Configuring OS X and iOS for elders: Simplifying email, remove the Reminder items from Snow Leopard Mail

My mother first started using a Mac about six years ago, and an iPad 3 years ago. I wrote posts on how I configured both (I need to update some links to documents lost when Apple set fire to iWeb) [5]:

• OS X and Mac Mini tutorial and configuration guide 2007
• Elder Pad update: My mother's iPad continued 2011 and 2010

Her limited vision and ambulation mean she doesn't get that much use out of her devices these days, but she is quite proud of them. She particularly enjoys having her iPad on a prominent chair side stand. [4]

The one thing she most likes is to read email. She can't reply any more, but she likes to see it. The use of an ancient desktop [4] CRT running in 800x600 combined with the largest available font sizes means she can slowly digest whatever I send her.

The catch is there are too many sidebar items in Mail on iOS and on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It's too easy for her click on the wrong "box" and get lost in Drafts or Sent mail. There's an easy for fix for that, but I missed it for some time.

Since she gets her email via IMAP from her Google account [1] all I had to do was use the Labels Setting in Gmail configure to disable IMAP access for everything except the Inbox. That greatly simplified her iOS and OS X (Snow Leopard) Mail sidebars. (See below for a caveat on OS X Mail restarts.)

I was still left with a "Reminders" item in Snow Leopard Mail.app. I searched around for tips on how to remove that -- and found lots of frustration and some red herrings but no answers. Alas, this was an Apple usability Fail. Go to iCal (!) and in the sidebar look for "EMAIL INBOX", uncheck "Mail To Do". Restart Mail and it's gone. [Uh Oh: See Update!)

One Snow Leopard caveat to note: Between the Mail.app IMAP changes and the MobileMe removal I found I needed to restart Mail 1-2 times and OS X once to get all the changes established.

In iBook the Athelas font scales to much larger font sizes than some of the others.

As long as I'm on this topic, I'll pass on a few semi-related tips from some long delayed Snow Leopard/MobileMe maintenance [3]

• Sign out of MobileMe then restart. I think that's needed to clean out residual MobileMe settings [2].
• Set iOS Contacts back to old-fashioned (cable or wifi) iTunes sync - need to keep her SL desktop and iPad in sync.
• Enable the old Google Contacts to OS X Address Book sync. This is triggered whenever the iPad syncs by cable or Wifi and, with her tiny Address Book, it seems to work and manage conflicts pretty well. I'd be wary of trying this with a real world Address/Contact collection.

- fn -

[1] (She doesn't interact with Gmail directly, though I do that remotely as needed.)

[2] Apple's decision to exile Snow Leopard users when they discontinued MobileMe was a nice gift to Google.

[3] I make the trip to the old country q3months, and computer maintenance isn't at the top of the list. This trip I got more done than usual.

[4] If I were setting her up today she wouldn't have a desktop of course. I must note though that in some way she prefers the desktop. The iPad is heavy and awkward for her; she needs something half the weight but the iPad 7 display is too wee.

[5] A lot of the things I've done to simplify her Mac/iOS use also work well for very young children and special needs users

Update 5/13/13: Ok, that Damned Reminders To Do thing is some kind of bug.  It returned mysteriously. I wonder if it's somehow related to the end of MobileMe. There are about seven "ghost" tasks that show up without any attributes, and somehow display in Maill regardless of the iCal Mail setting. Resetting old SL iSync and disabling it didn't help. After a bunch of manipulations I got some message about 'server versions' not matching local versions. I might have gotten somewhere by deleting everything in Library/Calendars -- which is only feasible because she doesn't use Calendars.  Alas, I had to leave before confirming this bug is truly squashed.

Parental Controls after OS X 10.8.2: EXC_CRASH and changes to https handling

The kids don't often use my Mountain Lion machines, so I only learned recently that Apple made some significant changes to Parental Controls with the 10.8.2 update. I don't rememberer seeing any documentation at the time and there's nothing in the release notes.

I found out about the changes when I opened the Parental Control Preference Pane on my main Mac. It crashed. I rebooted, it still crashed, and crashed ...

The crash message looked like this one one from last year (I'm on 10.8.3):

Mountain Lion Parental Control time...: Apple Support Communities

Process: System Preferences [2658]
Path: /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences
Identifier: com.apple.systempreferences
Version: 12.0 (12.0)
Build Info: SystemPrefsApp-232000000000000~22
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [488]
User ID: 502

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (Code Signature Invalid)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:
com.apple.preferences.parentalcontrols v.400 (Kindersicherung)
objc[2658]: GC: forcing GC OFF because OBJC_DISABLE_GC is set

I was able get around the crash by turning off parental controls for the affected user from the the User Preference Pane. Then I could open and close the Parental Controls Preference Pane; after that I could reenable PCs for the affected account.

I assume the my old preferences were not compatible with the 10.8.2+ version of Parental Controls, and Apple's code didn't handle this very well. Old bug, not fixed. Disappointing, but there's a workaround.

Which leads to the obvious question -- what the heck did Apple change in 10.8.2 Parental Controls? For sure they didn't fix any of the longstanding defects -- like an execrable UI for log review.

The answer is in a 12 page Apple Discussion Thread, pointing to a mislabeled Apple KB article (it says it's 10.6, but it was revised June 2012 and the change came with 10.8.2). Apple changed how they handle https sites when "Try to limit access to adult websites automatically" is selected in Parental Controls.

You see, Apple's Parental Control infrastructure has never worked with SSL encrypted (https) sites [1]. So they have to decide what to do when someone tries to access an https site. Since the https site is effectively invisible, Apple can either decide to trust it completely or distrust it completely. Prior to 10.8.2 Apple's "automatic" limits erred on the side of universal trust. After 10.8.2 they err on the side of universal distrust (which has always been the "Allow access to only these websites" behavior).

So this isn't a bug introduced with 10.8.2, it's Apple being a bit more honest about how crappy OS X Parental Controls always have been. I wonder if the change was made to avoid litigation, or if the transition to all SSL net access made it impossible to keep the old pretense.

In theory an admin user an approve all the https access requests that come up when a user tries to reach one of those sites, but in practice that doesn't scale.

Bottom line: Parental Controls was born lousy, but with 10.8.2 Apple is at least being honest about how bad it really is. [2]

[1] See  OS X Parental Controls: The https bug and our family Google Apps services back in 2010. I think this is related to my employers ability to block dropbox, but inability to block Google Drive without also blocking Google Search.

[2] Parental Controls are no better on iOS by the way -- thanks to the webkit back door. (Bob Tedeschi wrote about this back in 2012.)

Contaqs.app - A contacts.app replacement that is great except for one awful decision

I have about 2,200 Contacts, and if they could speak they'd all complain about iOS Contacts.app. The bizarre Groups implementation, the limited search options, the crummy search result display ... 

Frustrating.

So I've been looking for an alternative. Most of the App Store alternatives failed the smell test, but Clark pointed me to a relatively good one - Contaqs.app. It looked good enough that I bought it.

My initial impression was pretty good. Search results show the company name. You can search on names, company names and phone numbers. You can edit group relationships (!). There's a smart-tag and geolocation function and you can create new tags. Seems fast.

Then I tried searching on my wife and didn't get any hits.

This test explains the problem:

Contact: John Paul Jones

Search in Contacts.app on John Jones: 1

Search in Contaqs.app on John Jones: 0

Search in Contaqs.app for John Pau: 1

The sound you here is my head repeatedly hitting the wall.

Instead of what's called 'starts with word search' the authors of Contaqs.app implemented phrase search. This means that you need to include the middle name if your Contact has one.

I'm sure they had some reason for this, but it wasn't the right choice. If Contaqs.app were to implement 'starts with word search' they'd be a 4-5 star app. As it is I'm tempted to rate them 2 stars, but that's frustration speaking. I'll give 'em 3 for now. I might use it to clean up Group relationships, but it doesn't replace Contacts.app.

Darn it.

Forget ICE: put your contact information on your iPhone lock screen

After mass emergencies I often read Facebook posts on about the "In Case of Emergency" (ICE) program:

It encourages people to enter emergency contacts in their mobile phone address book under the name "ICE". Alternatively, a person can list multiple emergency contacts as "ICE1", "ICE2", etc. The popularity of the program has spread across Europe and Australia, and it has started to grow into North America.

Of course this only works if you leave your phone unlocked. That's kinda risky in the era where our smartphone is the key to our lives. In any case business phones have mandated locks.

A much better policy is to have your iPhone (or Android) lock screen display your contact and emergency information in a note. Then if someone taps the power button they see it all. You can organ donor status if you like. Of course this also means that if someone finds a lost iPhone you'll probably get it back.

Here's how I do it on my iPhone:

1. Create a note with the information to display.
2. Press home-power button to take a screenshot.
3. In Settings choose Brightness and Wallpaper. (See how to set your iPhone lock screen).
4. Tap on the Wallpaper image and make the screenshot you saved your lockscreen, but not your wallpaper.

It takes a minute. I keep the note around in case I want to revise it sometime.

 

I include

Name 

Address

Home phone

Emerg phone (Emily's cell)

My email

My organ donor status

Thanks!

If you have a significant medical condition, you could add a line that with the URL for a web page with key advice, or you could type it in. (On the i5 there's lots of room.) Don't bother adding your blood type, nobody would rely on that.

You can do something similar with Lion and later to help recover a lost laptop: Lost and found: putting contact info on iOS and OS X login screens.

Apple's two-step verification: Multiple Apple IDs and mac.com Apple IDs?

I like the idea of "two-step verification" for my Apple credentials (aka two factor authentication).

Problem is, I have no faith in Apple's ability to get this right, especially given their many years of unresolved Apple ID problems [1]. In particular I wonder about two things:

• Can I do two-step verification for my core Apple ID that's tied to all of my App Store and iTunes purchases? That is a mac.com address, and when I tried setting one I wasn't given that option. I think the answer is no -- I'd have to change the email address first. But I know I can't change it to one of my 3 other Apple IDs.
• Can I do two-step verification from an iOS device for an Apple ID that's not the same as the Apple ID tied to the authenticating device? (iOS: iTunes and App Stores)

Until I get answers to those questions, I'm afraid enabling two-step verification will lock me out of my core Apple ID services

- fn -

[1] Examples below. Their Apple ID failures are one example of why I think Apple's mind-boggling successes of the late 00s may have also broken the company. There are so many things small and large that Apple can't seem to manage. I'm hoping Cook is doing recovery work.

• Apple's identity and account system is screwed up. Again. 2008
• Apple is again messing with Apple IDs – pay attention! 6/2009
• Apple's messed up Apple ID system: what are they smoking?! 7/2008
• Apple ID Hell: Apple's identity mismanagement and an insanely obscure ID bug with MobileMe send as email 5/2012
• My Apple purchase records jumped from true AppleID to one I've never used. This is what I think happened. 6/2012

App.net - using Duerig's custom RSS feed to see only root posts from selected people

I enjoy app.net. I like the conversations, but I particularly like the 'root' or initial posts shared by a few of my followed appnetizens.

Problem is, these posts are lost in the streams of the app.net clients I use - Felix (iOS), Kiwi or Wedge (OS X), and Alpha or NoodleApp (web). They are mixed with replies and conversations. Current app.net client UIs aren't a great fit for how I'd like to follow folks; they are best suited to recreational engagement.

Thanks to Jonathon Duerig (@duerig), there's a better option. He's providing a special RSS feed that accepts parameters. For example, here's mine:

http://jonathonduerig.com/my-rss-stream/rss.php?user=6172&replies=0&directed=1

In this example

• 6172 is my app.net userid (I was #6,172 to sign up)
• replies=0 means I see only root replies
• directed=1 (just include this, don't ask why) [2].

To find the userid you can mouseover the official (shows all activity) RSS feed icon on alpha.app.net profile pages, like https://alpha.app.net/johngordon. It shows the userid.

I've created feeds for several people who I particularly like to follow, and put those feeds into a Google Reader folder called App.net [1]. Now that Duerig has also removed an unnecessary username prefix from each post, the results display very well indeed. Each post comes with a link to alpha.app.net, so I can respond easily in that environment.

It's really quite elegant, and should be an inspiration for app.net app builders. I'm looking forward to more like this; Duerig will probably make this to a custom domain and tidy it a bit. For now I've put the feed URL into my Profile Bio to make it easier for others to copy.

[1] I haven't settled on a Reader replacement yet, I'll start doing serious testing in May. I do want folders.
[2] Duerig: "A directed post is a post beginning with a mention ... to anyone. .. the concept of a directed post is immensely confusing ... Just do replies=0 vs. replies=1 and you will be happy."

WordPress attack - lessons from my personal security review

This week there's a  brute force password attack on WordPress sites. That inspired my security review, here are a few things I learned doing it:

• I again appreciated the FileMaker database I've used since 1997 to track my net credentials. I dump data from it to a now dated version of 1Password, but it's hard to beat the ease of searching and editing my own repository. It lives on an encrypted disk image on my local machine.
• It's easy to end up with orphan WordPress instances. I have one on Wordpress.com and two on my Dreamhost account, but I only use http://www.kateva.org/sh/. It archives my Pinboard/App.net shares; one day, if I figure out how to do it, I may append my old Google Reader shares (json).
• I had a strong password on the wordpress.com account, but only pretty-good on my other two and they had the same pw. I upped both to very strong but still typable. I will have to review how IFTTT connects to kateva.org/sh -- obviously there are big security risk with many uses of IFTTT. 
• I'd been keeping my WordPress blog software current (Dreamhost makes that easy!) but not the plug-ins and themes.
• I'd changed a theme on one blog recently, and today I learned it didn't include a log-in link! I was briefly shut out, but a bit of web research turned up kateva.org/sh/wp-admin.

The most important thing I learned is that it's not trivial to safely delete a self-hosted WordPress blog. Yikes! No wonder there are lots of vulnerable old blogs lying around for the taking. WordPress.com blogs have a delete tool, but not self-hosted sites. Things can get nasty here -- two WordPress blogs can share the same database, so deletion must be done carefully. Reading some Google hits this is a very unsolved problem with lots of confusion.

We need a fix WordPress.org and we need it very soon. Dreamhost, you could help too.

Google Reader: More like this

Sad moment in the last days of Google Reader -- I'd forgotten about the 'more like this' item in the Folder Settings (and Feed Settings) dropdown ...

Note the Translation services, and ability to create a 'bundle' (shareable set of feeds made of all the feeds contained in the Folder).

There's so much in Google Reader that most users never saw.

Today's Aperture bugs: Empty Projects, Repeated Facebook Albums (Bonus: fixed screensaver)

Aperture gave me two bugs today. Or maybe three.

One I've seen before. I move an Event, Aperture chugs along, and the Event shows no images. There's no way to make them reappear, but if I restart Aperture they're back. It happened several times today, so I ran "Select Repair Database". I don't know if this will help. 

This is, of course, a rather nasty bug. It would be easy to delete a seemingly empty project and lose all of its photos. [1]

My second bug concerned the drop down list of Facebook albums available from the Facebook publish dialog. Each album was repeated 4 or more times. That I fixed by deleting my Facebook account and restoring it.

There's a related Facebook bug, but this one came, I think, with a Facebook change. When publishing to Facebook Aperture's share settings are ignored. Albums are always private, you have to make them visible from Facebook. This has been broken for months, and Apple hasn't issued a fix, so I suppose it's a joint bug.

[1] Tip: If you configure Aperture to display the number of images in Project you'll at least see that number, even if none of the images can be seen. Still, I do wonder if I've deleted images in the past due to this old bug.

Update 3/17/2013: Subsequently I also ran permissions repair. I can't say whether it was upgrading to 10.8.3 or this work, but my OS X Aperture smart album based screen saver/slideshow has now worked for two days. I think that's a record.

It wasn't obvious at first, but I also discovered 60 thumbnail sized images in 'Rejected' folder with file names like: "4206_76697672461_1778151_n (1).jpg". They are assigned batches of dates that don't match the image date. I was able to find the five of them full sized in my Library, so I was reassured that these were truly garbage and I deleted them.

Clearly the repair process did something.

I've set a reminder in my calendar to do an Aperture database repair every four weeks as a routine preventive measure.

Update 3/21/2013: I think the library database repair MAY have helped my screensaver bug, but it didn't fix the empty folder bug. I just moved a project from one folder to another, and after the move Aperture wouldn't display its images. Again, having the image count display by the Project is a potential lifesaver. Nasty nasty bug.

iOS Contacts search annoyances

There are two things to be aware of about Contacts search in iOS:

• If you search from Contacts.app iOS will search both person name and business name.
• If you search from global (spotlight) search iOS will only search one of these, depending on Contact type.

This is sufficiently weird and inconsistent that it may qualify as a bug.

In general search on iOS is "annoying". PalmOS did a much better job in 1997.

Mountain Lion Recovery Partition Disk Utility Drive Repair - Unlock the Encrypted Drive with Admin Password

Even after I figured this out I couldn't find Apple's documentation on this. (Yeah, worrisome.)

I first noticed a problem after attempts to run VirtualBox on my 128GB SSD MacBook Air. We first tried a Win7 .vbox and ran into some network issues, then I tried a smaller sized XP .vhd image. The latter worked, though getting VirtualBox to use the .vhd was a bit odd; I think I did better ignoring the few web references I could find and simply telling VB to create a new XP image then selecting the .VHD when asked for drive.

After that process I checked available disk space, and the Finder said I had a 120GB drive with 228GB available.

Uh-oh.

So I ran Disk Utility and found I had about 58GB free but my drive was corrupted due to "incorrect number of file hard links". DU told me to boot into the ML Recovery Partition and run Disk Repair.

When I did that though, my OS drive appeared grayed out. I could see other non-gray items I could "repair" but that did nothing.

So why was it grayed out?

My guess was encryption. Even so, Google was no help. I did see that the Disk Utility toolbar had a new icon however, one called, I think, Unlock. I clicked on it and was invited to enter a password -- but not, curiously, a user name. I entered my admin pw and that worked. (This smells like a security hole btw -- not asking the un is weird. I suspect I could have turned off File Vault encryption first and avoided this mystery.)

After I did that my system drive was no longer grayed out. I ran Disk Utility repair and it said the drive was better; I ran verification twice to check.

On restart, however the Finder still has the wrong amount of Free Space -- though now Disk Utility says the drive is fine.

So I'm not entirely happy. But at least I've documented how Disk Utility Unlock works from the recovery partition.

Update: The VirtualBox VHD thinks it has a 127GB hard drive. Disk Utility says I have 69GB free. I'm suspicious that a hard link in the Virtual Box is messing up the Finder, but I can't find anything on this...

Tools for diagramming and sketching on Windows

Windows is a broken and barren desert of malware and spyware, but I still need to work in it. Alas, I can't switch at work (yet).

So, when I'm looking for better ways to diagram and sketch, I can't choose from the rich world of Mac alternatives, much less from iOS tools. I need something that will work on Windows -- or on a web platform our corporate software doesn't block (alas, Evernote).

I'm working on my options, but fwiw here's a list I'm assembling. I'll update it with whatever I like, while striking out those I've considered and eliminated.

Windows 

• OneNote 2010: popular, but tied to Office
• SnagIt Editor
• PowerPoint: Too awkward to just use for diagrams.
• Visio: Expensive, clumsy, overpowered, relearning curve with infrequent use.

Web

• Google Drawings: Current favorite
• Lucidchart (Google Drive/Apps): $$
• Gliffy Online
• Balsamiq Mockups (wireframe)
• Creately

Mac/Win

• Pencil Project - GPL, no documentation, no help file. Couldn't figure out rounded corner.
• Dia - GNOME Live! - Visio like
• yEd - Graph Editor
• ConceptDraw Pro $200

Apple's iCloud control panel enables iCloud Contacts within corporate Outlook

iCloud support is limited to relatively new Macs able to at least run Lion. Practically speaking, Mountain Lion.

Apple is kinder to the Windows world. The iCloud Control Panel will run on Outlook 2007 or later on any old OS.

I suppose they don't have the same sales incentives on the Windows platform. In any event, it seems to work very much like the old MobileMe Control Panel, at least when it comes to Contacts. I installed it on a Win 7 laptop running Outlook 2007 that syncs to Exchange Server and I now have full access to my iPhone/Mac Contacts.

It works by creating a new account, separate from the Exchange account. There are few install options -- you have to sync Calendar, Contacts and Reminders (but not Notes). Just like MobileMe [2] (I suspect some shared code). It also creates an IMAP account.

I had some glitches on installation and had to fiddle with restarting both the Control Panel and Outlook 2007, but now it seems stable. I didn't want the IMAP service so I canceled out of the credentials prompt and deleted the IMAP account.

There's no way to turn off Reminders, so I now sync my iPhone reminders in some puzzling ways -- basically via ActiveSync/Exchange for one set of reminders, via this method for the iCloud set. Weird.

Contacts is what I was interested in and it seems to work. Since Outlook allows only one Group per Contact, and iCloud allows many [1] there are potential problems related to Group assignment. In the case of MobileMe this didn't seem to break anything.

It's great to have all my Contacts at hand, and to able to quickly add to them. As an extra bennie, I get to use Outlook's Contact views. They are old and complex, but they are far more powerful than anything Apple gives me.

[1] Group relationships are kind of messed up between iOS and OS X, but Apple has bigger problems.
[2] At one time MobileMe Control Panel could work with Outlook/Exchange, but then it coulnd't -- which made things hard. This version can, perhaps because it creates a new local account.

Aperture: You can drag and drop Inspector attributes (fields, metadata labels) to rearrange their sort order

I discovered this by accident. Once I discovered it, I did find a bit of documentation. In the Help file, under "rearrange the metadata fields in a metadata view" it says you can drag the metadata labels around to change their sort order - like this:

I've long been annoyed by the default field order, but I had no idea I could fix it.

This helps.

Damn, but I do miss iPhoto's ability to click and quickly edit version names.

Mountain Lion sharing and permissions: two things I didn't know

Didn't know, or forgot:

• If you option click the permissions add icon, you can add permissions for System and the like but not Wheel.
• The Groups defined in Contacts can be used to add permissions to sets of users. I think that's probably as old as OS X, but I forget it. It's odd because Apple seems otherwise to have forgotten Contact Groups exists. I wonder how it works ...