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macOS Apps

Articles about OS X applications.

The macOS Stage Manager needs to exit, stage left

For the last couple weeks, I've been (finally) working on some Moom videos. And while I personally don't use Stage Manager, it was ideal for the first video, as I needed to keep switching into and out of Moom's settings, and didn't want to leave app windows cluttering the screen.

But I ran into a problem…I generally record with ScreenFlow, and when I tried to do something in System Settings, I would run into a massive delay—30 or so seconds before my clicks would take. And when I tried to record an onscreen pop-up menu that users can resize, it only showed up in about one of 20 frames.

After a lot of troubleshooting, I found the cause of the problem: Stage Manager itself. And while the first glitch only affected ScreenFlow, the second occurred in both ScreenFlow and Apple's built-in recording tool.

Here's how both look in action:

As soon as I disabled Stage Manager, both issues went away. I have reported this bug to Apple (#FB22517070), but I don't know that they'll do anything about it. I hope they will, as it's incredibly disruptive and prevents using Stage Manager when making videos, which seems like a prime use.

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The Queue helps track TV shows and movies to watch

As with Dramatis, The Queue is a Claude-developed web app. Its purpose is to help me track the TV shows and movies that I want to watch, am watching, or have watched. So as with Dramatis, the same disclaimer applies: While I managed the project, all of the code involved was written by Claude. There's no use of passwords, nor does it store or collect personal data (other than free API keys, which are store locally in your keychain). But still, use at your own risk.

Unlike Dramatis, though The Queue is completely free to use—no Anthropic API key is required. It uses the free TVmaze API to retrieve information about TV shows, and two free API keys (which you have to create) from TMDB and OMDB for movie information.

Here's how it looks on my Mac:

And here's a download link:

Download The Queue web app (591KB)

It works like Dramatis does, by running a mini web server on your local Mac.

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Dramatis tracks characters in books, series, and movies

As shown in my post about Claude Code, Dramatis (from "dramatis personae," the list of characters in a story) is a tool Claude created to help me keep track of the relationships between major characters in books, TV series, and movies. Here's a look at the main screen, for season one of The West Wing:

When you retrieve data for a title, it's automatically grouped into buckets that make sense for the show's plot—by function in The West Wing, Friends gets "Main Six," "Romantic Interests," and "Supporting Cast," etc. Click on a bucket and you'll see just the characters within that bucket.

Each character can have a separate, lower level of organization—Jed Bartlett is in the Executive Branch bucket, but his info card also shows Oval Office. Click on any character for full details on their role, as well as links to other characters who interact with the selected character.

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How to monitor Apple update releases

As the last step in bringing back my A Full History of macOS (OS X) release dates and rates post, I wanted a way to be notified of released updates. On the Macs I regularly use, of course, this happens automatically for the versions I'm using. But Apple updates the older OSes on a regular basis, and I don't see those releases.

Of late, Apple has been good about listing all their releases—even those without security-related components—on their Apple security releases page, so I though that'd be a good one to watch.

There are lots of tools and web sites out there that monitor pages for changes, but they all seemed overly complicated to me, or do way more than I need. I did mostly like urlwatch, but its output is just raw diff results. I wanted something a bit simpler to read.

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Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts and System Settings indicator

Based on some comments on my Mastodon post, this only works due to a bug in macOS 15.7.3! The 90 day period isn't supposed to be a rolling date, but 90 days from release date. So it should have no impact…but it does, so I hope Apple doesn't fix the bug.

Although I have to have a machine running macOS Tahoe to support our customers, I personally don't like the look of Liquid Glass, nor do I like some of the functional changes Apple has made in macOS Tahoe.

So I have macOS Tahoe on my laptop, but I'm keeping my desktop Mac on macOS Sequoia for now. Which means I have the joy of seeing things like this wonderful notification on a regular basis.

Or I did, until I found a way to block them, at least in 90 day chunks. Now when I open System Settings → General → Software Update, I see this:

The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that "organization" is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows), which seems like exactly what I needed.

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Create macOS automations using a little-known app

I use a lot of browsers for testing, so I created this launcher to make the process easier:

Browser launcher

You may be wondering what third-party tool I used to do this. Such things are possible in Keyboard Maestro through custom HTML prompts, but that's a lot of work. I'm sure there are other apps that can do similar things. Surprisingly, though, I used nothing more than a built-in app to create this launcher. The app has existed since macOS 10.15 (Catalina), but I doubt more than a handful of Mac users (outside its target user base) even know it exists—I didn't hear about it until yesterday.

What app is that? It's called Panel Editor, and the easiest place to find it is here: System Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard → Scroll down until you see the Panel Editor button.

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Revisting old-school stock quotes

Back in 2020, I explained how to use Terminal to display stock quotes. Once set up, it looks something like the image at right, though that's a four-year old screenshot, so the prices are way off!

In a follow-up post, I showed how to quickly chart any of the stocks in your list. I've moved to a new Mac since then, which means (as always for me with a new Mac), I set it up from scratch.

Sometimes not everything makes the cut for the new Mac; in this case, my Terminal quotes were one of the things that didn't make the cut.

But I recently decided I wanted them back, and the good news is that it's gotten a bit simpler in four years since I last wrote about this. And I took the time to improve the stock charting macro, too.

Read on if you're interested in geeky Terminal stock quotes…

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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!



The macOS’ version of the cp Unix command won’t create links

 
Update: Apple fixed this in macOS 14.4; the cp command can once again create hard links.

I ran into this while working on a Keyboard Maestro macro that creates hard links: The macOS version of cp won't create links, at least not in Sonoma. In Ventura, it works even though it throws the same error as it does in Sonoma.

Copying as hard links is part of the cp feature set, fully covered in its man pages. But it doesn't work in macOS. To confirm, try this:

When I ran into this, I searched and discovered that someone else had run into the same issue,1Apple Developer login required but that's the only mention I could find.

I have filed this bug as FB13255408 with Apple, and I'm hopeful they fix it soon. There is a workaround, obviously: Use ln instead. This works fine for individual hard links, but using cp to quickly copy an entire folder as hard links is a nicer implementation.



More helpful help for Terminal commands

I use Terminal a fair bit, for any number of things. But I don't use it all the time, and that means I sometimes struggle to remember syntax of commands. "Was it rsync source destination or the other way around? Or was it ln that was backwards of what I thought it should be?"

You can open the man page for a command, of course, but sometimes there's so much there that finding the simple thing you want is tough. Enter tldr, installable via Homebrew or MacPorts. tldr skips most of the detail of the man pages, providing user-curated examples of how to use a given command.

As an example, here's the aforementioned rysnc command's man page:

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