hoakley May 11, 2020 General, Macs, Technology

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 46

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 46. Here are my solutions to them.

1: backup
Reverse (in North America in particular, backup) in case you need to restore (what you do with your backup).

2: Pasteboard
I’m not really made of card (pasteboard is made from layers of card pasted or compressed together), but I’m always ready to hold what you’ve cut or copied (the Pasteboard is where cut or copied data are kept until you paste them). What am I?

3: Which British city connects a famous musical quartet with Location Services? Answer: Liverpool.
The ‘quartet’ in question is, of course, the Beatles, whose careers started at the Cavern Club in the city in early 1960. For reasons I don’t know, Liverpool has also been Apple’s internal name for Location Services.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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1

artiste212 on May 11, 2020 at 11:26 pm

These riddles help to elucidate some of the finer differences between British English and American English.

For the first, “backup” was a no brainer in the US – an instant answer.

For the second, I only thought of clipboard, the word we use for where cut or copied items are stored before being pasted. Although I’ve heard the word pasteboard, I don’t think of it in conjunction with this function. After seeing your answer, I checked the American English dictionary built into IOS, and “pasteboard” is defined only as “a type of thin board made by pasting together sheets of paper. e.g., a pasteboard ticket”

For the third, the quartet prompted me to guess Liverpool instantly – probably due to my age, as the only quartet I know is the Beatles (I know there are other quartets, but they are all I knew). That was my guess, although I kept thinking the correct answer should be Greenwich, the center of longitude used for location, despite Greenwich having only relatively less famous quartets. I hadn’t known the internal codename used by Apple at all. So this was the right guess for the wrong reason!

Rather than being confounding or frustrating, these differences between our respective languages only enhanced the value of the exercise you provided us this past Saturday. What interesting things I’ve learned – both intended, and possibly not intended.

Thanks.

Bruce

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- 2
  
  hoakley on May 12, 2020 at 7:14 am
  
  Thank you, Bruce.
  Hopefully this morning’s article about the Pasteboard has been revelatory: it’s actually Apple’s technical term for the Clipboard, and has long been so. I’m not sure why the two terms have come into use in this way, but I was being deliberately obscure in choosing that one!
  Howard.
  
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artiste212 on May 12, 2020 at 1:01 pm

Howard, I’m not a programmer or an Apple expert, but I am a very involved user. So I went to the Apple website, and could not find an official reference to pasteboard. There is a reference to the clipboard, however, at this url: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460.

The text on that page includes, in part, the following:
*Use Universal Clipboard*
On one device, copy the text, image, or other content as you normally would.
You can also use Universal Clipboard to copy entire files from one Mac to another. Each Mac requires macOS High Sierra or later.
The content is automatically added to the clipboard of your other nearby device. It remains there briefly, or until you replace it by copying something else on either device.
On the other device, paste the content as you normally would.

On another page, https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209651, the text says,
*Copy or cut*
Start by selecting the text or other item to be copied or cut. Then use one of these steps to save the item to your Clipboard so that it can be pasted elsewhere.

On their support pages, the only reference to pasteboard is at https://www.apple.com/us/search/pasteboard?page=1&sel=support&src=serp, which has a link to a page describing pasteboard as malware!

So my question is, is the term “pasteboard” a programming term that Apple keeps hidden from us mortals, or is this simply another instance of two countries separated by a common language?

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- 4
  
  hoakley on May 12, 2020 at 1:49 pm
  
  Thanks.
  This is my point: for users this is known as the Clipboard. No such thing exists in development and internally in macOS: see for example this page, which introduces these features. It has nothing to do with countries, but whether you’re a regular user, or a developer (or expert user).
  Howard.
  
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