Sharing an iPad with "Family Sharing" and a unique "Family" Apple ID.

Nobody expects Apple to bring Apple ID switching to iPadOS -- even though there's a version of it for managed devices. Technical and revenue issues aside, there are likely DRM contractual limitations.

So no Apple ID switches for the iPad. But there's a relatively easy way to implement a shared iPad for up to 5 people where Family Sharing can be used:

1. Give the iPad it's own unique Apple ID
2. Make the iPad Apple ID a family member. (See also: migrating from legacy shared iTunes Apple ID to family sharing.)

The five person "limit" is because Apple DRM / FairPlay is limited to at most 6 Apple IDs in a family group. Five for each family member, one for the family.

Caveat: Family Sharing for adults means every family member's purchases go first to the Apple Cash balance purchaser's account, next to the Organizer's payment method. Sooner or later I suspect Apple will need to fix this but it's been a problem for years. Without family sharing the shared iPad isn't useful for sharing Apple's media content.

iPhone Recovery Key attack vector kills your iCloud access: Workarounds pending an Apple fix including Apple ID protection

Someone who has your iPhone passcode can lock you out of your Apple iCloud and Apple ID services -- as well as take control of your iPhone and have access to all passwords stored in Apple's Password Manager (iCloud Keychain).

This can happen when someone steals your phone and obtains your passcode by the simple measure of threatening to kill you. Or they might see you enter your passcode or surreptitiously record entry. In bars drugs can be used to facilitate the process. This is often done as part of "borrowing a phone" for an "emergency call". (Never let anyone you don't trust with your life and wealth touch your phone. If it's an emergency make the call for them but ensure they don't record your passcode and don't let go of the phone.)

Once the thief has your phone and passcode they can change the victim's Apple ID password. This prevents the victim from locking the iPhone. The victim could still do the Apple ID password recovery process, so to get more time with the phone the thief can set a Recovery Key. If a Recovery Key exists they can change it. Setting a Recovery Key this way disables Apple ID password recovery. This gives the thief an unlimited time with the phone. It also locks the user out of all their Apple ID associated services and products including video, music, personal photos, personal documents, family sharing, other Apple devices, and the like. From the thief's perspective the Apple ID lock out is merely a side-effect. They may even feel a tiny qualm of sympathy for their victim. They do it to prevent iPhone lockout.

This is an Apple design problem. They need to fix it. Basically the iPhone passcode has far too much power -- especially since it has to be tapped in far too frequently and thus relatively easy to enter. Secondarily the benefits of the Recovery Key are limited to a few people and the with this technique in common use the risks dwarf the benefits. Apple should disable creation of new Recovery Keys immediately while they come up with a better fix.

TidBITS has one of the best descriptions of the problem following a somewhat confused WSJ article. I suggest also reading TidBITs preceding article on the problems with iCloud Keychain.

I was aware of most of these issues, but the Recovery Key hack is new to me. Again, if an attacker has control of your iPhone they can change your Apple ID password, locking you out of your photos, documents, Apple services, Apple media you've purchased, subscriptions, software, and more. At this point you can ordinarily reset your Apple ID password [1] through a tedious series of authentication steps or with the help of a previously specified Recovery Contact [2]. However, if you have set a Recovery Key you can't use these methods. You have to know the Recovery Key. If a thief sets or changes the Apple ID Recovery Key to prevent locking of the stolen iPhone you are truly screwed. Once you set the Recovery Key yourself Apple no longer stores it [3]; they can't recover your Apple ID even if they wanted to.

Apple has to fix several things here. It's insane that a six digit iPhone passcode allows access to all of the iCloud Keychain (Apple Password Manager) and setting up a Recovery Key. The power and risk of the Recovery Key is a separate problem and creation of new Recovery Keys should be disabled until there's a better fix.

In the meantime we've taken two steps on our our iPhones:

1. Emily and I set each other up as Recovery Contacts to facilitate doing an Apple ID password reset in the absence of an Apple Device.
2. Follow the recommendation of TidBITS to use Apple's Screen Time feature to prevent Account Changes. This requires setting a separate 4 digit ScreenTime code (PIN). When you do this Apple seems to require entry of Apple ID credentials that can be used to reset the ScreenTime PIN, but if you tap "cancel" you can continue without this step. That means an attacker can't use the Apple ID credentials they've stolen to unlock the account settings; they can't change an Apple ID password and they can't set a Recovery Key. (I think this can trigger an Apple Bug with App Updates and mixed Apple ID - see this article.)

I have not yet deleted all of my iCloud Keychain entries. I will go through mine and delete a few key ones. Apple really and truly needs to secure iCloud Keychain with an optional separate credential [4].

I do NOT recommend setting a Recovery Key.  An attacker with your iPhone passcode can change it anyway, and you won't be able to use Apple's standard Apple ID password recovery method.

- fn- 

[1] One time I tried to use login with Apple on a calendar service provider (Stanza). Apple evidently decided that was a bad idea and instantly locked my Apple ID. I had to follow the password recovering steps. If I'd set a Recovery Key and did not know the Key I'd have lost access to my Apple ID content (photos, etc) for all time.

[2] Setup a recovery contact NOW.

[3] I presume that when you do a standard password reset, or a Recovery Contact does a password reset for you, that behind the scenes Apple is using the Recovery Key they keep.

iOS 12.1 Files.app will open Google Drive hosted ePub directly in Books.app

iOS 12.1 Files.app will open Google Drive hosted ePub files directly in Books.app (formerly iBooks). I don’t know how new this is, but tapping on the same file in Google’s Drive.app gives an “unsupported file type” error. (You can still copy it to Books, it’s just awkward.) I’d long used Drive.app to open my ePubs, just happened to try Files.app today.

Books UI doesn’t scale well to significant number of ePubs, storing them in Google Drive or iCloud Drive works much better [1]. I treat iBooks as a temporary store, periodically I clean it out.

[1] Also iOS 12 Books.app won’t sync with Sierra iBooks, so those of us who are putting off painful updates have another reason to store in the file system. Really, though, it’s just way better than using iBooks storage. I’m a bit disappointed Apple hasn’t fully integrated iBook storage with iCloud Files, but this is nice.

Apple Manage Devices / Associated Devices is still kind of broken

If multiple devices share a Store Apple ID they will show up in Apple ID Devices. They will also show in iTunes (for that Store Apple ID), Apple’s current documentation states iTunes is the only way to see and manage this list. “You can have ten devices (no more than five of them computers) associated with your Apple ID and iTunes at one time."

And you thought iTunes was dead!

You have to remove devices manually from this list after you stop using them. If, like me, you use the same Store Apple ID on family devices it’s easy to hit the limit.

The interesting bit is these two lists are different and they don’t synchronize. They are presumably on two different databases.

The applied.apple.com list is current and shows 8 devices. I think if you sign out of a device you’re not using this list will be updated.

The iTunes managed list is not updated when you sign out of a device. You have to update it manually. I think it still supports iPods. It had one of our devices that was no longer active on it, but it also had an old iPhone 4 we use for music only that runs iOS7 [1]

iPod support explains why the iTunes managed list can’t be automatically updated. I don’t know what happens if you exceed the limit on one list but not the other.

- fn -

[1] The iCloud My Devices display supports “iOS 8, macOS Yosemite … or later …”

iOS 12 Family Sharing: Purchase Sharing supports changing Apple ID and UI could support future multiple Apple IDs.

One of Apple’s “original sins” is the proliferation of Apple IDs and the inability to merge or manage them. I have four that I know of with cryptic and fungible relationships between Apple ID and product ownership. (The worst bugs in the software world are data model bugs.)

In iOS 12 Family Sharing there’s now a setting for Purchase Sharing with an associated Apple ID. Mine is set to my Apple Store ID which is historically distinct from my iCloud ID (many old timers have this unfixable issue). If you tap on this Apple ID it rings up a dialog that allows this to be changed (there’s a bug here — tapping on it doesn’t always work. I had to leave the screen and return to it to enable tap). When I tapped it switched the default to my iCloud Apple ID.

I believe this is a new control. It will be interesting to see what happens when I migrate other family devices that use this iTunes Store ID for purchasing.

At the moment only one Apple ID can be used, but this UI could support multiple Apple IDs. The screen also displays a payment method that cannot be changed, it’s presumably defined by Apple ID.

This is something to watch.

PS. The ten year history of this mess is one reason I recommend Spotify over Apple Music for families.

See also:

• Move your Apple product records from one Apple ID to another Apple ID 11/2014
• How to delete your iCloud account and Apple ID 6/2017 (not)
• iCloud Family Sharing storage: What happens to Alice’s photos when Bob drops her from the Family? 10/2017. Wonder if this has changed.
• Apple’s Apple ID fiasco is getting worse — declining support for Apple Store ID that is not iCloud ID 11/2017 Then it seemed to reverse. I don’t know where Apple is going with this.
• Apple has a new problem with DRM and device management 3/2018 This will be interesting to retest.
• Converting from shared store ID to Family Sharing - and what didn’t work 4/2018. That was a fiasco - largely because family sharing only works for children.
• Apple ID Hell: Apple’s identity mismanagement - back in 5/2012
• Apple’s messed up Apple ID system: what are they smoking?! - 7/2008. Ten years ago.
• My Apple purchase records jumped from true AppleID to one I've never used. This is what I think happened. 7/2012. I think they were missing a ‘foreign key’ between two or more database systems.
• Apple's identity and account system is screwed up. Again. 10/2008
• Apple ID associated purchase records have jumped again: partly back to my old Dev account 7/2014

iOS 12 Parental Controls / Restrictions / Screen Time: Parental Controls (Passcode restricted) is not always compatible with "Share Across Devices"

Experimenting with Screen Time I enabled a passcode on my personal iPad after I’d enabled “Share Across Devices” [1]. I then found I could disable it without reentering the passcode. Which kind of defeats the purpose of a parental control passcode.

Then I turned it on again, and this time I was asked something like: “Is this iPad for you or your child?” [2]. Once I chose child I could no longer remove the passcode without entering it.

“Share Across Devices” then turned itself off.

When I turned “Share Across Devices” back on then I had to reenter my Screen Time Passcode. After than Screen Time Passcode was disabled.

Maybe this isn’t exactly a bug, but it certainly is awkward. I wonder if “Share Across Devices” uses iCloud ID or iTunes/Store ID.

Screen Time for family is enabled through the “Family Sharing” screen.

- fn -

[1] I think Share Across Devices Requires Apple’s two-factor authentication, which seems to rely on SIM-hack-friendly justly scorned phone number authentication. Yay Apple.

[2] Remember when iOS was going to allow multiple accounts on a single iPad? Android did that for their now defunct tablets.

iOS 12: It's now possible to remove/change Restriction / Screen Time passcode without removing restrictions

Prior to iOS 12 if you’d set a restriction passcode the only way to change it was to remove restrictions — which deleted things like blacklists and whitelists. With iOS 12 there’s a dialog for changing or removing the passcode. My favorite iOS 12 feature so far.

iOS 12: "family sharing" is still for children only -- ask to buy disabled at age 18 in US

The “Share purchases on iPad with family members” chapter of my iOS 12 iPad user guide tells me Family Sharing is still limited to children, and still not suited for use with special needs adults.

The problem is that “Ask to Buy” is available only for 18 and under. Since all purchases go to the “Family Organizer” Ask to Buy is the only way for the Organizer to control what family members purchase intentionally or accidentally. Since it’s turned off at age 18 “Family Sharing” is effectively for parents (who presumably share expenses) and children (who can have Ask to Buy).

This means that Family Sharing is not helpful for special needs dependents (guardianship status).

This is unchanged from iOS 11.  I’m not surprised, Apple doesn’t want Family Sharing to be widely adopted beyond the target group.

iOS 12 Books will not sync to Sierra or High Sierra Books

I updated my iPad to iOS 12. Books gave me this notification:

Changes you make to your library on this device sync only to devices running iOS 12, macOS 10.14, or later.

I downloaded the iOS 12 manual to my iPad and, as promised, it doesn’t show on Sierra iBooks.

Took me only a few minutes to find the first problem with iOS 12.

It’s a gift!

A similar problem happened with Mavericks.

Appigo Todo Cloud.app - don't forget to unsubscribe when you leave

Even since iOS 11 editing in Appigo’s Todo Cloud.app has been buggy for me on iPad and iPhone alike. Just aggravating. Feels like they failed to revamp something. I wasn’t delighted with their sync technology, but I could live with that. The editing bugs finally broke me.

So I decided to exit. Somehow I remembered Todo Cloud is a subscription service. I found my way to the somewhat hidden account settings and disabled premium. Turns out that turns off auto-renewal. 

Hope it really works.

Appigo is a textbook example of how subscription solutions can disappoint. They never provided a good export strategy, so there’s a strong data lock. Then they failed to do minimal maintenance but continued to collect subscription revenue and sell the app.

So what will the replacement be? I’d like a product that

1. Did what Appigo ToDo Cloud did but actually worked
2. Had a web client as well as Mac, iPad and iPhone client
3. Supported family sharing
4. Had good data export (exit strategy).

I evaluated Things.app and OmniFocus. Things got #1 and 3. OmniFocus got #1 and 4. Neither got #2.

Hmm.

On the other hand, Reminders.app for iOS got #2 and #3 and it’s free. So it’s weirdly in contention.

For now I’m using Reminders.app for tasks and Trello for projects. I manually copying over tasks that had dates, it’s not too bad. The backlog of ‘someday’ tasks I’ll gradually slog away at.

If Things gets some data export I’ll probably buy it, but it’s expensive since it’s not a universal app. If OmniFocus gets family sharing I might buy it. Meanwhile I’ll see what I can make Reminders do.

I think this is my first significant iOS functional regression.

Update 5/22/2018

I just discovered I wrote about this in 2011 …

There are no great task managers for the iPhone - but there's hope for 2011

… Neither Things, nor Appigo’s ToDo.app (which I have used incessantly since 2008), nor OmniFocus, nor Remember the Milk.app nor Toodledo.app are a great solution. They all fall short…

Seven years later and ToDo.app is moribund (I’ve been using it for 10 years!) and both OmniFocus and Things are still flawed.

Since I first wrote this I’ve run into issues with Reminders.app — including sync bugs and even text editor bugs. On the other hand, OmniFocus is promising a web client. I’m going to transiently switch back to ToDo.app and see if WWDC providers some kind of family sharing for subscriptions. That would make OmniFocus pricing less extreme.

Converting from shared store ID to Family Sharing - and what didn't work

Maybe this worked. Or not. See update.

Our five family members have long shared one store Apple ID. We’ve done this before there was Family Sharing. I put off switching to Family Sharing as I figured it would take Apple 3-4 years to get it working.

With iOS 11.3 Apple broke a longstanding purchase behavior. My son’s iPhone no longer required a password for purchases, only his fingerprint. There might be a fix, but I decided instead to move him to Family Sharing. (There is a fix, see below.)

The story went something like this [1]:

• I have an iCloud Apple ID (john.___@icloud.com) and a different Store Apple ID (j____@mac.com) — because I’m old. He has an iCloud Apple ID (sam.___@icloud.com) and my store Apple ID.
• In my iCloud Apple ID he is a family member. 
• I removed my Store Apple ID from his phone and added his iCloud Apple ID.
• I sent $15 to his iCloud Apple ID from my App Store account.

So far he still can access our movies and apps. Now he will make his own purchases that will be associated with his Apple ID. When he runs through his $15 he’ll give me cash and I’ll send more money. Eventually I do need to get a debit or managed credit card on his phone but we’ll start with cash. Alas, it doesn’t work that way. See update.

After the change I checked the (this is broken) two places Apple currently tracks devices associated with an Apple ID

• appleid.apple.com/account/manage: showed 7 devices including an old iPhone my son used to have that I’d previously removed. This also showed on his iPhone Apple ID view. I removed it from both places and it has not returned.
• iTunes Manage Devices showed 8 devices, but not my son’s current iPhone. This, in contrast to past testing, is correct while the appleid.apple.com list is incomplete. It’s interesting that moving my son’s phone to Family Sharing means I’m no longer at my 10 item device limit (if that rule still applies!)

- fn -

[1] He is, incidentally, a special needs adult. I’d have liked to be able to use Apple Ask to Buy for him but that’s not available for an adult. (I wish Apple considered special needs as a disability — they have great support for visual and auditory needs, but not for cognitive.)

Update 4/19/2018

• Seeing purchase histories is really clunky. You can see what apps a family member has purchased by launching App Store.app, logging out and then logging in as the family member. To see both tunes and apps you go to Apps & iTunes in Settings (yeah, this is crazy). You have to log in as the family member — I got the ancient iOS 1.0 un/pw dialog that shows up when you get to a part of iOS that desperately needs a replacement. It did work, but seriously ugly.

Update 4/20/2018

• Subscriptions aren’t Family shareable. So that’s a significant bummer; several of his apps are subscription based. All is not lost though, At Bat.app presented my Store Apple ID username and accepted the password. In-App purchases aren’t Family shareable either — which is bad news for Omni Group. Apple has a list of what’s not shared.

Update 4/28/2018 - what I wish I’d known

My son ran up a $70 bill on a $15 credit — all on my account — because “Any time a family member makes a new purchase, it’s billed directly to the family organizer’s account”. It doesn’t work the way I thought it did. If a family member is under 18 you can activate Ask to Buy, but not for someone over 18.

Family sharing is clearly designed to only work for children. It’s a poor match for a couple that wants to keep separate finances and it’s unsuited to adult children.

I found that the 11.3 update bug didn’t truly break the ability to require an iCloud password for purchases. It only bypassed the requirement to enter the iCloud password to enable Touch ID. I went into Touch ID & Passcode and turned off “USE TOUCH ID FOR … iTunes & App Store”. 

He doesn’t know his iCloud password (so he can’t lose it in a phishing attack!), so this meant he again needed us to enter a password into his iPhone to make purchases. Obviously, Ask to Buy would be far better. If Apple wanted to support users with cognitive disabilities …well, this blog accepts comments. I’d be glad to advise.

We didn’t want to have to memorize another password, so I changed his iCloud password to match my App Store & iTunes password.

iTunes Mac to iPad photo sync is broken

I had a longish holiday break this year, so naturally I spent part of it fighting with another technology regression. 

This regression was about getting photos from my Mac to my iPad; I use the iPad as a digital photo frame randomly displaying my Aperture (running on Sierra) images tagged as “slideshow” (this drains the battery fairly quickly, so I usually have the iPad charging). Years ago this was painless, but over the last few months I’ve found that only a fraction of my tagged photos make it over to the iPad. Often the process seems to die.

This go round I tried an old Aperture tip to delete the iPod Photo Cache (Apple approved) [1]. That had one effect — image transfer died completely! Instead of telling iTunes to transfer all my Slideshow tagged images (9,019) I had to select year-specific smart album slideshows one at a time (incremental add):

That generally worked, though the ghostly counts shown above in the iTunes 12.7 UI came and went inexplicably. Sometimes a mouseover seemed to trigger an appearance. If they didn’t show up that was a clue that something had gone wrong with the sync. (Infamously iTunes does not log errors to Console. Perhaps because they’d overwhelm console?)

Some part of the OS (or Aperture?) has to regenerate the .ithmb files [2] that are shared, that seems to be a slow process. I think the build process might make use of some data Aperture saves on exiting; that data is also used by the old OS X media browser (itself related to Apple’s old iLife code) [3]. I’m pretty sure some of the .ithmb creation is by an OS thread thought, and that seems to have a low priority. Maybe part of what causes a complete failure with large numbers of files is that iTunes has an arbitrary timeout placed to work around some other iTunes bug [4].

Once I broke down my slideshow into smaller bits and added them incrementally I seemed to have some success. The count (erratically) displayed in iTunes matched what showed on the iPad album counts and the Aperture smart album counts. Then things went south. The numbers transferred started to be a fraction of the Aperture counts. When things settled out I seemed to be stuck at 7,811 on the iPad (same count in iTunes if I mouseover the iTunes content type distribution bar) out of 9,109 in Aperture [5].

I did some half-hearted testing to try to figure out if this was related to filename characters or the like, but I haven’t gotten very far. I did confirm that RAW files don’t have an obvious problem.

The great news is that I learned today that I’m not alone and it’s not an Aperture specific problem! There’s a Macintouch thread on this by riley (quotes others, emphases mine):

So here's an update on the issue with syncing large Photos databases between iOS devices and iTunes.

After posting a number of followups to my Apple bug report, the response I got back from Engineering was that this is a known limitation in iOS, and "we are working to improve this in a future iOS release."

Their suggestion was to sync by starting with just a few albums, and then repeatedly re-sync, adding a few more albums each time. "On subsequent syncs, iOS will not add additional photos unless the sync preferences in iTunes are different from the previous sync, which is why it is necessary to keep adding selected albums each sync, instead of all at once."

… There is a huge discussion of this over on the Apple forums (see “Photos app on iPhone not syncing in iOS 11 ").

Various people have been told various things. Some have been told it is an iOS issue, some an iTunes issue. Personally, I think there are issues in both that are interacting, which are preventing reliable syncs with large photo albums over USB between iTunes and iOS devices.

Two years ago, our then ~40k photo library in Photos would sync the selected items (maybe around 30k photos in various albums) without problem. Perhaps around the time of iOS 10, the syncs needed to be restarted to complete, but eventually it would work. Since iOS 11, some sync, but many do not, and the sync just cancels with a variety of error messages at various points. Sometimes it is a device error, sometimes nothing. Sometimes many of the photos will be on there, but the albums they should be associated with are empty…

… The last update I heard from the person who was helping me was that it was an iTunes issue (at minimum, perhaps iOS too). She said that the Apple engineering team is aware of the issue and working on finding the problem so it can be fixed.

… I also see that since the latest tvOS update and the latest iOS 11 update, many albums are no longer being shared with the Apple TVs.

Hmm. This suggests to force updates one should add or remove some album with every sync. That did not work quite as expected. After I tried using the Media Finder code [3] and the ‘add new album’ trick iTunes said it was synchronizing another 1000+ files (that’s good!) but then the counts in iTunes and iPad dropped from 7,811 to 7303. So that’s just great.[6]

Since I now know this is not just an (abandoned) Aperture problem I added an iTunes feedback comment about the problem. Rumor is Apple processes these, presumably doing some algorithmic text extraction based on volume. So add your voice if you’re interested.

- fn -

[1] It took hours to empty the trash after deleting iPod Photo Cache — despite files being on an SSD. As of 7/2020 the links are all broken, but this is what you do: "find your Aperture or iPhoto library in the Finder. Right-click and select “Show Package Contents” then find “iPod Photo Cache” and delete it."
[2] I changed extension of a copy to .jpg and it rendered as expected. They are fairly high res images, in a small sample I examined one was a 3MB jpg. 
[3] In Sierra’s Open dialog the Media Finder still shows in the left nav pane! Maybe invoking it might trigger some updates? Worth a try to open it and let it run for a while.
[4] It’s widely assumed that iTunes source code is an impenetrable mess with bits left over from pre-Apple days. 
[5] Incidentally “Stacks” are a problem. One of the many bad things Apple did in bridging iPhoto and Aperture was to treat an old iPhoto Edit as an Aperture Stack. This threw away key information — that one image was the new version of another. There are lots of downstream implications. Years later I’m recreating thousands of iPhoto edits in Aperture. One of the problem is that when you tag an image as “slideshow” then transfer to iPad both versions go. I think this can cause the iPad count to be higher than the Aperture count, but of course the problem I haves is in the other direction.
[6] I removed the extra album and then the count went UP to 7,811 again! That album did reference photos that were in other albums, so maybe part of the bug has to do with photos that are in more than one album. I do think there are multiple bugs here though.

Update 12/31/2017 I

There are some JPEG images in my older files that do not show up in either OS X Media Browser (old iLife code) or Sierra’s Screen Saver Library browser and do not transfer to the iPad via iTunes. However, if I export the original and drop it back in again then the image appears normally — this doesn’t appear to be problem with the JPEG. They also render normally in several different apps and EXIF viewers.

Rebuilding the Aperture database does not make a difference.

So this is curious, and potentially an important clue, but to go further I need to understand how Media Browser works.  In my case the bug doesn’t only impact image transfer to my iPhone; it impacts Media Browser as well. I’m now poking around at ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement and ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeMediaBrowser, especially ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/state/albumshare/Daemon.sqlite.

Update 12/31/2017 II

Finding more “invisibles” but no clear pattern to what’s omitted. Some are quite small - from the days when 100K was a good image size. It’s not size alone though; of a pair of similar old images a 64kb one made it across and a 70k one didn’t.

Update 1/1/2018

Same sync, same everything — but now iPad acts as though it’s been syncing to a different computer. All images removed! It took several tries to get one album to sync, but after it started working I could do about  @1,200 at a time. Now have about 7,700 on iPad out of 9,100 on Mac. I won’t sync iPad to iTunes again until there’s word of a bug fix. Just stick with what’s on there now.

Update 6/9/2018

I thought this was fixed — but it’s broken again. On latest versions of iTunes and iOS 11.3.1, macOS Sierra.

Update 6/9/2018b

I was able to sync 7777 of 7771 (different apps count photos differently, not least due to Aperture’s brain-dead “Stacks” handling of iPhoto imports) photos after installing iOS 4. I don’t know if the bug is fixed or if it’s just that process of installing an iOS update cleared something out. In the latter case it might return.

Update 7/4/2020

It's been a year or two since I last tried syncing. At this time I'm still on Aperture and Mojave. The sync was worse than ever. I wiped my old iPad and restored from iCloud backup and sync actually seemed to work! It saw only 7992 of the 9413 images in my Aperture slide show, but it did import those.

I tried the trick of deleting the iPad Cache in Aperture [1] but on resync it was still 7992/9413. Consistent at least. 

I think there's a bug in Aperture with Sierra and later with generating the images in the iPod Cache. Maybe something iTunes or OS X was supposed to do.

 I suspect the iPad flash memory is also in bad shape. 

The lack of logging or error handling is appalling.

iTunes cannot sync voice memos ...

“iTunes cannot sync voice memos … because the Voce Memos app is not installed … You must download the Voice Memos app …”

Got this error message in iTunes today. I haven’t used voice memos.app in a long time (I use iTalk.app) and didn’t notice Voice Memos.app was no longer on my iPhone.

So why am I only getting this now … and why did a search on this phrase only find some phishing/spam page? Why does searching on Voice Memo Apple find only a bunch of third party apps? Why isn’t Voice Memos.app on my iPhone?

1. I don’t know why only now … maybe an iTunes update?
2. I don’t know why Voice Memos.app didn’t get installed when I updated to iOS 11 — might be a bug there.
3. It is on the app store, but Apple’s app search/discovery is an unholy mess. You have to search for “Voice Memos” exactly. Shame we can’t search iOS App Store from the #$#@% Mac any more

One good thing — I ran across Apple’s Music Memos.app — which I’d missed. It does sound useful.

How to do a simple random image picture frame type slideshow in iOS 11 on an iPad.

You know how you look for something on the web and you can’t find it?

That’s because it can’t be done with the base OS and nobody talks about the features that Apple has removed. There’s no ad revenue in that.

But I don’t take ads, so here you go.

This post exists to tell you that as of iOS 11 you can’t create a random picture-frame like slideshow on an iPad without a 3rd party app. Yes, the iPad used to be able to this. Once upon a time you could set a random image display up as a lock screen. Later this was moved to the Photos app.

With iOS 10 it died. In Photo albums on an iPad there’s a slideshow button (top right), but it only plays linearly. Which I loathe.

There are slideshow options by the way. They are insanely obscure. Start a slideshow. When an image appears, tap on it. There are a few options. No “shuffle” though.

There used to be an excellent third party app to do picture frame slideshows called Picmatic. My father loved it. He died before I updated his iPad to IOS 10. Good thing, because iOS 10 broke Picmatic and the developer never updated it (damn thing needed #$!$ subscription pricing).

There’s one “Picture Frame” app left on the App Store — LiveFrame.app. It worked with my Google shared libraries, but even though it could “see” my iCloud Shared Libraries it would hang when I tried to use them.

I’ve been fairly disgusted with iCloud Shared Libraries so I decided to try life without them (to be fair all image sharing except Instagram seems to have died). I turned iCloud Shared Libraries off on all my devices. I’d already given up on iCloud Photo Library. Then I went back to the stone age. I connected iTunes 12.7 to my iPad with a Lightning cable and had it sync 8,300 images from my Aperture “slideshow” smart album.

Of course the sync didn’t go easily. The image transfer aborted 3 times — without any notice. Mercifully the sync restarted where it left off. Unlike iCloud Photo Sharing I think iTunes supports a true 1 way sync; updates are relatively painless.

With the photos on my iPad, and no evil iCloudness, LiveFrame.app works. It’s no Picmatic, but it’s there. The developer should go to subscription pricing so they have an incentive to keep it around. There’s zero competition and this app is a perfect fit for subscription (no data lock, nothing to prevent switching).

Note — this slide show doesn’t need a data connection. The images are on the iPad.

So today one Apple thing worked — albeit an old thing. Sort of. That’s pretty good for Apple in 2017. (I can’t believe people are buying the iPhone X. Are they insane?!?)

iTunes purchased movies showing only a handful of my purchased movies

iTunes on my Mac shows 138 movies of which 135 have purchase dates. Those 135 were purchases from Apple starting in March 2009.

If I visit those 135 in iTunes some allow me to download, some invite me to purchase again. One old SD movie allowed me to download and that worked on my iPad and showed in the Purchased list after download.

My iPhone seems to show about the same number (though it doesn’t count for me).

My new iPad shows only 24 movies as purchased. Both devices have the same iTunes account. When I view my devices in iTunes (we’re at the 10 device limit) both my iPad and iPhone show up under the same Apple Store Apple ID.

One possibility is that the purchased list on my iPad is only showing HD movies. I can’t tell from iTunes which are HD and which are SD; we almost always buy SD when it is available. Some 3+ GB files are probably HD and they don’t show up.

Something is broken in Apple DRM land. I have a private message into Apple Twitter support and an Apple Discussion post …

Update: The “something that is broken” thing is the user interface. Apple Twitter support pointed me in the right direction.

When I view Movies in TV.app on my iPad there’s a subtle top left drop down called “Library” that on tap shows a hidden filter that defaults to Recently Added.

When I change that to Movies I see them all.

I was fooled by the "See All" link to the right of "Purchased Movies" that displays when the hidden Recently Added filter is active. The “Purchased Movies” heading should really be “Recently Purchased Movies” when viewed in this mode. It shows 4 recently purchased movies, and “See All” shows all recently purchased movies.

Nursing home personal videoconferencing and iPad photo slideshow - a successful project

My 94yo father lives in a veterans long term care facility located in Ste Anne de Bellevue, a small community at the west end of the island of Montreal. It has been a good home for him despite some difficult organizational transitions. Canada’s last major war ended over 70 years ago, their veterans system is fading away.

It’s a costly 6 hour flight (fly+security+etc) to see him, so I only get out there every 3-4 months. I send a weekly email that staff print for him, and every other week I send him a PhotoCard featuring one of the kids or a family thing. Phone calls really don’t work though — he didn’t do well with them even when his cognition and hearing were better.

The facility was keen for me to try videoconferencing with him using a Skype workstation. I was a bit skeptical, but they were right. He does much better with videoconferencing than with a phone call. The audio quality is much better than a modern phone call, and it’s a lot easier for me to see how he’s doing with the conversation. I can tell, for example, that he’s enjoying just hearing me talk. He really doesn’t need, or want, to say much himself.

The Skype workstation had problems though. Most of the time scheduled calls failed. Technical and organizational issues made it too unreliable. 

I didn’t want to give up on the videoconferencing, so I researched LTE videoconferencing for a longterm care facility resident. I considered WiFi but the costs at his facility are higher than LTE and in my experience institutional WiFi is often unreliable. He was already using an LTE Rogers Wireless device to connect an old school landline phone to a cellular network [1] so I was reasonably sure the LTE solution would work from his room.

At the end of the day we deployed a new LTE iPad Air 2 in a minimally modified “CTA digital” anti-theft stand. Here are some images of the stand the Vets built for him; during this first conference he spoke with a younger brother he’d not seen in over 10 years:

 

The wall stand was build by “Jean-Paul”, a staff and facilities person at the Vets. It’s a work of art and an unexpected key to this successful deployment. He built it around the iPad locking stand and incorporated a simple turntable. My father can do the videoconferences from his wheelchair or he can view the 3,000 image family photo slideshow from his lift chair. 

Dad hasn’t tried to operate the iPad. I think he could learn some things if I were there to work with him, but he’s a passive user at this time. A private aide visits him weekly and I schedule the videoconferences with her. I initiate the call, she taps the green button to answer. We use FaceTime because it’s very reliable, has great sound and video quality, and very efficient compression. A typical 15 minute call uses about 25-40MB of data, he has no trouble staying within his monthly Rogers data cap.

I often do the calls from my iPhone and I usually incorporate some kind of walking video tour. The last tour was of a CrossFit gym I’d just finished working out at. The walking tours are very popular, he reports on them to friends and family.

When the iPad is not being used for videoconferencing it’s displaying images using Picmatic.app. I was irritated when Apple dropped its original iPad slideshow functionality, but I figured there would be many fine replacements. I was wrong. There is exactly one - Picmatic. Miraculously it’s well done. It’s also ridiculously cheap at $2. It’s configured to randomly display full screen images from an iCloud photostream; I put images on there from Aperture and my iPhone. Images display full screen with an integrated clock and cycle every 30 seconds or so. He, or an aide, taps the bottom right icon to start the show. It automatically turns off at night. I wish it were more automatic but Apple is not terribly helpful in this regard. There is only so much developers can do when using iOS.

 

I’d put some other apps up there I thought might be useful: Notes for memory aide, Mail to show old emails I’d sent him, Podcasts for entertainment, Great Courses.app to play his history audiobooks, Contacts as an address book, Facebook to see our family activity, Weather, FaceTime.app (of course), Messenger.app (for non-Apple videoconferencing) and Calendar.app. Only Picmatic.app and FaceTime are being used. As Dad’s moderate dementia progresses he is less able to follow things like an audiobook history talk. He might do better with a brief Ted Talk video.

I’ll conclude (out of time :-) with some quick notes for anyone considering a similar project:

• Theft is a problem in longterm care facilities. Lots of visitors and impossible to screen them all, not to mention residents with impaired judgment. When the staff heard he was getting an iPad they expected it to disappear. This device would not be terribly hard to steal — the cable is only attached to a wall screw and the stand could be unscrewed from the turntable. It’s been enough so far though — just awkward enough to take that it hasn’t been stolen so far. There are two keys for the cradle lock; one in a lockbox in his room, the other in the nurse manager’s desk. The iPad stays in the cradle.
• I like the cradle but with the cable lock installed it’s hard (almost impossible) to rotate orientation. It stays landscape and that works well.
• For security I set a passcode and assigned Dad and his aide’s prints to the device. If stolen it’s iPad locked so wouldn’t be useable anyway.
• My brother has power of attorney. He had to send a copy of that to Rogers so he could get added to the Rogers account. Then he could add me to the account. This was the hardest part of the project. When I arrived in Montreal I took the documents to the Rogers wireless office. They had a hard time setting things up because Roger’s standard software couldn’t handle my US address, they did it using old paper forms. Once that was done the SIM worked fine.
• I bought the device and did all the setup in the US, wasn’t time to do something like that in Canada. I tweaked setup for weeks. I should have put more things in the hidden folder. I wanted everything on one screen to minimize confusing.

See also: 

• Bandwidth use over 5 min video call: FaceTime << Facebook Messenger < Skype
• Father longterm care iPad videoconferencing project: Securing the iPad

- fn - 

[1] I wrote about that project in Wanted - a way to make an old style landline work over a cellular connection. Service was a bit flaky at first, but quality improved substantially and it’s fine now. It turned out to be quite economical to pay for a family member’s iPhone on Rogers then add the “wireless home phone” for $10/month and subsequently add the LTE iPad for $10/month, all sharing data. With this device he can change rooms without a service disruption, and his entire monthly service bill is less than the institutional landline charge.

Bandwidth use over 5 min video call: FaceTime << Facebook Messenger < Skype

As part of my Father longterm care iPad videoconferencing project I compared cellular data use during an approximately 5 minute videoconferencing call made from my iPhone (LTE) to an iPad Air 2 (WiFi). To measure data use I “reset statistics” for Cellular data before, then refreshed the view after concluding the call. I turned microphones off.

The results were:

FaceTime: 7.5MB (repeated, this is correct)s

Messenger: 32MB

Skype: 46MB

FaceTime gave the best image quality. The data use with FaceTime was so low I repeated the measurement with a similar results. Data use can vary with image activity by up to 25%.

I was very surprised by my results. FaceTime had excellent image quality despite exceptional compression. Skype is a real data hog.

The user interfaces were quite similar; names on the left, a details pane on the right. I liked Messengers easy messaging integration, but FaceTime was a 1 touch call from the left side.

My sister and I can do FaceTime, but my brother has an Android phone. I’ll suggest he try Facebook Messenger as he uses Facebook and the data usage was less than Skype.

Father longterm care iPad videoconferencing project: Securing the iPad

My father has been doing well in a Quebec long term care facility for veterans (in Canada that has historically meant WW II, he’s in his 90s). Things are getting tougher though — the facility is shifting from federal to provincial control. Great staff are leaving and programs will be stressed.

I see him every 3-4 months, but in between I was surprised how well Skype worked with him. He does much better speaking when he can see me than he does on the phone. It seems to be related to knowing when to try speaking and when to listen. He also seems to hear Skype sound better than mobile phone sound. (It’s likely much higher quality.)

Even with the old regime though the Skype conferences often failed. Tech complexity and organizational issues forced us to discontinue them.

So now I’m going to try bringing him an LTE iPad Air 2. I’ll get a Rogers SIM card when I visit in a few weeks and we’ll see if it works from his room. If all goes well it will cost him an extra $10-$15/month — and the iPad cost [1].

Dad’s lost a few wallets from his room. I think most longterm care facilities see this kind of problem. Visitors can have issues. So we need to secure his iPad. Other than photo display I think he’ll only be using it for conferencing. So it needs to be secure [2], continuously powered up, stored somewhere he can sit, and not take up much room. The secure device needs to leave speakers and camera clear.

After some thought I ordered the $33 CTA Digital Universal Anti-Theft Security Grip with POS Stand for Tablets - iPad Air 2, iPad mini 4, Galaxy Tab, Note 10.1, 7-10-inch Tablets (PAD-UATGS) (grip and stand). It seems solid enough, it will keep the iPad off his desk, and there are screw holes (but no screws included). It may screw into his (antique) desk, but, even though it’s not shown in the picture, the lock comes with a cable. So I might be able to secure it to his desk in a less damaging and harder to remove way.

Of course the iPad Air 2 is way too thin for this device. It flops around. There’s supposed to be an included adapter strip, but mine was missing. I don’t think it would have worked — this home made setup seems a lot better. I had some TrueValue gripping pads (549104, TV23148) lying around…

I put those inside the corner retainers:

and it works pretty well:

So the first step is complete. Next step will be to test some of the conferencing options for data use and usability with various iPad accessibility features enabled: Skype vs. FaceTime vs. Facebook Messenger (Hangout is not very useable.)

I don’t expect Dad will use it by himself, we’re hoping a friend who helps with him will get things set up. I want it to be useable for them though.

- fn -

[1] (Rant) Incidentally, the iPad Air reminds me what a mixed bag Apple is these days. Nice device in many ways, but when I brought my mother an iPad six years ago one of the features she loved most was it could be used as a high quality digital photo frame. It was easy to launch from the lock screen. She loved that.

So, of course, Apple pulled it from the lock screen around iOS 7 and then ditched the replacement with iOS 9. There’s exactly one half-decent alternative, an app called Picmatic. Not to be confused with spammy copycat apps of the same name in the kinda broken App Store.

I don’t know if Apple is merely senile, or if the app had to be reworked for iOS 9 and it got ditched in a last minute panic to get that half-baked release out the door. Either way, the good news is that now that Ive has retired there’s only Cook to launch.

[2] Would it have killed Apple to incorporate some sort of secure lock feature in the iPad? Ok, yes, it would have.

How I moved my daughters iOS Notes from school to personal iCloud account

Please don’t put data into iOS Notes. Really, it’s quite horrid [1]

If you do you may find it’s stuck there. We ran into this when my daughter’s school iPad had to be wiped and we needed to rescue Notes that were only stored on her iPad (school iCloud account doesn’t support Notes, neither does school Google Apps).

I did this:

1. Used AirDrop to move notes one at a time from her iPad to my iPhone 6 (her 4s doesn’t support AirDrop).
2. Since my iPhone 6 is configured to use iCloud, each time a note arrived via AirDrop it went via iCloud to Notes.app on Mavericks [2]
3. On Mavericks the notes appeared in my iCloud account. I added my daughters Google Account to my Mavericks User account. I could then select ALL notes (yay) and drag and drop them to the Google account.
4. Then I created an OS X User account and associated it with her personal iCloud Account and added her personal Google Account. Then I did the drag and drop from her Google to her iCloud. 

I did something similar with her school Contacts. Interestingly the account drag and drop behaves differently — Notes are moved, but Contacts are copied.

 

- fn -

[1] I took a look at the folder where Apple stores Notes.app data: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes. (Yes, the organization is bizarre). The data is in NotesV2.storedata-wal. I inspected the binary file in Mavericks [2] and found it contains text of Notes I deleted long ago. So if you had sensitive data in Notes.app deleting it won’t remove it from your Mac. It seems the file is never purged.

More — in Mavericks, it only looks like you can drag and drop notes to the desktop. It doesn’t actually work.

More — Notes can sort of hold images and rich text, in some Apple OS but not in others. Definitely not in Google IMAP.

More — Notes was implemented unsung an oddball IMAP hack. It’s like nothing else.

More — Like Contacts Notes can have Groups / Folders in OS X, but in iOS you can’t do anything with these.

There’s still more…

[2] Yeah, I’m still on Mavericks. Yosemite has … issues. I’m waiting for a fix for the crazy network problem.

iOS 8.3 took away one of my favorite parental controls

With iOS 8.3 Apple made an undocumented change that will make a few kids happy.

No, not the post-update dialog that will lead many parents to unwittingly enable 15 minute authentication lifespans for purchases. Apple documented that feature. Here’s where you undo any mistakes by they way:

The real change is that users no longer need to enter the App Store account password to reinstall any app that’s been previously purchased with that account on any device. There’s no setting to revert back to the old behavior of managing a reinstall very much like an initial installation (respect password settings as above).

Why does this matter?

Well, let’s assume you install YouTube on the KidPhone and late find some highly educational porn. In the old days you could just delete YouTube and be done — assuming your user doesn’t know the App Store account password. Now users can simply download it again.

Now imagine the problem if you do old school App Store/iTunes credential sharing like we do — we each have our own iCloud accounts, but our FairPlay DRMd material is all associated with my App Store credentials. Yeah, everything can be installed. It’s a good thing I’m not into S&M apps.

I don’t know how this works with Family Sharing, the change is too new to see much commentary. For old-school families like ours there are 4 options based on this screen …

Your options are:

Install Apps	Deleting Apps	Result
Off	On	App Store disappears so can’t install or update. You can’t update from iTunes either, so this setting is a pain in the butt. You need to go through the restrictions dialog to do app updates. User can delete apps which is convenient.
On	Off	App.net@ronnie suggested this one. User can download anything, but they can’t hide contraband. So if they install forbidden apps they get banished to “Install Apps Off” which is painful for everyone.
Off	Off	As option 1, but can’t remove apps. I can imagine limited use cases.
On	On	The default.

For now I’m going with Install On and Delete Off, with the warning that forbidden fruit will lead to App Store removal.

I’d love to see a fix from Apple but it’s going to take a lot of complaining. I’m not holding my breath.