Apple has released a tiny iOS 11.1.1 update that addresses just two issues: the bizarre bug that autocorrected the letter “i” to the letter “A” followed by a question mark in a box (see “Me, Myself, and A⍰,” 7 November 2017), and a bug that would make Hey Siri stop working.

Unfortunately, it does nothing to fix the calculator input lag we noted in “iOS 11 Calculator Lags Cause Errors” (9 November 2017).

The update, which is 54 MB for the iPhone X, can be obtained either in Settings > General > Software Update or via iTunes.

Every year, as I travel around the security conference circuit, the hallway conversations always turn to the interesting things attendees have seen lately. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I was excited about a legitimately cool security technology. I see plenty of security evolution, but not much revolution.

That is, until my iPhone X arrived on launch day, and I got to try Face ID in real-world usage. Put simply, Face ID is the most compelling advancement in security I have seen in a very long time. It’s game-changing not merely due to the raw technology, but also because of Apple’s design and implementation.

First things first — Face ID nails nearly every criterion I came up with to evaluate it in “Preparing for a Possible Apple “Face ID” Technology” (18 August 2017). The false positive rate, unless you happen to have an identical twin, is 1 in 1,000,000 compared to 1 in 50,000. Watch enough videos of journalists trying to fool Face ID with masks and it becomes clear that Face ID is more expensive to circumvent than Touch ID. We haven’t seen a public vulnerability yet, but I always assume one will be found eventually. Although Apple sometimes has a weak spot in underestimating bad actors, it did a good job with Face ID.

In my pre-release article, I wrote: “Face ID doesn’t need to be the same as Touch ID — it just needs to work reasonably equivalently in real-world use.” In my personal experience, and for every user I’ve talked with and in every article I’ve read, Face ID’s core usability is equal to or greater than that of Touch ID.

For example, Face ID doesn’t work as well at any angle from which you could touch your iPhone, but it works better than Touch ID when your hands are wet. I’ve tested it in all sorts of lighting conditions and haven’t found one that trips it up yet. The only downside is that Face ID lets you register just one face — my wife and I have become accustomed to being able to use Touch ID on each other’s devices.

I believe Face ID is slower at actual recognition than Touch ID, but it’s nearly impossible to notice due to the implementation. In the time it would take to move your finger to a Touch ID sensor, Face ID could have already unlocked your iPhone X.

That’s the real Face ID revolution. Since you’re almost always looking at your iPhone while you’re using it, Face ID enables what I call “continuous authentication.”

Continuous Authentication — We’re used to authentication events being discrete — you do something that requires proving that you’re the person performing the action, and the iPhone asks you to authenticate.

In the past, you had to either unlock your iPhone once and allow access to everything (well, everything that didn’t require a separate password) or put your finger on the Touch ID sensor whenever an app wanted you to authenticate. Face ID is different.

With Face ID, since you’re usually looking at your phone when an authentication event occurs, the iPhone X can scan your face as soon as you initiate the task that needs authentication, so it doesn’t need to ask you to do anything additional. And the iPhone X does this constantly. Here are examples I’ve discovered so far:

• Notifications, by default, don’t show details on the Lock screen until you look at the iPhone X. This is my favorite new feature since it improves security with little usability impact. (However, if you prefer being able to read notifications when your iPhone is sitting on the table in front of you, change Settings > Notifications > Show Previews to Always or Never.)
• I always disable Control Center on the Lock screen for security reasons, but now just looking at my iPhone X unlocks it so I can use Control Center. You can disable lots of other features on the Lock screen now too — look under Allow Access When Locked in Settings > Face ID & Passcode.
• Safari now optionally uses Face ID before filling in passwords on Web sites. Previously, even with Touch ID, they filled automatically if the iPhone was unlocked. That’s enabled by default in Settings > Face ID & Passcode. Many third-party apps, such as 1Password, can also use Face ID for authentication.
• Apple Pay and the App Store now authenticate with Face ID without prompting you for separate authentication actions.
• Apps can authenticate as you open them. This is where I believe Face ID is a bit slower than Touch ID, but it still feels faster because I don’t need to touch the Home button.

In short, Face ID allows your iPhone X to authenticate you under nearly every circumstance you need without requiring any action other than looking at the screen, which you’ll do anyway.

We’re just scratching the surface of what this first generation of Face ID makes possible. Imagine the use cases as Face ID gains features like multiple user support and as Apple starts embedding it in other devices. As an example, one of the most significant problems in healthcare security is the need for users to authenticate quickly to shared workstations in clinical environments. I could see a future version of Face ID embedded in an iMac solving that problem, changing an entire industry, and selling a lot of iMacs!

I’ve previously said that Touch ID lets you use a strong password with the convenience of no password at all. Face ID exceeds that mark, and its introduction of continuous authentication may be the ultimate expression of effortless security.

[A previous version of this article aimed at security professionals appeared on my blog at Securosis.]

ProVUE Development has released Panorama X, a long-awaited update to the legendary RAM-based relational database for macOS that was one of the very first apps for the Mac. The new version — rewritten from scratch as a modern Cocoa app — took six years to develop, and every bit of that shows. The lists of new and updated features are each a mile long, and they’re astonishing in both breadth and depth. Among the highlights are Unicode support, unlimited undo, a modern user interface, regular expression support, a map display, and embedded Web content. But that barely
scratches the surface. Panorama X is basically the soul of Panorama 6 transplanted into a new body that’s vastly more fit, flexible, and attractive. Panorama X also introduces a new user-friendly licensing and pricing scheme; more on this ahead.

For those of you who were not already familiar with it, Panorama is to databases as Nisus Writer Pro is to word processors. That is to say: it doesn’t merely get the job done; it’s endlessly flexible, customizable, and programmable, so you can make it do whatever you need it to do. Just as Nisus Writer Pro can slice and dice text in any conceivable way, Panorama can do the same with structured data. It’s also entirely RAM-based, which means it’s exceptionally fast — reading from and writing to your disk or SSD won’t slow it down.

The only problem — and it was a pretty big one — was that for years, Panorama had been increasingly behind the technological curve. Panorama 6 wasn’t a 64-bit app, it didn’t support Unicode, it had a homely and old-fashioned user interface, and it suffered from a long list of other limitations that were frustrating for people using recent versions of macOS. Developer Jim Rea decided it was time to rebuild the app from the ground up, and it has been a long but rewarding process. The new version has virtually all the capabilities of
the old one — and many more — without those drawbacks, and in a form that’s both more comfortable to use and far more sustainable.

I’ve been using beta versions of Panorama X for months, with huge data sets, in the mission-critical environment of running Take Control. Although the beta versions contained the usual sorts of bugs one expects in a beta, they never resulted in data loss, and the final release has been solid for me. In fact, it’s surprisingly hard to lose data in Panorama X, even if you screw up an entry or deletion, or botch an operation that affects every record in your database. I’ve never used a database app with such extensive support for undoing or redoing virtually any action or series of actions.

Although Panorama X is a fine general-purpose Mac database app, the people most keen to give it a try — yet also perhaps the most circumspect — are undoubtedly long-time Panorama 6 users. Panorama X can import Panorama 6 databases quickly and easily, and most work fine without any modification. However, because there were some unavoidable differences in Panorama X’s programming language, some procedures created in earlier versions may need updating. I found that to be the case with the databases Take Control uses for tracking books, coupons, orders, royalties, and so on: a number of our custom procedures required minor rewriting, and a few forms we use for creating royalty statements had to be adjusted. But these were one-time
changes, and ProVUE was quick to offer assistance when I ran into confusion.

Allow me to say a few words about those aforementioned procedures. Panorama X has a built-in procedural programming language that’s not quite like any other language, yet similar enough to many that anyone with programming experience should be able to pick it up quickly. (Unlike developer-provided documentation for most programming languages, the built-in help is both thorough and genuinely helpful — and you get not only text but also tutorial videos to help you learn.) Panorama X’s programming language can do much more than run simple scripts; it can create and modify user interface elements, and can even be built into specific database fields so that code runs automatically when a value is added.

As a testament to the power of this language, large portions of Panorama X itself are written in it. So if the Find and Replace dialog doesn’t work the way you want it to, no problem; you can make your own that does just what you want. Furthermore, you’re not limited to the capabilities of the Panorama language. Your procedures can also contain code written in AppleScript, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby, as well as shell scripts.

Procedures are just one way to customize Panorama X. You can also create or modify menus, toolbars, and other interface elements; add icons from the included Font Awesome package; create forms with buttons, pop-up menus, sliders, and suchlike; and indeed build powerful applications using the available tools.

What’s Not There (At Least, Not Yet) — For most of my database needs, Panorama X is a perfect fit: I need to gather (download, import, or manually enter) a bunch of data; format it just so; and run lots of calculations, sorts, and other manipulations on it. All this happens on my Mac, and that’s fine.

But as of today, if I want to share that data in real time with another Panorama user here in the Take Control Galactic Headquarters, there’s no convenient way to do so. That’s because the server version of Panorama X isn’t quite ready yet; ProVUE says it’s coming in the first half of 2018. Once that ships, multiple users will be able to access the same data at the same time.

Even then, those people will have to be Mac users (running OS X 10.9 Mavericks or later). Although the earlier version of Panorama was available for Windows, Panorama X, which was written in Objective-C, is an Apple-only product. ProVUE has plans for an iOS version, but they’ll come to fruition only after Panorama X Server, and the company has not announced a projected time frame. I can’t tell you how thrilled I’d be to run royalties for our authors on my iPad Pro, but time will tell whether or to what extent that becomes feasible.

I should also note that the current, single-user version of Panorama X is not designed to function as a back-end database for a Web server. Panorama X Server will be able to do just that, along with supporting multiple users on a local network. That said, one could use, for example, a shell script embedded in a Panorama X procedure to talk to a local or remote MySQL database that was in turn used by a Web app. I’ve done enough testing to know that the process works, but I haven’t made any real use of this capability yet.

Finally, Panorama X is best at storing and processing numeric and textual data, including rich text. Although the app can also store binary data, like images, the fact that Panorama keeps your entire database in RAM imposes practical limits on the types and amounts of binary data you might want to store in it. Therefore it’s best to store any non-alphanumeric data as separate files and simply include references to that data in your Panorama database. Even then, displaying that data within Panorama X requires a number of non-obvious steps. The documentation explains one way to display images that are stored as separate files, but it would take
some creativity and programming effort to create a form element that operates roughly like FileMaker Pro containers, which let you drag in pretty much any file and can display many kinds of content, including photos, movies, and PDFs, with essentially no extra work.

Pricing — Panorama X uses an entirely new approach to licensing and pricing. I know what you’re thinking: Oh No, Not Another Subscription App. Right? Of course that’s what you’re thinking. ProVUE knows that customers have a love-hate (but mostly hate) relationship with subscriptions, but at the same time, the company needs dependable, recurring revenue. So Jim Rea has come up with a new way of doing subscriptions that I haven’t seen before.

It works like this: You have to set up an account and purchase one or more credits to use Panorama X. To oversimplify slightly, think of a credit as permission to run Panorama X on one Mac for a month. If you want to use Panorama X for just one month, fine: buy one credit, one time, for $15 — no strings attached. But the more credits you buy, the lower the cost. So, a 12-month subscription costs $100 ($8.33 per month), but if you buy 60 credits — enough to last one user 5 years — that’ll set you back only $300, or just $5 per month.

Credits are based on concurrent usage. So if you use Panorama X on two Macs during a given month, but never at the same time, those computers effectively share a credit. Use two computers simultaneously on the same account, however, and that’ll cost you a second credit. On the other hand, if you don’t use Panorama X at all in a given month, you won’t use up any credits, and those unused credits roll over to the next month. For intermittent usage, even a 12-month subscription could last several years.

Because of this system of checking credits, Panorama X does need to talk to ProVUE’s servers from time to time, but the app is quite lenient in the way it treats these periodic check-ins (see the FAQ page for details). Indeed, even if you fall behind on your payments, Panorama X will still let you access your data, albeit with regular reminders to pay. A welcome side effect of this subscription scheme is that Panorama X has no serial numbers and requires no installer — you can simply drag the app into your Applications folder. All in all, this is perhaps the most humane subscription model I’ve seen, and for me, paying $5 a month for something so powerful is an absolute no-brainer.

Who Needs Panorama X — All of Panorama’s fantastic features notwithstanding, is this a product you need? I spent an unreasonable amount of time puzzling over the question of who needs a desktop database app in general these days, let alone Panorama X in particular. I know the sorts of data I need to keep track of myself, both personally and professionally, for which a database is the obvious solution, but my needs are idiosyncratic.

Besides, there are great off-the-shelf apps for doing many of the things one might otherwise choose a database app for — tracking books, music, photos, and other media; managing contacts; storing miscellaneous files and snippets of text; and cataloguing collections such as your wine cellar or recipe archive. So who needs an ultra-powerful, standalone database app?

The trivial and tautological answer is: those who know, will know. If you’re accustomed to using a desktop database already, it’s obvious to you why you need it, and the only question is whether Panorama X is the right database for you. (If you like flexibility and saving money, the answer is probably yes.)

But who needs a desktop database app besides those already using one?

My first pass at a substantive answer is that if you currently track any information in a spreadsheet or a table in a word processor and you start bumping up against the limitations of that type of container, a database is the natural place to move. For example, spreadsheets typically aren’t great for storing long chunks of text or handling data consisting of thousands of rows. Panorama X can perform most of the common tasks people use spreadsheets for (from simple lists to complex calculations), plus a great many tasks spreadsheet apps can’t do at all.

Like most database apps, Panorama X also lets you enter and view your data in ways other than its default, which is a familiar spreadsheet-like table. You can create forms for entering or displaying data with just the fields you want, arranged the way you like them, along with all the usual human interface niceties — and even a built-in Web viewer — to make data entry and retrieval simple and user-friendly. Similarly, you can create reports (and export them in various formats, such as PDF) that summarize or expand on just the sorts of data you need, in almost any conceivable way. Spreadsheets generally can’t do these things.

So, if you work with structured data, and you’ve outgrown the capabilities of a spreadsheet, Panorama X is an excellent replacement that you’d be unlikely ever to outgrow. If your needs include support for networked Macs and iOS devices, Panorama has the potential to meet those requirements too, just not right away.

Even if you don’t meet those criteria, but you’re in any way curious or on the fence and would like the chance to play with an incredibly powerful database, programming environment, and all-purpose data manipulation tool, $15 for a month’s access is a sweet deal — and it just might get you hooked.

Carbon Copy Cloner 5.0.4 — Bombich Software has issued Carbon Copy Cloner 5.0.4 (CCC), ensuring that newly created disk images are formatted as APFS if the source is an APFS volume and creating the Preboot and Recovery volumes on these disk images so that they can be restored). The drive-cloning and backup app also fixes a bug with the free space indicator for APFS volumes in CCC’s sidebar, resolves an issue where a backup task could stall while “Cleaning up” if the task was configured to unmount the destination volume, and ensures that items marked as hidden stay hidden on an HFS+ destination in macOS 10.13 High Sierra. You can upgrade to Carbon Copy Cloner 5 from CCC 4 for $19.99 (50 percent off) or from CCC 3.5 for $29.99 (25 percent off). A free 30-day trial is available. ($39.99 new, paid upgrade from CCC 3.5 and CCC 4, free update from version 5, 13.6 MB, release notes, 10.10+)

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Bookends 13.0 — Sonny Software has issued Bookends 13.0, a major upgrade for the reference management tool that updates its database engine and resolves a longstanding problem with improper rendering of large PDFs. The release adds support for importing references and PDFs with annotations from Papers 3, adds PDF quick links that enable you to jump back and forth between references and their PDFs, adds support for scanning Pages documents stored in iCloud, improves the speed of transferring PDFs from Bookends for iOS over Wi-Fi, saves fresh PDF before opening the PDF in another application, and now correctly remembers PDF scroll positions. The app is now 64-bit and requires OS X 10.9 Mavericks or later. A free trial that’s fully functional for up to 50 references is available. If you purchased a Bookends license more than 2 years ago (Bookends licenses provide 2 years of free updates), you can upgrade to version 13 for $39.99. ($59.99 new with a 25 percent discount for TidBITS members, $39.99 upgrade, 44.3 MB, release notes, 10.9+)

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Retrospect 14.6 — Retrospect, Inc. has released Retrospect 14.6, adding cloud support for DigitalOcean Spaces, Aufiero Informatica, and Google Cloud Storage Frankfurt and São Paulo. The backup software also adds support for concurrent backups from different favorites of the same source, enhances daily backup reports for large-scale environments, automatically recognizes an HFS+ volume that has been converted to APFS as an original volume, improves CPU efficiency of certain client operations, fixes a client network issue for MacBook Pro models with a Touch Bar, and resolves an engine crash during certain storage-optimized groom
operations. You can download a free 45-day trial of Retrospect, and the company is offering a 15 percent discount in response to CrashPlan for Home being discontinued (see “CrashPlan Discontinues Consumer Backups,” 22 August 2017). ($119 new, 178 MB, release notes, 10.6.8+)

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SuperDuper 3.0 — Shirt Pocket released SuperDuper 3.0, a major update to the drive-cloning and backup app that brings full compatibility with macOS 10.13 High Sierra, including support for both HFS+ and APFS volumes. The release also adds support for snapshot copying on APFS boot volumes, improves many parts of the user experience, and increases the minimum system requirements to 10.10 Yosemite. If you previously purchased a license for SuperDuper, you can upgrade to version 3.0 for free. (Free for basic functionality, $27.95 for additional features, free update, 5.0 MB, 10.10+)

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Tinderbox 7.3 — Eastgate Systems has released Tinderbox 7.3, adding new ways to capture notes easily from other devices. A Tinderbox document can now watch a folder in your Notes app, automatically fetching notes you wrote on another Mac, iPad, or iPhone. You can also watch folders from Evernote, a DEVONthink group (enabling you to import notes from the DEVONthink To Go iOS app), and any local or remote Finder folder (including Dropbox and iCloud
folders). The note-taking assistant and information manager now ensures multi-column outlines scroll horizontally, improves the speed of outlines, and improves the look of text windows with dark backgrounds. ($249 new with a 25 percent discount for TidBITS members, $98 upgrade, 31.9 MB, release notes, 10.10+)

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ChronoSync 4.8.3 — Econ Technologies has released ChronoSync 4.8.3, implementing a new False Mount Readiness Test that checks to see if one of the targets is inappropriately referencing a folder in the /Volumes folder. The synchronization and backup app also adds logic to work around bugs in macOS 10.13 High Sierra when renaming files on file servers, changes auto-update checks so they are not performed when syncs are running, filters out some legacy Finder Flags when detecting attribute changes in the Validator and sync engine, and changes how the ChronoSync Scheduler checks for missed jobs that
could lead to erroneous triggering of sync jobs after a system wakes. ($49.99 new for ChronoSync with a 20 percent discount for TidBITS members, free update, 48.5 MB, release notes, 10.10+)

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In ExtraBITS this week, Apple defends its tax practices, Facebook’s first president is having second thoughts about social media, Jony Ive sits down for a new interview, and iOS 11 calculator lag is causing fundamental math errors.

Apple Defends Its Tax Practices — Apple is once again in the news for shuffling its cash hoard among various countries to minimize its tax burden. The company has released a sprawling statement defending its practices, stating that it not only follows all applicable laws, but is in fact the largest taxpayer in the world. However, Apple continues to call for international tax reform and simplification to help it repatriate its overseas funds. The reality is that many large businesses play legal shell games to minimize liabilities — fiscal and otherwise — and corporations
squirreling away cash in low-tax countries is a side effect of globalism that’s difficult to prevent.

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Past Facebook President Calls Out Social Media — As Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker was instrumental in the company’s eventual success. But now the billionaire tech pioneer has had a change of heart, confessing at an Axios event that “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” He added, “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when
it grows to a billion or two billion people… God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Quick — tweet this link! Or not.

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Jony Ive on the iPhone X and Apple’s New Campus — In an interview with Wallpaper, Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive discusses some of the design decisions behind Apple’s new campus and how multi-touch has fundamentally changed hardware design. Along those lines, he said something interesting about the iPhone X: “What I think is remarkable about the iPhone X is that its functionality is so determined by software. And because of the fluid nature of software, this product is going to change and evolve. In 12 months’ time, this object will be able to do things that it can’t now.” So by next
year, what do you think the iPhone X will be able to do that it can’t do now?

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iOS 11 Calculator Lags Cause Errors — If you type 1+2+3= in iOS 11’s Calculator app quickly, you may get 24 instead of 6. The problem is a delay in recognizing taps on all the operation buttons. Thus, in the example above, the second + is ignored, so you’ve instead typed 1+23=. If you type 1+2+3= slowly, making sure that the operator button activates on each tap, Calculator works correctly. We hope Apple fixes this embarrassing bug in the next update to iOS 11. In the meantime, Siri works well for simple calculations, and for those who need a serious calculator, PCalc is the
gold standard.

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