MacOS Books - Why it is Unusable in Monterey

I've been trying to use Books in MacOS 12, Monterey, for half an hour now, and even though it is not completely unusable, it has such a lot of shortcomings and bugs that using it is a challenge.

• The window cannot be shrunk enough. There is a minimum size where the paragraph lines are still too long to be read with ease. You can make the individual lines shorter by increasing the size of the window, which gives you two columns, which you never asked for, and which distracts the reading.
• There is no way to change the space between the lines, making it still more difficult to read.
• The lookup function needs several steps: 
• Double click on the word.
• Scan past the different colour labels: Yellow, Green, Blue, Pink, Purple and the past Underline and Add Note, before you reach Look Up Selection.
• Click on Look Up Selection.
• Nothing happens. On my machine, it works about once out of three attempts. 
• Synching is haphazard. I sort my books according to how "recent" they are. The books are jumbled up in a system I have not understood with books I added a long time ago and never touched close to the books I just added. The order by "Recent" on my iPad shows completely different books.
• Searching the Book Store, there are no options to sort the books by useful criteria, like price, rating, language or best seller.

Some of those problems were probably there in past versions of Books/iBooks as well, and I cannot tell which ones are new to Monterey. However, I can tell that just displaying text in an agreeable way seems to be beyond Apple's engineers.

Disable Javascript

If you wonder what Javascript is, it is what makes the pages in your web browser bounce around uncontrollably, loads and plays heavy films and images you never asked for and makes your browsing experience generally frustrating.

Javascript has some utility, but most websites use it more to annoy their users than to actually help them. A few websites require Javascript. 

This blog, for example, sometimes works and sometimes doesn't work at all, if one disables Javascript. Unfortunately, it is not up to me, how this works. It is google's designers who determine whether the content is visible without Javascript. (I might have an option to change it, but then I risk breaking the blog for everyone, with or without the script.)

If you want a soothing browsing experience, you may want to switch off javascript completely. However, as there are such a lot of sites that require javascript, you should make sure you also have a javascript option. You can for example have one browser configured with javascript enabled and another one where it is disabled. If you encounter a site you actually need (but do you really need it, if you really think about it?) you can open it in the browser where javascript is enabled.

Here is how to disable javascript currently (May 2021) in some browsers. It may change in the future.

Firefox for MacOS or Windows:

1. Click in the address bar (where you usually type URLs).
2. Type "about:config" (without quotes) and enter.
3. In the search field, type "javascript.enabled" (without quotes).
4. Double-click on the value "true." It will turn to "false" and javascript is disabled for all new windows.

Chrome for MacOS or Windows:

1. Go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Site Settings > Content > Javascript.
2. Switch off "Allowed."
3. Optionally add individual sites with exceptions to Block or Allow.

Safari for MacOS:

1. Go to Settings > Security.
2. Disable javascript.

Safari for iPhone or iPad:

1. Go to the device's global Settings app.
2. Click on Safari > Advanced.
3. Disable Javascript.

Once you have done this, browsing the web will be a much more peaceful and serene experience. Plenty of sites will not work (like this blog, perhaps), but there are plenty of other sites that you can use instead.

You have taken back control.

Blogger usability

This blog, as well as most of my other blogs, are made using Blogger.

The irony is that Blogger keeps making changes much beyond my control. They then send me mails telling me that I need to correct things on the blog, without giving me a five minute instruction on how to change it.

On behalf of this blog and my other blogs, I want to apologise for not having the time to fix all usability errors that somehow are introduced into a blog, which once worked fine.

Cannot make comments on Blogger

If you go to a blog that is handled by Blogger, like this one, you may not be able to make any comments. You do not get any good error messages, but the text you painstakingly composed disappears into cyberspace.

If this happens, it is very possible that you have blocked third party cookies in your browser. How that is done in your particular browser varies, so google for "block third party cookies" and the name of your browser.

(As an example, in Chrome for MacOS, you go to Chrome > Preferences > Advanced > Privacy and Security > Site Settings > Cookies and Site Data > Block Third-party Cookies.)

If you want to make a comment, toggle the setting temporarily to off, make the comment, and then toggle back on, if you want to continue to block third-party cookies.

Text-only News sites

While a lot of web sites out there become increasingly slow and distracting and bandwidth hungry, there are a few sites that still give you no-nonsense text information without pictures, huge video ads or useless javascript code. Here are a few such sites:

• CNN. A lite version of CNN's news. Whether you like their journalism or not, it is quick to load. In English.
• DR. Danish state television teletext news. In Danish.
• NOS. Dutch publish news broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting. In Dutch. 
• NPR. American National Public Radio without any distracting layout. In English.
• SVT. Swedish state television teletext news. In Swedish.
• Textnews Pythonanywhere. Aggregated news from different RSS feeds. In English and Hindi.

OneDrive and Twitter on iPad problem

Another OneDrive bug, but it may not be Microsoft's bug this time. To reproduce with the currently latest versions of iPad OS and Twitter App:

1. Open Twitter on your iPad.
2. Find a nice picture in a post. Click on it.
3. Click on the three dots in the upper right corner to get a context menu.
4. Click on "Save to Files".
5. Select OneDrive and some folder of your choice.
6. Repeat the steps above with another image. In both cases, the system (iPad? Twitter? OneDrive?) will save with the file name "PNG image.png".
7. Wait for the second file to be synchronised with OneDrive.

This doesn't happen - at least for me. The synchronisation is somehow blocked. The following workarounds do not work:

• Delete the file from the OneDrive app. There is no option to do it.
• Delete the file from iPad's Files app. The option to do it is greyed out.
• Rename the file from any app. There is no option to do it.
• Kill the OneDrive app. This doesn't change anything.
• Restart the iPad. This doesn't change anything.

What does work is to remove the OneDrive app from the iPad and reinstall it. You lose the second file, but you probably find some other acceptable way of saving it, like from your Mac or PC or to your photo library or some other cloud service where you then copy it to OneDrive.

Apple's Music and Split Albums

For a long time Apple's Music app (and before that iTunes) has introduced crazy splits of Albums. One thinks one has one album, like Mozart's String Quintets with Cecil Aronowitz and the Amadeus Quartet. However, the Music app splits the album into two, with the tracks spread seemingly randomly between them.

The same album split into two by Apple's engineers.

For an almost equally long time, my solution has not included any trust in Apple, who has not shown any interest in fixing the problem. Instead, I have added all the songs of the "two" albums into one "Playlist," which I have played like an album.

However, when there are too many song tracks scattered too randomly between the two ghost albums, it is very difficult to make sure that everything gets to the right place in the right order. I recently found a somewhat reliable way of doing it semi-automatically.

1. Click on one of the two icons for the album. 
2. Scroll to the bottom of the list and check if there is a link called Show Complete Album. (See illustration below.) If there is such a link skip the steps 3-5 and go to direct to 6. 
3. Check different views (albums, downloaded...) to see if the link is there.
4. Click on one or several items and remove them from the downloaded songs.
5. Repeat until you see the link, or until you decide that life is too short for this kind of exercises. But be patient and take your time and wait. Something is probably updating in the background.
6. Click on the link Show Complete Album. Surprisingly, this view contains all the tracks from both ghost albums.
7. Click on the red circle with three white dots to get a context menu for the album. 
8. Click on "Add to a Playlist". Give the playlist a good name, and from now on use the Playlist instead of the broken Album icons. 

Click on the red link!

Enjoy your music!