TidBITS readers have reported a conflict between Safari 12 and Spotlight in macOS 10.12 Sierra, where invoking Spotlight and typing causes it to crash. Happily, there’s a simple fix.
Please welcome our latest long-term TidBITS sponsor, easyDNS, the Canadian Internet company that we have long used for DNS hosting and management, and now rely on for email services.
Despite no longer offering the audio-enabled base station for sale, Apple has updated the 802.11n model of the AirPort Express to support AirPlay 2, making it a decent option for whole-house audio.
NAS (network-attached storage) can be a great way to expand your available data storage, but buying a NAS device involves wading into a lot of technicalities. In this article, adapted from his book Take Control of Your Digital Storage, Jeff Carlson breaks down the NAS buying process.
Apple has posted a support article about how the decade-old Back to My Mac service—which enables users to access files on and share screens with on their Macs over the Internet—will not be in macOS 10.14 Mojave.
Do you subscribe to Backblaze—or perhaps you’re looking into the online backup service? While backup is easy and automatic, restoring takes more work. Josh Centers explains the process of restoring files over the Internet and reveals a little-known way to restore a single file at a time.
The story of the meeting between Steve Jobs and Lucent Technologies to add wireless networking to Apple laptops is short and quirky, but it changed networking forever.
Twitter has once again crippled third-party clients in its ongoing campaign to slowly drain the life out of them, this time removing major features.
On the Mac, Mailplane is a good fit for Gmail users who like Google’s Web-based interface but also want desktop features. With version 4, Mailplane rolls out many changes, including a new reliance on the Google Chrome browser under the hood, enabling the use of Gmail-focused Chrome extensions.
Now and then, when you’re browsing the Web in Safari in iOS, you might want to load the desktop version of a site or reload a page without your content blocker enabled. Here’s how to do that, but beware that it may not work as desired.
AT&T and Verizon are both eliminating lower-priced Internet service tiers even though they haven’t extended faster speeds to rural customers. The net effect is that rural DSL customers are paying the same rates as urban fiber-optic customers for much slower speeds.
With Apple’s AirPort line of base stations gone to that Wi-Fi network in the sky, the Velop wireless system from Linksys is a solid alternative. Unlike Apple’s base stations, Velop is “mesh” hardware, with multiple units working in unison to bathe a residence in bandwidth. Velop works well but is costly. Luckily, there are less expensive options.
The Xmarks bookmark-syncing service shut down on 1 May 2018—with users receiving little warning. Looks like there never really was a viable business model behind cross-browser and platform bookmark syncing.
Upcoming Twitter API changes will severely cripple third-party client apps. The developers of some of those apps are banding together to pressure Twitter into changing things before the August deadline.
Gmail, Google’s popular email service, has undergone a revamp that includes visual tweaks and a battery of new features, some focused on usability, others on security.