical controls for all of their functions, so multi-function control systems like iDrive, Comand or MMI were introduced to help with the plethora of systems and settings that modern cars require. All of these systems allow users to navigate hierarchical menu trees to control in-car entertainment, navigation, and vehicle settings.

These systems are still better than touchscreens, though, because at least the driver’s hand rests on the one control, and that control still has tactile increments to it. The haptic feedback from those clicks is enough for seasoned users to be able to navigate the menu tree with only occasional glances at the screen - very important at highway speeds.

Touchscreens are terrible for non-visual feedback. Users have no idea, short of looking at the screen, whether their action achieved the result they wanted or not.

Apple’s suggestion of using Siri is not much of a fix. I like Siri and use the feature a lot in my car to dictate e-mails or messages, but it depends entirely on network access. Out of major cities - you know, where I take my car - network access is often insufficient to use Siri with any reliability, so drivers will almost certainly need to use the touchscreen as well.

I really hope that CarPlay also works with steering-wheel mounted controls, as those allow control with an absolute minimum of interruption. If we could have audio feedback that did not require network access, using the existing Accessibility text-to-speech functionality in iOS, that would be perfect.

Here’s a handy little AppleScript to switch the Bluetooth audio output device on a Mac.



Why do this? Well, partly because I can and it’s fun, but partly because I run a headless Mac Mini, and I’d rather not have to VNC into it just for something this trivial. Since AppleScript can be run from the command line via `osascript`, this little script can easily be triggered from SSH.



The next step is to make an iPhone-optimised web control panel for this and a couple of other equally simple tasks.



     set theDevice to "HT-CT260"



 tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer"

          tell (first menu bar item of menu bar 1 whose value of attribute "AXDescription" is "Bluetooth")

               click

               delay 0.2

               tell menu item theDevice of front menu

                    click

                    delay 0.2

                    try

                         click menu item "Connect" of menu theDevice

                         click menu item "Use as audio device" of menu theDevice

                    end try

               end tell

          end tell

     end tell



     tell application "Finder" to activate



It wasn’t obvious how to do this, and then I had to do it twice, because I did the development on Mavericks, only to realise that the Bluetooth Preferences pane is different between Mavericks and Mountain Lion… The method above works on both versions though, so it’s all good.



If you need to do this sort of thing from scratch, the Accessibility Inspector in Xcode is your friend. I obviously started out trying to browse menu items off the Finder menu bar by using `UI Elements` directly in the AppleScript Editor. The problem is that this only gives the Apple menu and the basic menus (File, Edit, View, Go, Window and Help), none of the widget menus over to the right. Because they belong to SystemUIServer. Of course.



If you need to use this actual script, you’ll want to set the value of `theDevice` to your own device rather than "HT-CT260". I didn’t make this script to take inputs, so there’s no downside for me in hardcoding the value. Apart from that, it should be ready to go.

Over at the ever-fascinating Stratechery, Ben Thompson dissects [Microsoft’s Mobile Muddle](http://stratechery.com/2014/microsofts-mobile-muddle/). I especially like one of his recommendations (emphasis mine):

Embrace services. Services seek to touch every device, and, as I’ve written previously, are much more suited to Microsoft’s culture. Moreover, Microsoft has many of the pieces already in place, along with their primary remaining trump card: Office. Microsoft should use this trump card with Apple specifically: offer Office on iPad exclusively for a specified time in exchange for Bing as the default search, fuller iCloud integration with Azure, and/or built-in Xcode support for Azure cloud services. Apple has most of the best customers – the ones who will pay for services; Microsoft needs those customers desperately, and Nadella should go hat in hand to Cupertino.

The irony here is huge for those of us who remember 1997, and Steve Job’s MacWorld speech:



> We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job, and if others are going to help us, that’s great, cause we need all the help we can get…The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting healthy, and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry, to get healthy and prosper again.



The situation is almost perfectly symmetrical. Without Apple, Microsoft is… well, not dead; there’s a lot of life left in a rump-Microsoft focused on enterprise sales alone. On the other hand, for Microsoft to survive in its current incarnation as the Everything Company, it needs to do something extreme like this.



I think this move would also make sense for Apple, as a way of further getting out from under Google’s thumb without having to build all the services for themselves. I mean, I actually found Apple Maps to be [an improvement](http://findthethread.postach.io/platform-wars-are-here-again), but there have been too many issues with iCloud as well for Apple to be seen as properly credible in online services.



If Microsoft really were to follow all of Ben Thompson’s advice and also fork Android using its own services, we could end up with a duopoly of strong cloud-based mobile back-ends, with Apple providing the balance between them. Sounds like a pretty good future to me...