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Apple Watch & macOS

Posted: December 13th, 2018 | Category: Gadgets, Mac | §

Useful things you can do with the Apple Watch

I was’t much of an Apple Watch fan to begin with. I owned a Pebble and was quite happy with it. It showed the time, let me control media, and when paired with an Android phone and a third party app whose name I forget I could even launch media apps from the phone and play. That was awesome, and it ticked the only need I had for a smart watch apart from showing time – let me launch media from the phone coz I don’t like taking it out just to play music. I use wireless headsets anyways (have so, for a long time) so there’s no need to take the phone out to plug a pair of headphones either. 

Pebble went out of business, and my wife gifted me a Series 3 Apple Watch last year. It was cool. I use Apple Music already, and the Music app on the Watch could browse through my Apple Music library on the phone and play music from the there so it plays via Bluetooth. Perfect! Then in a later update Apple removed this functionality and the use of the Apple Watch diminished hugely for me. Later however, they introduced it again and that was cool. 

During the course of time other music or media apps I use too launched Apple Watch apps or improved their existing ones. So now I can launch & control my podcasts from Overcast and Pocket Casts; I can launch music from Apple Music and Spotify (and even mark them as liked or add to library); and Audible has an app that lets you download books to the Watch itself but I don’t use that as it’s not something I am interested in (I am hoping they give the ability to browse through the books in your phone and launch from the app there – that would make the app very useful for me). 

Other media related things you can do with the Apple Watch is use Shazam to quickly find what song is place. It’s a bit slow to launch so I am not a huge fan of the app, but I still have it in my dock so I can launch it if I am lazy to take out the phone. :) And then there’s there the Remote app. This lets me control iTunes on all my Macs as well as my Apple TV. That’s so awesome! It is pretty cool being able to pause or rewind/ fast forward songs on your Mac iTunes from the Watch. And if the Apple TV remote is not around I can play/ pause or navigate around Apple TV from the Watch itself. 

Spotify’s recent App is useful too especially since I have an Amazon Tap and that integrates well with Spotify. So I can (say) launch Spotify from my iPhone and tell it to play via the Tap so the phone isn’t doing any Bluetooth transmitting to the Tap but the Tap streams the music directly. Then, I can use the Spotify app on the Apple Watch to control the playback of the music via the phone of the Tap. So I can increase/ decrease volume of the music being played by the Tap; rewind/ skip tracks etc. Which is nice. 

Lastly, the watch can unlock my Macs if you set it up that way (I haven’t, but it is a useful feature). And if you use the Microsoft Authenticator app it even sends sign in approval requests to the Watch – super cool! 

This is what I mainly use my Apple Watch for and for these tasks the Watch is a pretty good device. I also use it to track my daily moves and calories etc., but I don’t know, I don’t use it extensively for that. I know I used to watch my step count more closely on the Pebble than I do on the Apple Watch. I try and close the rings every day, but that’s more of a best effort than strongly trying to close all rings.

Useful macOS apps

Quick shout out to some useful macOS apps I happened to discover over the past few months of Mac usage. Nothing new here, you’d probably know them all already. 

  • SteerMouse – If you are not a fan of the Apple Mouse (I am not, it’s too small!) but love the macOS gestures and want to get them working somehow with your existing mouse this app can do it. Thus if I left&right click my mouse buttons together I get mission control; I can left&middle click to go one space left; right&middle click to gone one space right; etc. Little stuff, but useful. 
    • SensibleSideButtons – similar to above, but for side buttons. I don’t use it but came across. 
  • BetterTouchTool – I bought this app (as I did SteerMouse too) but I haven’t used it extensively yet. It can customize your Touch Bar and also mouse gestures etc., but there’s so many options and I haven’t had a use case yet. Some day ..
  • Keyboard Cleaner – Obsessed with cleaning the keyboard but don’t want to shutdown the Mac while you do this (so the keys don’t do anything)? Download this free app and launch it. It disables the keyboard until you press a special shortcut to activate it again. Neat huh!
  • Keyboard Maestro – Haven’t used this one but it has good reviews. For customizing keyboard shortcuts etc. I am more of a gestures person currently. 
  • FastScripts & MarsEdit from Red-Sweater: I use the latter for blogging. I haven’t used he former but it lets you create scripts to control & customize things. Looks to be useful; will try sometime.
  • SetApp – an App Store. Pay $10 per month and get access to a variety of apps. 
  • Reeder for Mac – For all your RSS cravings. :) Works perfectly with NewsBlur which I use and pay for. I like RSS, am old fashioned that way. 
  • Underpass: Again, an app I haven’t used but I liked the concept and the story behind it. It’s a file transfer and chat app for use between you own devices – i.e. without need to send stuff to iCloud or email them to yourself. 
  • Time Out: If you spend too much time in front of your Mac you need this app to remind you to take a break.
  • Kinesis Freestyle 2 Blue for Mac: not an app, but an ergonomic keyboard for you Mac. Works over Bluetooth but there are wired versions too if that’s your fancy. I purchased their VIP3 accessories too.
    • Not Mac related, but following the theme of ergonomic behavior and healthy habits I’d also like to point out to the SKARSTA standing desk from IKEA which I use. Let’s you adjust the height via a crank handle. 

FileVault and BlueTooth/ Wi-FI

I don’t have any other place to mention this so might as well put it here. The macOS has a good (but irritating) behavior with respect to BlueTooth and Wi-Fi when FileVault is on. If FileVault (i.e. disk encryption) is on, then macOS disables Wi-Fi and BlueTooth until someone logs in. This means you cannot remotely login to your Mac via VNC or SSH, nor can you login at the console via a BlueTooth keyboard or mouse! Irritating, but yeah I get the idea behind it (the OS does not load any drivers etc. until you login not does it allow remote access – just to keep things secure). This is not explicitly mentioned anywhere but you find mention of this behavior in various forum posts etc. Keep this in my when you use BlueTooth keyboards. 

Magic Trackpad 2

Posted: December 2nd, 2018 | Category: Mac | §

Ever since I started using the MacBook Pro my right wrist has been hurting. I suspected the butterfly keyboard first, but nope that’s not the culprit (in fact, the keyboard’s kind of good … it felt odd initially, not having much travel, but I quickly got used to it). I realized later that the problem must be the trackpad. You see, unlike with Windows I use the trackpad heavily here as the macOS has many useful gestures and although I try to distribute it evenly between my left and right hands the right is what usually does the work.

I thought of getting a regular external mouse first, but there’d be no fun in that. Then I seriously considered getting the Magic Mouse 2 and even went to the Apple shop to try it out … but boy it’s small! I can’t imagine how I would be able to use that. And finally, today, after a lot of thinking and delay I went for the Magic Trackpad 2. Yup, it’s not cheap, nearly double the price of the already pricey mouse … but what the heck.

I find that I am using the left hand more often now for swiping and gestures. And now my left hand too is starting to hurt! 😂

Speaking of Mac stuff I started using the Mac Mini as a regular desktop now with a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. I don’t get to do any mouse/ trackpad gestures but I realized I can assign keyboard mapping to get a lot of the functionality. Feels different, using a Mac device with a non-Mac keyboard and mouse … but hey, it works pretty well. The one thing that does not work so well is the monitor. I have two (a Samsung and an LG) 1920×1080 resolution monitors and they have worked well with Windows so far so I thought they’d do a good job with the Mac Mini too. But nope, they are fine, but not great. And that’s then I realized that not all monitors are the same. I knew better, but had not really registered in my head I think … just because two monitors might have the same resolution that does not mean they have the same ppi (pixels per inch). The more pricey ones, including the MacBook Pro screen, have a higher ppi and so everything appears smooth and pretty; while the not so pricey ones that I had have a lower ppi. That is why my eyes are able to notice the fuzziness. About 300ppi is where the human eye stops discerning the individual pixels so any monitor with 300+ ppi will appear amazing! These cost a lot more though unfortunately. (For now I decided to suck it up and stick on with the existing monitors. I use the Mac Mini to Citrix and VPN into work, so it’s mostly running Windows and that displays perfectly fine on the lower ppi monitors :)). 

Trying out MarsEdit

Posted: December 2nd, 2018 | Category: Mac, WordPress | §

Trying out MarsEdit today. Downloaded a trial version, want to see how it goes. My blogging has reduced a lot last few months – mainly coz I have been super busy, but I don’t want to neglect this blog either. Ever since I switched to macOS I wanted to try MarsEdit but was too stingy to pay for it and didn’t see why I should shell out money when I can do for free via a web UI, but I guess everything’s better consumed via an “app” nowadays and so it just feels more natural to blog via an app than a website. I dunno. Just a reason to try out something I guess. :) 

One thing with a Mac (and Apple in general) is that you tend to spend more. And you don’t mind it too … or at least I don’t. I know with Windows (or Android) apps I’d be stingy and think twice, but with Apple I am fine. That’s the beauty of Apple … they have you reeled in well into the system. 

Various bits and pieces

Posted: November 24th, 2018 | Category: Books Audiobooks Podcasts, Mac, Musings | §

I listened to Ian Fleming’s “Quantum of Solace” now as part of the “For Your Eyes Only” collection narrated by Simon Vance. Wow, that was an amazing James Bond story. My favorite now, next to “Casino Royale” (which I listened to the version narrated by David Tennant). No guns or action in this one, just a story on human nature … and boy was it better than everything else! The narration enhanced the story. I love Simon Vance’s narration and he outdone himself in this one.

Speaking of audiobooks I have been laxing on them recently. In fact I switched to an alternate-monthly plan after emailing customer service as I simply wasn’t able to keep up with my purchases. This way I get 6 credits a year – a purchase every other month – and I continue to get access to the members only sales and Audible Originals etc. Not a bad deal.

There’s simply too much stuff to listen to now. Audiobooks plus a lot of fantastic podcasts. I have split my podcasts amongst two apps mainly coz I like both apps and want to keep a foot in each but also because I use each app for a different sort of podcast. I use Overcast to listen to a lot of the TWIT and Apple focused shows and try it use it like one would use Twitter – i.e. dip into the stream of podcasts as and when I can and try not to get too fussed if I am falling behind on my listening (which I almost always am). Side by side I use Pocket Casts to listen to “stories” – podcasts I would like to listen to from the first episode to the last, or at least in order or even just try and keep up more regularly. This too doesn’t always happen but I try and keep it that way. There’s simply so much stuff to listen to now!

Speaking of podcasts check out “Homecoming” by Gimlet. The podcast is fine, but the TV show based on it is amazing. That takes the podcast to a whole different level. Speaking of TV shows “Bodyguard” was a good one, so were some stand up comedies on Netflix like the Adam Sandler one “100% Fresh” and Trevor Noah’s “Son of Patricia”. I have been slacking on TV shows too.

Yup, life has a lot of pressure! :) Don’t get me started on the books I have in my Kindle and physical to read but which I am barely making progress on. It’s like entertainment is no longer just entertainment – you have to choose between multiple options, there’s pressure, try and not waste too much time on stuff you don’t like (and not feel guilty either about leaving things partly if you don’t like them) … so much pressure! I like to listen to music too but that’s taken a huge backstage probably recently as there’s only so much ear time I have. That said today morning I spent about an hour or two just listening to music. That was awesome indeed!

I am also getting up to grips Macs and macOS. I bought the latest Mac Mini and setting it up hasn’t been as pleasurable an experience as I was imagining it to be. For one, I went with the base model and so don’t have much storage space, but I did that hoping I can just point my iCloud etc. to an external drive and be done with it. You see, I wanted this Mac Mini to be sort of like my file server at home, hosting all my iCloud files etc., and I know in Windows I can point the iCloud drive to a different drive/ folder and so I incorrectly assumed I would be able to do the same on macOS too. Nope, you can’t. iCloud drive has to be in your home drive, and if you are stuck like me with a small home drive then you are screwed. So I had to fiddle with having the home drive itself be on an external drive, then realize that I can’t automatically mount it as I have to enter the password of the drive (not like Windows with BitLocker where you enter the password for the main drive and all other drives can be automatically mounted). On top of that I learnt that since my system drive too is encrypted I can’t even remotely connect to the Mac until I login via the console (eugh!) (it makes sense though, so while I say eugh I appreciate it). What I ended up doing finally is turn off encryption in my system drive, have my home drive mounted to an external drive, and each time I power on the Mac I’ll SSH into it remotely and will mount the home drive partition after entering password so that I can then login via console and proceed to do whatever I want.

Speaking of which. 1) the VNC based screen sharing sucks. Doesn’t just expand to the correct resolution like Microsoft Remote Desktop would do. and 2) I can’t figure out how to mount all my other non-encrypted drives automatically or via CLI as it only seems to happen once you login. I tried fiddling with the fstab file but didn’t make progress. (Again, none of these are huge complaints. If it were Windows I would have similar issues like being unable to enter the BitLocker password for the root drive without connecting to the machine directly … but yeah, I sort of didn’t expect it with the Mac Mini. My fault for assuming iCloud can be easily re-pointed elsewhere without moving the whole home directory itself someplace!)

My Mac Mini troubles aren’t ended yet as it currently doesn’t let me do time machine backups and complains it can’t take local snapshots. I haven’t had time to look into it so left it for now.

MacOS VPN doesn’t use the VPN DNS

Posted: August 21st, 2018 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Infrastructure, Mac | §

Continuing with my previous post … as part of configuring it I went to “Advanced” > “DNS” in the VPN connection and put in my remote end DNS server and domain name to search. On Windows 10 I didn’t even have to do this – remote DNS and domains were automatically configured as part of connecting. Anyways, once I put these in though I thought it should just work out of the box but it didn’t.

So turns out many others have noticed and complained about this. I couldn’t find a solution as such to this but learnt about scutil --dns in the process. Even though the Mac OS has a /etc/resolv.conf file it does not seem to be used; rather, the OS has its own way of DNS resolution and scutil --dns lets you see what is configured. (I am very very sketchy on the details and to be honest I didn’t make much of an effort to figure out the details either). In my case the output of this command showed that the VPN provided resolver for my custom domain was being seen by scutil and yet it wasn’t being used – no idea why.

I would like to point out this post though that shows how one can use scutil to override the DHCP or VPN assigned DNS servers with another. Good to know the kind of things scutil can do.

And while on this confusing topic it is worth pointing out that tools like nslookup and dig use the resolver provided in /etc/resolv.conf so these are not good tools if you want to test what an average Mac OS program might be resolving a particular name to. Best to just ping and see what IP a name resolves to.

Anyways, I didn’t want to go down a scripting route like in that nice blog post so I tried to find an alternative.

Oh, almost forgot! Scoped queries. If you check out this SuperUser post you can see the output of scutil --dns and come across the concept of scoped queries. The idea (I think) is that you can say domain xyz.com should be resolved using a particular name server, domain abc.com should be resolved via another, and so on. From that post I also got the impression you can scope it per interface … so the idea would be that you can scope the name server for my VPN interface to be one, while the name server for my other interfaces to be another. But this wasn’t working in my case (or I had configured something wrong – I dunno. I am a new Mac OS user). Here was my output btw so you can see my Azure hosted domain rakhesh.net has its own name server, while my home domain rakhesh.local has its own (and don’t ask me where the name server for general Internet queries is picked up from … I have no idea!).

Anyways, here’s a link to scutil for my future reference. And story 1 and story 2 on mDNSResponder, which seems to be the DNS resolver in Mac OS. And while on mDNSResponder, if you want to flush you local DNS cache you can do the following (thanks to this help page):

What a mouthful! :)

Also, not related to all this, but something I had to Google on as I didn’t know how to view the routing table in Mac OS. If you want to do the same then netstat -nr is your friend.

Ok, so going back to my problem. I was reading the resolver(5) man page and came across the following:

Mac OS X supports a DNS search strategy that may involve multiple DNS resolver clients.

Each DNS client is configured using the contents of a single configuration file of the format described below, or from a property list supplied from some other system configuration database. Note that the /etc/resolv.conf file, which contains configuration for the default (or “primary”) DNS resolver client, is maintained automatically by Mac OS X and should not be edited manually. Changes to the DNS configuration should be made by using the Network Preferences panel.

Mac OS X uses a DNS search strategy that supports multiple DNS client configurations. Each DNS client has its own set of nameserver addresses and its own set of operational parameters. Each client can perform DNS queries and searches independent of other clients. Each client has a symbolic name which is of the same format as a domain name, e.g. “apple.com”. A special meta-client, known as the “Super” DNS client acts as a router for DNS queries. The Super client chooses among all available clients by finding a best match between the domain name given in a query and the names of all known clients.

Queries for qualified names are sent using a client configuration that best matches the domain name given in the query. For example, if there is a client named “apple.com”, a search for “www.apple.com” would use the resolver configuration specified for that client. The matching algorithm chooses the client with the maximum number of matching domain components. For example, if there are clients named “a.b.c”, and “b.c”, a search for “x.a.b.c” would use the “a.b.c” resolver configuration, while a search for “x.y.b.c” would use the “b.c” client. If there are no matches, the configuration settings in the default client, generally corresponding to the /etc/resolv.conf file or to the “primary” DNS configuration on the system are used for the query.

If multiple clients are available for the same domain name, the clients ordered according to a search_order value (see above). Queries are sent to these resolvers in sequence by ascending value of search_order.

The configuration for a particular client may be read from a file having the format described in this man page. These are at present located by the system in the /etc/resolv.conf file and in the files found in the /etc/resolver directory. However, client configurations are not limited to file storage. The implementation of the DNS multi-client search strategy may also locate client configurations in other data sources, such as the System Configuration Database. Users of the DNS system should make no assumptions about the source of the configuration data.

If I understand this correctly, what it is saying is that:

  1. The settings defined in /etc/resolv.conf is kind of like the fall-back/ default?
  2. Each domain (confusingly referred to as “client”) in the man-page can have its own settings. You define these as files in /etc/resolver/. So I could have a file called /etc/resolver/google.com that defines how I want the “google.com” domain to be resolved – what name servers to use etc. (these are the typical options one finds in /etc/resolv.conf).
  3. The system combines all these individual definitions, along with dynamically created definitions such as when a VPN is established (or any DHCP provided definitions I’d say, including wired and wireless) into a configuration database. This is what scutil can query and manipulate.

What this means for me though is that I can create a file called /etc/resolvers/rakhesh.net (my Azure domain is rakhesh.net) with something like these:

Thus any requests for rakhesh.net will go via this name server. When I am not connected to VPN these requests will fail as the DNS server is not reachable, but when connected it will work fine.

What if I want to take this one step further though? As in I want DNS requests for rakhesh.net to go to its proper external DNS server when I am not on VPN but go via the internal DNS server when I am on VPN? That too is possible. All I have to do is have multiple files – since I can’t call all of them /etc/resolvers/rakhesh.net – and within each specify the domain name via the domain parameter and also define the preference via a search_order parameter. The one with the lower number gets tried first.

So I now have two files. For internal queries I have /etc/resolvers/rakhesh.net.azure (the name doesn’t matter):

For external queries I have /etc/resolvers/rakhesh.net.inet:

The internal file has higher priority. I also added a timeout of 5 seconds so it doens’t spend too much time trying to contact the name server if the VPN is not connected. Easy peasy. This way my queries work via the internal DNS servers if I am connected to VPN, and via external DNS servers if I am not on VPN.

If I now look at the output of scutil --dns I see all this info captured:

So that’s it. Hope this helps someone!

 

Azure Point-to-Site VPN disconnects without connecting on MacOS

Posted: August 21st, 2018 | Tags: | Category: Mac, Virtualization | §

Wasted a lot of time today trying to get Azure P2S VPN setup on my MacBook Air. I had done the hard work while setting it up for Windows – setup an internal CA, generate client certificates, etc. – and it was working fine with Windows 10 but kept disconnecting with Mac OS. The instructions were straight-forward but the client would connect and disconnect with no messages. Couldn’t find a way to enable logging either! 

The issue was very similar to the one in this StackExchange post but it couldn’t be about certificates as in that post as I had setup mine correctly. I too was getting the same error message as that poster in both wifi.log and syslog.

I poked around the authentication settings and finally hit upon a fix. Instead of setting “Authentication Settings” to certificate, as in the instructions, I set it to “None” and that gave me two options as in the screenshot below. I selected “Certificate” here and pointed it to a copy of the user certificate I had on file and that did the trick!

No idea why this is different to the official instructions.

New MacBook Air

Posted: August 11th, 2018 | Tags: , , | Category: Gadgets, Mac | §

So I finally dipped my feet into the Mac ecosystem and bought myself a MacBook Air. Yes, I know it’s 3 years old but what the heck – it was the cheapest Mac I could buy! Went for the 8GB/ 256GB i5 version as that’s the one I found on a deal with our local online shopping provider. Might have gone with a different spec if I decided to go with the version available officially with Apple but a) that had a UK English keyboard and b) the same model there was about 33% more expensive so if I were to get a better spec’d one I’d be spending a lot lot more (bringing the costs up to the MacBook range). 

One thing about MacBook purchases though – it isn’t easy. I mean, with an iPhone. you only have to choose along the color & size, and then pick the capacity you want. But with Macs I have to worry about size, CPU (i5 or i7), RAM, and storage; and each choices ups the price by so much! And more than the price the choices just exhaust. It’s the paradox of choice concept (I’ve read the book) and the feeling is similar to Windows laptops where there’s so many choices and you just get bogged down trying to pick what you want and eventually let go of the idea itself. Which is what I had done here (let go of the idea) until my wife suggested this MacBook Air model that was on a deal and I thought what the heck and just purchased it. My focus here is to get something that will get me a toehold in the Mac ecosystem and probably settling on price as a criteria than anything else was what was needed. 

Oh, and the MacBook Air is the only one with a decent set of ports. Yikes! All the other MacBooks have just USB-C ports so there’s the additional cost of dongles and the hassle of having to carry them around. If it wasn’t for the dongles and the fact that the MacBook has a 2nd generation butterfly keyboard which is known for problems (which is fixed in the MacBook Pro’s 3rd generation keyboard) I might have gone for the MacBook. It has more colors too. 

Anyways, back to the MacBook Air. I’ve had it for less than a day now so these are just initial thoughts. 

  • I love the keyboard and size. There’s a lot of room for the hand, and the keys feel good to type on. It’s a very “lapable” laptop. 
  • I thought I’d be put off by the 1440×900 screen as I am so used to full HD nowadays and when I had recently tried using a 1440×900 external monitor I didn’t like it at all, but no I don’t mind this screen. Yes I notice the difference but I don’t mind it. 
  • I like the feel of the OS. I had various people tell me it is complicated and unintuitive etc. but I don’t see that. I love the two finger way of scrolling up and down pages and going back and forward, and the three finger way of moving across apps. That feels very intuitive and much better than having a touch screen. There’s a lot more gestures but I am yet to get the hang of that. I tried to memorize those initially but then figured I’ll pick them up as I go. I think I know the main ones that I am interested in at least. 
  • It’s a jarring experience going to the App Store and seeing all the prices! Boy. It’s like the pre-iPhone days when software used to be expensive. Pretty much everything is US$10 and above, and if something is free it is bound to have a in-add purchase. Even the same app which for iPhone & iPad is (say) US$5 would be US$50 or above here! I imagine it is because the code base is different and so there’s more effort? I don’t know. That’s something I am having trouble getting my head around. The Windows OS store apps are much cheaper (but yeah there aren’t many). Anyways, the App Store is like a trip back in time to expensive software. I don’t think I’ll be buying much apps. Or I hope I won’t be buying much apps – it is not a sustainable option. 
  • The laptop came with MacOS High Sierra 10.13.1 and I couldn’t update to the latest 10.13.6 via the App Store. I downloaded it and tried to upgrade manually, but that failed saying the volume doesn’t meet some pre-requisites. I downloaded 10.13.2 and 10.13.3 and was able to upgrade to them manually, but 10.13.4 fails with the same error. That’s when I came across the macOS Recovery options, especially the Internet Recovery option which you get to by pressing Option-Command (⌘)-R (instead of just Command (⌘)-R for regular recovery). Internet Recovery actually connects to the Internet (it prompts you for Wi-Fi details etc) and can download the latest version and do a fresh install. When I tried this it complained my disk was still being encrypted and so it cannot upgrade. Am guessing that is why the update previously failed so I’ll wait for the encryption to finish and try again. That is so cool though, being able to connect to the Internet and do a recovery! Windows recovery options are nothing compared to this. Even the Recovery screen has a good GUI etc. (of course, that’s easy for Apple to do as it controls the hardware; versus Microsoft which can’t cater for every single display where Windows might be installed on). 
    • Update: After encryption completed I was able to install 10.13.4 successfully. I tried to just to 10.13.6 directly but that failed. I realized that these updates are deltas so I’ll just have to install 10.13.5 and then 10.13.6. Tried that and now my system is finally up to date. Yay! Pity MacOS doesn’t do cumulative updates. 
  • What else? The Finder is good, the uniform way in which each app shows a menubar where you can go and find its options etc. is good. I love the UI as expected for its consistency and sleekness. I also loved how I could just click on the Apple icon and go to “About this Mac” to quickly find its OS version, free storage etc. I don’t know why I liked that, but I found it incredibly thoughtful of Apple to present this information via this option. 
  • There’s still (obviously) a lot to pick up. Keyboard shortcuts and gestures etc. 
  • Oh, forgot. Installing apps from outside the App Store is cute in the way you download the DMG file and then (in most cases) just drag and drop the application to the Applications folder. I remember reading somewhere that in the Mac each application is sandboxed to its own hierarchy or something so it’s not like Windows or Linux where everything just writes to a common place and there’s dependencies and DLL hell etc. 
  • I love how the MacOS restores all my previously open apps after a reboot/ shutdown. It’s just the other day I was wishing Windows could do something similar (my laptop crashed and I had to restore all my Windows) and it was pleasant to see the MacOS do exactly this whenever I’d reboot. Such a user friendly and useful thing to do!

More later!

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