Hey Tim. Here’s a “Portrait” icon. See? It’s taller.

There be gremlins? A ghost in the big giant Apple machine? An Easter Egg? Or somebody’s idea of a joke?

Because a couple of important icons have gotten switched!! And “icons”, little pictures that we rely on to represent certain very specific things, are important! You can’t just go switching them around! You’ll defeat their purpose. You’ll make them unreliable. I mean, what if somebody changed all the light switches in your house so that when you click “On” the lights go off? Or swapped faucets so hot water came out when you wanted cold?? What if one day Captain Aubrey decided that port would be starboard from now on?

Details are so important. Attention to important details helped establish Apple as the platform of visual artists. Unfortunately, someone has forgotten the importance of small details, in this case, in the difference between Landscape and Portrait. And here’s what I’m talking about:

On the Macintosh—Look at this Print Dialog from MacOS Monterey 12.1.1.

Notice anything?

The Print dialog has two icons, helpfully labeled “Portrait” and “Landscape”. Two tiny upward-pointing arrows are also supposed to help you figure this out. But if the rectangles were placed correctly, arrows would be unnecessary. The ORIENTATION of the rectangle is the indicator, the rectangles don’t even need anything inside them to make this point. (Ideally, the Landscape rectangle would contain mountains, not people, but we’re not going to fix everything today…).

Remember:

Portrait=long edge vertical (tall).
Landscape=long edge horizontal (short).

The arrows are there because the rectangle of the Landscape icon is turned on its side! It’s in Portrait mode, the same exact orientation as the rectangle of the Portrait icon. This misses the whole point of the VISUAL CUE that icons represent!! The “person” image inside the rectangle does not make it “Portrait”!

The rectangle icons would be more obvious if they were empty. But in this Mac dialog, in the Landscape icon, the “person” is sideways, which only makes sense if you turn your head sideways. Do you look at your screen that way??

That’s one issue. Once this flaw was established somewhere, somebody “understood” that any rectangle with a “person” in it is a Portrait icon. Confused? They were. Now you’ll never guess where the Landscape icon turns up, the one that is correctly oriented, but unfortunately contains a person image in it.

On iOS—Look at this so-called “Genius Pick” from “Tips” for iPad

How about here?

This “Tip” literally tells you to tap on a LANDSCAPE Icon “to turn on Portrait mode.”

Now we have the right icon (Landscape), being asked to do the wrong thing. Where will it end?? What I shouldn’t have to explain here, is that you ought to have to tap on a Portrait Icon to turn on Portrait mode! Does anyone at Apple know who Steve Krug is anymore? Or Don Norman?

And so, continuing my long tradition of helping Apple when I can, I, TechWite, have returned from a long and mysterious absence to remind you, “Think Different”. Remember that Landscape and Portrait are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, historically represented by TWO DIFFERENT icons, and essentially, by THE ORIENTATION of the TWO RECTANGLES.

🤐 So many words! Try this:

“I’m Portrait!”—a tall image, with longer vertical edge

“I’m Landscape!” —a short image with a long horizontal edge

What’s to be done? I’m not going to correct every dialog and Genius Tip in Apple world, but I’ll give you a place to start. Please fix the icon in the Mac Print Dialog so it looks something like this:

Oh look! No tiny arrows!

When you’re done with that, then you can tackle the rest of this confusion in all the bazillions of iPhones and iPads and every other iThing. Okay? Glad to help. Now get to it!

I’m back.

—TechWite

Apple Flashback 2001: We Didn’t Think of That

How to Update Quicktime

As I mentioned way, way back in UNPREDICTABLE #3, the Software Update Control Panel doesn’t update Quicktime! And I still can’t tell you why—but I can guess. Those whacky, wonderful guys and gals in Apple’s Quicktime development group are pretty independent. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve got Apple’s crown jewel, and all the other development groups should just BOW and BE HUMBLE.

For example, a few years ago at MacExpo NYC, Apple demoed the ‘new’ release of Quicktime 4. One of the cool features was the ability to set up Quicktime to tell it HOW FAST your Internet connection was. That way, Quicktime Streaming servers could send you movies appropriate for your speed. (To oversimplify: Slow connection? Small movie. Fast connection? Big movie.) When I saw that, I thought, “Cool. I bet they have it tied to Location Manager!”  Which would make a great deal of sense.

Location Manager – definitely an Overlooked and Underused item, is mostly for laptop users. It’s kind of a SUPER Extension Manager. It’s a way to change ALL KINDS OF SETTINGS with just one command. You can: turn File Sharing on, have a default printer named “Joe”, and use a certain TCP-IP address connected to an Ethernet LAN at WORK. Then, switch to: A default printer “Jane”, turn File Sharing off, and use TCP-IP over your modem, at HOME. Once you have it set up, all you have to do is choose ‘WORK’ or ‘HOME’ and everything snaps into place.

So I asked one of the Quicktime DUDES at the Apple booth about that. He pointed his blond beard skyward, ran his fingers through his pony tail, and said, “Hmm, No..we didn’t think of that. That might be a good idea. Thanks.”

I try to help Apple where I can. Now Quicktime speeds are tied-in to Location Manager. My point, besides shameless self-promotion, is that the Quicktime Team is in their own little world. Why should THEY have to use the Software Update Control Panel? THEY don’t like it. THEY can build their own Software Update into Quicktime. And THEY DID. SO THERE.

via Unpredictable Back Issue #8, February, 2001.

It’s a Power Tool. It’s an Advantage.

In Safari on Macintosh, you can create a folder of bookmarks that open with a single click. What does that mean? Think about it for a second – you have, let’s say, five web pages that you look at all the time, maybe even all day long. Maybe news sites, maybe social media or blogs, maybe “dashboards” of stocks, or equipment you administer, a document control system, or knowledge base, Evernote, webmail, or some combination of the above. Every day or so, you load these sites from Bookmarks or a “Favorites” page of some kind (depending on your browser). Up one menu, down the next, open this panel, click, click, click, click. But wouldn’t it make sense to just launch them all with one button? Let’s do it.

First, Folders Full of Tabs on the Bookmarks Bar

You probably know you can add Bookmarks to Safari on the “Bookmarks bar”. You may even know that you can have a folder full of bookmarks accessible there, which drop down in a menu (indicated in the image above, after “Hot”, by the little disclosure triangle—formerly known as a “twistie”.) But, did you know you can create a special folder (marked above with the little square) that will open all the bookmarks inside when you click it? “Workbench” is my folder full of bookmarks that open with one click!

ONE button, ONE click all my tabs in ONE window.

All my “dashboards” and other web-based Admin tools available in one browser window.

How? Safari Help – it’s “Easy, but not Obvious“.

Apple people, Macs are not perfect. Safari is not perfect. You have to work hard to figure out how to make this happen, and the option has been here for years! (And please, don’t get me started on the CRAZY interface in Safari and how you have Bookmarks and Favorites available in so many places and so many ways that you you can just get lost. Simplify THAT, Jonny Ive! Please!) Anyway…

You need to know how to Edit your Bookmarks in Safari.
Hint: Go to Bookmarks > Edit Bookmarks…

1. Create a new Bookmark folder
2. Put the Bookmarks that you want to group together in that folder
3. Put the folder in the Favorites bar
4. [Control]-[click] the folder name, then choose “Automatically Open in Tabs”

Now, tell me how you do this in Windows and Internet Explorer? I know you can, sort of, with a lot of work. Way more work. Go ahead. Choose your tool.