Steve Litchfield

So I've been reviewing the Clicks keyboard for the iPhone for the last year and have done several videos showing its strengths and weaknesses (mainly size!): But then I tried to get too clever. The idea was to 'Enable full keyboard access' and then set custom keyboard shortcuts to trigger iOS Shortcuts. It sounded logical and it did work, as evidenced by the next video: However, there have been some side effects, not least with Apple upgrading iOS 18 and something clearly changing under the hood. What has been happening on simple, regular text input via Clicks, is that the space bar often gets missed and the fields and forms on-screen become highlighted with a neon outline. Clearly there was something screwy going on here, and it looked very much like an Accessibility 'thing'. Then I remembered that the shortcuts system above was part of Accessibility and I have discovered that turning off 'Enable full keyboard access' fixes the bogus text field highlighting...

This had been bugging me for a year and I finally got music sync between my Mac and my iPhone working reliably in 2024... With a little 'dance' I have to do. Sadly. I don't think I'm alone in having problems, either, judging from reports online, yet the issues are not so widespread that Apple has actually, you know, FIXED them with a software patch. Sigh. The symptom is that, when plugging in to sync (I know, I know, old school), everything just grinds to a halt when it comes to the 'sync' step, i.e. where your music library syncs to what's on the phone. It will hang there forever. What's happening, under the hood, is that Apple's MDCrashReportTool (ironically) has errr... crashed, and, when queried by Finder's Music sync, can't respond to say that all is OK. So the latter just waits and waits...  The 'solution' (which works every time but is a bit of a hassle) is to go into Activity Monitor on your Mac (it's in the Utilities fold...