Miscellanea for 2021-08-14

Been a while since I wrote a new post, mainly because I’ve not had anything big to write about, so I’m dumping a load of things into this one.

The announcement that 1Password 8 for the Mac will be an Electron app, and will no longer work without a subscription, has caused a furore and pledges to abandon it for other password managers. Personally, I’m nonplussed by the whole business. As long as it still integrates into all the places I need it, I’m fine.

Now, if they’d announced that they’re going to jack up prices by a huge amount, then I might consider my options, but that isn’t the case and as it stands now I’m happy with paying for a good product.

On the other hand, the news that Apple are going to do on-device scanning of photos destined for iCloud to help detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM), while not a concern, did prompt me to reconsider my usage of iCloud for various things, particularly as I’m currently paying for 200GB of storage and using less than a third of that amount.

iCloud Photo Library is definitely convenient, but it’s not a necessity. Neither is iCloud Drive, particularly as I already have that data backed up online with Backblaze. And iCloud in general, while greatly improved in reliability these days, is occasionally not as seamless as I’d hope.

I was pleased to discover that it’s trivially easy to import photos directly from my iPhone SE or iPad Mini 4 into Photos on the Mac, and will be doing that from now on. I had to log into my iCloud account in a browser, however, in order to dispose of all the photos stored there.

Removing my Documents and Desktop folders from iCloud Drive took a bit more work, and the dialog that pops up when you do so is a lot scarier than it needs to be.

I’ll still be paying for some extra space for now, until I see how my usage goes over next few months.

Out of curiosity, I decided to reinstall Byword, the first Markdown text editor I bought, to see how it compares against iA Writer. It is still perfectly usable, and I’m pleased to see that it’s still being updated and maintained, but overall the writing experience is just that bit easier with iA Writer, so I’ll be sticking with that.