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Brad Choate
San Francisco, California
Software developer, working at SAY Media.
Recent Activity
iOS: Mail's "Load All Images" button
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**This has been fixed! Option to load images is at the top of the message.** **Observed in iOS 8 (β 3).** I typically configure my email apps to *not* automatically load images. On occasion a spam message gets through the winding maze of spam filters put in front of them... Continue reading
Posted Jul 10, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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iOS, OS X: Reordering for Playlists
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Observed in iOS 8 (β 3) and iTunes/Mac (11.2.2 (3)?). Both the iOS Music app and the iTunes app on OS X suffer from this bug: you can't order your playlists. No, I'm not talking about the songs *in* a playlist, but the playlists themselves. I'd like to have easier... Continue reading
Posted Jul 9, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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iOS: Figure out where to put your media player controls
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Observed on iOS 8 (β 3). Here are three different screens on iOS. All of them allow you to control whatever media you have playing (in my case, an excellent remaster of Distintegration): From left to right: the Music app's "Now Playing" screen, the iOS control center and the lock... Continue reading
Posted Jul 7, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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iTunes: Swiping Gestures Gone Bad
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**Observed as recently as iTunes 11.2.2.** The iTunes Store has a really annoying usability bug around swipe gestures. Go to the home tab of the Movies part of the store and you'll see a number of content "wells"... many of these are side-scrolling areas where you can view the movie... Continue reading
Posted Jul 4, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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iTunes: Allow streaming of full trailers and short, free videos
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Recently, I was browsing the iTunes TV catalog and decided to take in a one-minute video for HBO's True Detective series. So I click on the play button in iTunes to watch the trailer. Then, a gripping 30 seconds later, it stops. Why? Because iTunes is only showing me a... Continue reading
Posted May 21, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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iOS: Bluetooth mouse pairing
Okay, hear me out. I don't think Apple would **ever** bring an actual mouse pointer to the iOS user interface. I hope not-- it might bring the beach ball cursor with it. And touch isn't going to take a back seat to the mouse on that platform. But I think... Continue reading
Posted May 17, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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iOS: Support for importing music, video
It's ridiculous that, in 2014, you cannot add music or videos to your iPhone or iPad without using iTunes. Let me talk about my brother a bit. This story involves him. I recently gave my brother an iPad I used to use. This follows a long tradition of ours: my... Continue reading
Posted Jan 19, 2014 at Please. Fix. That.
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OS X: Please let me hide all running apps
Something I run into often enough, so it deserves to be blogged. I use the "Hide Application" OS X command a lot. I rarely ever minimize a window. I prefer to hide the whole app. I try to keep my laptop screen pretty focused, since it's a smaller space to... Continue reading
Posted Oct 31, 2013 at Please. Fix. That.
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iOS: Search for the Settings App
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One of the best features for a new user on OS X is search. You can search for so much! Of course, there's Spotlight search to search for documents, mail, contacts, applications and so forth. Another awesome feature is a search field in the Help menu (Shift+Cmd+?) to search for... Continue reading
Posted Oct 23, 2013 at Please. Fix. That.
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Don't forget @pleasefixthat
This blog is for long-form posts, but the bite-sized gripes go to Twitter. Follow the [pleasefixthat](http://twitter.com/pleasefixthat) user there to catch them all, including retweets from other annoyed Twitizens. Continue reading
Posted May 8, 2013 at Please. Fix. That.
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Brad Choate added a favorite at abe hassan | blog
Apr 26, 2013
iTunes Store: Don't download movies to my phone, please
iTunes now asks if you want to download the movie later. Scenario: I'm at work and I have a date night planned with my wife. The kids will be staying home to see a movie and it's my job to find something for them to watch. "Hey, I'll find something... Continue reading
Posted Apr 26, 2013 at Please. Fix. That.
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Web: status.twitter.com
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A "status" page for a high-traffic web service such as Twitter is meant to provide users with service interruption news when the main site is offline or malfunctioning in some way. What it should not do, is be offline itself. Twitter uses a Tumblr.com blog for reporting service interruptions, and... Continue reading
Posted Jan 31, 2013 at Please. Fix. That.
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Missing Lyrics in MP3s
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The iTunes Music store now features lyrics on many of their songs. Hello, dear music industry. You've come a long way. I remember the days I spent in the late nineties digitizing all my audio CDs to MP3 (or was it Ogg Vorbis at first? I can't recall). Many years... Continue reading
Posted Jan 30, 2013 at Please. Fix. That.
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iTunes: About that dialog for deleting a podcast episode
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Update: "Fixed," I guess? No more confirmations on deleting any podcasts or episodes in iTunes 11.2. iTunes has many, many issues, but here is one that has been around for a long time... perhaps since the introduction of podcast subscriptions in iTunes. In iTunes (under Mac or Windows), you can... Continue reading
Posted Jul 11, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Unix: ditch the rmdir command in favor of rm
Under Unix-derived operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, etc.), there are a pair of commands used to delete files and directories. `rm` is used to "remove" file(s), `rmdir` is used to "remove directory". If you try to use `rm` to delete a directory, you get this: $ rm directory rm:... Continue reading
Posted Jun 14, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Pandora: Enough with the live recordings
Look, I love music. I listen to as much music as I can. But live recordings (particularly of a live venue) just aren't my thing. I don't care for the crowd cheers, the sing-alongs, the improvisation, the occasional rant-about-something-in-the-middle-of-my-famous-song. It just doesn't do it for me. When I hear a... Continue reading
Posted Jun 5, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Preview: Let go of that file!
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This happens all too often: I receive a PDF file and open it in the Mac OS X Preview app. I read the document, then decide I no longer need it. I close the Preview window (but do not exit the Preview app). I move the PDF file to the... Continue reading
Posted May 29, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Mac App Store: Swipe to navigate history
UPDATE: Fixed in OS X 10.8. The "Swipe between pages" gesture for a mouse and trackpad (as configured through System Preferences) do not navigate forward and backward through your history in the Mac App Store (as they do for Safari). I can't tell you how many times I've tried using... Continue reading
Posted May 29, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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iOS: Missing Modes
UPDATE: "Do Not Disturb" is available in iOS 6. Still waiting for an energy saving mode. A while back, a highly-publicized faux pas brought some attention to the need to silence a smartphone without turning it off. Many of us carry these little noise-makers in our pockets... ready to embarrass... Continue reading
Posted May 8, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Twitter: Who to Follow
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Update: Appears to be fixed! Thanks, Twitter. I love the little things. Little things are easy to fix, too. Here's a little thing I found on Twitter's "Who to Follow" suggestions page: (And I fixed the bug of not following @ylnt.) Continue reading
Posted May 4, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Google: Search For What I Asked For
Google has adopted an annoying habit of changing what I have asked to search for with something similar but different to what I want. Perhaps this doesn't affect you, but for a software developer, it happens all too often. Here's a recent example. I search Google for the phrase: "document... Continue reading
Posted Mar 29, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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Apple Developer Login: Stop preventing paste
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UPDATE: Apple has changed their login form quite a bit and it no longer prevents pasting into the password field. But, other sites out there still employ this tactic for some reason. So to counter that, you can install a Safari browser extension that fixes it for them too. When... Continue reading
Posted Mar 12, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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To be clear, Android 2.2 and later offer the ability to upload specific types of files (I tested in Android 4.0.3 just now and was offered the option to select an audio file, image or video file). So it doesn't let you select from any sort of file on your device, but for select media (as I suggested Apple could implement in my post). Mobile devices don't really expose a traditional file system to the user, although it's possible they could expose content from an SD card using a traditional file browser (Android could do this already; I just don't have a real device with an SD card to test with at the moment). SO, Android (2.2+) fans: I'm so happy for you. But this isn't about you, or Android. I should probably post a separate post for TwitPic on this issue -- even though Android does support a file upload field, they don't bother showing a file upload for Android web browsers... instead, they say that the browser is unsupported and suggest emailing the photo to them instead.
Toggle Commented Feb 22, 2012 on Mobile Safari: The broken file upload field at Please. Fix. That.
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Google Reader: Broken next and interestingness
Update: Will never be fixed, since Google Reader is no more. This post concerns Google Reader. In it, I will cleanly side-step: the recent redesign the loss of certain features the encroachment of Google+ the issues around data portability and difficulties surrounding the transfer of former Google Reader social contacts... Continue reading
Posted Jan 9, 2012 at Please. Fix. That.
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