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Mac OS X Hints

Be aware of this Applescript-with-droplet bug

Another post thanks to Many Tricks' Peter Maurer; this particular bug bit me last night—I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out why a compiled AppleScript with a droplet wasn't working. I never did get it, so I emailed Peter, and he pointed me to these tweets from a while back…

And yea, that was the problem: As soon as I added the +x to the compiled script, everything worked as expected. The exact syntax is:

chmod +x /path/to/compiled.app/Contents/MacOs/droplet

I'm documenting this here so that I can find it more easily the next time I save a compiled droplet AppleScript and forget about this not-so-little bug.



Mac OS X Hints and April Fool’s Day

When I ran Mac OS X Hints, I had a tradition of running April Fool's Day pranks. Here's a link to every one I ever published (including the intro of each) from 2003 through 2010 when I departed for Many Tricks. I've also found and included the images that went with each post, as these have vanished from the static version of the site that remains online.

2003: PR: macosxhints.com announces future direction

Beaverton, OR -- April 1, 2003 -- macosxhints.com today announced its new strategic direction to address the constant need for growth in the dynamic web site information portal business. In a highly anticipated move, the site announced that all future hints will eventually focus solely on the WindowsXP platform.

2004: Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s

Cupertino, CA -- April 1, 2004 -- Apple today announced its first-ever triple-CPU system, the PowerMac G5 Cubed. Featuring a total of three G5 processors, the G5 Cubed offers unmatched desktop processing power. "It's clearly the fastest thing we've ever made, and it's head and shoulders above anything the Wintel world has to offer," said Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs.

2005: Install and run OS X on an iPod

After running this site for a few years, I've come to know many people in the Mac world. Many of these fine folks are slaving away on pet projects, most of which will never see the light of day. Yet still, they toil, hoping for success. My good friend Richard is one such person. He's been obsessed with running OS X on his iPod since the day he bought his first generation machine. Not just installing it and booting a Mac with the iPod, but honest-to-goodness using OS X on the iPod. I should preface and say that Richard is brilliant, stubborn, and amazingly resourceful ... three required qualities for this particular project!

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On the increasing difficulty of launching some apps

A brief history of launching Mac OS X/macOS apps…

Mac OS X 10.7 and earlier: Launch whatever app you want, the OS doesn't care.

Mac OS X 10.7.5: Gatekeeper appears, but is a benign master, defaulting to allowing apps from anywhere. You can still install and run anything without any intervention from the OS.

Mac OS X 10.8 through 10.11: The benign master is slightly less benign, as the default setting changed (somewhere in that timeframe) to only allowing apps from the Mac App Store and registered developers. You could still disable Gatekeeper completely, though, as the "Anywhere" button was still present. If you didn't do that and tried to launch an app from outside the store or a non-registered developer, you had to click OK in one dialog box. Still not awful, but you were aware you were working outside the Gatekeeper's happy zone.

macOS Sierra (10.12): The benign master is now clearly just the master—the "Anywhere" button is gone. (Gatekeeper can still be disabled in Terminal, if you wish: sudo spctl --master-disable.)

And when you try to run an app from an unidentified developer, you really have to jump through some hoops…

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Color and ‘human readable’ file sizes in Terminal

These are two very old tips, but I'd forgotten about them until recently, when I sent someone a screenshot and they said "Hey, how'd you do that?"

Do what, exactly? This…

The most-obvious thing in that shot is the colored filenames. But notice, too, the file sizes are in a human-readable form. Both of these changes are pretty simple, though you could spend hours playing with colors.

Human-readable output

To get human readable output—not just from ls but also in du, which shows disk space usage—just include an h with the ls command: ls -alh. Instead of raw bytes, the values are converted and marked with trailing B, K, M, etc.

Because I never use ls in its short form, I actually added a line to my .profile (which loads whenever you open a Terminal session) to make this automatic:

alias ls='ls -alh'

You could do the same thing with du, but I rarely use that command, so I didn't bother.

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Browsers, caches and web page changes

Browsers cache data whenever you load a page. In general, this is a good thing—you'll save data transfer (very important on mobile), and increase speed on any connection if the browser can use data that it's already cached.

But there's one place I hate browser cache: When creating or editing web pages. I'll edit a file, save the changes, upload the new file, load the page…and nothing. So I edit again, repeat, still nothing. Only then do I remember the cache. Argh!

Thankfully, there are ways around (most) cache issues. I do most of my web development in Chrome and Safari; here are the simple tips I use to manage cache in those browsers when developing.

Safari

  • Enable the Developer menu (Prefs > Advanced > Show Develop menu in menu bar).

  • Once enabled, use the Developer menu to easily empty the cache via the Empty Caches menu item, which is bound to the keyboard via ⌘⌥E.

  • Also in the Developer menu, you can completely disable the cache with the Disable Caches menu item. This is what I do when developing—just remember to enable them again when you're done, or you'll find browsing quite slow.

  • To force a single page to completely reload, hold down the Option key and click on the reload icon in the URL bar.

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Zoom zoom zoom

Today's tip is simple, yet for me, critical—it's one of the first things I do when I set up a new Mac or user on an existing Mac, as it solves a vexing issue: Small fonts that can't be modified within an app's preferences. As my eyes get older, these small fonts get more and more annoying.

Thankfully, there's a fix in the Accessibility section of System Preferences, specifically on the Zoom tab: Easily zoom the screen via keyboard or gesture shortcut. Here's the setup screen:

You can choose to use keyboard shortcuts to zoom (top section of the full screenshot), or (my preference) a scroll gesture with a modifier key. There are also some useful options in the "Zoom style" section.

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Microsoft’s public-by-default file sharing site

This morning on Twitter, I saw that @rosyna had retweeted this tweet from @GossiTheDog:

https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/845446263244050434

That seemed insanely scary, so I did a quick search on docs.com for password 1I am not revealing anything secret here; the original tweet went to thousands of people, and many have already noted the number of shared password files.. The results were quite shocking—hundreds of files containing full login information to major sites—Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Gmail, Linkedin, Netflix, PayPal, Twitter, etc.

It seems crazy to think that these users are intentionally sharing this information with the world. I wanted to see how it was happening, so I logged into docs.com with my Office365 account to see. I created a simple file to upload as a test. After uploading, you have to set a bunch of options before you save the file; one of the settings is the Visibility, and this is the default setting:

Yes, docs.com defaults any uploaded file to world-visible, "giving it a larger audience." Yikes!

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Use macOS VMs in VMware Fusion in retina mode

I use VMware Fusion often—I have virtual machines that span Mac OS X 10.6 to macOS 10.12.4 beta. I use the more-recent of these for supporting our customers on older versions of the OS, and keep the really old versions just for nostalgia purposes. (I have a bunch of non-macOS virtual machines, too, but they're not relevant to this tidbit.)

In all the time I've been using Fusion on my retina Macs, though, I've never enabled this setting…

…well, I enabled it once, but turned it off, because the end result was too small to see: In Retina mode, every pixel is an actual pixel, not a doubled pixel. On my 27" iMac, that meant the macOS VM thought it was running at (for example) 2560x1600 instead of a retina resolution of 1280x800. VMware even warns you of this in their Knowledge Base:

Mac OS X running in a virtual machine is limited to an approximate resolution of 2560 x 1600, and treats the display as a standard DPI device. This makes the text and icons to appear small in the OS X interface.

However, today I stumbled across this solution from Patrick Bougie—and it's brilliant in its simplicity. Patrick's post has all the details; I'll reproduce them here in abbreviated form, just in case his page ever vanishes.

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Edit long Terminal commands in a visual editor

Here's a quickie tip for those of us who occasionally string together complex commands at Terminal's prompt: You may want to add this simple line to your .profile (or whatever init file you use):

set -o vi

What does it do? It tells Unix/Terminal to set the input line editor to vi. When might this be useful? Let's say you've typed a long command, like the one to launch a background screen saver:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -module "Arabesque" -background &

Before you hit Return, you notice a couple of typos early in the command. You could use cursor movement keys to move around, of course, but with the above command in place, just press Escape and hit v: The entered command will open for editing in vi. Make your changes, then do the usual :wq vi exit dance, and your edited command will then execute.

Note that if you edit a command but then don't save it (i.e. you press :q!, you may have to hit Return on the command line to get out of an odd "waiting for v to edit" mode. (At least that's the only way I found to return to normal typing.)



An odd fix for ‘jpeg’ vs ‘jpg’ filename extensions

I recently reinstalled macOS Sierra, due to my annoying Bluetooth issues. I hadn't noticed any side effects of the reinstall until I went to save a JPEG image from Acorn.

On save, I noticed that the image's extension was .jpeg rather than what I thought was the usual .jpg. As both of my other Macs save with the .jpg extension, I figured something was messed up on the iMac. So I (of course) tweeted about the issue. A while later, Shawn King replied with this seemingly odd suggestion:

So I tried it, and sure enough, changing the screen capture file format via defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg and then restarting the SystemUIServer with killall SystemUIServer changed my default JPEG extension in every app to .jpg.

What's really strange is that I then switched the screenshot format back to png, and the .jpg extension remained. I even went so far as to delete the pref (defaults delete com.apple.screencapture), and still, the extension remains .jpg. So whatever change occurred when switching the default screenshot format, it appears to be permanent.

I tried the same trick for the .tiff extension (which I rarely use, so it doesn't bother me as much), and it sort of worked: Captured screenshots got a .tif extension, but images saved from apps still got the four-letter .tiff extension. Weird.

If anyone knows exactly what's going on with the .jpeg vs. .jpg extension, I'd love to hear the explanation.