I REALLY need to condense my notes and writing app addiction down to one or two apps. Who am I kidding? It sure is fun trying out new ones.
Author: Evan Kline (page 41 of 164)
Hello, I'm Evan. I write about tech from my perspective – that of the average tech geek, sometimes with my lawyer glasses on. You can also find me on Twitter and at my real-life job as a lawyer. MORE ABOUT ME.
Momentous tech day for me – just wiped my Evernote account. First used it almost a decade ago and had been a huge fan, but have been DEVONthink-only for a couple years. Also just kicked my office PC to the curb. Will use Parallels on my Mac when I need Windows.
Do a quick Internet search for “MacBook Pro keyboard problems” and you’ll see how unreliable the keyboard has been for many users. Further, some users hate the short travel of the keys. I haven’t had any reliability issues with the keyboard, and I actually love the feel of the keyboard.
Now that I’ve jinxed myself, it’s time for me to talk about my biggest problem with the MacBook Pro – the trackpad. The trackpad on my 2017 MacBook Pro is so huge, that it constantly registers misclicks, causing my cursor to randomly jump around a document. Bottom line, for me the palm rejection on the new MacBook Pro is horrible.
My attempted fix
I type with my palms raised a bit, and my fingers dangling down, which might be what is causing the misclicks. I tried for weeks to retrain myself to keep my palms resting on the keyboard, which, oddly, is how I type on a desktop keyboard. I could never get myself to do it consistently on the MacBook, and even when I did I got misclicks. Back to the drawing board.
My final fix
My final fix was to turn off the tap-to-click option in the Trackpad settings on my MacBook. I’ve been a tap-to-click person for as long as I can remember, so I really wanted to avoid this. Ultimately, I didn’t have a choice. Worse, I made the change on my iMac, too, so I would have a consistent experience across devices.
I HATE having to forcibly click the trackpad. Often that click doesn’t even register at all, and when it does it slows me down. But at least typing on the MacBook Pro isn’t horrible.
An attempted tweak
I thought I could bring BetterTouchTool into the equation to get back to tap-to-click. I set up tap areas around the edges of the trackpad, where a tap would register as a click. That just brought back the original problem.
Resignation
It looks like I’m a click person, until Apple fixes this monstrosity of a trackpad.
It sure sounds like macOS Server isn’t long for this world. Apple has announced a number of services that are being removed from Server, including Calendar, Contacts, DHCP, DNS, Mail, Messages, NetInstall, VPN, Websites, and Wiki. In addition, FTP support and iOS File Sharing support were removed from Server back in September.
In the age of NAS devices like Synology that offer easy setup of many of these services, I understand why Apple is doing this. Still, there are bound to be many Server fans upset over the loss of features from a product that had a devoted following.
Apple has moved some Server features into High Sierra, making them available to all users. These include the Caching Service, which let users save bandwidth by having a Mac cache iCloud data, app updates, and more, for use by other devices on the network. File Sharing has also been moved to High Sierra, and Time Machine backups can be made using SMB backups built into High Sierra.
If you want to take a look at all the features that previously were in Server, the OS X Server features page is still online.