macOS Archive
We may have been using APFS for nearly seven years, but some of its features remain thoroughly opaque. On Christmas Day, I posed the puzzle of 60 TB of snapshots being removed from a 2 TB disk. While we all accept that may be “technically correct”, for ordinary users it makes no sense. Suggestions that they should be “educated” miss the point that the Finder has to be accessible to all users, whether or not they have a degree in Computer Science. If my eleven year-old granddaughter can’t make sense of it, then the Finder is a failure. Today I turn to another thorny issue raised by the ingenuity of APFS: the size of its special file types, sparse and ‘clone’ files. As usual, I start with a practical demonstration. ↫ Howard Oakley I feel like I should ring a little bell while posting a link to this article.
Running macOS virtual machines (VMs) on Apple silicon Macs may not seem popular, but it has long been one of Apple’s important goals. Yet, if you do use a virtualiser on an M-series Mac, you’ll know how different it is from those that virtualise macOS and other operating systems on Intel Macs. This article explains why virtualisation is so important, and how it has become so different. ↫ Howard Oakley Excellent read, as always from Howard Oakley.
So what can you do with it? Well, let’s first address the elephant in the room – the internet is still lousy on OS 9. Despite Cameron Kaiser’s genius effort put into his Classilla browser project, he’s pretty much squeezed every ounce of usability from the now 20+ year old underlying networking frameworks. A lot of websites still render “ok” in the browser, but most of the modern web will simply cause it to spit back an error. Also, file sharing with other machines on your network takes a bit more forethought these days as OS 9’s implementation of AppleTalk will only work with OS X versions up to 10.4 Tiger. In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later, AppleTalk will not function at all without some difficult technical workarounds, so a “bridge” Mac is generally recommended (for those not familiar with that term – bridge Macs are machines that can handle both legacy and modern technologies and can be networked between both old and new hardware). It is also possible to wring out a bit more usability by setting up a web proxy such as macHTTP and running a small Netatalk server on one of your modern Macs (this is something I’d like to feature in the future). ↫ Adam Goff at Low End Mac Running Mac OS 9 today has become somewhat of a rite of passage for retrocomputing and operating system nerds (…2006), and every few years a new article about the experience makes the rounds. For good reason, too – OS 9 is fun, quirky, has tons of software to play around with, and still looks and feels great.
Even if you’ve used the Mac for decades, I suspect you have never fully understood the Fn key. Not helping is the fact that Apple sometimes calls it the Function key, but all Mac keyboards already have 12 or more numbered F-for-Function keys! The Fn key first appeared in 1998 in the PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet) and has become a fixture in the lower-left corner of laptop keyboards ever since. The Fn key migrated to standalone keyboards only in 2007 with the release of the Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, where it occupies a spot between the Delete key and the Home key. On Apple’s compact desktop keyboards, it reverts to the lower-left corner. ↫ Adam Engst at TibBITS This article made me wonder when the Fn key first appeared, but searching for it leads to a lot of SEO spam that is clearly all wrong. As the article notes, Apple first introduced it in 1998, and IBM already it in on the monochrome ThinkPad 300 in 1992. It’s much older than that, though; the IBM PC Convertible from 1986 also had one, as did the IBM PCjr from 1984. At this point I’m starting to think it was actually a fairly common key, but with the explosion of IBM compatibles in the early ’80s it’s basically impossible to check them all, and, of course, there’s the possibility it may have existed on earlier systems, or third-party keyboards long lost to time. This would be an interesting mystery to solve.
It was Big Sur that focussed attention on the size of macOS updates. In Mojave and earlier, updates had essentially been Installer packages that brought a minimum of overhead. By the time that many had installed Big Sur’s new Signed System Volume (SSV), we were starting to discover just how large its updates were. Those were early days with its completely new updating process that builds a new System volume, takes a snapshot of it, and constructs a tree of hashes that verify the integrity of every last bit within it. ↫ Howard Oakley I had no idea macOS updates had become as big as they had, and good on Apple for trying to bring this back down again, and speed up installation of updates, too.
EE Journal reports: National Instruments (NI) recently released a new version of its LabView test automation programming environment for the latest Apple Macintosh computers based on the Arm-based Apple M1 CPU/GPU SoC. At the same time, NI let its customers know that this release would be the last one for Apple Macintosh computers, sending a shock through some portion of the company’s customer base. LabView’s importance to test and measurement cannot be overstated. It was the first graphical programming language designed exclusively for test systems. The language has been continually expanded and improved for nearly 40 years and features more than 7000 software drivers for instruments from many vendors as well as support for custom, FPGA-based instruments. LabView supports many instrument interfaces starting with IEEE-488 and extending to MXI, PXI, USB, Ethernet, and probably a few more interfaces that don’t immediately come to mind. It’s a shock to many and will likely punish higher education students and a chunk of the scientific and research segment which is still Mac dominant.
Apple has officially ceased the sale of OS X Lion 10.7 and Mountain Lion 10.8 from its online store. That’s it. That’s the post.
What’s happening here is that Migration Assistant has migrated all my apps, and has automatically launched any of them that are listed in Login Items or are set to automatically launch in the background. They all launch, all at once, and every single one of them then prompts me for permission to do all the things they already had permission to do on my previous Mac. In this screen shot, I’ve dragged them apart, but in reality most of these windows appeared on top of each other. They float above every other window, and most of them want to open various portions of the Settings app. In the background, a few apps have launched with their own alert prompts, requesting that I perform more tasks in order to get the system ready. You will be protected.
One of the most distinctive features of Apple silicon chips is that they have two types of CPU core, E (Efficiency) cores that are energy efficient but slower than the P (Performance) cores, which normally run much of the code in the apps we use. Apps don’t decide directly which cores they will be run on, that’s a privilege of macOS, but they register their interest by setting a Quality of Service, or QoS, which is then taken into account when they’re scheduled to run. With the introduction of Game Mode in Sonoma, CPU scheduling can now work differently, with E cores being reserved for the use of games. This article looks at another atypical situation, when running a macOS virtual machine (VM) assigned a set number of virtual cores. How does macOS Sonoma handle that? Exactly what is says on the tin.
Jason Snell: It’s incredibly frustrating. This is my software, running on my computer, yet there are moments when it feels like Apple thinks it’s really in charge. It needs to back off. He’s so close.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Apple’s macOS gaming policy of only offering a proprietary, Apple-only API isn’t exactly paying off. One of the most popular online games in history, CS:GO, is removing support for macOS, and it won’t be coming back. From here on out, the game will only be available on 64-bit Windows and Linux. That cycle played out again in Valve’s recent Counter-Strike 2 update, which removed the Mac support already present in the outgoing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Today, a Valve support document for CS2 confirmed that Mac support had been removed and wasn’t likely to be re-added, along with support for ancient DirectX 9-class GPU hardware and legacy 32-bit operating systems. Fret not, though, Mac gamers – there’s always Super Tux Kart.
As many of you will know from personal experience, there is a longstanding issue with VoiceOver on Mac where Safari will frequently become unresponsive with VoiceOver repeatedly announcing the message “Safari not responding.” When this issue occurs, the user’s Mac may become unusable for up to several minutes at a time. Sometimes it can be resolved by switching away from Safari. Sometimes restarting VoiceOver can resolve the issue. However, far too often, the user is unable to switch away from Safari or turn VoiceOver off, instead having to simply wait for their Mac to become responsive again. This “Safari not responding” behaviour when using VoiceOver dramatically impacts productivity and overall usability of Macs for blind and low vision users. Furthermore, it appears that the issue extends beyond just Safari – many other common applications that utilise Apple’s WebKit browser engine can also be affected by the “not responding” problem. I’m not highlighting this to make Apple look bad – for once – or to fill some quota. The fact of the matter is that in the blind and vision-impaired community, the Mac and iPhone are immensely popular for their accessibility features other platforms just cannot match. If you’ve ever seen a blind person use an iPhone, you know just how different their way of using it is from sighted people. As such, having a major bug like this is a huge deal. It impacts people who really have nowhere else to go, technology-wise, since switching to other platforms really isn’t a viable option in most cases. This issue must be fixed, and can’t be left by the wayside because it only impacts a relatively small number of people. Blind and vision-impaired folks have placed their trust in Apple because they’ve got nowhere else to go, and Apple needs to step up and take this seriously. Now.
Little did we realise then that Sierra was going to change all that, and by Mojave we’d be enduring 4,000 and more log entries in a second, when our Macs were feeling loquacious. That was because Apple introduced the Unified log, with its entries written not in plain text but compressed binary format. This was the death-blow for the casual reader of logs: for a start, the replacement Console app was unable to access any log entries made in the past, and its tools were, and remain, woefully inadequate for tackling the increasing torrent of log entries. Despite its many great strengths, the Unified log has suffered two problems that are limiting its usefulness in Sonoma: its diminishing period of coverage, and censorship. This article highlights some real problems with the logs in macOS. Logs are so crucial in finding out why something is happening to a system so having them limited or restricted would drive me nuts.
When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That’s the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release. OpenCore Legacy Patcher is an indispensable tool for Mac users, since a lot of machines no longer support by Sonoma are perfectly fast and capable enough to run Apple’s new release. No longer supporting machines that are only five years old is absolutely bonkers, and should simply not be legal. It’s a sad state of affairs people will have to resort to community tools, but at least the option is there.
Apple released macOS 14.0 Sonoma today, and what’s the best way to celebrate the new release? Why, the Ars Technica review, of course. So macOS Sonoma is a perfectly typical macOS release, a sort of “Ventura-plus” that probably has one or two additions that any given person will find useful but which otherwise just keeps your Mac secure and avoids weird iCloud compatibility problems with whatever software is running on your phone. You probably don’t need to run out and install it, but there’s no real reason to avoid it if you’re not aware of some specific bug or compatibility problem that affects the software you use. It’s business as usual for Mac owners. Let’s dive in. You can download and install it from the usual place if your Mac supports it.
In the last few years, several other vendors have begun selling Mac ROM SIMMs too. Friendly competition is great, but it creates a potential dilemma for me if someone buys another vendor’s ROM SIMM and reprograms it with BMOW’s base ROM in order to get the on-the-fly ROM disk decompression and other features. It could turn into a situation where my base ROM software is subsidizing another competing product. To compound the problem, I didn’t have any clear usage policy or “license” for the base ROM to say whether this type of use was OK. Furthermore my FC8 compression algorithm is free open-source, but the BMOW base ROM which incorporates it is not. This all created a large gray area. I hope to clarify this now by making the BMOW base ROM image explicitly free for personal use with anybody’s own Mac ROM SIMM, no matter what vendor they purchased it from. This is the simplest and best way of resolving the ambiguity for the benefit of the classic Mac community. I only ask that you don’t resdistribute the base ROM image elsewhere – come back to the BMOW Mac ROM-inator II details page if you need to download the image. Excellent move.
A third XProtect was discovered in Ventura, this time observing potentially malicious behaviour such as attempts to access private data for browsers and messaging apps. This XProtect Behaviour Service (XBS) has used a set of Bastion rules embedded in the strings in syspolicyd to record behaviours in a new database, but so far has been an observer and hasn’t blocked such behaviours. Security researchers have already been able to discover its records of novel malicious code, and Chris Long has documented how to access its database, but so far syspolicyd has only watched and recorded. Recent descriptions of Bastion rules have identified four, last updated in syspolicyd in macOS 13.5 on 24 July 2023. Those changed on 8 August, when Apple released its first update to the Bastion rules, and again a month later on 1 September, when they changed again. There’s now a fifth Bastion rule, and XBS appears to be getting ready to fly for the first time. If you had told me in 2005 or so, when I was a fervent Mac user, that one day, macOS would come with an extensive set of antivirus and antimalware tools that ran silently in the background, checking everything you do on your computer – I’d have thought you were crazy. But here we are.
I’ve been working off and on doing further Mac-ification to my updated fork of MacLynx, the System 7-compatible port of the venerable text browser Lynx for classic 68K Macintoshes (and Power Macs) running A/UX 3.x or System 7.x and later. There’s still more to do, but a lot has been worked in since I last dropped beta 4, so it’s time for another save point. Meet MacLynx “beta 5”. Extraordinary work, and a great way to keep an old Mac connected to the web.
macOS Catalina and later include an anti-malware scanning service, XProtect Remediator (XPR), that periodically checks your Mac for known malware. If it detects anything untoward, it tries to remove it in a process Apple terms remediation. Because this is all performed as a background service, XPR doesn’t inform you when it scans, or when it detects and remediates malware. Instead it records those events in the log, and in Ventura and later makes them available to third-party software through Endpoint Security events. To help you keep track of this, three of my utilities report on XPR: SilentKnight runs a quick check on the last 24 hours, as can Mints, and XProCheck provides detailed reports for periods of up to 30 days. Every few weeks I get a flurry of comments here, and emails, when those using XProCheck, or browsing the log, notice warnings and strange behaviour by XPR. This article explains what’s happening, and why it’s perfectly healthy. It seems absolutely bizarre to me that such malware scans just happen in the background without informing the user when it finds anything. That feels a lot like treating the symptoms while the patient’s sleeping, without informing them they’re sick.
31 years ago Tetris Max for the Macintosh was born, an improved clone of Tetris, and it became an insanely popular Mac game during the 1990s. I may or may not have had some involvement in its development. Macintosh System 6 was the current OS version at the time of the game’s release, but System 7 was introduced shortly afterwards. It’s recently come to my attention that the final version of Tetris Max (v2.9.1) may not work when running System 6 on certain Mac hardware, even though the game was advertised as System 6 compatible. I haven’t yet been able to fully verify this myself, but there’s a Macintosh Garden bug report from ironboy36 in 2022, and more recently a detailed bug report complete with video (thank you James!). Obviously I need to fix this stuff ASAP – 31-year-old bug be damned. And I need your help! Consider this a group debugging effort. This is such a cool story. If anyone can contribute to fixing this – please help them out.
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