New Year’s Eve is a time for celebration. I often find myself texting friends, siblings, and other loved ones just after the ball drops to wish them all the best in the year to come.

Traditionally, I ring in the New Year with a champagne toast. (Or a toast with whatever other beverage is handy.) If you like to do the same, this year I’ve got you covered for how to combine your toast with your texts to loved ones: The Mixologist Sticker Pack.

Mixologist conveniently contains a glass of champagne (along with dozens of other cocktails) which you can send along to friends and family as a way of adding extra mirth to your well wishes.

You can even wow them more by sending the sticker with the “confetti” effect Apple provides. I’m guessing most of your less tech-savvy friends will think you performed a magic trick on their phones with the confetti, as they likely haven’t seen that yet.

For a quick demo on how to send with confetti (or balloons, or lasers, if you prefer), check out the video below.

The Mixologist Sticker Pack is available on the App Store.

• It took all of ten seconds to take the AirPods out of the package and get some music going in my ears. And that included choosing the song I wanted to test first.[^1] The pairing process has that “magic” feel that so many claim Apple no longer produces.
• The AirPods sound pretty good. Better than any wireless headphone I’ve ever tried, in any case. They can’t compete with my B&O H6s, but how could they? Meanwhile, not having a cord is going to make a huge difference in my travels around the city every day. So I think the tradeoff is going to be worth it for me. I have my good wired headphones for home use whenever I really want to listen to the absolute best quality audio.
• I can’t use Apple’s included white earbuds at all. There’s simply no way to put them into my ears and get a proper seal without physically holding them constantly with my hands. I was skeptical about AirPods for this reason, as they are pretty much exactly the same shape as the earbuds. But it turns out, not having the cables pulling the buds down makes a big difference. I have no trouble getting the AirPods into a position where they produce the proper balance of bass and treble, and so far, they mostly stay put while sitting and working.[^2] I still need to test them further while walking, but so far the fit is way better than I expected. I may look into the many silicon sleeves that are out there to tighten up the fit even further. Though that could make them hard to put back into their case.
• I haven’t tried taking a phone call on AirPods yet. At the rate I usually talk on the phone, it may be months before that changes.
• I absolutely love the idea of having wireless headphones that can switch between my phone, Mac, and iPads with zero hassle. Compared to un-pairing and re-pairing constantly with my last set of wireless headphones, this is like waking up in the future. So far, I’ve had no issues getting them working on my iPads and my iPhone. Neither of my Macs as of this writing seem to be syncing the pair over iCloud. They are both running the latest version of Sierra, so I don’t know what’s going on there. The AirPods simply don’t show up in the Bluetooth menu. I know this is supposed to “just work” so I’m hopeful this is a temporary iCloud glitch. Switching over to my Mac for audio is something I do fairly often.
• I think I’m going to keep these. And that surprises me quite a bit. I fully expected AirPods to not work for me at all, given my history with Apple’s earbuds and fit. But they sound good enough for day-to-day music and podcast listening, and the lack of wires is going to be epic for me as I move around the city.
• I get why so many reviewers have described AirPods as the best thing Apple has released in a long time. You can tell a lot of attention to detail went into all aspects of the design, and the integration of the hardware with software is where Apple shines most.
• Having said that, I do hope Apple eventually licenses the W1 chip inside AirPods to other headphone manufacturers.[^3] I would absolutely love to see what B&O, or Bose, or Sennheiser could do with wireless over ear headphones that paired this seamlessly.
• As I said when the iPhone 7 and AirPods were announced, we’re going to have much better wireless headphones a year from now because Apple has done away with the headphone jack. AirPods should kick the other manufacturers into high gear. If they can’t match Apple’s pairing magic, they can at least up the ante on sound quality and offer more options beyond earbuds.

Update: I rebooted my MacBook, and the AirPods now show up in the Bluetooth menu. Not sure if the reboot was necessary, or if they would have shown up eventually. But that’s resolved, anyway. I’ll have to check on my iMac when I get back home.

“As far as I’m concerned, Apple cannot claim that it loves music ever again until it gives us the option to sort albums by date. No self-respecting music geek sorts albums by name. I don’t care if you hide the option in the Settings app, just give me the option for date, you wankers.”

Yes, that was me a few months back, railing on Apple for what was truly a terrible omission in the iOS Music app.

I honestly expected that Apple was never going to fix this, but low and behold, with the recent release of iOS 10.2, there’s the Sort button, sitting right in the artist listing top navigation bar, and it indeed lets us sort by Release Date, in ascending or descending order, to boot.

So let this be a beacon of hope for all your fantasy feature enhancements. I have no delusions that Apple reads my blog and “heard my plea” on this issue. I figure a like-minded brave developer or two on the iOS Music team pushed the powers that be until the feature was deemed worthy of the time.

To that developer or developers, I say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It really does make a huge difference to the experience of playing music on my phone.

As far as Apple’s claims to loving music—let’s just say I’ll be at least slightly less likely to roll my eyes next time I hear that old line uttered on a stage by an Apple exec. They still have a long way to go, but the progress, however slow, is always welcome.

As long as I can remember, people have complained to me about the frailty of Apple’s various cables. Lightning cables, the cables on the power bricks. The old 30-pin cables. You name it, people say they are always having to replace them because they fray, short out, etc.

No doubt, the cables Apple makes are far from perfect in this regard. They’ve gotten thicker in recent months, probably as a long-overdue response to this complaint, but time will tell if the new thickness is any help to these unfortunate people who have had to pay to replace fraying cables.

I have to confess, though, I always have to struggle to empathize with people over their cord issues, because in the many years I’ve been using Apple products, I’ve never had a single cord fail on me. Is this extreme luck? I doubt it.

Having borrowed cords from friends over the years for a quick charge, or to plug my phone into my laptop, I’ve noticed a pattern. Many of my friend’s cords look as though they’ve been through a war, whereas just about any of mine look like they were unpacked out of their original boxes yesterday.

Guess which cable is mine?

I won’t speculate why my friends’ cables are so often yellowed, sticky, etc. But I can say with certainty that the way most developers wrap their cables has a great deal to do with the condition they end up in after a few months. I’ve seen all sorts of variations of wrapping the cord around itself, around devices, twisting them into knots, etc. Usually, the ends are completely stressed when they are done wrapping. And then they throw them into a bag that way for several days at a time.

I’m not saying that Apple’s cables shouldn’t be able to withstand a bit more torture than they get from most people, but there is something to be said for being a bit more careful.

And that’s where the “twist” comes in.

I first encountered the twist when I was a young musician. The one aspect of playing an electric instrument that I’ve always hated is dealing with the instrument cable. After a live performance, especially, the cable would be so twisted up in knots, and I’d have only a few minutes to pack up all my equipment and get off the stage for the next act. So I’d wrap the long cable into a circle using my arm, or just shove the cable into a bag any which way, which led to me needing to replace my cord about every six months or so.

Then one day, a sound engineer I was working with taught me the trick. Make sure both ends of the cable are free to move. Then, hold the end of the cable in one hand, and use your second hand to bring a loop of the cable over to the first hand, making a twisting motion as you do so. Allow the free end of the cable to spin freely. Repeat until the entire cable is in nice, even, flat loops.

This literally changed my life. I use this technique with every cord I own, and it works flawlessly. I almost never need to replace instrument cables anymore. I can pack several cables in seconds, and everything stays neat and orderly for the next show.

It works particularly well with Lightning cables and other Apple cables, too, as demonstrated in the following video.

The best part is not only does this prolong the life of your cables, it makes stowing away the cables into bags and pouches much easier. And it makes keeping the cables separated from each other much easier, too. No more knots.

Learn this trick, and I swear, unless you are pulling the plug out by the cable (which I really hope you aren’t) or you are stressing the cable in some other way during actual use, you should never have another problem with any of Apple’s white cables again.

Unless your cats get to them. I can’t do anything about your cats.

The Common Aspects list was always slated to be the key feature of version 1.1 of x2y for Mac. I decided to ship 1.0 with two major features of the iOS version not yet included, in the interest of getting the product shipped within a reasonable time frame. (The other feature is iCloud sync, coming in version 1.2.) I figured I would need at least a week or two to tackle adding a sidebar and all the new learning that would involve, given this was the first Mac app I was coding myself.

Above all, I wanted to use standard controls as much as possible, as I wanted x2y to look like a native Mac app. That meant using a Source List, with the blurred translucent background, standard controls for showing and hiding, and a look that was similar to the built-in Sierra apps. If you compare x2y to the Notes app, you'll see where I drew my inspiration (minus the paper texture, of course).

One little detail I wanted to add that I'm particularly happy about: if you have typed in custom values for your x1 and y1 fields, the app automatically fills them in for you when you click the add ratio button. Just give the new ratio a name, and save. Or replace those values if you want to save a different ratio.

Having access to the ratios you use most often with one click has always been a feature that sets x2y apart from most other aspect ratio calculators. I'm glad I took a little extra time to make sure I got it right. There were some gotchas along the way that I hadn't anticipated. (nextKeyView was interesting, for instance. And drag and drop reordering of an outline view was an eye opener.) But it was a great learning experience.

Add NSSplitViewController and NSOutlineView to the growing list of classes with which I am now familiar.

I also added the option to customize the main toolbar of the app, including using large icons, if desired. That one was easier than I thought it would be.

I continue to be surprised at the ease with which I have translated my familiarity with iOS APIs to those in macOS. Apple has really made a good effort to make macOS development easier over the years.

x2y for Mac 1.1 is available now on the Mac App Store.