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Fix a broken search in Photos

I was having some issues with my desktop photos (which I load from Photos) not working properly, and I noticed that one particular photo wouldn't preview in the Wallpaper System Settings panel. I noted the name, searched for it in Photos, and came up with no matches. Then I tried other searches, for photos I knew were there as I could see them onscreen, and still, no matches. Clearly Photos' search was broken.

I tried the (long, slow, painful) photo library rebuild process, but still, no search.

After much digging, I found a solution that works, which is to force Photos to rebuild its search database. Here's how to do that:

  1. Make sure you have good backup of Photos before you start, just in case.
  2. Also make sure you quit Photos before proceeding.
  3. In Finder, navigate to your Photos.library file and right-click on it. Select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
  4. In the new window that opens, open the database folder. Inside of that folder is a search folder. Delete it, but leave the database folder open.

That's it, you're (almost) done. Now launch Photos, and it will start rebuilding the search database. This can take a while, depending on the size of your database—it took about five or so minutes for my 65,000ish image collection. There's also no onscreen indication that anything is happening, so use Finder: Open the newly-created search folder in Finder, and check the size of the psi.sqlite file. When the size stops changing, the rebuild is done.

I found this answer in a post by Michelle Lyons in this Apple Discussiosn thread. Michelle notes they found the answer elsewhere, but don't link to that source, so I don't know who originally discovered this. All I know is it worked for me!



I despise this icon

That ugly garish purple travesty shows up in the menu bar whenever your screen is being recorded by any number of apps. From Apple's perspective, they probably consider it a good thing, as it lets a user know their screen is being recorded, and I understand that logic.

But it also shows up when you record your own screen via an app such as ScreenFlow. I find it incredibly intrusive, and there's no option for a user to say "Yes, Apple, I know my screen is being recorded—because I myself started the recording!—please disable that ugly purple icon in my menu bar."

Left in place, the purple icon screams for attention any time it's onscreen, regardless of what you're trying to show in your screen recording. It's unlike every other item in the menu bar, and at least for me, my eye is constantly drawn to it.

So please, Apple, let the user disable that menu bar icon. A logical way to do this would be to show a "Disable this one occurrence" menu item when the menu bar icon is clicked. That way, it's not a blanket override, but you could easily banish it for a given recording.

Until that happens, however, we (all two of us) here at Many Tricks so dislike the icon that we've implemented a workaround, but it's not ideal.

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My iPhone 13 Pro and its ultra-short battery life

Yesterday on Twitter, I bemoaned my new iPhone 13 Pro's surprisingly short battery life:

I've been seeing very short battery life on my iPhone 13 Pro—it barely makes it from 5am to 8pm despite it just sitting here on the desk most of the day.

Battery usage shows a sustained constant drain—and neither Music nor App Store were even running today.

WTF?

You can see full tweet thread with follow-ups, but here's the key graphic:

Each day, the battery would drain smoothly and continuously—you can see the pattern repeating on the prior day, as the battery dropped to under 20% by 9:00pm. This was happening despite the fact that I work at home and rarely use the phone while here—I might look at Twitter occasionally or launch an app or two, but it mostly just sits on my desk.

As Apple touts up to 22 hours of video playback for the iPhone 13 Pro, I didn't think it should be draining to under 20% in about 12 to 15 hours of non-usage. So the debugging started.

If you want the tl;dr, here it is: I turned off wifi sync, and the problem seems to have vanished. Read on for the details and a before-and-after comparison image.

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My impressions of the M1 MacBook Pro

I recently received my Apple M1-powered 13" MacBook Pro, which is primarily going to be used for testing our apps on Apple silicon, and supporting customers using these machines. But that doesn't mean this is a work machine; it's a personal purchase as I'll use it for my own needs as well. (Thankfully, it only had a net cost of $33 after I sold my 16" MacBook Pro.)

By now, you've probably read a slew of stuff about both the MacBook Pro and its slightly-lighter MacBook Air cousin. Between unboxing videos, extensive benchmark suites, and multi-thousand-word reviews, there is no lack of coverage of these machines. (However, I will add that I did make a video of my MacBook Pro—with its 16GB of RAM—opening 75 apps in just over a minute. Not bad for an entry-level machine!)

I'm not going to try to replicate those reviews, because they do an excellent job of covering the new M1-powered Macs in a level of detail that I just don't have time to get into. Instead, here's what I'll be discussing…

  1. Why I chose the 13" MacBook Pro
  2. A few benchmark results of interest
  3. Rosetta and non-native apps
  4. Using iOS apps on macOS
  5. General discussion on performance
  6. The future of Apple silicon Macs

So why a MacBook Pro and not an Air?

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16GB of RAM and 75 open apps…what could go wrong?

I ordered my 13" M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM, as I felt buying the most offered was the best bet for future proofing this "entry level" M1 chipped Mac. Later today I'll be posting a detailed writeup of my time so far with the new machine, but for now, here's a little over-the-top demo.

I selected everything in the Applications folder—excluding Time Machine, Siri, Launchpad and a few other similar non-apps—and opened them all at once. I did this with a timer running, while recording the screen, and here's the result…

As you can see at the end of the video, it took one minute and seventeen seconds to open all 75 apps—do the math, and you'll see that's about 1.5 seconds per app (it was notably quicker than that at first, and slower than that at the end). For 75 apps. On a machine with nowhere near enough RAM to fit them all in active memory. I was amazed at how rapidly it was able to complete this task.

These weren't even all native apps, it was a mix of Intel, Apple, and Electron (both native and non-native) apps.

I tried a similar test on my MacBook Air, but as it's an 8GB RAM machine, I limited it to opening 37 apps, which took it well over three minutes (about 5.5 seconds per app). I didn't bother to try on my iMac—it has 40GB of RAM, but it's also got a slower SSD, so I don't know that it would've matched the MacBook Pro's performance.

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Bookmark both of Apple’s system status pages

I've long known about Apple's general System Status page, which provides a dashboard showing the state of most of Apple's consumer-focused services:

https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

Until yesterday's "why can't I launch any apps?" outage, however, I'd never known that they also have the same type of status page for developer-focused services:

https://developer.apple.com/system-status/

But this page is useful to more than just developers (and it doesn't require a login to view). Had I known about it earlier, yesterday it would've shown that they were having a problem with the Developer ID Notary Service, which is why apps wouldn't launch.

In typical Apple understatement fashion, they've posted the resolved status for that service today:

"Some users were affected" and "Users may have experienced issues with the service" certainly make it sound less painful than what it was, i.e. "A ton of users were unable to use their Macs" and "Mac users could not launch their apps for over two hours." Somehow Apple needs to come up with a better failure mode for the service, as the results yesterday were unacceptable.

Note: If it happens again, simply edit the /etc/hosts file as root, and add this as the last line:

0.0.0.0      ocsp.apple.com

That will prevent your Mac from trying to contact the validation server at all. Note: This seems to break the App Store app, but it let me keep working, which was more important at the time.



A deep dive into the Apple Arcade—Part Six

Today wraps up my deep dive into the Apple Arcade. As a refresher, here's what's in each part of the series:

  • Part One: This covers what I look for in games, some general observations on the games in the Arcade, and the lengthy list of games that didn't make my first cut.
  • Part Two: A slightly deeper look at the first half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
  • Part Three: A slightly deeper look at the second half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
  • Part Four: The first half of my set of definite keeper games.
  • Part Five: The second half of my set of definite keeper games, including my two favorites.
  • Part Six: The part you're reading now; wrapping it all up.

So is the Apple Arcade worth its $5 per month cost?

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A deep dive into the Apple Arcade—Part Five

Today wraps up my deep dive into the Apple Arcade. As a refresher, here's what's in each part of the series:

  • Part One: This covers what I look for in games, some general observations on the games in the Arcade, and the lengthy list of games that didn't make my first cut.
  • Part Two: A slightly deeper look at the first half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
  • Part Three: A slightly deeper look at the second half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
  • Part Four: The first half of my set of definite keeper games.
  • Part Five: The part you're reading now; the second half of my set of definite keeper games, including my two favorites.
  • Part Six: Wrapping it all up.

And now, the rest of the keepers…

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A deep dive into the Apple Arcade—Part Four

Today wraps up my deep dive into the Apple Arcade. When I planned this, one Part Four post was going to cover everything left…but it was way too long. So I'm still publishing it all today, but I've split the last part into three separate posts. So here's the full series:

  • Part One: This covers what I look for in games, some general observations on the games in the Arcade, and the lengthy list of games that didn't make my first cut.
  • Part Two: A slightly deeper look at the first half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
  • Part Three: A slightly deeper look at the second half of the games I felt merited additional time for playing and testing.
  • Part Four: The part you're reading now; the first half of my set of definite keeper games.
  • Part Five: The second half of my set of definite keeper games, including my two favorites.
  • Part Six: Wrapping it all up.

Before I get to the keepers, though, there were two more games released while I was working on these posts, so I'll take a quick look at those.

All of You In this unique puzzler, your character is a chicken that needs to collect a number of lost baby chicks. Your chicken walks from left to right across the circles as seen at right. One circle can be animating at a time while the others are still. On some levels, you can rearrange and/or flip the circles, too. (In the level at right, you animate the dynamite circle first, so it explodes before you walk across.)

Higher levels have more circles, so there's not so much empty space…and some of the puzzles get a bit tricky. It's fun, but I'm not sure it's a keeper just yet.

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