I don’t see the news

That’s not to say there’s a problem with photos, videos or even text displaying. No, the problem is that they’re so damn small on my MacBook Pro 15″ screen (as well as the 27″ LG Ultrafine it’s connected to) that I can’t read anything.

With the exception of “feature” articles which appear at the top of the main pages with larger headlines, virtually nothing in News is readable, especially on pages such as Top News Stories, etc. The publication titles are completely unreadable, headlines are a bold and condensed font, making them difficult at best, the article summaries are not only too small, but Apple chose to make them a light gray color. To rub salt in the open wound, the timestamp and share buttons look like a bug got smooshed on my screen.

Even the Discover Channels & Topics button in the lower left corner of the navigation column pops-up this tiny little modal box floating in the middle of the massive screen real estate I have available. Inside the static-sized box, Apple crams 12 previews and the name of the publication. At least, that’s what I assume it is, because I can’t read it.

Once you click on a headline and are taken to the actual article page, you are afforded some relief in that while the article text is tiny by default, you can hit the Command + keys several times to make the text legible.

Gee,  thanks Apple. Would it have killed you to allow me to set a text size default in the preferences, or at least remember my zoom setting across relaunch?

The second thing that really bugs me about Apple’s News app is that I can’t share articles.

Part of reading the news these days is sharing a great article with friends, family or social media followers.

There is a Share button for each article, but you’ll have to find it. Sometimes it’s at the bottom of the article, sometimes next to the headline, and sometimes in the menubar. It just depends on what type of page you’re on. No matter what, it’s tiny.

But the biggest problem is that Apple has decided that the Share button should only allow you to share with yourself.

Since Apple chose to remove system-level access to Facebook & Twitter (and every other social network), you can now only share with apps that Apple has chosen for you, or 3rd party apps that specifically build-in a Share Sheet extension. Those apps are few and far between.

Apple allows me to “share” an article to my own Notes, Reminders, or send as a text message. Who would use any of those options? Even email isn’t an option for many people, unless you have a 3rd party app like MailPlane that offers a Share Sheet extension.

At the very least, Apple should have built-in the ability to copy the link to the article on the publisher’s website.

Overall, Apple News is a decent app for a 1st version. But it has a long way to go, in my opinion. I look forward to any improvements they make.

Two things became obvious as I was carefully doing the autopsy. First, Apple uses a crapload of every sized screw imaginable, as well as glue and tape to build the iMac. The second thing, which comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed Apple for any amount of time, is that they obviously put a lot of thought and care into the design of the inside of the case as well as the outside.

No loose wires, transistors, cards, boards or other doo-dads can be found. Everything is buttoned down tight. It was actually quite difficult to take apart. Because I didn’t care what happened to the thing, I broke some pieces just to get them out.

The hard drive was glued-and-screwed like it was made of solid gold. I nearly gave up on the project trying to get the stupid thing out… just so I could thoroughly destroy it for security purposes.

Anyway, here are a few photos of the guts of the 21″ iMac. You can click the images to get a closer look.

AppleEverySecond tracks sales of Apple’s products and use of some of their major services by the second. I suspect that Mac’s sold per second number is going to start going up with the MacBook Pro having been recently refreshed.

Amidst all the complaints about the horrible MacBook Pro keyboard crumb problem, you know the one where a crumb from your morning bagel can render your $3,200 laptop useless, Apple has found some potential solutions and filed for patents on them. Think of them as umbrellas, or even condoms, for each individual key. The drawings are interesting in that they show distinctly different and complicated solutions to what seems like a simple problem.

Personally I’m in the market for a new MacBook Pro, but in addition to the lack of 32GB of RAM, this “crumbs in the keyboard” issue is preventing me from even considering a purchase.

Apple’s Reno data center is getting an expansion.

This comes on the heels of Apple’s announcement last year of an entirely new data center in Des Moines, Iowa (image above), with construction set to start sometime this year.

As for me, I think there’s a whole lot to love about Apple’s latest pro-level Mac. It’s the most powerful Mac Apple has ever made, and that includes the Mac Pro. It’s so powerful that I can’t recommend any designer buy one. In fact, I can’t recommend anyone buy it that doesn’t do very high-end video, animation or 3D rendering work on a daily basis.

There is simply no use-case scenario for a print or web designer for this beautiful beast of a Mac that justifies its price. I’m not saying it’s overpriced, not at all. The iMac Pro is actually priced cheaper than any DIY PC you can find. It’s just so much more computer than is necessary to do any manner of print or web design work. Buy a decked-out regular iMac and use the extra money for nice peripherals and upgrades, and pocket the rest of the money—or get yourself a MacBook Pro for taking work on the road.

While some companies “throw together” features to sell their wares, Apple spent years developing a low-energy form of Bluetooth for just such a use-case. Bravo, Apple!

I switched to the Safari Technology Preview browser, and that helped a little bit, but not much. Pages still weren’t loading completely.

With all the discussion about privacy, tracking and ads on websites lately, which I mostly ignore because I know it’s out of my control for the most part, I found myself installing an ad blocker for the first time in a long time.

Rather than going with the most popular AdBlockers out there, I went with Ad Blocker from the Mac App Store. It’s a Safari Extension and a stand-alone app. One of the features of the app is a Website Inspector that runs a test to show you how long a page takes to load, the page size (in MB), number of Requests the site sends, number of ads, number of trackers and number of Social Media buttons & doodads it loads.

After installing Ad Blocker, I went to a variety of Mac-related websites I normally visit to compare it with my pre-ad blocker results.

My results were astonishing.

Without going into detail on each site, I’ve compiled a bunch of screenshots of the results below. Some sites are worse than others, but I think the results speak for themselves.

It’s also important to note that some of these sites load perfectly fine and appear in this list simply for context. Also, sites that subscribe to ad networks for their income often have no choice in the ads that appear and would love it if the Javascript-heavy, privacy-infringing, ad-tracking bloatware didn’t appear on their site… they just have no choice.

As you can see, MacRumors was a major offender of ads and tracking, as was AppleInsider, BGR and iMore. The worst of them all, by far, was CultofMac with a whopping 349 ads and 43 trackers. Now keep in mind that what the software considers an ad or a tracker may not in fact be an offensive ad or tracker. If the site is a WordPress site, it has a tracker, and many sites offer aside items that show a list of popular articles on the site, etc., which typically show up as ads. But by-and-large, anything that shows up in the inspector’s results is something other than the content you went to the site to view.

For context, I ran the inspector on a few other sites. Apple’s homepage has no ads, no trackers, no social annoyances, and loads extremely fast. CNN and ESPN, two sites that are typically considered obnoxious by most users, are relatively tame in comparison to the Mac-related sites I tested (see results below).

The end result for me was that all the sites I was having issues with loaded significantly faster, and loaded completely the first time when running the Ad Blocker extension.

Sites like Daring Fireball (the clear winner and model website, in my opinion), Macintouch and SixColors manage to run their site profitably (I presume) without killing the end-user’s browsing experience (see results below). All three of those pages load virtually instantly and are a pleasure to read, with or without an ad blocker—which is why I whitelisted them in Ad Blocker.

I want all of these sites to make money, it’s what keeps them offering up great content for free. But when it comes at the expense of the user experience, it’s self-defeating. If I don’t block the ads to make the site tolerable, I’m just not going to visit the site at all.

There’s an easy way to manage the schedule of Apple’s Time Machine, which by default backs up everything every hour. That’s a bit too often to back things up if you’re not constantly saving loads of data to your drive. Plus Time Machine can soak-up a lot of power and network bandwidth while working if there’s a lot to back up.

TimeMachineEditor (free, donations welcomed) is a fantastic little tool that offers three distinct ways to edit Time Machine’s backup schedule.

Interval – Allows you to simply set a time interval to have Time Machine back up your files, such as every 3 hours, etc.

Calendar Intervals – Allows for a more complex scheduling of backups. As you can see above, you can schedule specific (down to the minute), multiple daily and weekly backup times.

When Inactive – Allows Time Machine to back up your files whenever you’re not using it. This is my preferred setting.

No matter which setting you choose, TimeMachineEditor also offers the option to NOT run backups between user-specified times. I have mine set to the middle of the night to morning, since it’s likely nothing new will have been added for quite a while before and after that.

Because this is simply setting some parameters for Apple’s Time Machine app, you can still use Apple’s Time Machine menubar widget to “Back Up Now” and “Enter Time Machine” whenever you wish.

I love this little utility. It’s been around for years and has always worked flawlessly for me.

I wish I could explain it, but there’s something comfortable and soothing about Apple’s implementation of rounded corners when compared to virtually every other company that tries.