Updated: Changed the Terminal command to reflect “sudo killall coreaudiod”
Apples recent announcement of features in iOS 8 that will bring the iOS and the upcoming Mac OS X 10.10 release even closer together has not been without some bumps in the road. We have all seen some of the previous news regarding those.
One of which has been showing is Continuity, many reports insisted that it would not work under the OS X 10.10 BETA and with iOS 8. I recently began testing it after the most recent release of iOS 8 to the market. All of the features appeared to be working on the OS X 10.10 BETA 3 side except for an issue that I’d encountered with Facetime earlier in this version of the BETA. The Early 2008 iMac that I was testing this on would drop it’s MIC. You could hear and see audio but NOTHING was being sent out.
After testing and making sure that the mic was not bad. This was verified by testing using several sound applications as well as Apples Dictation & Speech, I could see and hear the the mic clearly was not at fault.
So the search was on, pouring over countless articles in the Apple Support forums didn’t produce anything unfortunately, likely because the product is STILL in BETA on the OS X 10.10 side. However after another deeper dive into Google, I ran in to articles about deleting libraries, resetting PRAM and other nasty mucky things none of which appeared to really fix the issue.
Initial reports regarding this issue and others included some rather DISMAL news that support for HAND OFF and Continuity may not support many Early Mac’s due to the need for Bluetooth 4.0/Bluetooth LE. However I persisted in hopes that there may be a solution to the issue.
After a rather exhaustive search one article did stand out.
How to fix disabled audio in OS X 10.10 Yosemite beta
This article appeared to fix an audio issue that could be simular to the issue at hand. It went into details about FaceTime issues not working under OS X 10.10 Beta’s. It seems that coreaudiod has been broken since the first BETA release of OS X 10.10. Developers have reported it but up until now Apples Engineering team had not fixed it and BETA users have been forced to reboot their systems each time this broke. Mihaita popped up with a quick solution, loading the terminal and issuing the following command ” sudo killall coreaudiod ” of course OMIT the “” marks. Pop in your password and then relaunch Facetime.
I tried this with Continuity. BAM, this worked like a champ. Mihaita’s article also points out the length of time that Apples software engineers have known about this issue and have not attempted to fix it in any following BETA releases. Personally the time to fix this one, is before rolling something this buggy out to the public Apple ala the issues your having now with iOS 8.
Here is a link to Mihaita’s full article regarding this fix.
Now on to one of the first programs I’ve seen so far that supports continuity. It’s still in BETA phase just like OS X 10.10 is but it appears to pick up on something that wasn’t added to OS X 10.10, the Continuity Keypad.
This is an item that will be considered a MUST for Continuity will be the Continuity Keypad.
It integrates seamlessly into the OS X 10.10 desktop as well as the notification bar quiet well.
It allows for dialing from both the keypad as well as the Notification bar. Written by Eytan Shulman and Harrison Weinerman this is a nice addon to watch.
Currently still in BETA version 0.5.5 can be found at http://continuitykeypad.co
As more details come out regarding Continuity this application is sure to grow as well. Access to the contacts and addresses stored in the iPhone or on the OS X 10.10 computer will be something that would be nice.