macOS Archive
A lightweight macOS window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as CoffeeScript. Phoenix aims for efficiency and a very small footprint. If you like the idea of scripting your own window or app management toolkit with JavaScript, Phoenix is probably going to give you the things you want. With Phoenix you can bind keyboard shortcuts and system events, and use these to interact with macOS. Pretty cool.
It’s well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I’ve discovered that on Catalina, pasting a file from Finder not only outputs the file path in Terminal, it also invisibly and permanently grants Terminal access to the file, bypassing any macOS privacy protections! This is such a weird bug… Or feature?
If you’ve updated to macOS Catalina 10.15.2 and installed any notarized apps since, you might have noticed that something has gone missing. Do you remember that dialog shown by Gatekeeper when you first open a notarized app, telling you that “Apple checked it for malicious software and none was detected”? Well, that sentence has now vanished. Instead, that dialog now looks very similar to the pre-Catalina dialog for non-notarized apps. I had to read this post twice to fully comprehend what was going on, but once you get it – and most of you will get it without multiple reads because you’re not stupid like me – it’s an interesting look at how seemingly subtle changes in security dialogs – especially undocumented changes – can actually have very serious consequences if you take them at face-value.
When you upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina, your boot volume will effectively be split into two. Assuming it’s the standard internal storage, your existing boot volume will be renamed to Macintosh HD – Data, and a new read-only system volume created and given the name Macintosh HD. However, when your Mac starts up in Catalina, you won’t see the Data volume, as it’s hidden inside the System volume, in what Apple refers to as a Volume Group. I miss the olden days where disk layouts were simple and straightforward. Look at the partition layout of any recent operating system, and you’ll be greeted by several small partitions with specific functions, such as boot manager partitions, restore partitions, and so on. These partitions are hidden, and I’ve always been of the school that if you need to hide something, you probably designed it wrong. In any event, I understand why this is necessary, but that doesn’t make it any less hacky and messy.
After my blood pressure dropped to healthier levels I got the strangest feeling of déjà vu. This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s. Things break at random for reasons you can’t understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best. Then it hit me. This was not an isolated incidence. The parallels are everywhere. I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely a kernel of truth to the perception that macOS just doesn’t feel as polished and effortless as it once was, during the Leopard days.
macOS Catalina has been reviewed, and taking over from John Siracusa’s legendary Mac OS X reviews at Ars Technica is MacStories. The Mac isn’t in crisis, but it isn’t healthy either. Waiting until the Mac is on life support isn’t viable. Instead, Apple has opted to reimagine the Mac in the context of today’s computing landscape before its survival is threatened. The solution is to tie macOS more closely to iOS and iPadOS, making it an integrated point on the continuum of Apple’s devices that respects the hardware differences of the platform but isn’t different simply for the sake of difference. Transitions are inherently messy, and so is Catalina in places. It’s a work in process that represents the first steps down a new path, not the destination itself. The destination isn’t clear yet, but Catalina’s purpose is: it’s a bridge, not an island. You know where to get Catalina, but it might be a good idea to wait a few point releases before diving in.
Apple started adding user consent alerts way back in High Sierra. The first time an app would try to access your location, contacts, calendar, reminders or photos a system alert would prompt the user for consent. Mojave expanded these prompts to automation, camera and microphone. And now Catalina adds screen recording, keyboard input monitoring, access to folders such as Desktop, Documents and Downloads, user notifications and Safari downloads… These alerts are just another step on a long path Apple has been taking to protect user’s data. Previous steps include code signing, sandbox, gatekeeper, the “curated” Mac App Store and notarization. But security features are most useful when they’re invisible. All previous steps were mostly invisible. This last one… Not so much. There’s a lot of complaining going around in Apple circles regarding the latest Catalina betas and the excessive amount of permission alerts and associated user access problems. On his latest podcast, for instance, John Gruber detailed how it took him ages to figure out why the Terminal wouldn’t show him any directory listings, until he realised the Terminal needed disk access permission, but didn’t ask for it. This is, of course, all quite reminiscent of Windows Vista, and the goal here seems to be to turn macOS into iOS, with similarly harsh restrictions on what users can do on their computers.
What is Bitcode? Well, bitcode with a small b is an architecture-specific intermediate representation used by LLVM, and capital-B Bitcode pertains to a set of features allowing you to embed this representation in your Mach-O binary and the mechanisms by which you can provide it to Apple in your App Store submissions. Of course, the specter of macOS on ARM has been in the public psyche for many years now, and many have pondered whether Bitcode will make this transition more straightforward. The commonly held belief is that Bitcode is not suited to massive architectural changes like moving between Intel and ARM. I was unconvinced, so I decided to test the theory! By Steven Troughton-Smith, so you know you’re going to learn more than you bargained for.
Since macOS 10.15 will remove support for 32bit binaries, it might be time to start preparing for this as a user. Steven Troughton-Smith linked to this older article from last year: macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 gets us a step closer to ditching 32-bit mode for apps. In fact, you can force your Mac to run only in 64-bit mode if you aren’t afraid to pay a visit to the command line. This way, you can see if any applications you use are 32bit, and if you can live without them – if not, you can start looking for alternatives.
Apple has released iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4. Both are minor releases, but at least macOS 10.14.4 has some nifty changes for Safari: macOS Mojave 10.14.4 includes support for Safari AutoFill using Touch ID and it offers automatic dark mode themes in Safari. If you have Dark Mode enabled in Mojave, when you visit a website that has an option for a dark theme after installing the update, it will be activated automatically. Every one of you using iOS devices or PCs running macOS know exactly where to get the updates.
At WWDC 2018 Apple gave us a ‘sneak peek’ at perhaps one of the most impactful developments on macOS since the transition to Mac OS X: UIKit apps running on the desktop. Today, I’m going to detail a special tool I built, called marzipanify, to get started with UIKit on the Mac early, and start the initial bringup of your iOS app on macOS. Amazing work by Steven Troughton-Smith.
With macOS Mojave, Apple is adding support to run UIKit apps on macOS without the requirement of rewriting the UI in AppKit. While this isn’t yet something that's officially supported for third-party developers, let's explore what to expect in 2019 and how to try it out today.
Coincidentally, macOS Mojave has been released today as well, so head on over to the Mac App Store and update your Macs.
Some more light reading, right in time for the weekend - the 147 pages long reference to APFS.
Apple File System is the default file format used on Apple platforms. Apple File System is the successor to HFS Plus, so some aspects of its design intentionally follow HFS Plus to enable data migration from HFS Plus to Apple File System. Other aspects of its design address limitations with HFS Plus and enable features such as cloning files, snapshots, encryption, and sharing free space between volumes. Most apps interact with the file system using high-level interfaces provided by Foundation, which means most developers don't need to read this document. This document is for developers of software that interacts with the file system directly, without using any frameworks or the operating system - for example, a disk recovery utility or an implementation of Apple File System on another platform. The on-disk data structures described in this document make up the file system; software that interacts with them defines corresponding in-memory data structures.
This document could prove quite useful to developers who might wish to add APFS compatibility to for instance Linux.
Back in 2016, security researcher and developer Jonathan Zdziarski released a tool called Little Flocker that could protect Macs at the file level. Much as a firewall analyzes and blocks network traffic, Little Flocker locked down the file system and allowed only authorized applications access to only approved files.
Little Flocker was too complex to manage for average users, but it quickly became a darling among Mac security experts.
When Zdziarski took a job at Apple in 2017, he sold Little Flocker to the security vendor F-Secure, which released it as Xfence. Zdziarski's job change started the clock ticking on when we might see similar capabilities built into macOS. With macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple has added file-level protections, plus some additional security enhancements. And you know what? Mojave is running into the same usability issues that users of Little Flocker endured.
I had never heard of this functionality. It seems like one of those things particularly Apple ought to be good at to integrate in a user-friendly manner.
While sometimes it can be hard to see from single release to single release, Apple has steadily been refining the Aqua user interface since first introducing it.
Of course, there have been highs and lows. Pin stripes and Brushed Metal and Linen and Rich Corinthian Leather. Transparency and Vibrancy. At times, Apple had led the way into new design trends, and at other times, they have fallen behind the rest of the industry.
Over 1500 screenshots of every Mac OS X/macOS release. A fantastic archive to browse through while enjoying a nice cup of coffee or tea.
Fast forward 5 years and Apple still doesn't have a solution that satisfies customers that have extensive need for customization and specialized workflows. During the time of trash can Mac Pro, I worked on a 5K iMac, because I really liked the hi-resolution display. But hiding away all those cables was a chore. After Apple showed us the future of professional hardware with the iMac Pro, I was fed up with the situation and I started to investigate the possibility of building my own Hackintosh. Putting all the hardware together was the easy part, making macOS work was tough, but I did it.
I honestly don't believe a 'Hackintosh' is a suitable machine for any mission-critical environment, but if you're willing to deal with the risks and minor headaches, it's a not-as-hard-as-you-think way to get your hands on a very powerful macOS machine for a very reasonable price - with a lot more options and choices than Apple will ever give you, even if you take the hypothetical, vapourware new Mac Pro into account.
Apple is expanding its Windows Migration Assistant in macOS 10.14 Mojave with a handful of new features that will make switching from Windows to macOS a much more seamless experience.
As spotted by a user on Twitter, for macOS 10.14 beta 6, the Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant will be able to migrate more data than ever before such as accounts, documents, email, contacts, and calendar.
Working at NeXT was the most exciting software engineering job I ever accepted.
NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative technical minds. Many people had computer science (or other) research backgrounds. One thing that was unusual is that all the technical people there understood all aspects of the machine. Software people could talk about ASICs and CPU instructions, and the hardware people understood the software stack. Every aspect of what it takes to make a computer work was represented in one building: analog hardware, chip design, motherboard design, compiler design (Objective-C), loader, operating system, windowing system, application layer, and applications. Where other companies had engineering teams, NeXT would have a single individual. Many people had been managers or technical leads elsewhere and came to NeXT to be an individual contributor to help create the most innovative computer ever invented (enter reality distortion field).
Great read.
In some ways, the narrative is out of Apple’s hands. The myth of Snow Leopard is bigger than life, a cultural reference rooted in nostalgia. OS X Lion succeeded 10.6.8 in July 2011 - closing in on 7 years ago. At this point, millions of Mac users have never even used Snow Leopard, and can’t attest to its reliability.
However, a kernel of truth persists underneath the mythology. Improvements to iOS and macOS, no matter how small, contribute to a better experience for everyone. Fixing bugs might not be as marketable as shiny new Animoji or a fresh design, but maintenance can only be deferred so long. If Apple can knock stability out of the park in 2018, maybe the legend of Snow Leopard can finally be put to rest.
There's a tendency for people to fondly look back upon older releases, whether warranted or not. Since I switched away from the Mac before Snow Leopard came out, and was a fervent Mac user during the PowerPC days, my personal Snow Leopard is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, which I still consider my personal best Mac OS X release. Mac OS X is obviously not alone in this; Linux and Windows users will also have their favourite older releases after which supposedly everything "went downhill".
It's just human nature.
Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming macOS Mojave update to its public beta testing group, giving non-developers a chance to try out the software ahead of its fall public release. Today's public beta should be the same as the second developer beta, released last week.
Jason Snell published a review of the first developer beta (released during WWDC), and concludes:
Personally, I'm more excited about macOS Mojave than any recent macOS beta. The new dark mode alone is a huge change in what we have come to think of as the Mac interface, and the changes to Finder have an awful lot of potential. I'm also really happy to be able to control my HomeKit devices directly from my Mac, either via the Home app or Siri.
We're about to enter a major era of change for macOS. Mojave is the last hurrah for some technologies - most notably 32-bit apps - but it's also our first glimpse (in the four new Mac apps based on iOS technologies) of what is to come. Even if you don't install the public beta now, I expect this to be a compelling update when it arrives in final form this fall.
The final release is planned for later this year.
