The Deck
  • Posted on December 15, 2016

    Nervermind Apple

    I just wanted to take advantage of one of the coolest looking feature of watchOS 3 : the auto unlocking of your mac.

    Well, the first step is to enable 2 factors authentification for your iCloud account. My account was already on the 2 steps authorization scheme so that should be a piece of cake, right ?

    Wrong, so f***ing wrong.

    You first have to downgrade your account to go back to the classic protection by security questions. By doing so, macOS asked me to create a new user because I used my iCloud account to log into my mac and for some reason that was not possible anymore.

    Okay … I guess ?

    At this point I had no real choice anyway so let’s go ahead : create a new password and that’s it, you have your new user identical to the previous one (or so it seems, keep reading …).

    Then upgrade your iCloud account to 2 factors auth : Oh boy ! There’s nothing that makes me like doing my taxes more than a good old fashioned self imposed Apple nightmare …

    When you activate 2 factors auth you have to validate each device you use (iPhones, iPads, Macs) with a second factor. This second factor being (it’s the only option) a prompt that appears on one of your trusted devices. The problem being that each of my devices were then asking for a validation and that none of them was showing me the said prompt.

    So what can you do ? After several reboots, logout / login again cycles … you give up. That’s for sure what I did. I reverted my iCloud account back to security by security questions (because of course the 2 steps verification scheme is not available anymore once you have upgraded to 2 factors auth).

    And now, the kicker: remember my macOS account that seemed OK. Well it was not. The session password was now de-synchronized from the FileVault password that I have to provide at each reboot to decrypt my hard-drive. So each time I rebooted I had to enter the FileVault rescue key.

    Had I not set a FileVault rescue key (which would have been stupid sure, but what if you’ve lost it ?) trying to unlock my Apple Mac with my Apple Watch through my Apple iCloud account would have nixed all my data.

    Let that sink in.

    So thanks Apple and next time would it be possible to … No, you know what, nevermind. It’s on me.

    Next time I won’t even try.

  • Posted on December 13, 2016

    Mac Niches

    Micheal J. Tsai speaking of the mac models used by the users of its macOS apps:


    The numbers for the MacBook seem really low to me. The 2% (1.68% before rounding) includes both the MacBook One and the plastic MacBook that was discontinued in early 2012. The 12-inch MacBook never seemed attractive to me—overpriced and underpowered, not to mention the keyboard—but I would have expected to see more people using it.
    […]
    It’s frustrating that Apple sees the MacBook One as a worthwhile niche but doesn’t want to make a high-end MacBook Pro with a larger display, more RAM, a real keyboard and trackpad, etc.

    Some niches seem more comfy than other in the new Mac ecosystem.

  • Posted on December 6, 2016

    Change font size in screenshots created with Frameit

    Frameit is a very nice utility to create nice looking App Store screenshots. It will take your images, add a device frame around them and optionaly a title of your choosing in multiple language. In short, it’s a godsend.

    But unfortunatly, as any tool, it has a few shortcomings. One of them (for my use case at least) is that there’s no way to choose the size of the font you’re using for your titles.

    For example, look at this screenshot for my app Librairie - Ebook Cloud Reader:

    Bad screenshot

    It’s not bad per se but it could be much better with a bigger font to add some punch. The corresponding json is:

            {
            "filter": "collection",
            "title": {
                "color": "#bc1626"
                ,"text": "Automatically sync and read all your ebooks stored in the cloud"
            }
        }

    The trick is to make Frameit think that the text will take more space and as a consequence use bigger font to fill that space. For this, you can use a new line character in your description. The Framefile.json becomes:

            {
            "filter": "collection",
            "title": {
                "color": "#bc1626"
                ,"text": "Automatically sync and read all\nyour ebooks stored in the cloud"
            }
        }

    And the rendered screenshot:

    Good screenshot

    Et voilà !

  • Posted on December 1, 2016

    Amazon introduces Lex

    Yesterday, Amazon introduced a new service in beta called Lex:


    Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to any developer, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”).

    In a nutshell, this is a Siri competitor available for all developpers. And instead of being limited to the handfull of intents that Apple provides (and won’t extend until at least next year iOS major version) you can use it for whatever use case you want. You can even use text to talk to this “assistant” an often asked feature for Siri.

    Obviously the drawback is that you won’t be able to invoke it from outside your app. Still that seems massively interesting.

  • Posted on December 1, 2016

    Paris' Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir

    For those who have liked the Lucky Knot Bridge posted by Kotke this morning I humbly present la passerelle Simone de Beauvoir.

    Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir

    This bridge is located in Paris and links the 13th district (on the left bank of the Seine river) with the 12th district (on the right bank). It was opened in 2006.

    Paris is a beautifull city, more modern than what one might imagine.



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