As most of you know, I haven’t exactly warmed up to the iPad. A key reason is that it’s large and ungainly for just checking email when in bed. I can just as well use the iPhone for that, though I agree that writing long messages isn’t its strong suit. When it comes to productivity, I am a radio broadcaster, and the tools that I require to record and edit shows are best done on a Mac.

Indeed, there is no way to properly capture audio from Skype on the iPad that I know about. Or at least when I last checked the App Store. The reason is that Apple’s sandboxing scheme doesn’t support the ability to capture audio from another app. Such shortcomings need to be fixed, particularly if there’s hope to expand the iPad’s productivity capabilities. Sure, the Mac App Store doesn’t support it either, but I can at least download such apps directly from a publisher’s site.

Apple certainly has had some difficulty making the proper case for the iPad, at least expanding beyond consuming music and movies, playing games, and managing email. Yes, you can get an accessory keyboard, which makes it easier to actually write longer form material, but the ones I’ve tried tend to be ungainly and prone to decreasing the accuracy of your typing. Well at least for me.

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As some of you know, I’m between cars. Well, just before Thanksgiving, I had a call from a client — let’s call him Robert — who asked me to come over to fix his Mac. We set Monday for the visit, and since he lived just a few minutes away, he arrived to pick me up. His car was new, still bearing the temporary plate, and he seemed proud of his new purchase, a white 2015 VW Passat Limited.

As you might expect, I was a little surprised at his choice. If you’ve been reading about Volkswagen’s problems with embedding software that faked emissions tests on their diesel engines, you might have wondered what Robert was thinking about. While he might have chosen a diesel for maximum fuel economy, VW has stopped selling vehicles with TDI diesels until they’re fixed, so he got one with VW’s 1.8 liter TSI turbocharged gas engine. It promises up to 36 miles per gallon; Consumer Reports claims up to 39 miles per gallon, and that’s not too shabby.

Well, as a car buff, I peppered him with questions about his choice. But Robert is no fool. VW dealers are struggling to sell product. They’re offering huge incentives not just on closeout vehicles, but the 2016 models that are now trickling in. He figured he saved enough money to cover much of what he’d lose in trade-in value when it was time to get a new car a few years hence.

Having arrived at his home, I began work on his late 2009 iMac that required a drive transplant. Having done it before, I can tell you it’s not a pleasant experience. You have to use suction cups to pry off the glass to get at the insides, and the entire process of taking it apart and putting it together took about an hour in billable time.

Now since I’ve owned two VWs over the years, I was real curious about his new purchase, and I kept asking him questions. So he offered me the chance to take it for an extended drive, with him in the passenger’s seat serving a sort of backseat driver’s role, and to make sure I didn’t attempt to test its 0-60 acceleration potential.

I did some research first as I tested his iMac after the repair. The “Limited” moniker applied to a special model, released in March, which contained several useful options in a Passat that was otherwise based on the entry level “S” series. You got fancier 17-inch wheels, corner-illuminating foglights, a rearview camera, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, an 8-speaker touchscreen sound system with SiriusXM and HD radio, proximity keyless access with a push-button start button, V-Tex faux leather seating, heated front seats, an 8-way power driver’s seat, and a few other geegaws that would normally list for $2,755 at a $1,555 premium over the standard price.

It’s actually a smart package, even though you give up a few things. There’s nothing comparable in the 2016 lineup, and some features require that you buy options that take the list price to over $29,000.

Style-wise, VW tends to be conservative but elegant. This motif also mostly applies to the Audi luxury brand. I compared it closely to my last car, a 2014 Kia Optima EX. It is an interesting contrast, since the Kia was designed by Peter Schreyer, who also designed the distinctive Audi TT and the New Beetle during his stint at VW.

Now the Kia was meant to be futuristic outside, and Germanic inside. An interesting combo, but it also has a high belt line and a coup-style slope at the rear that somewhat restricts headroom and your view to the rear. The rearview camera is essential, but the one on the Passat also came in handy.

Since the 2011 model, the American Passat, built in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is noticeably larger than its European counterpart. While it’s within an inch or two of most mid-sized sedans, such as the Kia Optima, Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, it’s positively huge inside. You can easily spread out in the front, and the rear seats offer almost limousine-like space. The trunk, rated at 15.9 cubic feet, has a wide opening, thus affording more usable space than the storage areas on comparable vehicles. You sit upright in a tall cabin, with big side windows. Except for thick rear pillars, visibility as as good as it gets.

Indeed, I was positively amazed at how much extra room it appeared to offer, while, again, being about the same size and weight as the Kia. It’s very much about clever packaging.

The faux leather on the Passat is so well done, I was hard pressed to detect much of a difference compared to genuine leather. The control placement is excellent with big white on black gauges, and simple controls for the radio and cooling systems. There’s also a multifunction button on the steering wheel that puts the phone and audio functions in a convenient space.

The touchscreen radio has big labels for selecting station presets. Options are straightforward, and there’s no multifunction button or the need to wade through loads of menus and submenus to manage some functions. It’s also responsive. The touchscreen on the Kia was a little hit or miss.

But the best things about the VW radio are the surprisingly robust audio quality and the sensitivity of the FM and satellite radios. My Kia had a Premium package with a fancy Harmon Infinity system sporting seven speakers, the last being a subwoofer. Despite the pretense, I found it overwrought in both bass and treble, with an overall tinny aspect. It eluded an air of cheapness,

The sound on  the Passat is warm. Bass is decent, not quite as deep or robust as the Kia, but it still delivers the appropropriate thump when it’s called far. As a former drummer, I listen carefully to the quality of snares, bass and cymbals. The VW gets it mostly right. Cymbals smeared on the Kia. Best of all, my extended drive took the Passat to a few places where the audio cut out on the Kia’s satellite radio. Kia fans claimed it was the fault of the Sirius satellite system, but the dropouts on the Passat’s radio were few and far between. All in all it’s a better deal.

For 2016, the Kia is offering a radio with up to 14 speakers. The top-of-the-line for the Passat is a 9-speaker Fender system, highly praised. But the 8-speaker audio on Robert’s Passat is good enough for most of you.

So what did he give up with a car priced just above the entry-level?

There’s no moonroof. But Robert never used them, and I maybe spent a day using one over the past 20 years. and just about all of my cars had some form of moonroof or sunroof. There’s no dual-zone automatic climate control either, but that’s of minimal impact in the real world, unless you and your passenger have widely divergent tastes. I’m almost always fiddling with the temperature settings on the automatic systems, since few provide consistent performance from day to night, as outside temperatures change. It’s a minor loss.

The lack of a power front passenger seat may also be a negative, but if only one or two people sit there and can settle on basic adjustments, it’s not such a big deal. The manual controls on the Passat are fairly easy to manage.

The other negative, slight, is the lack of a rear vent for back seat passengers. But I find the airflow on those systems is so light that it hardly matters, at least in the cars I’ve driven. In addition, the rearview mirror is not auto-dimming, and there is no Homelink garage controller. But it’s no big deal to manually switch from day to night view without depending on the system to figure it out, and aftermarket garage door openers aren’t very expensive.

What this means is that the buyer who can still find one of these cars will be getting a great price and save thousands on options you may not actually need.

The styling has been criticized by some as being a tad plain. But it’s VW through and through, without the needless styling cues that serve little purpose other than look fancy, or different. This conservative approach carries to the interior, where the layout is straightforward with generous storage space and large cupholders front and rear. It gives evidence of careful thought to every detail of the motoring experience. An example: Unlike other brands, the ignition start/stop switch is conveniently placed on the center console at the left of the transmission stick. The emergency brake is activated by a big old fashioned lever on the center console. The Optima’s was at the left below the dash, and occasionally missed. More than a few times, I began to drive the car without realizing, until I saw the dash light, that the emergency was still activated.

Both the Passat and the Optima have a ride that leans firm. But Kia and its sister brand, Hyundai, have a few things to learn about proper suspension design. The Passat simply offers a better combination of comfort and control, and is rarely upset by bumpy roads. The electric power steering is rock solid, and you could drive miles on a straightaway barely moving the wheel. Not so on the Optima, which required slight but fairly frequent corrections on the very same roads. After a few hours driving, the Passat would leave you feeling less fatigued.

Despite having “only” 170 hp, the 1.8 engine manages to move the Passat faster than the higher rated engine on the Kia. We’re talking of maybe a second in 0-60 times, but it’s enough to make you feel you’ve really got a small six-cylinder engine under the hood.

For 2016, VW has given the Passat a nip and tuck here and there, with some fancy tricks to reduce wind resistance that results in an improvement in mileage of a few percent, from 36 to 38 mpg on the 1.8 turbo. The interior is also gussied up a bit, and some added safety features that include adaptive cruise control, automated braking, blind spot monitoring, and lane change warnings. You may even be able to get one with a diesel version once VW fixes the emission controls and gets EPA approval.

It’s unfortunate that VW managed to screw itself with its emission control fakery. It will cost the company billions to fix the cars and pay regulatory fines. An untold number of customers will give up on the brand, and it may take years to grow sales once again.

The solution going forward will require total honesty, and careful attention to the recall and repair process. That, and huge financial incentives for new car purchases may help.

All in all Robert let me spend several comfortable hours taxiing him around the Phoenix area. He allowed me to repeat the experience a couple of days later to flesh out my review. All in all, it was a pleasant motoring experience, and when I’m in the market again, I’ll give the Passat a real serious look, well at least if the dealer is willing to offer some huge financial incentives,

Although I have run OS X El Capitan on my iMac since fairly early in the beta process, I had avoided installing it on my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro for one key reason. You see, I mostly use the note-book for my rare trips from my home office, and, obviously, for on-the-scene recording. My carrying bag contains a USB mic, and my recording apps are installed on the computer. But one of those apps, The Levelator, wasn’t compatible with OS 10.11.

The Levelator automates the job of optimizing volume levels on a recording. This can become real difficult otherwise when you are recording a group conversation on Skype, with participants presenting different output levels, and adding the input from a USB mic or, in my case an outboard mixer. Some podcasters will ask each participant in a conversation to submit their own recordings of the session, and piece together the separate recordings. That may be the ideal, but it is time-consuming, and it’s not practical for my two commercial radio shows.

But The Levelator made the sound normalizing process as seamless as it could be. Drag and drop the file and, in a short time, a processed duplicate, with “output” appended to the file name, appears.

Unfortunately it was useless with El Capitan, apparently because the app was looking for an external system file that wasn’t there. A few weeks ago, a hack was posted that illustrated how to pull a file from inside the app’s bundle and move it to the system-related folder for which it was searching. That appeared to be the final solution because the developers had opted, back in 2012, not to do any updates.

Fortunately, they have since relented and released an updated version that fixes the problem. Yes, I could have performed the same hack I did on the MacBook Pro. But the change, however minor, could have been wiped out with a system update, so I opted to just stick with Yosemite for the time being. It was mostly out of laziness; I don’t use the MacBook Pro as much as I used to.

Now I realize that this one app has a fairly narrow audience consisting mostly of podcasters. It is the sort of app that does one thing really well, and had survived several years before a system change forced the programmers to fix things. Or at least one thing. It’s also free, and I recommend it to anyone who is going crazy fiddling with audio levels to get the best sound out of a recording. It’s also available for Windows and Linux, and thus most anyone with a desktop computer can install it.

And it’s yet another reason why I cannot duplicate my workflow on an iPad.

As you might have expected, other apps are still being updated for El Capitan. One key change, to “rootless” or System Integrity Protection, removed direct access to certain system files and processes to enhance security. But it also broke some apps. A notable example is Jon Gotow’s Default Folder X. This is the ultimate — and only — Open/Save dialog enhancer and I recommend it for any Mac power user. But the system changes made it incompatible, and Jon is busy developing an all-new version, a full rewrite. It takes time, but it’s available as a pretty stable public beta if you want to try it out.

I’m guessing he’ll have it done by the end of the year. But as with any beta product, be careful about using it on a production Mac. All right, that’s precisely what I’m doing, and I’m reporting back to Jon when I find things that might need fixing to justify my participation.

I also notice that El Capitan isn’t exactly getting the love at the Mac App Store. It receives a 2.5 star rating, worse than Yosemite at this point in time. That may be one reason why the reported adoption rate has fallen several points behind Yosemite two months after release.

Now maybe the forthcoming 10.11.2 update will fix the most serious remaining problems and raise that rating. The sole problem of note that I still encounter, from time to time, is a curious stall or freezing in Mail. For up to 30 seconds, you can’t do anything in the app other than scroll. Nothing can be selected, and you cannot create or edit messages till it clears up, as it always does.

That’s not a serious problem. But you’d think from the online reviews that lot of things have gone wrong in a release that was supposed to be very much about stability and performance. I continue to wonder about the value of public beta testing if the final releases are no more stable than before. Yes, I realize public betas are a good marketing move, to drive interest in a new OS, and perhaps to encourage developers to support the new features. But Apple may need to pay closer attention to user feedback.

The most important thing is to make the final release as stable as possible. For me, it’s been mostly about third-party apps, but that’s not true for everyone. Yes, I realize online reviews tend to be weighted towards the negative, since people without any serious problems aren’t apt to bother. Still, I am troubled by El Capitan’s low rating, and I hope Apple is working real hard to fix the remaining problems so it earns a better score — and a higher adoption rate.

So it is beginning to seem as if Adobe has finally recognized the reality that Flash is yesterday’s news, and it’s time to move web developers along to using HTML5 instead. But let me start at the beginning.

In the spring of 2010, Steve Jobs wrote one of his rare editorials, this one about the fate of Flash. It was designed to justify the lack of Flash support in iOS, and came at a time when a beta version was available on some Android smartphones.

The long and short of it was that Flash was a relic of the PC and mouse era, and besides, it wasn’t the most secure platform. It was also proprietary to Adobe even though licensing was essentially free. Instead, Jobs suggested that there were open standards, such as HTML5, which would do the trick.

Well, maybe not. It took a while for HTML5 to not just gain support in popular browsers, but to flesh out the features to allow displaying the sort of animations that were part and parcel of Flash. Now I have to tell you that Flash is embedded into one of my sites. Our original developer, Brent Lee, said Flash was the bee’s knees, and that everyone was using it, so might as well get with the program. He also helped design the original format for this site, but Flash wasn’t a part of it.

The reaction to the editorial was expectedly polarizing. Apple was attacked for its decision not to support Flash, perhaps with the intimation that it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, since Apple had its own proprietary standards. But the fact is that a lot of what Apple uses in its OS is actually based on open source Unix components.

Predictably, Adobe responded that they did not agree for various and sundry reasons. I remember voicing a challenge to Adobe in this blog, and on my tech radio show, to demonstrate that they could actually make a version run reliably on iOS without clogging resources (as it did on Android). They never took me up on the offer, or anyone else’s challenge. The version of Flash provided on some versions of Android was beta, poorly optimized for a mobile platform. Indeed, the sort of navigation tricks that worked fine on a traditional Mac or PC with a mouse, trackball or trackpad, were not comparably functional on a smartphone or tablet with a touch interface.

So it wasn’t possible for Flash navigation schemes to work as effectively without redesigning a site.

Flash for Android never got to the release stage, and is no longer offered. While Flash is still supported on Macs and PCs, the popularity of smartphones and tablets has forced web developers to use other alternatives, primarily HTML5. Sometimes a site offers both, and you receive the version of the multimedia content that’s compatible with the device you use.

I still have two Flash elements on our sci-fi site, Attack of the Rockoids. I’ve asked for some assistance in moving all of it to HTML5, and maybe I’ll get that help eventually. The online tools I’ve tried are hit or miss.

While Flash is still available, you need to update regularly, or take advantage of Adobe’s autoupdate option to provide the regular fixes to newly-discovered security problems.

And now it appears Adobe is finally getting the message. In 2016, Adobe will release a new version of its Flash Professional software that reduces dependence on Flash. It’s renamed Adobe Animate CC, which means it’s part of the Creative Cloud subscription scheme. It will include support for HTML5, which means you can evidently encode your content in either format or maybe both. Obviously, I’ve not seen this as-yet unreleased product.

What I would like to see was some soft of easy conversion capability in the new app, so you can quickly funnel all your old Flash content through this app and have it converted to HTML5. That would be a great way to migrate from one format to the other.

Now the fact that Adobe is not using the word Flash in the name of the app is telling, and it’s clear they are recognizing reality. But even if it was easy to move on to HTML5 for your animations and other Flash content, it’ll probably take years to exorcise it from the Internet.

I am not a fan of subscription apps, but I would think that, if you can easily convert the Flash content to HTML5, you could rent it for a month or two, get your work done, and let the license lapse. Or maybe Adobe will provide a free converter. Yes, there are other converters available, free and retail. As I said, I tried a few of the former without much success.

While I do not wish to see a company’s product rendered obsolete, Flash’s day in the sun expired a long time ago, but it has been a slow, painful death.