Tag: Mac
HODLing gear in 2026
My new MacBook Neo
At the end of last month, my new MacBook Neo arrived. This is my first new computer since 2018, and specifically my first new Apple computer since 2010. In this (rather long) post, I'm going to go through my rationale for going back to Mac OS after 8 years on Windows, and review the computer....
The $25 MacBook Pro
Buying a second-hand 2020 MacBook Pro for twenty-five dollars, upgrading from Catalina to Sequoia, and identifying the problems with the laptop's non-functional screen and Touch Bar. Diagnosing and troubleshooting the issues causing the problems, which is hopefully of value to others.
Mac版鳴潮の追加DLデータを外部ディスクに移す方法
クソデカ容量のゲームの為、追加DL分が内部ディスクに入らないよ！という場合に備えて
Aeronaut
I've been enjoying using Aeronaut, a Bluesky app for mac that feels quite native. Still tend to use the site in browser, but it's a nice dedicated option to have.
Mac aufräumen mit Pearcleaner #stuffthatworks
Ich habe im Laufe der Jahre mehr "Aufräumtools" für meinen Mac gekauft, als ich zugeben möchte. Alle diese Tools eint, das sie auf hübschen Webseiten mit großen Versprechen und einem meist erschreckend hohen Preisschild angeboten werden. Kurz nach dem Kauf hat sich dann aber schon Ernüchterung eingestellt, mal wieder auf Marketingversprechen und Empfehlungswebsites hereingefallen zu sein. Und kurz darauf hat die Suche nach einem neuen Mac-Cleaner begonnen. Seit ein paar Monaten habe ich diesen Teufelskreis dank Pearcleaner endgültig durchbrochen. Dieses kostenlose Open-Source-Tool liefert genau das, was kommerzielle Lösungen in der Regel nur versprechen: Apps werden nicht nur gelöscht, sondern wirklich entfernt, inklusive aller Einstellungen, Caches, alter Support-Dateien und verwaister Reste längst deinstallierter Programme. Dinge, von denen man meist gar nicht weiß, dass sie noch existieren. Garniert wird das Ganze von einem Sentinel-Monitor der Apps automatisch sauber entfernt,…
They forced me to use a Macbook!
I recently started a new job at Plain and in addition to all the normal new-hire nerves, I was faced with my first Apple device - a Macbook Pro. Having spent the last decade plus as a Linux desktop guy I was nervous to say the least, but after having spent a few months getting to know Apple’s operating system and hardware I feel like I’ve come out the other side alive and want to share some thoughts.
Funhouse Mirror Macs
The Mac clone program, Apple’s attempt to revive its fortunes during its lowest era, had the opposite effect. But hey, it could have worked in 1985.
Network Upgrades 2025
It's been just over a year since I last posted my 2024 Network Upgrade post. In that time, my network has undergone several changes. Here are the major updates: Swapped from a UDM Pro to a UCG Fiber. Upgraded my FTTH link from 2Gb to 5Gb! (Hence the upgrade from the UDM Pro) Added a...
Mac As Appliance
Apple ticks off its non-casual users by upping the naggy permissions menus in the upcoming version of MacOS.
Robby Russell - oh my zsh, Planet Argon
Robby Russell shares the origin story of Oh My ZSH and how Planet Argon evolved alongside the terminal customization revolution he sparked.
Hackintosh In The Pastintosh?
If the Hackintosh ecosystem is about to fade away, it’s because it fulfilled its purpose as a way station between two vastly different eras of Apple.
Linux in 2024 – charting its own path to innovation
"Why do people take the path less traveled and choose an operating system based on Linux over the proprietary based ones from from Microsoft Windows and also the Apple Mac OS? So welcome to the intriguing world of Linux, an operating system that's been quietly revolutionising the tech landscape."
Making My Linux Move
Why I decided to mostly move to Linux in 2024, and what I’ve learned in the process of that move.
Permanent Unicorn
The reason Apple needs a cheap MacBook in its lineup right now is simple: It always needs a device in its lineup that costs less than you expect, but does more than it needs to.
Jori Lallo - Linear
Linear co-founder Jori Lallo talks about building project management software and his entrepreneurial journey.
Thomas Paul Mann - Raycast
Thomas Paul Mann, Raycast founder, reveals how they built the ultimate Mac command palette with custom React renderers and powerful plugins.
New edition of the "Guide to NSButton styles"
Note (Oct 2023): The names of the buttons have been changed again in the SDK in macOS Sonoma - I will update the blog post again once I have Sonoma on one of my Macs :) Back in October 2014 I wrote a post about different styles of NSButtons. That was in the era of OS X Yosemite and Xcode 6. I started researching what each kind of button available in Interface Builder was for, because I couldn’t figure that out from Xcode and the built-in documentation - I dug a bit into the Human Interface Guidelines, some older documentation archives and into Apple apps themselves. I collected everything into a long post that went through all the button styles and described what I could find about each one. It seems that a lot of people also had the same problem, because the post turned out to be extremely popular. It’s around #3 in total page views on this blog, and 7 years and 7 major macOS versions later it still usually comes out #2 in monthly or yearly stats and still gets a couple hundred visits a month. Even with greatly improved documentation in Xcode and much expanded content in the modern HIG, there’s clearly demand for this kind of information collected in one place. However, the post was kind of asking to be updated for a long time now… The original screenshots were made in 1x quality, since I didn’t get a Mac with a Retina screen until the end of 2016. Big Sur was released in the summer of 2020, significantly changing the design of the OS, and making Catalina suddenly look outdated (to the point that I’ve seen some people already call the Yosemite-Catalina era design “classic macOS”!). Some new button variants were added, some older buttons were no longer used in system apps the way I presented them, and the button styles available in Xcode were no longer shown and described as shown on screenshots from Xcode 6. The Big Sur launch seemed like a great moment to give that post a refresh, and I started working on it at the end of last year, but then 2021 came and this year turned out to be kind of rough - surprisingly more so than 2020… as it was for a lot of people, I suppose. I only managed to get back to this project this month. I thought it would take maybe a week or two… it took around three in total 😬 That included setting up new Mavericks and Yosemite installations in VirtualBox to get updated Retina screenshots from there, building a number of versions of a sample app full of all kinds of buttons that I took a ton of screenshots of on several macOS versions, cutting every screenshot pixel-perfect to size a few times, merging different versions of the same information from a few different sources, including versions of HIG going as far back as 2006, looking through Apple apps searching for buttons, and view-debugging some of them with SIP turned off to check what controls were used there… whew 😅 I’m really happy with the result though. This is now by far the longest post on the blog, with around 11k words total (although around 1/3 of tha…
SwiftUI betas - what changed before 1.0
In the last few weeks I’ve been trying to catch up on SwiftUI - watching WWDC videos, reading tutorials. Not the new stuff that was announced 2 months ago though - but the things that people have been using for the past year. Last June, like everyone else I immediately started playing with SwiftUI like a kid with a new box of Legos. In the first month I managed to build a sample Mac app for switching dark mode in apps. However, after that I got busy with some other things, and never really got back to SwiftUI until recently, so by the time the “version 2” was announced at the online-only WWDC, I’ve already forgotten most of it. So in order to not get this all mixed up, I decided to first remember everything about the existing version, before I look at the new stuff. Back then, when I was watching all the videos and doing the tutorial, I was taking a lot of notes about all the components, modifiers and APIs you can use, every single detail I noticed on a slide. However, I was surprised to see how many of those things I wrote down don’t work anymore. After the first version that most people have played with and that the videos are based on, there were apparently a lot of changes in subsequent betas (especially in betas 3 to 5). Classes and modifiers changing names, initializers taking different parameters, some things redesigned completely. And the problem is that all those old APIs are still there in the WWDC videos from last year. But WWDC videos are usually a very good source of knowledge, people come back to them years later looking for information that can’t be found in the docs, Apple even often references videos from previous years in new videos, because they naturally can’t repeat all information every year. This was bothering me enough that I decided to spend some time collecting all the major changes in the APIs that were presented in June 2019, but were changed later in one place. If you’re reading this in 2021 or 2022 (hopefully that damn pandemic is over!), watching the first SwiftUI videos and wondering why things don’t work when typed into Xcode - this is for you. Here’s a list of what was changed between the beta 1 from June 2019 and the final version from September (includes only things that were mentioned in videos or tutorials): NavigationButton Appeared in: “Building Lists and Navigation” tutorial, “Platforms State of the Union” ForEach(store.trails) { trail in NavigationButton(destination: TrailDetailView(trail)) { TrailCell(trail) } } Replaced with: NavigationLink ForEach(store.trails) { trail in NavigationLink(destination: TrailDetailView(trail)) { TrailCell(trail) } } PresentationButton / PresentationLink Appeared in: “Composing Complex Interfaces” tutorial, “Platforms State of the Union” .navigationBarItems(trailing: PresentationButton( Image(systemName: "person.crop.circle"), destination: ProfileScreen() ) ) Replaced with: PresentationLink, which was lat…
Notes from WWDC
When I watch conference talks, I like to take notes - either on an iPhone or iPad when I’m in the conference room, or on the Mac when I’m watching online like in case of WWDC (I’ve never seen it in person). It makes it easier for me to remember the most important content from the presentation, and especially in case of WWDC notes I often come back to them to find some specific piece of information - WWDC talks are a very important part of documentation of how to use Apple’s APIs, sometimes (sadly) the only piece of documentation about the specific class or method that’s available. I have a fairly large archive of those notes (around 20 from each year on average), usually just stored as one long note in the Notes.app, and I’ve been thinking for a while that it could make sense to somehow share them with the world. I have no idea how useful they will be for others, since I write them primarily for myself, they’re much more condensed than blog posts and basically written as just a “diff” from what I knew before, but I guess I won’t know until I try. One problem I had with sharing the notes is that they’re written as completely plain text, something like this: If I wanted to convert each note to proper Markdown, it would be a lot of manual work, and I didn’t really feel like doing that. So one day I had an idea: I could write some kind of parser that renders those notes as they are written, with some minimal changes, into something that looks as if it was rendered from Markdown. It was a pretty fun challenge - involving some large number of regexps straight from hell, for detecting all the code fragments automatically - but in the end, the result is better than I expected: For now, I’ve added all my notes from last year’s WWDC - you can view them as one page with all contents or as an index of titles. I was planning to add some older ones too, but I ran out of time. I’m planning to add notes from the current WWDC as I watch the videos - you will be able to see them here :) RSS feeds I’ve also updated my RSS (Atom) feeds - there are now 3 separate feeds: main blog feed (with classic long posts): https://mackuba.eu/feed.xml notes feed: https://mackuba.eu/feed-notes.xml complete feed with both posts & notes: https://mackuba.eu/feed-all.xml Previously I’ve been using a FeedBurner proxy URL for the feed. If you’re reading this through your feed reader app, check what URL you’re subscribed to - if you’re subscribed to the FeedBurner one, please update it to the direct link from above (blog feed or complete) - the FeedBurner one probably won’t work forever (Google bought the service long time ago, and you know what happens to services that are bought by Google).
Power Outage
Looking back at Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and considering why Intel now finds itself in the same position PowerPC did 15 years ago.
I'm building an ad blocker
Since my update to the iOS version of Banner Hunter was rejected by app review, the app’s been in a kind of Schrödinger state, both dead and alive. It’s still selling those few copies a week, and I’m updating the blocklist, but I’m afraid to make any updates to the Mac app now… So since then I started looking for some other ideas for new apps I could build instead. One thing I started working on is a Chrome version of Banner Hunter. I wasn’t really planning to do it before, but since Apple pushed me now… I might as well give it a try. I have no idea if it’s possible to make any money on Google Store, since the vast majority of extensions are free, but we’ll see. The main part of the app is done, but I need to work on the non-technical parts like graphics and copy, and it will probably have to wait until late summer at least. I’ve got another idea though which has kind of come up by itself, which is… to build an ad blocker for Safari. (TLDR: here’s the landing page.) Researching the options I’ve been a long time user of Ghostery before, since it was closest to what I want from an ad blocker and it worked well. But since I upgraded to Catalina and Safari 13, I had to finally let go of the old Ghostery extension, and the new “Ghostery Lite” is just not as good as the old one. So I started looking for alternatives. Turns out, there aren’t really that many good, reputable, popular ad blockers on the Mac App Store - I think it’s easily a single-digit number. I’ve tried a few, but I wasn’t completely happy with any of them. That doesn’t mean they’re not objectively good - they should work fine for a lot of people, possibly most people - but it’s just not what I personally want. Here’s what I want from an ideal ad blocker: it should mercilessly block any unnecessary code loaded from external sources that slows down page load and sends tracking cookies who knows where - this conveniently blocks almost all ads, but it should also block any non-ad things that spy on me (like Google Analytics or Facebook tracking pixels) it should NOT try to globally block any resource and any div on any page that includes the word “ad”, “banner”, “popup” etc. - I believe this makes it way too easy to hit false positives and randomly break some innocent sites in the process (and it seems to be much easier to detect for anti-adblockers, which usually create a “bait” div that screams “this box is an ad, block me!”); but unfortunately most public ad lists seem to work this way it should not try to do so much that it becomes bloated in some way, or needs to be split across several separate content blockers, etc. it should allow some basic configuration like site whitelisting it should have a native look & feel Most of the apps I’ve tried were either doing way too much for me (e.g. 1Blocker - 8 content blockers and requires a subscription, Wipr - 3 blockers) or too little (Ka-Block - just ~500 rules, or Wipr’s no whitelisting by design), often also didn’t look right in t…
SwiftUI quotes
I was going through some saved links and open tabs from June recently while finishing the WWDC collection post. I found a lot of interesting quotes about SwiftUI, Catalyst and the future of Apple platform development, and I decided to steal the idea from @mjtsai and put them together in one place. It might be interesting to look at this 5 or 10 years from now… First impressions Paul Hudson: “Whole SwiftUI programs fit into tweets 🤯” Paul Hudson: “Having now built half a dozen apps using SwiftUI, I can say one thing for sure: going back to UIKit feels like going back to Objective-C. So, be warned – if you dip a toe in SwiftUI you’ll find yourself groaning when you head back to UIKit!” Jeff Nadeau: “I have *never* written a UI for any platform faster than I have with SwiftUI. And I was working with the unfinished version.” Samuel Giddins: “SwiftUI is legit. I’ve played around with it for about 15 minutes having skipped over most of the docs, and I have a functioning skeleton app. This would’ve been about 10 files and 200 lines of boiler plate 5 years ago. A tip of the hat to friends who build this amazing future” “Incidentally, this is roughly the first time in 5 years where I feel any urge at all to work on an iOS app from scratch. Seriously, this is exciting stuff!” “We’ll probably be using it for 10+ years, I’m glad it doesn’t come encumbered with baggage to allow backwards-deploying it for a single years worth of releases” How it will change Apple platforms Brent Simmons: “I’m surely not the only person to think, all week long, that this WWDC marks the end of Apple’s NeXT era and the beginning of the Swift era.” “It’s early. It has bugs. It’s not nearly complete. Sure. But it’s also how we’re going to write apps in the future.” “It may be a while before you’re running apps that use SwiftUI and Combine (and who knows what else still to come). We’re in a transition, and transitions take years. But we’ve all just had a glimpse of the next 20 years.” Wil Shipley: “Apple announced a lot of stuff today but the the most amazing thing was kind of low-key — SwiftUI is a new way to write code for all their platforms simultaneously that’s incredibly efficient and uses modern programming practices. This is a revolution for Mac programmers.” “All of us Mac-heads have been bracing for iOS UIKit to get shimmed into the Mac and we’d have to learn that, because it’s crazy for Apple to have two UI frameworks. And we got that today…but we also got a THIRD framework, which both obviates and unifies the existing two!” “I thought eventually, if we were lucky, we’d get a new UI framework that was Swift from the start and cross-platform, but I did NOT expect it for years and years. I am blown tf away.” Craig Hockenberry: “Don’t underestimate what is going on here: I haven’t been this excited about how we make products since the Carbon to Cocoa transition. This is an absolutely fundamental change that we’ll be using for decades.” Daniel Jalku…
New stuff from WWDC 2019
As I’m writing these words, it’s the last day of November and the temperature has just dropped to close to 0°C here in Poland. But let’s move back to a better time for a moment, to the first days of June - the long days of warm sunny weather, inviting you to spend some time outside… and the huge pile of new stuff that Apple had just dropped on us on the WWDC keynote day, inviting you to try to frantically read and watch everything at once, and don’t leave the computer until you’ve read it all. For the past 4 years I’ve been trying to cope with this crazy period by collecting notes from the WWDC talks, release notes, saving tweets, links to blog posts and so on, and organizing it all in a single ordered blog post. Writing things down this way is how I learn best, it helps me put together all loose pieces of information into a single picture, and gives me the peace of mind that I haven’t missed or forgotten anything important. I usually finish this by July, but this year was different - first I got really hooked on SwiftUI and spent some time doing some experiments with it, and then I was busy working on and releasing my iOS content blocker app and doing some travelling. It didn’t help that the sheer amount of new APIs added this year was simply overwhelming. So I finally got back to this in November, and I’m posting the list here on the half-anniversary of the 2019 keynote (yes, it’s really been 6 months already!) - hopefully it will still be of use to you. Previous editions are available here - I’ve also done some slight formatting changes here and there, and updated the links to point to Web Archive 🗄️ versions if the page no longer exists or was overwritten: WWDC 2018 WWDC 2017 WWDC 2016 WWDC 2015 Quick links: macOS 10.15 • iOS 13 • watchOS 6 • tvOS 13 Shared Frameworks • macOS 10.15 SDK • iOS 13 SDK • watchOS 6 SDK • tvOS 13 SDK Web APIs & Android • Developer Tools • Safari 13 • Other macOS 10.15 Catalina https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina/ https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina/features/ Find My app (Catalyst-based) combines “Find My iPhone” and “Find My Friends” can find devices that are offline and in sleep mode - communicates through other devices nearby (article) iTunes is split into: Music app (includes iTunes Store) Podcasts app (Catalyst-based) TV app device syncing section in Finder redesigned Reminders app Screen Time for Mac (it has some problems though) Sidecar - using iPad as a second display, iPad with a pencil can act as a drawing tablet App Store: Apple Arcade section Mail: “classic layout” of the window (email contents below) and classic look of the email list (narrow rows with columns) are now two indepedent settings in the View menu option to block emails from specific senders muting notifications from specific threads button for unsubscribing from newsletters in the email header Maps: completely rebuilt, much more detailed map content - entire US by the end of 2019, some other countries next year Not…
SwiftUI on AppKit: Building a Dark Mode switcher
I spent a large part of last week learning and playing with SwiftUI. So far it’s been pretty frustrating at times since I kind of feel like I forgot everything I knew, but I’m also very excited about where this will lead us. I’ve summed up my first impressions in the “Thoughts on SwiftUI” post last week. At the moment most of the available examples show how to use SwiftUI in iOS apps, but I wanted to see how it would work on the Mac (in AppKit), since it’s kind of closer to my heart (hint: look at the domain name :). And I had an idea: last year, when I was playing with the new Dark Mode in macOS Mojave I had a plan to build a simple app that would let you override the appearance in specific apps using the NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance setting. I started working on it, but I got stuck while figuring out the complex NSTableView API which I had no experience with, and I gave up. So, how about I give it another try now, but with SwiftUI? I don’t really need such app myself (I only use light mode), and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other similar apps last year, but this seems like a perfect way to try out SwiftUI on the Mac - and to see if it will be easier to get the table view to work… Update 15.08.2020: I’ve updated all code to work with the latest (stable) version of SwiftUI, adapting it to all the changes that were made to the API in last year’s later betas. mackuba ∕ DarkModeSwitcher Simple app for overriding light mode per app on macOS (demo for a blog post) Building the app In order to build a SwiftUI Mac app in Xcode, you need to have the beta version of macOS Catalina installed - SwiftUI will not work on Mojave. This is the first beta and some people have had serious issues with it, so be careful and don’t install it on your main computer. If you want to play with SwiftUI in UIKit, you can use this trick to make it run in a playground on Mojave, but it doesn’t work for AppKit. And one more thing to note - Apple has unfortunately removed any remaining ways to force the dark mode per app in one of the later Mojave betas. The only thing we can still do (so far) is force the light mode if the rest of the system uses dark mode. So, let’s begin. First, we’re going to need a list of all installed apps. Let’s define an app model: class AppModel { let name: String let bundleURL: URL var icon: NSImage? var bundleIdentifier: String? var requiresLightMode: Bool = false init(bundleURL: URL) { self.name = bundleURL.deletingPathExtension().lastPathComponent self.bundleURL = bundleURL } } We’ll store the list of apps in a list manager called AppList. We’ll make it an ObservableObject so that the UI can subscribe to updates in apps, and we’ll use @Published to send updates whenever the app list changes: class AppList: ObservableObject { @Published var apps: [AppModel] = [] } The AppScanner class will take care of finding and returning the inst…
Thoughts on SwiftUI
Like everyone, I was shocked by Apple’s surprise reveal of SwiftUI at WWDC last week. We’ve heard rumors of some kind of declarative, multi-platform framework coming sometime in the future, but I don’t think anyone expected we’d see it so soon. This seems like a huge change, a beginning of a completely new chapter for app developers on Apple platforms. I’ve watched most of the session videos about SwiftUI and I’m incredibly excited and eager to start using it in practice. Here are some first impressions and thoughts about SwiftUI after reading about it and playing with it for a few days: Difficulty: Prepare to feel like you’ve just started learning Mac/iOS programming… This is a completely new thing which works in a completely new way, and it’s hard to switch your brain to a new mode. You will be thinking “How the hell do I do X” every step of the way. And it’s ok, because even ignoring the paradigm change, this is just a completely new API, we don’t know the names of all the classes and methods by heart and it will take time before we’re somewhat familiar with them. We’ll need to figure this thing out together - over the next months there will be thousands of blog posts, tutorials, books, screencasts and conference talks. People sharing tips, techniques and best practices. This will make it much easier to learn how to use these new APIs and how to do it well. (Some crazy people have already started last week!) Things I’ve had the most trouble with so far: layout, whenever it goes beyond the simple horizontal or vertical flow - how to put this thing in that place or make sure it has such size - things that would be trivial with AutoLayout, here I often don’t even know where to start bindings - which kind of property to use and how, where to use the ‘$’, how to make sure the UI gets notified of a given change (or even how to get the thing to compile at all) arrangement of modifiers - in what order I should put them if I want to apply several different effects Project state: This is definitely a beta thing at the moment. Some things just don’t work yet, the compiler is often extremely unhelpful, showing very cryptic error messages or showing them in a wrong place, and the reference documentation is incomplete. Autocomplete only works about half of the time. This will hopefully get better by September, although I suspect it won’t be completely perfect by then. Also not every feature from the native frameworks that we might need is exposed in the new API, and that’s kind of by design - that’s why we have NSViewRepresentable and UIViewRepresentable. Hopefully more and more shared and platform-specific things will get added in future versions (and hopefully we won’t have to wait until June 2020 to see anything new). Potential: We’ll only know for sure once we start using SwiftUI in real, full size apps, but judging by what we’ve heard so far, the potential for saving us work, speeding up development and eliminating bugs is huge. I can’t wait…
Sent From My $10 Mac
Pondering the lessons on user experience to be gained from using a 14-year-old Mac Mini as a daily driver. Can it be done, honestly?
New stuff from WWDC 2018
For the last 3 WWDC’s I’ve been collecting ordered lists of all new features and APIs added in the new releases of Apple’s OSes, either announced in the keynote or one of the talks, or in release notes, or just discovered by some API diff spelunkers :) I’m pretty late with that this year, because I spent some time instead on a couple of longer posts about notifications and Dark Mode, but here it is, just in time for the final launch and the September event. In general, there seems to be noticeably less changes this year, which is good in a way - it should be easier for us to learn the new things and update our apps. For a moment it even looked like the “macOS SDK” section could be longer than the “iOS SDK” this time with all the Dark Mode changes, but iOS got a boost from the notification APIs and finally finished 3 lines ahead of macOS :) If you want to learn more about any given topic, the best way is probably either to look it up in the shiny new Apple Developer Documentation (redesigned last year), or watch the recorded WWDC talk videos - either on Apple’s site, or using the great unofficial WWDC Mac app. Previous editions are available here: WWDC 2017 WWDC 2016 WWDC 2015 Quick links: macOS 10.14 • iOS 12 • watchOS 5 • tvOS 12 Foundation & Core Frameworks • macOS 10.14 SDK • iOS 12 SDK • watchOS 5 SDK • tvOS 12 SDK Web APIs • Developer Tools • Safari 12 macOS 10.14 Mojave 🗄️ https://www.apple.com/macos/mojave/ Dark Mode (more info: part1, part2) 8 accent colors instead of just blue/graphite Desktop: dynamic wallpapers desktop stacks Screenshots: thumbnail sliding in in the corner like on iOS that opens an edit view options HUD while screenshot is being taken (Cmd+Shift+5) recording screencasts from inside the screenshot tool new redesigned Mac App Store new apps ported from iOS with Marzipan: Home News Stocks Voice Memos Books: renamed from iBooks to Books Finder: gallery view replacing Cover Flow right sidebar shows more file metadata (e.g. for photos) the set of fields shown can be configured per file type with the “Show Preview Options” context menu action (source) quick actions on files in the right sidebar and Touch Bar new actions can be created in Automator (“Quick Action” template, replaces older “Service”) markup editing and video trimming inside Quicklook iCloud Drive has now its own section in the folder sidebar (source) FaceTime: group calls - up to 32 people (delayed) Mail: emoji picker button suggests a folder to move a message? stationery feature removed Safari: favicons in tabs prevents tracking through commenting systems and share buttons (loads on demand) makes fingerprinting harder - lists only built-in fonts, no legacy browser plugins iCloud Keychain: can automatically create strong passwords for you when signing up highlights duplicated passwords Siri can be asked to find saved passwords Continuity Camera - use your iPhone as an external camera to take a photo for the Mac forms will auto-su…
Dark Side of the Mac: Updating Your App
(Part 1 is available here.) Last week I posted an article here about how the “Dark Mode” in macOS 10.14 works behind the scenes and how such features as appearances, materials and vibrancy, which were present in macOS since at least 10.10, have been extended to work with the new visual style. This is the second part of that article - now that we have the theory behind us, let’s see how you can make your own app work with dark mode. The first thing to remember is that dark mode is automatically enabled in apps built with the 10.14 SDK (which will be in beta until September, so it can’t be used for Mac App Store app releases yet). This means that: Even if you use all the right APIs, your app will display as completely light on a dark Mojave desktop unless it’s recompiled on the new SDK - which makes sense, since otherwise most third party apps would look pretty ugly. When you switch to the new SDK, the app will use dark mode on a dark desktop whether you like it or not, which might not be good if you haven’t updated it at all. Apple has solved both of these problems with an Info.plist key named NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance: if it’s set to true, it disables the dark mode when the app is built on the new SDK, so you can buy some time this way to tweak everything in the app until it looks great on a dark desktop; Apple has emphasized that this should only be used temporarily :] if it’s set to false, it enables the dark mode when the app is built on the current SDK - you can use this if you can’t or don’t want to switch to the new SDK yet, but want your app to not look out of place on a dark desktop Interestingly, it seems you can also override this property through the NSUserDefaults system as a user, for any 1st or 3rd party app (at least if it doesn’t set it itself in its Info.plist?). This means you can make a system app “forget” how to use the dark mode: And you can also force a third party app to try to work with the dark mode: The former should usually work, the latter will depend on how much the app was following various good practices, which we’ll talk about later in this post. Be aware though that some apps might even crash when this user default is set! If you’d like to instead force an app (that already supports dark mode) to always use it, even in light mode, there was a NSWindowDarkChocolate property before which did just that, but apparently it was removed in Beta 2. I’ve tried the alternative _NSSystemAppearanceOverride mentioned in that tweet and it seems to work for now - both with DarkAppearance, and to force a light appearance you can use a value of NSAppearanceNameAqua. Note that everything about user defaults (not Info.plists) described above is an undocumented behavior and it can all stop working at any moment. Debugging Dark Mode There are also two new features in the Xcode 10 UI that can help you during testing: when you open a Mac storyboard (or XIB, if you’re old school 😛), there is a new “View as” switcher av…
Dark Side of the Mac: Appearance & Materials
One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme, instead of just the dock and the menu bar as before. While I’m not nearly as excited about it from the user’s perspective as some others are 🙂 - I’m totally a “light side” Mac user, I’ve always used a light theme in TextMate, light theme in Xcode, white background in iTerm, and I sometimes have to use reader mode on websites with a dark background - I’m actually very curious about it as a developer. The reason is that it seems to require a lot of changes across apps to adapt them to the new appearance, or at least a lot of checking and testing, but it does so in a way that feels like “making things right” - not so much introducing complexity just for this reason, but rather enforcing some order and good practices that were earlier easy to forget about. As you’ll see, a lot of work might actually be about removing things. As with the changes in notifications, I’ve set out to collect everything related to dark mode from the WWDC videos this year and organize all the information in a way which makes more sense to me (since in the talks these things are often mentioned in a slightly random order and topics are scattered through multiple sessions). This eventually grew into the longest article on this blog, so instead of deleting some sections, I’ve decided to split it into two parts. This first part will be a bit more theoretical about some underlying features and APIs that make the dark mode work or that are especially relevant now, and the second part will be about the things you need to think about while updating the app (and in the future). I’ve learned a lot about AppKit while writing this, and I’ve managed to clear up a lot of things which I didn’t fully understand before, so I hope this will help someone else too. (Part 2 is available here.) NSAppearance The funny thing is that a large part of what makes Dark Mode work and what was explained in the WWDC talks this year was available since… 2014, when OSX Yosemite (10.10) was introduced. A lot of it sounded kind of familiar as I was listening to it, so I started digging in ASCIIwwdc, and I’ve found three videos from WWDC 2014 that were talking about the exact same things (links at the end if you’re interested). Interestingly, there was barely any mention of all that between then and now, so you have to go all the way back to WWDC 2014. As with a lot of things before - like AutoLayout or size classes - Apple has introduced some APIs back then that were at first ignored by a lot of people, which have later turned out to be really important after some hardware or software updates made years later. And again, looking back now at the 2014 talks, it seems kind of obvious in retrospect that these APIs would eventually lead to a full dark mode. The base class for the appearance system is the NSAp…
New stuff from WWDC 2017
It’s that time of the year again - if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent a lot of time in the last few weeks following everything that’s been announced at WWDC, digging into release notes, watching WWDC talks and playing with some cool new stuff. And as usually, the amount of new things to process is pretty overwhelming. So like in the last two years, I’ve prepared a nicely organized list for you of all the things I could find from various sources: all the user-facing features in macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS, and all new frameworks, APIs and improvements in their respective SDKs and Apple’s developer tools. To get more info about any specific thing, follow the links above the sections to Apple’s developer site and the “What’s New” documentation, download the release notes from developer.apple.com, and of course use the freshly redesigned unofficial WWDC Mac app to watch the talks that you’re interested in. If you want to catch up on last year’s notes (e.g. to see what you can use if you drop iOS 9 support in your app), check out these posts: WWDC 2016 WWDC 2015 Quick links: macOS 10.13 • iOS 11 • watchOS 4 • tvOS 11 Foundation & Core Frameworks • macOS 10.13 SDK • iOS 11 SDK • watchOS 4 SDK • tvOS 11 SDK Developer Tools • Safari 11 • Other macOS 10.13 High Sierra 🗄️ https://www.apple.com/macos/high-sierra/ Mail: smart highlight of important emails split view for compose window uses less disk space Messages: syncs conversations through iCloud between iOS/macOS (end-to-end encrypted) Notes: pinning notes support for tables Photos: persistent sidebar shows all imports chronologically improved face recognition synchronizes people across devices curves and selective color edit tools more partners for printing photos more available topics for memories photos can be edited in 3rd party apps and are saved back into Photos app playing animated GIFs live photo effects Safari: video autoplay blocking intelligent tracking prevention per-site settings (e.g. enabling autoplay or disabling content blockers on some sites) automatic reader mode Spotlight can find more kinds of web results, e.g. flight info, and can return multiple results from Wikipedia smoother, more natural sounding Siri voice window server (Mission Control etc.) is built on top of Metal 2 APFS is the new default filesystem for new installations H.265 (HEVC) video support, with hardware acceleration in newest Macs accessibility: new on-screen accessibility keyboard Type to Siri (disables voice interface) voiceover descriptions of images will now include automatic description of the image contents and any detected text iOS 11 🗄️ https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-11/ redesigned control center single page, animations more controls shown with 3D Touch some areas can be customized allows you to toggle e.g. cellular data, hotspot, AirDrop new design for app switcher: new animation no longer shows the home screen as the first app older notifications accessible from the lock screen…
MacBook Pro 2016 - an iOS developer's review
Here are some thoughts about my new MacBook Pro that I’ve been using for the last few weeks (the Santa Claus from DHL brought it to me just before Christmas), hopefully this will help someone who’s considering getting one. Note: this is written from the perspective of a person who switched to the MBP from a 2015 13" MacBook Air (i7) and also has a 2012 21" iMac. Your experiences will obviously be different if you have e.g. a fairly recent 15" Retina MacBook Pro. Update 3.10.2018: I’ve added some more thoughts at the end about how it looks almost two years later. Specs MacBook Pro 15", late 2016 Core i7 2.9 GHz (4 cores) 16 GB RAM Radeon Pro 450 512 GB SSD US keyboard Touch Bar Design The weight The size and weight of the previous generation MBPs was the main reason why I haven’t bought one. Since 2012 I’ve been using MacBook Airs as my main work machines, and once I got used to the extreme thinness and lightness, to not feeling the weight of the device at all when I carry it in my backpack, I couldn’t convince myself to go back to a heavier laptop. So I sticked to the Air. I replaced it with a new one in 2015 when it got too slow for Xcode, and it was ok for a while, but it was getting really annoying again lately, and I knew it was slowing me down. But I also knew that new redesigned MBPs were just around the corner, so I decided to wait patiently until they’re out. And in the end, I got what I wanted. The MacBook Pro got a bit thinner and a bit lighter - not drastically, but just enough to make it comparable to the Air in case of the 13", and to move it into the acceptable range for me in case of the 15". I decided to get the 15". I’d still be switching to a heavier laptop again, but given that it was lighter than before, and I would get much better compilation times and more screen space for Xcode, it was an acceptable tradeoff. I tried to convince myself in the store that it isn’t that much heavier, but the truth is, it is noticably heavier (I don’t know why, but I could swear even the 13" feels slightly heavier than the Air, even though it shouldn’t - it might have the weight distributed differently or something like that). I feel the difference when I have it on my lap, it’s harder to hold in one hand from the side, it’s harder to open it with one hand. I wish it could be made even lighter (ideally keeping the same battery life…), but I guess we’ll just have to wait the next 4 years for that. I mostly got used to the weight after a couple of weeks though, and I also adapted to its not-wedgy shape easier than I expected. It’s still in a completely different league than my first MacBook from 2008, or the pre-Retina MacBook Pro - I saw one from 2012 in the cowork last week, and the thing looked ridiculously thick. The size An interesting thing is that because the bezels around the screen are noticably smaller, the whole device seems much smaller than the previous generation in terms of width/height. The 13" looks like it’s less than…
New stuff from WWDC 2016
Following the tradition from last year, here’s my complete list of all interesting features and updates I could find in Apple’s OSes, SDKs and developer tools that were announced at this year’s WWDC. This is based on the keynotes, the “What’s New In …” presentations and some others, Apple’s release notes, and blog posts and tweets that I came across in the last few weeks. If for some reason you haven’t watched the talks yet, I really recommend watching at least the “State of the Union” and the “What’s New In” intros for the platforms you’re interested in. The unofficial WWDC Mac app is great way to download the videos and keep track of what you’ve already watched. If you’re interested, here are my WWDC 2015 notes (might be useful if you’re planning to drop support for iOS 8 now and start using some iOS 9 APIs). (This was originally posted on Gist at https://gist.github.com/mackuba/e8fb4219c7ef611f47cdb66b93986d85.) Quick links: macOS 10.12 • iOS 10 • watchOS 3 • tvOS 10 Foundation & Core Frameworks • macOS 10.12 SDK • iOS 10 SDK • watchOS 3 SDK • tvOS 10 SDK Developer Tools • Other OSX → macOS 10.12 Sierra 🗄️ http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra/ includes Siri launch from dock, menu bar or with a keyboard shortcut results can be pinned to the “Today” sidebar some returned results like images can be drag&dropped to another app any app with multiple windows can now group them into tabs in one window like in Safari or Finder option in preferences to automatically use tabs: only in full screen (default) / always / never new design for notification center / today sidebar Universal Clipboard - copy/paste between Mac and iOS devices Desktop/Documents folders can be automatically synced with iCloud Drive (?) Auto Unlock - unlock the computer automatically with your Apple Watch Picture-in-picture for video like on iOS when dragging a window next to another, it will snap to the other window all items in the menu bar can be reordered, removed (if the app allows it) and also navigated with keyboard Safari: blocks plugins like Flash, Java, Silverlight with click-to-run overlays, and doesn’t tell sites that they’re installed makes Apple Pay available to websites - payments are confirmed with an iPhone or Apple Watch (a site can apparently even check if an iPhone is available nearby to pay?) can now restore multiple previously closed tabs with Shift-Cmd-T like Chrome updated Messages and Photos apps and Apple Music in iTunes with features matching iOS 10 a set of new features for reclaiming free space: rarely used files can be moved to iCloud automatic cleanup of files that aren’t needed anymore (e.g. caches, logs, backups) automatic cleanup of files that have been in Trash for 30 days new graphical tool for configuring these features Gatekeeper changes: option to allow any (non-signed) software is removed (right-click + Open still works) Gatekeeper Path Randomization - newly downloaded non-MAS apps will be run sandboxed inside a read-only volu…
New stuff from WWDC 2015
Here’s my own list of the interesting stuff announced during this year’s WWDC, collected from the keynotes, various Apple docs, blog posts and tweets. If you’re planning to watch the videos, I really recommend this Mac app that helps you download and watch them: https://wwdc.io. (This was originally posted on Gist at https://gist.github.com/mackuba/15994186a4f9d7da3137.) OS X 10.11 El Capitan 🗄️ http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/ split view - two apps side by side on full screen improved Mission Control shaking the mouse highlights the cursor smarter Spotlight (Siri-like results, natural language queries, resizable window) Mail: tabbed compose window as a popup in full screen mode; autosuggests new contacts and events; swipe gestures Notes: updated UI, supports checklists and embedded media, syncs through iCloud, attachment browser Photos: sorting albums by date Safari: pinned sites, detect and mute audio in tabs Maps: public transit significant performance improvements, mostly thanks to the Metal framework new beach ball cursor new system font (San Francisco) Safari developer tools: responsive design mode System Integrity Protection - limited some privileges of admin accounts (can’t modify system files or access system processes) - can be disabled with a special utility redesigned disk utility, new color picker, option to autohide menu bar iOS 9 🗄️ https://www.apple.com/ios/ios9-preview/ more intelligent Siri proactive suggestions in various places more intelligent search feature, extensible by apps iPad multitasking - slideover, split view, Picture in Picture Notes: supports checklists and embedded media, sketch drawing, syncs through iCloud Passbook renamed to Wallet, can hold reward cards etc. Maps: public transit, finding places nearby News app iCloud Drive app that shows all contents of your iCloud drive “Move to iOS” app (in the App Store) for migrating from Android iPad keyboard - copy/paste buttons, dragging on the keyboard makes it select text iPad external keyboard - app switching new app switcher lowercase keyboard low power mode smaller download size for OS updates and less free space required to install passcodes can be 6 digits long to log in on a new device, you need to enter a verification code shown on one of your existing devices full right to left support - in RTL mode, everything is right to left - system controls, layout, gestures, navigation, tab bars etc. optimized UI, up to 1h more of battery usage notifications don’t light up the screen if the iPhone is lying face down popovers now drop a slight shadow around them on the underlying view “share” option added to the popover shown when selecting text watchOS 2 🗄️ https://www.apple.com/watchos-2/ new watch faces (photo, album, timelapse) time travel feature - shows events and predicted status of various things (e.g. weather) in the future or in the past if you’ve missed something night stand mode - landscape display, buttons act as “snooze” and “off” pub…
Testing Retina images on an older Mac
Update 7.12.2020: Added info at the bottom about a UserDefaults setting you can use instead. If you build iOS apps, you’re used to providing all icons and other images in @1x and @2x versions for older and Retina screens respectively (or rather @2x and @3x now). And it’s pretty easy to test if all those versions work or not, by starting the right iOS simulator and looking at it scaled to 100%. If you work on Mac apps, you should also include @2x images for Retina Macs now; but if you’re like me, you might have treated that so far as something not urgent that can be done later… When you do get around to that, if you don’t have any Retina Mac yet, you’ll quickly notice a problem: how do you test your app on a Retina screen? There’s no OSX simulator in Xcode, after all. Fear not, turns out there is a tool that lets you turn your Mac into a Retina MacBook simulator, it’s just pretty well hidden. First, go to the Downloads page on developer.apple.com and find the latest “Graphics Tools for Xcode” package on the list (you might find many versions, but the latest should be on the first or second page - right now it’s the Xcode 6.1 version from Oct 2014). This includes various thingies that were distributed with Xcode before and could be found in /Developer, but now were removed from the main bundle. Open the DMG and run the Quartz Debug tool (you don’t need to extract it anywhere, you only need to do this once). It will show you a small HUD window, but ignore it and instead open the “UI Resolution” panel that you can find in the Window menu: See that checkbox? Yeah, you need to check it. And unfortunately you’ll need to either log out and back in or restart your computer for this to work. You can close Quartz Debug and you can even delete the DMG (though some of the other tools there might be useful too, e.g. Icon Composer). When you’re back, open the standard Displays panel in the System Preferences, and you should see at least one additional resolution on the list - this will be a special @2x mode that runs at half your normal resolution: When you select that, your desktop will look a bit funny and you’ll have much less space, but you’ll be able to see which of the icons and controls adapt to a Retina screen properly. This is the result of doing this on my iMac (it turned the standard 1920×1080 resolution into 960×540@2x): It does work on smaller screens too, but the effective resolution gets really small so it’s not as comfortable; here’s a screenshot from my MacBook Air at 720×450@2x (as you can see, Xcode is not terribly usable at such resolution :). BTW, prepare to feel confused for a few minutes after you switch back - the cursor movement and animation will feel slower and so on :) All the windows will also stay resized to much smaller dimensions, and iPhoto might start complaining about having to generate @2x thumbnails (it’s probably better to not have it running while you’re doing this). Update 7.12.2020: Turns out that there is al…
How to add icons to the menu bar on Yosemite
Mac applications often add their icons to the notification area on the right side of the menu bar. That way they can show you some status changes by changing the icon image, and they can also save some space in your dock by removing the icon from there while still being easily accessible. If you’re like me, you probably have quite a lot of those there: The menu bar controls usually display their standard (preferably dark) icon on a standard background by default, and an inverted white icon on a blue background when clicked: Creating the status item To create such control in your app, you need to create an NSStatusItem object and add it to the NSStatusBar: @interface StatusBarController { NSStatusItem *statusItem; } // ... - (void)createStatusBarItem { NSStatusBar *statusBar = [NSStatusBar systemStatusBar]; statusItem = [statusBar statusItemWithLength:NSSquareStatusItemLength]; // ... } Make sure to keep a strong reference to the NSStatusItem - otherwise ARC will clean it up and it will only blink in the menu bar and disappear immediately. Configuring the images (old way) You also need to prepare the icon image. In older versions of OSX, the standard approach was to create two separate images, a normal and an inverted one, and assign them to the image and alternateImage properties respectively. This had the advantage that you could make the icons look however you wanted, e.g. the old Dropbox icon (which I really miss) was blue instead of black, which made it much easier to find it in the menu bar. You also had to remember to set the highlightMode property, which tells OSX to change the background of the control to blue when selected; the default was to not change it, showing a white icon on a light background, which looked pretty bad. - (void)createStatusBarItem { NSStatusBar *statusBar = [NSStatusBar systemStatusBar]; statusItem = [statusBar statusItemWithLength:NSSquareStatusItemLength]; statusItem.image = [NSImage imageNamed:@"icon_menu.png"]; statusItem.alternateImage = [NSImage imageNamed:@"icon_menu_inverted.png"]; statusItem.highlightMode = YES; } Fixing the icon on Yosemite However, in OSX Yosemite Apple introduced a “dark mode” where the menu bar has a dark background and the icons are supposed to be light (you can enable it in the first section of the “General” System Preferences panel). If you’re doing it the old way as described above, the menu icon by default will probably be almost invisible. You can see that e.g. in the Google Drive app (at least you could when I was writing this, I’m assuming they’ll fix it sooner or later): The solution? Let OSX generate the inverted icon automatically. The trick is to use the template property of NSImage - if you set it to true, OSX will only use it to determine the shape of the icon and will fill it with the right color automatically, so it will display correctly in normal and highlighted state and in light and dark mode. - (void)createStatusBarItem { …
A guide to NSButton styles
The NSButton class used for making buttons in Mac apps has as many as 15 different styles, not counting subclasses. But which should be used where? (Updated with new examples and Big Sur graphics)
How to fix NTFS support on OSX Lion
After I upgraded my Mac to Lion this month, I’ve noticed that my NTFS drives stopped working. I’m using NTFS on my Windows XP partition and on a WD external drive. I’ve previously used MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, which is probably the most commonly used solution for people who want full NTFS access on OSX (as you probably know, by default OSX only provides read only support). However, that doesn’t work anymore on Lion. The problem is that MacFUSE is not maintained anymore and doesn’t work with a 64-bit kernel which is used by default in Lion. First Google results usually point you to commercial solutions, but I’m not willing to pay for something as basic as filesystem support, which, frankly, Apple should have provided themselves long time ago. If you want to avoid paying, the right way is to replace latest stable MacFUSE with something that works on Lion. Based on a few blog posts and comments I managed to find a way that worked for me, so I thought I’d put it all here in one place for others. The fastest way IMHO is to install packages from the command line, because - at least in case of NTFS-3G - it’s hard to tell from the website which version is the right one. I’m going to assume you haven’t lived under a rock for the last couple of years and you’re using Homebrew, not MacPorts. It’s not completely automatic - you’ll need to do a few things in the terminal, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes in total. Instructions So here we go: Just to be safe, remove old MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. You can use the “Uninstall” buttons in Preferences panels, but at least for MacFUSE that didn’t work for me, so if it doesn’t, just remove the panels from Preferences. You can reboot OSX just to be sure the old stuff is gone - your NTFS partitions should mount as read only now. Install latest Fuse4X (a fork of MacFUSE) and NTFS-3G packages: brew install fuse4x brew install ntfs-3g Follow the instructions in the auto-included fuse4x-kext package (brew info fuse4x-kext). Basically you have to copy one file from the Homebrew package directory into /System/Library using sudo. Follow the instructions from a blog post that explains how to make OSX use NTFS-3G when mounting drives. The post is long so just scroll to the part that says “Ok, at this point you should have a functional fuse4x and ntfs-3g install” and create an alternative /sbin/ntfs_mount script as described there. Two caveats: the script needs to have a hardcoded UID of a specific user on whose behalf NTFS drives will be mounted. If you have a single user or if the user is the first one created in the system, the default values will just work. the script assumes MacPorts was used, so replace /opt/local/bin/ntfs-3g with /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g for Homebrew And that’s it, you should be able to unmount drives and mount them again using Disk Utility as read-write filesystems. If it doesn’t work, try to turn it off and on again. If it still doesn’t work, see if /var/log/ntfsmnt.log gives you any c…