iCloud is Broken; Photos is an insulting downgrade

Getting messages my iCloud is full, forcing me into my iCloud screen.

My iCloud screen is broken, asks me my password, logs me in for a second, then greys out again.

Eventually called support - after I convinced them of all this, which wasn't easy, they asked me to use the manage page under Preferences:Internet, which looks identical but works correctly.

Finally managed to get Photos to stop spamming my iCloud account, which I ONLY use to back up my iPhone, having a TB of cloud storage through Google (not set up yet... another story) through this alternate interface.

Discover I also have some Pages docs through that interface. But opening through Pages shows my iCloud "drive" as empty. So I don't have any idea what these Pages files are. (Actually I know what some of them are as I made a poster on my old computer and accidentally stored it on iCloud).

Will try it on the computer that made the images.

Everything seems to be set up to extract a monthly fee from people who use the camera on their iPhone. And it's broken in at least two places for me.

Finally, for some weird reason, the Mail app (which I do not use) says the phone has something for it, and then allows me only to get into the broken iCloud affordance. I really hope that one doesn't come back.

I can now dump photos into Photos, and a bit of a Google search shows me that I can delete everything from the phone using Image Capture. So my next backup should be of a reasonable size.

Photos has all the features of iPhoto except the basic Photoshop ones I actually use. Halfheartedly searching for how to get my favorite old version of iPhoto running, which wasn't even the most current one.

Note that all these problems may have started when Apple insisted I change my iCloud password. I kept old password but uppercased a couple of chars. Conceivable to me that this match/mismatch is triggering bugs. But now I'm totally gunshy about iCloud, just want it to back up my phone and otherwise go away.

Experience so far with setting up pretty new mac has been disappointing.

My promise to self to set up backups before installing anything so I can revert to a clean system has failed. It just broke by itself... No advice from Apple on fix, just a workaround.

It all feels so Microsofty.

Can't Search Safari Search History

There's an article I saw on Medium a couple of days ago. I'd like to refer to it.

Because this is a new computer I'm lazily using Safari. So I look at my search history for the past few days. I see a "search" widget, but it tells me I have 157 matches for "medium.com", and doesn't highlight any of them. One of them is at the top of the scroll screen, but the "Find Next" affordance is greyed out.

Broken. As far as I can tell irreparably so; if there's something in the UI I can't find it, and nothing of value turns up on Google about this.

Pasting into vi works.

It doesn't seem like anybody at Apple cares about people who actually use their computer for browsing. Sure is pretty though.

Can no longer email myself from Photo app on iPhone

No idea what is going on. Messaging app works, so now that iMac has same messages that is just as good.

Suspect gmail is losing messages. Or else it's entrapment in the Apple stack.

Post-Monopoly Network Solutions Gets All Shabby and Fly-By-Night

While I'm kvetching, I still host Ducks-In-A-Row on Network Solutions, dating back to the day when they were a monopoly. I think I will stop, because they are sending me extremely spammy advertising.

It's almost an argument for monopoly capitalism. They were cost-effective and dignified once.

About Me

Currently About Me on this blog links to some ancient page. This was Blogger's default. I did in fact create that page in an old Google app which is unsupported. But it's out of date and I haven't even thought about it for years.

I'm not even sure how to get to it to edit it.

Another example of the stacks being "helpful" in a non-helpful way. Thanks, Google.

I can easily turn off "About Me", but I'm more interested in finding the page and fixing it, since it still apparently exists.

But the widget configuration offers nothing!

UPDATE Well, I don't know why it says "click" and points to this but I at least updated it a bit so now it seems about right. Weirdness. How "Profile" knows about this page and/or how to disconnect them escapes me.

Busted Cursor in Safari

For some reason the Safari window on Blogger seems to be mishandling the cursor in some odd way. I can click in the text to move the curs or, and that works, except that the representation of the cursor doesn't move until I start editing, so it's not exactly clear where I'm pointing. Further, the old cursor representation is not changed. Here's a picture of what I mean. Note the multiple cursors.

I hope this is just this website and this browser....

I just tried Notes and it works okay there...

You will note three cursor images, none of which corresponds to the actual cursor location.

Google says https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7374056?start=0&tstart=0

Zoom in + zoom out shows the cursor. Meh. Not exactly an elegant fix.

No big deal; I expect to be using Firefox or Chrome anyway, but another Google/Apple fingerpointing episode behind the scenes presumably. If I see this again will report here, if only because I have no idea where else to report to.

Google Maps on iPhone

When the phone got replaced due to smashed screen, I had two Google Maps apps with very similar icons. I noticed one of them had a slightly changed interface so I deleted the older one, but found to my confusion and alarm that voice directions had gone away.

To fix this, I deleted again and went to iTunes and reloaded Maps. This time it's yet a third version, again very similar logo.

At first it didn't work at all. Aargh.

So I rebooted the phone, and now it works. However, it asked me to sign in to my gmail.

No big deal but...

That added yet another confusion in that Google sent me a warning that there was a device newly enabled to use their services, though I have been using their services from that device for a couple of weeks via the mail app.

The Google Maps voice robot works, though with a slightly different voice.

Nothing major, but really, it seems that UX people don't give a damn about installation. I wonder how many people are walking around with a crippled Google Maps or two different Google Mapses because they had their phone replaced. Or maybe Apple and Google hate each other so much that they just refuse to solve this, preferring to resort to fingerpointing? Or maybe I'm just lucky and this is a rare bug? I wonder how I'd report it.