I never even owned a smartphone with a hardware keyboard, but as soon as I saw this I wanted one: Clicks is a new $139 hardware keyboard case for the iPhone 14 Pro, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max (that one will cost $159 — Max phones have max prices). One of the creators of the project is Michael “MrMobile” Fisher, who, of course, created a YouTube video for the project . (One of his co-creators is CrackBerry Kevin — so there are some serious “hardware phone keyboard aficionado” bona fides on the team.)

I don’t know how much I’ll wind up using it but it looks fun, useful, and clever — and I’m just a sucker for upstart indie hardware projects. Clicks is even a great name. There’s no Bluetooth involved — it connects via Lightning or USB-C, just like any hardware keyboard can via a cable. If you’ve never connected a hardware keyboard to an iPhone before, you might be surprised how many keyboard shortcuts there are (Command-Space for Spotlight, Space and Shift-Space for paging down and up in Safari, Command-H to go to the Home screen, and more.)

You’ll never guess which color I pre-ordered.

Apple’s 2023 year in review, with Callsheet developer Casey Liss.

Sponsored by:

• Memberful : Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
• Squarespace : Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

The best calendar (and tasks!) app for your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. Get Fantastical now for 20% off for up to 24 months and love your calendar again! Offer valid through January 10, 2024.

I stumbled across an old note where I’d stashed some favorite quotes from Keith Richards; figured I’d append a few of them to my post from a few weeks ago on his 80th birthday.

Josh Marshall:

Richards often makes lists of the greatest guitar players of all time. But at a technical level he’s no particular standout. One-time Stones guitarist Mick Taylor was and is certainly superior by that measure. Even a casual rock fan could easily list a dozen guitarists who top him by that measure. Richards’ genius isn’t technical proficiency but knowing what to play, what not to play — both in the sense of the genius of composition but the role of silence in constructing an unshakeable riff. In interviews he has often spoken of silence as the composer’s canvass. For a man notorious for excess, his music is built on economy and restraint. His obsession with finding just the right sound, just the tonal palette he needs, leads him to start using a so-called “open G” tuning, a way to tune a guitar descended from banjo tuning. It literally involved removing one of the six strings. Most of the Stones’ most distinctive and indelible songs come after that switch. You can’t quite play most Stones songs on a conventionally tuned guitar. Very close. Almost the same, but not quite.

Richards was on The Tonight Show a few months ago, and played through a few songs on an acoustic guitar with Jimmy Fallon standing in for Mick Jagger. (He does a great Jagger .) It’s just amazing to me how he can get that Keith Richards sound out of seemingly any guitar. I think of it as a distinctly electric-guitar sound, but it’s not.

As Marshall (who’s about my age) points out, during the peak decades of the Stones’ run, Richards did not, shall we say, seem to be living a lifestyle amenable with a long lifespan. I grew up adoring The Rolling Stones (thanks, Mom), but expecting Keith not to be long for this world. But here we are, and he’s not just alive and well at the age of 80, he’s about to embark on a world tour behind the Stones’ best studio album since Tattoo You in 1981. Extraordinary. What a gift.

Update: A handful of my favorite Keith quotes:

• “Like I said many years ago, I never had a problem with drugs, only with cops.”
• “I would rather be a legend than a dead legend.”
• “There’s only one fatal disease, I’ve concluded. It’s called hypochondria. And it is deadly.”
• “The only thing Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music, and what we do.”
• “The problem is that no one is used to a band being around this long. It’s very hard for me to think that half the audience we play to can’t remember a world without the Rolling Stones. We’ve become like the air you breathe. The sun comes up, the stars come out, and a new Stones album appears every couple of years.”

For at least a few years, I’ve been mildly annoyed by the fact that my iCloud Photo Library reported containing something like “50,783 Photos, 3,643 Videos, 2 Items”. The counts for photos and videos weren’t the problem — the problem was the “2 Items”. What were they?

Caleb Hailey had the same problem, and posted a super-simple solution to Mastodon: a custom smart album for Photos for Mac with a dozen or so criteria like this:

• Filename does not include “.jpeg”
• Filename does not include “.png”
• Filename does not include “.heic”

and so forth. A few minutes of busy work and I found my culprits: two AAC audio files that were each just a few seconds long, and seemingly empty. I have no idea how or when they got into my Photos library but I’m delighted to have them gone.

Worth pointing out: You don’t need to build up a list every single filename extension that’s an image or video that you do want to keep in Photos. Once I built up a list of excluded filename extensions that whittled the list of matching items to 32, I just went through the items visually. The two AAC files stuck out like sore thumbs.

Also worth pointing out: You cannot create smart albums in Photos on iPadOS or iOS. Only MacOS. (Same thing goes for smart mailboxes in Apple Mail.) Apple still treats the iPad and iPhone as baby computers .

See also: A similar problem I had back in 2016 , in which I had five unnamed items in my Photos library that could not be synced to iCloud. The solution to that one was also a smart album — and thus also a problem that could only be solved using a Mac.

My thanks to Flexibits for sponsoring last week — and, spoiler, next week — at Daring Fireball. Fantastical isn’t just the best calendaring app for iOS and Mac; Cardhop isn’t just the best contacts app for iOS and Mac — these are two of the best apps in the world today, period.

2023 was a huge year for Flexibits, and they have a terrific year-in-review blog post that runs down all the details. But the highlights are obvious: excellent support for widgets (on all platforms, including interactive widgets on the latest OSes) and Live Activities on iOS. They also added several improvements to their Openings feature that lets people find meeting times that work for everyone.

Through the end of next week, Flexibits has a killer offer for DF readers: 20 percent off for up to two full years , both for new and current Flexibits subscribers.

When Charlie Munger — Warren Buffet’s longtime partner at Berkshire Hathaway — died last month at 99, I mentioned that a new edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack was about to be published by Stripe Publishing (a subsidiary of the very same Stripe of e-payments renown).

The hardcover edition is out, but Stipe has also made the entire book available on this marvelous website. The site is beautiful, fun, and clever, and reminds me greatly of the web edition of The Steve Jobs Archive’s Make Something Wonderful . Both are damning condemnations of the state of e-books.

Regarding Make Something Wonderful , Sebastiaan de With wrote :

It’s hard to capture the delight of a real book, but this website does a fantastic job coming close. Lots of delightful, thoughtful little details.

I say “ebook” because it isn’t a word used anywhere on the website, likely for good reason: there are no good ebooks. The ePub file lacks all the delight of the beautiful website. Books on Apple Books are objectively worse than their written counterparts. This might be nicer.

Kindle editions are even more primitive, design-wise. Compare the Kindle preview of Poor Charlie’s Almanack to the website edition. It’s like comparing a matchbook to a blowtorch. With the e-book editions — Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, whatever — you can merely read these books. With the web editions, you experience them.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

MacRumors has shared multiple details on the iPhone 16’s design , including the unveiling of a new button that is planned for the devices, the Capture Button . While we’ve known the name and location of the button, the internal information that we’ve obtained does not detail what it will be used for.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the Capture Button will be able to record video. In this week’s Power On newsletter , Gurman says that the iPhone 16 models will include a “new dedicated button for taking video.” [...]

The Capture button will be a capacitive button with haptic feedback rather than a mechanical button, and it is expected to include a force sensor that can recognize pressure. The location of the button may make it easy to trigger, but if it is activated via pressure, it could be that holding it down will launch into the camera and allow video recording to start.

If this comes true — and I hope it does — the button might default to shooting video, but I’d bet the house it will be configurable, like this year’s Action button. When using an iPhone as a camera, the main thing I miss from dedicated cameras is a hardware shutter button. With dedicated cameras, the shutter button can be pressed halfway to set exposure and focus, and only captures on a full press. A force-sensitive Capture button could work similarly.

You can set the iPhone 16 Pro’s Action button to act as a shutter button for the Camera app, but it’s in the wrong location on the frame of the phone. I don’t want to press a shutter button with my left thumb, I want to press it with my right index finger. (You can orient the Action button to be on the top right by holding the iPhone horizontally with camera at the bottom, but that feels awkward to me.)