Today I lost about four hours debugging what I thought was a bizarre bug due to my own ignorance. Now, I don’t want to be too hard on myself – no one can be an expert in every nook and cranny of a tech stack as large as AppKit. But, still, this one really knocked me on my butt when I realized my mistake.

Tonight I tweeted this…

In today’s exciting episode of Tyler is a Professional Software Developer™…

The bug I was running into happened when I dragged an NSTextField out of an NSStackView and dropped it elsewhere in the window. In the gif below you’ll see that after the drop completes, the NSTextField lingers behind – continuing to duplicate each time I drag and drop it.

Note: Only the original NSTextField is draggable. The copies left behind don’t accept mouse events.

So, I start debugging this. My first thought is there’s some sort of race condition happening because when I drop the NSTextField, the change persists to my Core Data stack – which does the usual NSManagedObjectContext merge dance and then posts a notification letting the other views in the window know there’s new data and they should refresh. (I don’t know if that’s the proper way to do it, but it’s how I approached it in this situation.)

That notification ? refresh isn’t necessarily anything crazy or complex, but once the change finishes persisting to Core Data, my CloudKit code picks up the new data and pushes it up to the customer’s iCloud account. I don’t just do a push to CloudKit, though. The data model for this app is very, very tiny. So, I’m saving myself some added complexity and just doing an actual two-way sync each time. And, of course, when the sync completes – ? – my views are told to reload any additional changes from the sync session.

I’ve messed up code like this plenty of times before and I’m hoping my first instinct is correct and I’m somehow maybe adding an extra copy of the NSTextField twice to the NSStackView?

Here’s the pertinent code. It removes any existing tasks from the NStackView and then loops through the new data adding a view for each item back into the stack view.

        monthDayView.clearTasks()
        for t in tasks {
            let taskView = t.taskView()
            monthDayView.stackView.addArrangedSubview(taskView)
        }

Heres’ the implementation for clearTasks() above:

    func clearTasks() {
        for view in stackView.arrangedSubviews {
            stackView.removeArrangedSubview(view)
        }
    }

(For the seasoned NSStackView readers out there who can already see the bug in my code, please hold your laughter while I explain the next frustrating hour of my evening in excruciating detail…)

Seems safe enough, right? But still, my eyes don’t lie. There’s clearly a duplicate NSTextField hanging around. Let’s dig deeper.

I start with the app in this state:

I add this debugging code to confirm if the stack views really do or do not have the number of arranged views I’m expecting:

print(monthDayView.stackView.arrangedSubviews.count)

In the screenshot above, March 18 is the “real” item, and the other three are the weird zombie copies. For each of those views, the above debugging code gives me these results:

• March, 18: 1 views OK!
• March, 10: 0 views wtf?
• March, 16: 0 views ?
• March, 24: 0 views ?

Um? That seems…wrong? Those extra views are clearly still there.

Firing up Xcode’s wonderful view debugger, however, completely blew my mind and shattered any remaining self-confidence I had as an app developer…

There’s not just one extra NSTextField hanging about. There. Are. Thirty. Of them.

Clearly at this point I am missing something incredibly obvious and foundational about the situation and frameworks in order for my (I think) relatively simple code to be breaking this badly. Let’s start from first principles and re-read the documentation.

Relatively speaking, NSStackView is a newish part of AppKit. It’s only been around since Mac OS X (not macOS) 10.9 Mavericks. Regardless, in the seven years since then, I haven’t ever really used it that often. I know it’s there and a nice tool to have available, but I’m just not super familiar with it. And as you’ll soon see, even less so than I thought.

I’m reading through Apple’s documentation in Xcode and I finally stumble upon removeArrangedSubview(_:)…

I think that’s strange for a seven year old API, but ok and keep browsing.

Nearly an hour later I’m really questioning everything I thought I knew about ones and zeroes until a google search leads me to this page. And, sure enough, my bug is spelled out right there:

However, using removeArrangedSubview() doesn’t remove the view altogether – it keeps the view in memory, which is helpful if you plan to re-add it later on because you can avoid recreating it. Here, though, we actually want to remove the web view and destroy it entirely, and that can be done with a call to removeFromSuperview() instead.

Holleeee crap. I never knew stack views worked that way. (Thanks, Paul!) I mean, wow. That is a very basic misunderstanding on my part. So, I add one additional line of code:

    func clearTasks() {
        for view in stackView.arrangedSubviews {
            stackView.removeArrangedSubview(view)
            view.removeFromSuperview()
        }
    }

and ? it works. Not only does it work, but it also fixes a number of other peripheral bugs that I had logged but not investigated yet.

Anyway, I hope this excessively long post has enough keywords stuffed into it so that anyone else facing the same problem can find it.

But, last point. Why didn’t Apple’s documentation mention this very important detail? More so, why isn’t that method documented at all?

Ha, well. Turns out, they did document it. My empty screenshot above is from Xcode’s documentation browser. However, if you go to the same documentation on the developer website you’ll see…

Well played, Apple.

Two of the topics I’ve written about the most on this blog are backing up your data and also photography – not professional, artsy photography, but more in the sense of your family’s photo and home video library. I’m a huge nerd for these topics. Part of the reason for that is my own obsessive personality traits, but also because of my affinity for nostalgia and history. My life, to a certain degree, is documented through the literal data I’ve created over the years. And the lives of the people I love are likewise documented through the digital archives I keep. So when those two topics intersect, holy cow do I ever proudly fly my geek flag.

The first post I ever wrote about backing up my data (posted to the blog of a former employer) made it to the front page of Digg back in May 2006.

There’s no need to rehash how much things have changed since then. I could go on and on about how the backup options available to consumers have evolved as well as how we’re simply generating exponentially more data. In fact, I do go into all of that here and here. Instead, I want to specifically talk about how I’m managing my family’s photo and video archives from two perspectives:

1. Purely from a data safety perspective. That means ensuring nothing ever gets lost.
2. And also from a usability point of view. Unlike other types of long-term data storage, the whole point of keeping your photos and home videos safe is to be able enjoy them. If they’re only stored on Blu-rays or magnetic tape drives kept in a bank vault, that kinda defeats the purpose.

The last time I wrote about this topic I thought I had everything figured out. And for a while I did. But it (surprise!) turned out that the Rube Goldberg machine I had created using rclone, rsync, and the Google Drive API as a workaround way to access my Google Photos, was a little too fragile. My aim back then was to make as much of the process as automatic as possible. In hindsight, I think that was too lofty a goal. Over the last nine months I’ve settled on a more manual, monthly backup strategy that I’ve found to be a good compromise. It Works For Me?

99% of my family’s photos and videos come from mine or my wife’s phone. We’ve had two DSLRs over the years. And even bought a nice camera specifically for when my son was born at the recommendation of Shawn Blanc. But they’ve all fallen by the wayside as camera phones have gotten so damn good. (Also, something something about the best camera is the one you have with you.) So, nearly every photo we take comes from one of our iPhones.

The other remaining one percent? That comes from photos other people take of our kids and post to a shared iCloud photo stream. I did have a decent system in place for backing those up, but then, well, shit. So I’m still not sure what to do about them anymore 🤷‍♀️.

Anyway, my family’s photo and video collection is currently weighing in right at one terabyte. For a long time I managed to keep it all stored and organized in Dropbox. I even wrote an app specifically to help with that. (As well as a book I never finished writing.) Eventually, though, that became untenable and I bit the bullet and switched to Google Photos. And Google pretty much solves the usability aspect of this puzzle for me. You can read that linked post for the reasons why I think it’s an incredible product.

Both my phone and my wife’s phone backup automatically to Google. A year or so after we made the switch, Google debuted partner accounts that let you automatically share your library with one other person. That’s awesome – and something I think Apple is sorely missing. But given that my wife and I had already settled on a solution that worked for us and also that having a second Google account involved would complicate the backup process I outline below, we still use the old trick of having the Google Photos iOS app signed into my account on both our phones.

So, that’s what needs to be backed up in a safe and sensible manner: 1TB of data stored in Google’s cloud. How do I go about it? I’ll tell you. But first…

Let’s talk about Amazon Photos and the cost of the cloud

Amazon debuted their Google Photos competitor in 2014 (I think). I gave it a brief try around 2015 or 2016, but I was very much underwhelmed. I remember it being decidedly not good and wrote it off. But late last year, for reasons I don’t really remember, I thought I’d take another look. And you know what?

It’s really good. Like, really, really good. Light years ahead of what I remember first trying.

For the last two years I’ve been looking towards the future and the ever increasing size of my photo library and hoping for a way out of Google. I certainly worry about the privacy implications of willingly paying Google to slurp up even more of my private data, but, meh. I don’t know of another alternative, and (for now) I’m willing to make the tradeoff given the benefits Google Photos offers. My biggest concern is the expensive brick wall I’m going to run into in the next year or two when I estimate I’ll cross into the next storage tier.

As I said, I’m currently using 1TB of data. My current Google One storage plan is $9.99/month for 2TB. That’s the same pricing as what Apple offers with iCloud. But what happens when I reach 2TB and 1 byte? The next option is 10TB of storage for $99.99/month.

Uh, that’s quite a jump. And I’m not even saying the price is unreasonable. If I had 10TB of data to store, I’d be fine paying that much. (Even B2 would cost $50/month.) And, to be fair to Google, at least they offer the option. Apple doesn’t even offer a higher iCloud storage tier than 2TB. When my family maxes that out? I guess our phones will just stop working?

But even as quickly as my data needs are growing, it’ll be a long time before I can justify $100/month. And so that’s why I decided to give Amazon Photos a full-on, complete, all-in try. Take a look at their pricing:

(Oh, and I should point out a bonus about using Amazon. If you’re a Prime member, you can store an unlimited number of full-res, original quality photos and they don’t count against your quota. So, the extra storage space you’re paying for only needs to cover your videos. That can be a potentially huge cost saver.)

I’m assuming Amazon is more concerned with purely making a profit on their storage costs because they have plenty of intermediate tiers that reasonably increase in cost as your storage needs grow. In my case, going one byte over 2TB with Google would be $1,200 a year for 10TB. Amazon would only be $180 for 3TB. And so with $1,020 on the line, I wanted to give Amazon Photos a fair shake and see if they were a viable alternative.

Spoiler: they’re not. At least not yet. But it was so damn close.

Let’s start with the good parts.

Amazon’s app, while maybe not as pretty as Google Photos, is far more functional and snappier to use. What I mean is, when I look at Amazon Photos from an iOS developer’s point of view, it appears to be built with, you know, UIKit.

Google Photos? I get the horrible feeling they’re attempting some shared codebase, cross-platform, UI framework shenanigans that only the engineers at a multi-billion dollar corporation intent on solving “hard problems” think they can pull off. Like pretty much all of their iOS apps, it feels completely foreign on the platform. But UX issues aside, it just doesn’t perform as smoothly. When I scroll through a long stream of photos, I can just feel all the layers of indirection and architecture they’ve built working furiously just to be able to display an image loaded over the network.

Amazon on the other hand – their shit is fast. It feels fluid and responsive in a way that only truly native apps do. Even on a mediocre LTE connection, images scroll on screen just as fast as I can scroll to them. The same is true about both of their web apps. It feels like Amazon is using a bunch of <img> tags inside a <table> (not really, of course). Meanwhile, Google is playing fast and loose with the DOM to reimplement scrolling from scratch for reasons only god knows why. I hardly ever see any blank / placeholder images with Amazon while I wait for the network to catch up. Google on the other hand…

For all of Google’s early leadership to help speed up the web…

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

the Google Photos app just feels slow in comparison.

Next up. Amazon’s sidebar filter. Oh. My. Goodness. It ticks my nerd checkboxes so hard.

With Google Photos you just have a search box. That’s it. And I get it. Google is built around search. The idea is to just type what you’re looking for and Google will give you that. And it works.

Until it doesn’t. Because it’s a black box, you have no idea if Google is interpreting your query correctly. There’s no documentation. No real search syntax to reference. You just have to sort of blindly experiment and hope Google understands what you’re asking for.

And, sure, Amazon has a search box, too. But being able to literally see the number of photos across all of the data points and categories Amazon has grouped your library into, and then being able to mix and match, sort and filter them live – until you’ve narrowed down to exactly what you need – is so incredibly refreshing and a delight to use.

The last super awesome feature I’ll highlight is a trend in consumer software that drives me absolutely up the wall. And that’s lack feedback when something goes wrong.

In my day to day life, Apple is by far the biggest offender. Almost daily, something iCloud or otherwise network related will fuck up on Mac or iOS, and the UI will just sit there with a dumb grin on its face like nothing is wrong. There will be no error message or any sort of actionable feedback about what went wrong. They’ve stripped the UI of so many progress indicators that often times you have no idea if anything is actually happening or if your task has just silently failed. Or, worse, there will be a progress indicator – but in the case of Photos.app on macOS – when you export a video it will remain at 0% for minutes upon minutes with no progress shown. Until finally, and suddenly, the job will finish despite never showing more than 0% complete. (NSProgress exists. Use it!)

/rant over

The Google Photos app is guilty of this as well. Many, many times the app will report that an image or video cannot be uploaded. Occasionally there might be a vague message saying the item was “unsupported” – despite the fact that it’s just a regular image taken with my iPhone. Same as the 80,000 the app has previously uploaded for me. And that’s it. No details. No way to try again or learn more about what went wrong or what might be done about it. Just a mostly silent failure.

Last Fall, my wife’s phone stopped backing up completely. The Google Photos app would not attempt to backup any new photos she took beyond a certain date. Logout / login. Delete the app and reinstall. Nothing worked. And, of course, there were zero error messages or even any indication anything was wrong or failing. Finally, we wiped her phone clean, let iCloud sync her photos back to the device, and tried again. Only then did Google start backing up once more. The cause? The solution? I have no real idea.

Now, compare that to Amazon’s app.

Bless those engineers. Look at all those glorious progress bars and detailed status labels. And when something does go wrong?

An actual error message with what went wrong! The product team that designed that screen would obviously never make it at a real Silicon Valley tech company.

Dealbreakers

With all the great things I said above about Amazon’s offering, why didn’t I stick with them? For a thousand paper cut reasons and one really big reason. First, here’s an email I sent to their feedback address.

Hi, Amazon folks.

I’m looking to move entirely away from Google Photos to Amazon. I’m really, really liking your product so far – especially being able to use the options on the left sidebar to explicitly filter combinations of people/places/dates. That’s a huge improvement over Google’s “only a search field” approach where I have to search and just hope Google figures out what I want.

I’ve successfully imported my 80,000 photos/videos from Google and recreated my 400+ albums. But there are a few key features that are preventing me from fully switching…

All of my albums follow the naming convention of “YYYY-MM Some Title”. For example “2019-06 Aaron’s 5th Birthday Party” or “2008-07 Beach Vacation”. This lets me sort by name and have them ordered chronologically. Unfortunately, in Amazon Photos I can’t search by album name. And with 400+ albums, that’s a huge problem.

Using the search field at the top of the page, I can enter a query and pause, and the search field will autocomplete and show a list of matching album names, but it’s extremely limited and not quite accurate enough. Here’s what I mean…

Say I have the following albums in my account:

* 2019-06 Aaron’s 5th Birthday Party
* 2019-06 Summer Camp
* 2019-01 New Year’s Party
* 2008-07 Beach Vacation
* etc

If I type “2019-06” into the search field and wait, it will correctly list the two matching albums. However, it will only display at most five results. If I have more matching album names than that, I can’t see them. If I actually perform the search (“2019-06”), the full search results page doesn’t list any matching albums – only individual photos ordered by date – no albums.

Also, going back to the search field, if I were to type “Party”, it doesn’t list any results despite there being (at least) two albums with the word “Party” in their names. It appears that the autocomplete results are only matching by the beginning of the album name – not by words within the full album name. And, again, even if the autocomplete results were more helpful, the full results page still isn’t returning results for albums.

Thanks for reading all the above. Your AI/ML based search results are a nice bonus feature for finding what I’m looking for, but for myself and the way I organize my family’s photo library, I really need to be able to do just a basic keyword search by album name.

Oh, and if it helps provide some weight behind my feedback: I’m a Prime member and also recently upgraded to an additional 1TB paid storage plan just for Amazon Photos. I’m sure my storage needs will continue to increase over time.

Happy to provide more detailed feedback if you have questions.

Cheers.
Tyler Hall

Even given that feedback, I was very much still on the fence. Until I hit a showstopper.

I have quite a few large videos in my library. They’re nothing insane. I’m not trying to upload blu-ray rips. But iOS now shoots video at 4k / 60fps. And I’ll occasionally take a 10+ minute home video. That’s easily multiple gigabytes in size. The Amazon iOS app handles files that size with no problems, but their server backend chokes.

I noticed this behavior with two videos – each 10 to 15 minutes long. Multiple days after uploading to their cloud, the website will show a thumbnail preview of the video, but it won’t play. Instead, it gives an error message saying the video cannot be played in a browser and I should use a mobile app instead. Ok, fine. But even on a stable wifi connection, those two videos would simply never play on any device. And I don’t mean they buffered or stuttered. Playback would just never start. Even if I dragged the scrubber to another point in the video, nothing. I tried again days later hoping that videos that big just needed extra time to process. But, the same result. I will say that I did try and download the raw video file and that worked fine. So my data was safe and backed up. It simply wasn’t viewable.

So, for me, that was a bug, breach of trust, a bridge too far, whatever you want to call it that made me realize I couldn’t fully switch to their product. At least not yet. But I’ll check back maybe in another year.

With Amazon out of the running, I still don’t know what I’m going to do when I hit Apple and Google’s next storage limit. But I estimate I have a least another 18 months before that becomes a problem.

Back to backing up my data – the whole point of this post. Here’s my solution.

My (Current) Google Photos Backup Strategy

I don’t trust Apple’s cloud. I don’t trust Google’s cloud. I don’t really trust anyone’s cloud for a number of reasons.

1. When Apple does their best work, it’s often the best in the industry. But that’s becoming increasingly rare as the services we depend on become more and more complex, and, quite frankly, I’ve experienced enough bugs (worse – intermittent bugs) and poor product decisions that I’ve lost faith. They have my business, certainly, but they don’t have my trust.
2. Even though I’m paying Google for extra storage space, I’m not their customer. I’m a product to be sold to their advertisers. And that puts me in a position where I have no leverage if something goes wrong. At any point one of their automated systems could flag me for a TOS violation and my account would simply be gone along with my data. It happened to my original Yahoo! account. It happened to my Twitter Developer account. It’s one of the main reasons why I quit Gmail years ago. And so I refuse to put all of my eggs in the basket of a company I can’t hold accountable.
3. I don’t actually fear any cloud losing my data due to a hardware failure. My worries all revolve around an application error or process failure. I’m in love with the benefits our new services culture offers, but I don’t trust the system for a moment. If I don’t have a backup of my data under my control, then it may as well not exist.

I also don’t trust that my house won’t burn down. And my photos and videos are too precious to me to take a chance with. So, I want them in three places at all times:

1. In Google Photos where they’re useable.
2. Locally on an external backup drive at my house where they’re accessible.
3. In Backblaze B2 storage where they’re safe in the event of disaster.

Google Photos should be the source of truth. It’s where my photos go first and how I organize them. B2 and my local copy should be a mirror of that and of each other.

If performing these backups becomes too time consuming or tedious, it won’t get done. And if you don’t have regular backups, why have any at all? And because each backup set might involve tens of gigabytes of new data, the whole process needs to be manageable from a 200 Mb/s Comcast Business connection. That’s the fastest internet I reasonably have access to.

So, every month on the 5th, I backup the previous month’s worth of photos and videos. Why the 5th day of the month? To stay organized, I literally only operate on and worry about days 1 – 30 of the previous month. By waiting to the 5th I can be reasonably sure of and notice if any stragglers from mine or my wife’s phones didn’t get uploaded.

The first step is to use Google Takeout to request a backup of my data. Doing a full Google Photos dump each month would be insane. Instead, Google helpfully allows you to choose specific albums and/or dates to archive.

Request the backup, and then a few hours or maybe a day or two later, Google will email you when your data is ready. For reference, here’s the February 2020 backup I requested a few days ago:

You’re seeing that correctly. My February archive was too big for a single 50GB .tgz file. So, Google helpfully split it into two. Ooof.

As I said above, I’m on a Comcast Business connection, so my download speeds are perfectly adequate. But it’s not fiber. And once I download 100GB and store it locally, I still then have to re-upload to B2. And my upload speeds are abysmal. So that’s out. Instead, I work around the bandwidth constraints like this.

I spin up a Linode (or DigitalOcean depending on my mood) VPS with just enough storage. For last month’s 100GB export, I went with an $80/month Linode that includes 320GB of storage. (Think: 100GB across two .tgz files and then double that once they’re extracted.) Don’t lose your mind yet. This whole process only takes an hour or two. So that $80/month price actually works out to less than $0.30 for the short amount of time I need it.

With plenty of storage and a fast cloud connection (I make sure to spin up the VPS in a California location since that’s where B2’s datacenter is), I download the Google Takeout archives remotely, extract, and sync to B2.

But wait! If you go this route you’ll find that the download URLs Google provides are protected behind your Google Account (as they should be). And since I’m doing all of this over an SSH connection to my VPS, I can’t exactly just give them to curl to do its thing. I’ll be unauthenticated and get rejected.

I toyed with various idea for how to login or spoof cookies or something, but I finally landed on a much simpler and more pragmatic solution. Using Charles Proxy as an SSL man-in-the-middle, I use Safari on my Mac to begin the download. Then, I kill it. Go to Charles and find that failed connection, right-click, and Copy cURL Request.

That literally puts the correct curl command on my clipboard including all of Google’s insane HTTP headers and authentication cookies. I can then just paste that into my shell and watch a 50GB file download in a matter of minutes.

Next, I extract the file, and use B2’s official command line tool to sync the new photos and videos into my bucket. Going datacenter to datacenter, it never takes longer than twenty minutes. Once the transfer is complete, I run the sync command a couple more times just to verify and let it report back that all files were copied successfully. Only then do I delete my data and destroy the VPS. And like I said earlier, the machine is only alive for at most an hour or two. So the costs never exceed $0.50 – even including bandwidth charges.

Your milage will vary, of course, but here’s the basic commands I use on the VPS (recent Ubuntu flavor) to install the B2 command line tool, download from Google, and sync to Backblaze.

The final step is to get the new data back down locally to my external drive. I also use B2’s command line tool for that. I’m lucky that downloading a hundred gigs of data only takes an hour or so. Even still, and even if it took multiple days, my iMac is always online so I just start the job and let it run however long it takes.

Ok, the final, final step is only sorta related to all this. Because storage is insanely cheap now, I also keep complete backups of my iCloud photo library as well as my wife’s in B2. Doing this is easier than backing up Google Photos. We each have accounts on my iMac with Photos.app set to download the original files of all our media. Then, I just setup Arq to backup to B2 every day and forget about it. It’s purely done as an ultimate last-ditch recovery solution in the event of a real disaster or if I manage to corrupt my other backups.

Next Steps

So that’s basically it. Nearly 4,000 words just to explain the convoluted process and reasons for how I backup my photo library. If the past has taught me anything, it’s that this strategy is likely to change in the future as well. As the amount of data we generate increases, bandwidth speeds up, and cloud and local storage prices fall, I feel like we’re at or nearing an inflection point where I can’t even imagine what my needs will be in the near future – much less years from now when I hand over the family archives to my kids for safe keeping as my aging father recently did to me with his own decades’ worth of genealogy research.

In the near term, my open questions are what will happen when my family hits the 2TB iCloud max? Apple doesn’t even offer a higher tier to pay for. I know that eventually they’ll recalibrate and increase their storage as the average Mac and iOS customer consumes more data. But if (when) I hit that limit before they do? I don’t know what to do other than just erase my iCloud photo library and depend entirely on Google Photos.

And speaking of, we’re going to hit our current 2TB plan’s ceiling within two years. And it’s a helluva jump from paying $10 a month to $100. I guess I’ll just have to move to Amazon at that point regardless of any remaining showstoppers in their product. And when I do, I’ll be sure to write about and publish the command line tools I wrote in Swift to migrate my library from Google to Amazon.

A Final Anecdote

In the first half of this post, and indeed in many, many of my posts on this blog and on Twitter during the last year or so, I’ve bitched about Apple and how I (and many others) perceive their recent software quality. Bugs, lazy decision making, too many balls in the air, etc. Certainly I could have been kinder in many of my assessments, but I stand behind everything I’ve written.

That said, a quick anecdote that I haven’t ever mentioned publicly.

After my Catalina rant gained attention last October, an Apple executive personally reached out to me via email. While it wasn’t exactly like one of those fabled responses out of the blue from Steve Jobs, it was along those lines in spirit. Over the course of a weekend we had a good discussion about the state of the Mac, how customers, developers, and shareholders like myself perceive Apple’s attention to the platform, as well as how this executive viewed the company’s commitment to the Mac – both software and hardware.

We certainly didn’t see eye to eye on every topic, and I’m not entirely sure how much of what they said were their honest feelings versus what their obvious PR training allowed them to say. But, it was a productive conversation. And whether or not they thought I was full of shit (I usually am) they did genuinely listen and demonstrate that they cared. I know this because

1. As our exchange was winding down, they setup a phone call between myself and an Apple engineering manager to do a deep dive into some of the technical points I brought up in my Catalina post and over email. That manager turned out to be incredibly smart, thoughtful, and willing to consider and debate every suggestion I had. Every interaction I’ve had with Apple engineers in the WWDC labs has been excellent. This was no different.
2. During our emails, I mentioned my pet peeve from earlier in this post about the lack of visual feedback, progress indicators, and silent failures that have crept into macOS. I offered to make a quick screen recording and also put together some examples to illustrate my points. They said that would be great, and when I sent them a link to a nearly 1GB zip file of videos and annotated PDFs on a Saturday morning, they replied a few hours later that “I’ve forwarded it to the team and they’re already looking into”. Okay. That’s nice to say but obviously lip service. At least I thought it was until I thought to check my server logs on Monday and saw that the file had been downloaded by nearly twenty internal Apple IPs Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

My point with all of that is that I’m going to keep bitching on Twitter and on this blog whenever I see shortcomings in Apple’s software and when I don’t agree with the direction they’re moving. But I am going to try and be kinder to the people behind the products. Because I know they are listening (to all of us, not just dumb me). And because this person took the time to demonstrate they obviously care.

It’s time.

The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

I read  The Kingdom of God Is Within You in college. I think I was too young at the time to fully digest it – for it to have the impact on me that it has had on others. Nonetheless, Tolstoy’s ideas have stayed with me in the seventeen years since then. Particularly the bit I quoted above. It seemed prescient at the time during the post-9/11 run-up to the war in Iraq when every news organization collectively lost their minds and got drunk on the power they found by turning up the volume, channeling fear, and scrolling sensationalized chyrons 24/7.

And now in 2020? There’s no need for me to spell it out. It’s all become exponentially worse in just a few short years.

Other than my unhealthy addiction to Twitter (which is clearly a huge part of our problem), I reached the point two or three years ago where I would only log in to Facebook once every few months. But I would never post anything. My Instagram account was made private long ago after a bunch of creepers started adding comments to photos of my kids they came across because I had (stupidly) tagged the images with the state park we were visiting.

Once all the old-guard tech companies realized there was no money to be made from instant messaging, they shut those networks down. Everyone I cared about migrated to text messages. I poured one out for Adium and haven’t even launched that app since 2016.

All of my close friends and family share exclusively through iCloud photo albums. (Oops.)

By the time 2020 arrived, I had sort of made peace with the idea that all those hundreds of friends I had on Facebook weren’t really very good friends after all. And I was honestly sad at the thought of no longer seeing my high school classmates’ kids grow up in photographs – even though I hadn’t seen or spoken to them since the day before graduation twenty years earlier. Except for that one click to confirm a friend request, of course.

As far as I was concerned, I was done with Facebook. And mostly Instagram, too. A quick look at my 1Password shows 842 website accounts. How many of those have I logged into in the last five years? How many of those services even still exist? I just assumed Zuck’s empire would become one more abandoned piece of my personal online history. And I was content to let my accounts lay dormant forever.

But then I read this article.

I’ve thought a lot about that story over the past twenty days. And in the course of writing this blog post I’ve taken the time to re-read it, gather my thoughts, and try to pin down exactly what it is that I find so objectionable. So anathema.

And I can’t do it.

It’s not just one thing. Or even a final straw. It’s all of it. Everything at once. An entire decade’s worth of shit, greed, hubris, and billions of people (myself included) who are both the perpetrators and victims.

What I think affects me the most is that I know how these things are built. And it infuriates me. I’m a developer. I’ve also worked in Product. And I’ve worked in Marketing. To a degree, all of these social networks are founded and grown organically. And perhaps they even become unicorns organically, too. But at some point we all have to admit that they do not continue to grow unbounded, continue to make disastrously poor, costly, and harmful decision after decision without morally bankrupt leaders and equally indefensible low-level workers purposefully and consciously choosing to do the wrong thing all in the hopes of upping engagement a sliver of a percent so they might earn one extra dollar.

Real people – every day – are going to work and continuing to build these systems. They plan the sprints. Write the code. Review the copy. And push to production. They speak at conferences and post on Medium about the hard problems they are solving.

Fuck them.

Fuck all of my old Silicon Valley friends who remain at these companies and participate in this fraud just to get one more stock grant.

But I’m done. As of last week my accounts are closed. (Well, except for Twitter. I am a professional hypocrite after all.)

This is just a decision I’m making for myself. For my mental health. And to continue being morally OK with existing online. I’m not advocating for anyone reading this to close their accounts, too. If you find a particular social network beneficial, go for it. The world is on fire, and we can all use happiness wherever we can find it.

This is just my choice. And I’m not even anywhere near the first person to come to it. But already in the last week I feel like a weight has been lifted.

Next

So, what comes next?

For me, that means continuing to interact with the same people I already care about by sharing and posting even more with them now that I’m not feeding the machine. And I’ll do that by owning my own platform.

For me, that means blogging with WordPress because that’s the publishing tool I’m most comfortable with.

I’ve already setup a new website to replace Instagram and to a lesser extent Facebook. It’s public facing, but I’m not going to share the URL here. It’s just for friends and family. If you happen to find it, then I hope you enjoy the many photos of my lunch as well as my kids being annoyingly cute.

But I am happy to share how I made it. Specifically, the tool I wrote to import fifteen years worth of Facebook and Instagram posts to seed my new blog and keep my old content alive and history preserved.

How it Works

Of the accounts I closed, Facebook and Instagram are the only two I care about preserving my history. Fortunately, both services offer comprehensive data export options to let you get a copy of all of your data in both human readable and machine readable formats.

I’ll leave the exact instructions as a google exercise for you, but in a nutshell the process is this…

1. Export your data. You’ll be emailed a link to a zip file.
2. Create a new WordPress blog somewhere.
3. Run the PHP scripts in this GitHub repo.
4. Profit.

The two scripts (one for Facebook, another for Instagram) will crawl through your exported data and make some (I think) clever decisions about what data to import and how to import it in a blog-friendly way. The result will be a blog with all of your old photos and videos, along with captions, and (optionally) location data inserted chronologically with the same date/time that you posted the original content.

One extra-special thing about this script I want to point out is that I also approached it from the point of view of a parent. I want to be able to share this new website with friends and family – many of them not the least bit tech savvy who frequently call me for help because they’ve forgotten their Facebook password…again.

So the last thing I want to do is lock all of this content behind yet another account they have to remember.

But at the same time I don’t necessarily want detailed personal info about my kids just floating around online before they’re of age to consent to that themselves.

So, like I said above, importing the location data attached to your old content is optional. But also, the script allows you to define a list of replacement words. The idea being, I added my kids’ names to the blacklist in settings along with a replacement. Then, when the script imports everything, any post caption containing names (words) like “Trevor” or “Jacqueline”, will be replaced with “T” and “J”.

This allows me to maintain the context of what I originally posted and/or captioned my photos with without being too revealing. If a stalker is determined to find out the names of my kids, there’s nothing I can do to stop them. But that doesn’t mean I have to make their identities easily googlable.

Here’s what the finished product looks like…

It’s every Facebook and Instagram post I ever made that included a photo or video, on my own domain, set to the date and time they originally appeared. It’s almost like Facebook was just a bad dream.

Furious Conclusion

So that’s my small contribution to make things better. It likely won’t matter. But it does give me some relief to have done something. Anything.

I’m filled with rage and despair and also just sad thinking about what we in the tech industry unintentionally unleashed upon the world – and then willfully made worse through greed and arrogance.

Let’s do better. And, above all, be kind.

The other day a coworker was making fun of me (in a good natured way) after we spent some time coding together and they realized just how many keyboard shortcuts I use. And it wasn’t about me having all the standard macOS shortcuts wired-in as muscle memory or even obscure hotkeys specific to a given app. It was all of the custom, global keyboard shortcuts I use to automate repetitive tasks on my Mac in the hope that what I’m telling my Mac to do with my hands might just barely be fast enough to keep up with what my brain wants it to do.

In my head I think of apps, websites, and folders on my Mac as “places”. I don’t just open an app or visit a website. I go there. For me, much like traveling in real life, getting to my destination as fast as possible is usually the goal. And so the majority of the keyboard shortcuts I use are about launching things on my Mac that would otherwise take too many mouse clicks or key presses.

I live and die by my keyboard. And here are the shortcuts I couldn’t do without.

Controlling windows

Let’s start at the highest level. Everything you do on a Mac takes place inside a window. And constantly having to reposition new widows by delicately dragging their edges and titlebars into place drives me mad. It’s the GUI equivalent of busywork.

I’ve played around with automatic window layout managers on Linux – and even a few that have been ported in spirit to macOS. But they were all a little too fiddly and unforgiving for my taste. (Which is great for some people!) As you’ll see below, while I generally want my windows arranged in an orderly fashion, sometimes I do need to break away from my grid-based system and arrange them freeform like a sane, normal person.

Years and years ago I used and was a huge fan of MercuryMover. But at some point I switched to another app that I no longer remember before finally settling on Magnet in 2012. It’s simple and works great. Here are the keyboard shortcuts I’ve setup in it…

Magnet allows for a fair amount of positioning options without going deep into the weeds. The system I use divides my screen into three arrangements: halves, thirds, and quadrants. (Along with a few miscellaneous commands that I’ll describe.)

At first glance many of my window position shortcuts might seem arbitrary, but they make sense to me. Each one is prefixed with the ^⌥ modifier keys and then a trigger key that sort of mnemonically maps in my head to what the window position should be.

Two Halves

In my head I divide my screen into top / bottom and left / right halves, which I position windows with using…

• Left half of screen ^⌥←
• Right half of screen ^⌥→
• Top half of screen ^⌥↑
• Bottom half of screen ^⌥↓

Three Thirds

Here’s how I see my screen in the thirds layout:

And I use these shortcuts to position my windows…

• Left third of screen ^⌥1
• Center third of screen ^⌥2
• Right third of screen ^⌥3

Four Quadrants

And similarly, I also visualize my screen like this:

• Top left of screen ^⌥7
• Top right of screen ^⌥8
• Bottom left of screen ^⌥9
• Bottom right of screen ^⌥0

Second screen support

Magnet works great in that the window position commands apply to the screen that the window is currently on. But if you want to quickly send a window to the next or previous screen, you can do that, too.

• Send to screen on the left ^⌥⌘←
• Send to screen on the right ^⌥⌘→

Miscellaneous window positioning commands

And here are the remaining miscellaneous commands I use for a few special window positions.

• Full screen ^⌥⏎: This does exactly what you’d expect. It makes the window fill the entire screen, but, crucially, does not activate macOS’ fullscreen mode for that app. It just makes the window as large as it can be.
• Center on screen ^⌥C: This takes the active window and centers it horizontally and vertically on the screen without adjusting its size.
• Undo ^⌥⌫: If you use Magnet to position a window using one of the above commands, this hotkey will restore the window to its previous size and position.

And, finally…

• Default position ^⌥5: This is a hotkey controlled by KeyboardMaestro – not Magnet. It sizes the window to be as tall as possible and 50% of the screen width, and then centers it on screen. I call this my “default window position”. I often use it when I want to bring my focus to a specific task. (For the curious: I chose “5” as the trigger key because the “5” key is phsyically in the middle of the keyboard between the 1-3 and 7-0 keys I use with my other window shortcuts.)

Here’s the macro in KeyboardMaestro:

Launching Apps

Next up are what I call my “launchers”. They quickly bring up the apps I use most often. Nearly all of them are built, again, using KeyboardMaestro.

• Web browser ⇧⌘⏎: Like most people, I’m constantly opening my web browser. This hotkey will launch Brave if it’s not already open. If it is running, it will bring its windows to the front. And if no windows are open, it will make a new one.

Even more apps with dedicated hotkeys…

• Open SnippetsLab ⇧⌘F7
• Open Dash ⇧⌘F10
• Open Bear and create a new note: ⇧⌘F11
• Open Drafts ⇧⌘F12
• Open iTerm ⇧⌘: This one is slightly interesting as I needed a way to either bring iTerm to the front or open a new window if one didn’t exist. For some reason the app didn’t follow the standard new window behavior, so I had to script around it.

1Password

I trigger 1Password with ^⇧⏎ and am very happy with how this macro turned out.

I take security seriously and so when I’m out and about with my laptop, I want 1Password to automatically lock itself after being idle, etc. I’m more than happy to have to enter my long, master password to unlock it. But when I’m at home working on my iMac that never leaves my house, I hate having to type in that password over and over again.

So, the macro I use to launch 1Password is actually two macros with the same hotkey. However, one is only activated when I’m at home and the other when I’m using a laptop. They both launch 1Password, but the iMac specific one then fetches my master password out of the system keychain and types it into the 1Password window for me. This lets me open and unlock the app with a single hotkey. Some might call this incredibly insecure, but I call it a small security trade-off for extra convenience 🙂

Here’s the iMac macro…

And I make use of KeyboardMaestro‘s ability to disable certain groups of macros based on what computer you’re using. In this case, you can see that I’m writing this post on my laptop right now, and the iMac group is disabled.

(I wanted to include a video of this macro in action, but in the end I decided it was too much trouble because I would have had to blur out all of my data in 1Password once that window opened.)

My final two launcher commands deal with navigating the Finder.

The first is one I wrote about recently that lets me quickly select and open my favorite folders with ⇧⌘9.

The other is probably my most used of any shortcut. Pressing ⇧⌘8 will prompt me to type the name of an application on my Mac. I can then arrow down the list of matching names and press return to select it. Then, KeyboardMeastro will open the selected Finder items (can be one file or multiple files) with that app.

Example: Often I’ll have a bunch of images selected in Finder. By default, ⌘↓ will open them with Preview. But I can just as easily hit ⇧⌘8 to open them in Acorn. Or, I might want to make a quick edit to a source code file but don’t want to wait for Xcode to spin up. Again, with ⇧⌘8 I can immediately open it in TextMate instead.

I know there are probably a million other ways to accomplish this – I think Alfred probably does it somehow – but it was faster for me to quickly write this script a couple years ago then dig around a for a specific app to do the job. Here’s what it looks like in action…

And the macro…

In / Out

These next commands are all about data. Getting data into some apps and out of others.

First, there is, of course, my beloved OmniFocus‘ quick entry window shortcut key ^⌥␣ which immediately brings up a floating window to jot down whatever task just came to mind, and then just as quickly disappears so I can get on with my work.

I use F12 for creating a new note in Drafts. I could use Drafts‘ native hotkey support, but by going through KeyboardMaestro I get the option of launching Drafts if it’s not currently running. That’s just one less point of friction to worry about. (If there’s already a way to do this with Drafts itself, I missed it. Sorry, Greg!)

I use Pastebot to manage and sync my clipboard and so should you. The system paste hotkey is ⌘V, so naturally my shortcut for opening Pastebot’s history window is ⇧⌘V.

And, finally, I have tons and tons of other macros that I don’t use everyday or that simply don’t warrant a dedicated hotkey. However, pressing ⌘⇧ will open KeyboardMaestro‘s macro search window. I can then just start typing the name of the one I’m searching for and then press ⏎ to run it.

Lastly in the launcher category is my Jira ticket opener hotkey. If you’re lucky enough to use Jira everyday, then you know it’s considered a dumpster fire by everyone who doesn’t just use it to generate reports. And navigating to a specific ticket – especially if you don’t already have a browser window open and loaded up on the appropriate page – is often a 10 to 15 second journey done tens if not sometimes a hundred times a day.

Using the macro search shortcut above (⇧⌘), I can then type jira⏎ to open a textfield that prompts me to enter the numeric portion of the ticket number. Press ⏎ again and KeyboardMaestro opens a new browser window (or tab) directly onto that ticket’s detail page.

Sure, it still takes forever for atlassian.net to load, but it’s way faster than going to an intermediate page first, then needing to click into a search field, and then wait for an awful AJAX request to hydrate the data I’m actually interested in.

(Oh. And the first time my coworker saw me execute that macro, they said “Of course. You of all people would have a hotkey for Jira.” ?)

Miscellaneous Shortcuts

I’ll call out just a few others. The first are a few hotkeys I use for performing various tasks in Xcode. And the last is an amazingly useful macro that I just wish I were smart enough to have come up with on my own.

Xcode

If you use Xcode, there’s no need for me to explain how useful it is to have a lightning fast way to blow away your DerivedData folder.

Along those same lines, I also have a similar macro that wipes out all of the ~/Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Preferences files and folders for the apps I’m working on. This is super useful for resetting data when you’re testing sync logic or when you’re iterating on database schemas.

Next, long-time readers of this blog will probably realize I’m quite insane and particular about my computing habits. (So will those of you who have made it this far in this blog post.) I especially like Xcode arranged in a certain way when I’m writing code vs debugging / running an app.

When I launch an app, I let Xcode do it’s normal behaviors to show the console, swap the sidebar to a different view, etc. But when I’m done testing, I want a quick way to get back to my coding mode. I’ve assigned ⇧⌘8 to be my Xcode “cleanup” macro.

In case you don’t have every Xcode shortcut memorized like I do, that does the following:

• ⇧⌘Y Close the bottom console pane
• ⌘1 Swap the sidebar to show my project’s file structure
• ⌘J Open the window pane selector (what is this thing actually called?)
• ⏎ Select the main editing pane so I can start typing

Basically, the macro maximizes the visible space for the text editor, shows me my most used sidebar view, and makes the editor the first responder so I don’t have to manually give it focus to start typing. Here it is in action…

Last on the list of my Xcode shortcuts is one I simply refer to as “FML”, which I launch with ⇧⌘R. (The meaning of that abbreviation is an exercise for the reader.)

So, so, so many times I’ll try to build and run my latest code changes and Swift and/or Xcode (I’m not sure where to draw the line or what is actually responsible) will vomit into my error logs and refuse to build. I can even do a ⇧⌘K to clean the build folder or, if all else fails, use my earlier macro to wipe out DerivedData. And, yet, still no luck building code that I ? know is fine.

But if I simply quit and relaunch Xcode – and make no code changes – my project will build and run.

This macro automates that process of quitting Xcode, pausing, opening it again, then opening the most recent project, and building. Voilà!

And, finally…

(And I do really mean finally this time.)

This macro takes advantage of KeyboardMaestro‘s text snippet expansion capabilities. If I type the phrase xfinder, KM will replace it with the full path of the selected item in the Finder.

I really wish I could remember where I came across this brilliant trick. It seemed like black magic the first time I read about it.

⌘Q

So, yeah. After writing all of the above, I’m now thinking maybe this post should have been titled A Love Letter to KeybaordMaestro.

That app, along with Magnet, are indispensable to my daily workflow. Many of the shortcuts I highlighted are extremely niche and built to suit my own, weird way of doing things. But hopefully, even if you don’t find any of them specifically useful, they do give you inspiration for ways you can remove all the little papercuts and friction you run into everyday.