#1638: Eliminate Apple Pay and Google Hangouts annoyances, give Affinity V2 a try, join TidBITS!
We’re looking forward to new publishing initiatives in 2023—will you join over 3600 other TidBITS members in helping us develop new approaches to sharing practical Apple content? Are you irritated by the badge left on your Settings app if you didn’t set up Apple Pay? Or have you started getting a Google Hangouts dialog that announces the required migration to Google Chat? We unintentionally ended up with a pair of articles about how to solve those usability annoyances. Adam Engst also shares his long and increasingly dysfunctional history with Adobe Creative Cloud en route to recommending that anyone in a similar situation check out Serif’s suite of Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Photo, which currently costs less than two months of Creative Cloud. Notable Mac app releases this week include Agenda 16.1; Mimestream 0.40.1; Airfoil 5.11.3, Piezo 1.7.11, and Audio Hijack 4.0.6; Default Folder X 5.7.2; BusyCal 2022.4.6; and Carbon Copy Cloner 6.1.4.
Help TidBITS Evolve in 2023 by Becoming a Member
Now that we’ve entered the home stretch of the year, many readers will be receiving TidBITS membership renewal notices in email. If you’re among them, thanks in advance for renewing—we rely on your continued support! If you have trouble, contact Lauri Reinhardt at [email protected] for help. Since TidBITS memberships run on a rolling annual basis, if you don’t get a renewal reminder, it’s likely because you joined at some other time of year. You can check your membership expiration date on your account page; if it’s blank, your membership automatically renews.
Normally, this is where I’d explain the importance of the TidBITS membership program in paying for Josh Centers and regular contributors like Agen Schmitz, Glenn Fleishman, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, and Michael Cohen, along with Web hosting, email distribution, and ongoing maintenance. Most of that is still true, but things are a bit different this year, as you read in “Josh Centers: So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” (14 November 2022).
Josh’s leaving was very much a mutual decision because we both found ourselves looking for a way to get off the news treadmill. For him, that was a new job; for me, it’s the opportunity to experiment with new approaches to content and infrastructure.
To step back briefly, my goal with TidBITS is to help you, the person behind the personal computer, use technology more effectively. When I collaborate with non-technical people, I’m often distressed at how inefficiently they work, their weak tech skills, and their lack of an understanding of how technology intersects with the world. TidBITS will never reach those people, and I can guide only a few personally, but if the tens of thousands of TidBITS readers can help those around them with their technology, the world will become a better place.
So I’m looking for new ways beyond our traditional articles to help you learn and retain more, both to aid you directly in your work and in the hope that you’ll be able to leverage that information and knowledge to raise the overall level of tech fluency of those near you. I honestly don’t know what these initiatives will look like yet, but I’m pondering possibilities that increase information stickiness by being more interactive and engaging. And frankly, I want what we create to be more fun, both for me to make and for you to consume.
All this is by way of explaining why the TidBITS membership program remains essential for funding our operations. The necessary software and development effort won’t be cheap, and additional resources may be required for production and hosting. More prosaically, without Josh, I’ll be doing more writing and will need to farm out more editing to other TidBITS regulars.
So if you aren’t yet part of the TidBITS membership program, would you consider joining the more than 3600 readers who help keep TidBITS running and growing?
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Be sure to scroll through our Membership Benefits page, which lists all the Mac apps on which members receive discounts. You’ll find essential apps we use and recommend, like 1Password, Audio Hijack, ChronoSync, Default Folder X, DEVONthink, Keyboard Maestro, KeyCue, LaunchBar, Nisus Writer Pro, PopChar X, Scrivener, SpamSieve, TextExpander, and more. (Contact me if you’d like to add your company’s product to the list.)
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So if you find TidBITS content valuable, want to support our efforts going forward, or have received personal help from one of us simply because you asked, please become a TidBITS member. You’ll have our undying gratitude and can bask in the good feeling that every article you read in 2023 was made possible in part by your generosity. Thank you!
Get Rid of the Apple Pay Setup Badge on Settings
I love Apple Pay, particularly on my Apple Watch. I still get a thrill every time I double-press the Apple Watch’s side button and rotate my wrist to touch a checkout terminal. And when I was recently employing a Square Terminal to sell T-shirts for the Finger Lakes Runners Club at the annual Ithaca Turkey Trot, I tremendously enjoyed having people use Apple Pay on their iPhones.
But I seldom use Apple Pay for online purchases. I rarely make Web purchases using my iPhone, my iPad solves no problems for me beyond testing, and I prefer Brave to Safari on the Mac. No harm, no foul, and I’m sure lots of you have radically different usage patterns.
However, if you’re like me and haven’t set up Apple Pay on your iPad, you might be bothered by the way iPadOS badges the Settings app and constantly reminds you to finish setting up your iPad. I expect that succumbing to iPadOS’s demands and setting up Apple Pay would work, but being nagged triggers my rebellious streak, so I wanted to see if there was a way to eliminate both the badge and reminder without setting up Apple Pay. After all, there may be scenarios where setting up Apple Pay is inappropriate, such as on an iPad that a child frequently uses.
Luckily, there’s a fix that’s simple, if unintuitive. In Settings, tap the Finish Setting Up Your iPad reminder, and then tap Set Up Apple Pay at the right. No, you’re not going to go through with the setup.
On the Apple Pay setup screen that appears, tap either Cancel or Set Up Later in Settings. Both seem to work, though I’ve had a chance to tap each only once on the iPads I had available.
As soon as you cancel out of the Apple Pay setup screen, the Finish Setting Up Your iPad reminder disappears, along with its red badge on the Settings app icon.
I realize this is a minor complaint, but it has been bothering me for ages. Every time I’d check to see what I had to do to make the badge go away, I’d get to the point where it wanted me to set up Apple Pay, which I didn’t want to do, so I would just back out and suffer with the badge for longer.
Ideally, Apple would change the Finish Setting Up Your iPad screen to include both Set Up Apple Pay and, as the company does with its Apple Arcade offer, an option to Decline or Set Up Later in Settings.
I’ve submitted this suggestion as feedback to Apple; we’ll see if it’s ever implemented. In the meantime, now you know how to tell iPadOS that you don’t need that stinking badge.
How to Eliminate the Google Hangouts Migration Dialog
For the last few weeks, whenever I launch Brave, my primary Web browser, I’ve been getting a dialog from Google Hangouts, alerting me that Google has replaced Hangouts with Google Chat. This isn’t news—Google first mentioned this would happen in an October 2020 announcement and provided more details in a June 2022 post. And, of course, the dialog provides a Learn More link for additional details. Moving to Google Chat isn’t the problem—I’ve been using it for some time now with the one person in my extended network who doesn’t use iMessage, SMS, or Slack.
The problem is that nowhere does Google say how to stop getting this migration dialog. Complicating the issue is that Hangouts is from Google, so it could be something special and may have migrated to Brave when I switched from Chrome years ago.
Because Google Hangouts puts an icon in my menu bar, my first guess was that it was a Progressive Web Application so it could provide additional local functionality. Since I know little about PWAs, I went spelunking through my drive and found a Brave Browser Apps folder and a Chrome Apps folder in my Home folder’s Applications folder. Unfortunately, although there was a “Hangouts call” app in the Chrome Apps folder, the Brave Browser Apps folder contained only an Authy app. So, even though I didn’t fully understand what the “Hangouts call” app could be in the context of Chrome, I could tell it wasn’t associated with Brave.
After some fruitless searches hampered by the need to use generic keywords, I found a page about installing the Google Chat standalone app. It gave me a link to another Google support page about Progressive Web Applications, which in turn revealed that typing chrome://apps (which redirects to brave://apps in Brave) in the address bar would show the installed PWA apps. Alas, it showed that the only PWA I had installed was Google Drive, making me even more confused about the Authy app in ~/Applications/Brave Browser Apps. (And no, the “Hangouts call” app didn’t show up when I loaded that page in Chrome either. Whatever.)
Additional searches failed to turn up any useful information about how to prevent this migration dialog from appearing, but on a hunch, I chose Window > Extension in Brave to see what Chrome extensions I had installed. I knew a Google Hangouts extension wasn’t showing in my Brave toolbar, but it wasn’t unthinkable that I had the extension installed and active but not pinned to the toolbar. That was indeed the case, and once I removed the Google Hangouts extension, a quick relaunch of Brave confirmed that the dialog was finally retired.
So if you find yourself in this situation, remove the Google Hangouts extension from Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, or whatever Chromium-based browser you use.
I’m a little annoyed with myself for how long it took me to solve this problem, but it’s a classic example of developers failing to put themselves in their users’ shoes. It was entirely reasonable to present the migration dialog to ensure that users are aware of the switch to Google Chat, but either the dialog or Google’s Learn about the switch from Google Hangouts to Google Chat page should have mentioned removing the Google Hangouts extension. I’ve left feedback about the omission on that page; we’ll see if Google improves it by adding those details.
Consider Switching from Creative Cloud to Affinity V2
Earlier this year, I stopped subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud, saving myself $54 per month. I had no particular complaints about the software, nor did I have any troubles with Adobe. The decision was purely financial—$54 per month works out to nearly $650 per year, which was far too much for the value I derived from InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, and Photoshop, without even considering the other 15 or so Creative Cloud apps that I never installed.
Things had changed. I first purchased Adobe InDesign in 2003 to write iPhoto 2: Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit Press, switching from QuarkXPress because of the move to Mac OS X. I then used InDesign to write and edit at least 14 books over the next few years. I got pretty good with InDesign and enjoyed using it.
After the Take Control-related books we published with Peachpit around 2007, my reliance on InDesign fell off. Acrobat Pro remained essential for Take Control’s workflow through 2017, and in 2016, I started using InDesign and Illustrator to create posters, sign-up sheets, and similar print collateral for the Finger Lakes Runners Club. My fingers remembered InDesign’s keyboard modifiers and shortcuts from nearly a decade earlier, and I enjoyed setting up proper documents with carefully designed master pages, character and paragraph styles, and more. And while my abilities with Illustrator are minimal at best (Photoshop completely confounds me), I appreciated being able to use it to collaborate more fluidly with designers and production systems. The price was high, but I felt it was worthwhile for the print work I was doing and to maintain my familiarity with that part of the industry.
By 2020, however, the running club was producing fewer print pieces—everything had moved online—and that $54 per month was starting to grate. Entire months would go by without me even launching one of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps. I was unenthused about the time and effort involved in learning another app and redoing my moderately complex documents, so I kept subscribing despite my increasingly dysfunctional relationship with Adobe’s suite.
The event that started to dissolve Adobe’s grip was a sale that Serif, makers of the so-called “Affinity trinity” of Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Photo, held during the early days of the pandemic. I had played with the beta of Affinity Publisher when it first came out in 2019, and while promising, it was too rough and didn’t compare sufficiently favorably with InDesign. For $25, I figured it was worth a shot to give the release version of Affinity Publisher a try, and I also decided to pick up Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for another $50.
Between the pandemic and being busy with other things, I didn’t use the apps that much right away, and it wasn’t until I needed to do more print pieces in 2021 that I dove in. Even as I built new documents in Affinity Publisher and discovered that I could export my InDesign files to IDML and open them in Affinity Publisher, I kept subscribing to Creative Cloud, just in case. Did I mention that the relationship was dysfunctional? Finally, in April 2022, I went on a conversion spree, exporting all my InDesign documents to IDML even when I didn’t anticipate using them again. Affinity Designer could open all my Illustrator files with no further fiddling, so that was all set too. Then I canceled Creative Cloud. Phew!
I’m embarrassed that I haven’t written much about the Affinity suite before, partly because I can’t believe I kept subscribing to Creative Cloud for so long and partly because I feel like a bit of an imposter. I may know how to do document setup and page layout in InDesign and Affinity Publisher, but I’m a fluent user, not a graphic designer who does this for a living. Similarly, while I can monkey around in Illustrator and Affinity Designer, my skills are weak. As with Photoshop, I seldom even launch Affinity Photo, and whenever I need image manipulation features, I immediately resort to searching for tutorials. Most of the time, I still fail to accomplish whatever I’m trying to do, but that’s on me, not Affinity Photo or Photoshop.
Along with feeling generally inadequate to review the Affinity apps, I was also aware that they’re sufficiently deep and powerful that it would be impossible to predict whether my needs match yours. Multi-chapter books in Affinity Publisher with exports to PDF and EPUB? I have no idea how one would set them up—I don’t do that sort of production anymore. Database-driven publishing? Affinity Publisher can merge data into a document, and I did it once, but are there gotchas if that’s what you do every day? I don’t know. And I can’t even begin to guess how you might use Illustrator and Photoshop and if you could replicate those tasks in Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo.
So, apart from a little public therapy session, why am I writing about the Affinity apps now? Serif just released version 2 of all three apps, and while there’s no upgrade pricing, the company is having a V2 launch sale through 14 December 2022. The 40% discount drops the price of any one of the apps to $40.99 (the list price is now $69.99), and a new Universal License gets you all three apps for macOS, iPadOS, and Windows for $99.99. That’s a one-time charge and still costs less than 2 months of Creative Cloud. Serif also offers multi-user business licenses and educational licenses.
Although I’ve been happy with the current 1.x versions of the Affinity apps, I’ve just purchased the Universal License to get the V2 apps. Although I have no plans to write another book in the near future, Affinity Publisher 2 now lets you combine separate documents as chapters. Styles sync between chapters, page numbers count up properly, and you can build a unified table of contents and index using the individual files. Affinity Publisher 2 also supports footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes.
All this is by way of saying that if you are paying Adobe monthly for apps that you don’t use sufficiently, like I was, I encourage you to give the Affinity V2 apps a try. For my purposes, they were entirely adequate replacements for InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, and maybe they would be for you as well. For $99.99 or less, it’s worth giving the Affinity alternatives a try. I could have saved many hundreds of dollars by switching sooner.