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Apple Universe

Top-level category for all Apple, Mac, and OS X related topics.

macOS Sierra minor update changes Library shortcut keys

Update: See this article for the cause of the shortcut key change. It's a bug, not a feature…I think.

Via Michael Tsai and Kirk McElhearn, today I learned that I've been giving bad advice to our users ever since macOS Sierra 10.12.3 shipped.

It used to be that holding Option in Finder and then clicking the Go menu would reveal an entry for the normally-hidden Library folder. In macOS 10.12.3, for reasons unknown, Apple has changed this: The only thing the Option key does now is change Go > Enclosing Folder into Go > Enclosing Folder in New Window. To see the Library folder entry, hold down the Shift key instead.

So that's the bad news: They changed an undocumented shortcut that many users have been told to use when troubleshooting. The good news is they added a better, easier, and faster way to get to the Library folder: Just press ⇧⌘L in Finder. This matches all the other shortcuts—⇧⌘O for Documents, ⇧⌘D for Desktop, etc. (Downloads is the odd one out, as it uses ⌘⌥L.)

Note: This may be a short-lived change, perhaps even a bug—it seems to be gone in the 10.12.4 beta release. Either that, or the 10.12.4 build is a bug, and it's supposed to be how it is now in 10.12.3. Hey Apple, I have some advice on how to fix this whole messy situation: Stop hiding the Library folder by default! (Note that you can unhide it by showing View Options (⌘J) on your home folder and checking Show Library Folder.)



iOS App: Pool Break pool simulator

I recently got back into playing pool, joining a local 8-ball and 9-ball league. It's been many (many) years since I played pool, and I can't really put a table in our home (unless I want to take over the living room or the master bedroom, probably a no go on either one). So I went looking for an iOS pool simulation that would help me visualize angles and cue ball spin (English).

I tried quite a few, and in the end, found Pool Break to be the best for my needs. Here's a very brief snippet of the gameplay…

You can turn the guidelines off; I use them to help understand the cue ball's movements after contact. Pool Break supports 8-ball, 9-ball, straight pool, snooker, and a couple things I've never heard of (Carrom and Crokinole). You can play against the computer, or against others on the Internet. The physics appear to be very good, plus you can change some of the friction values if you wish.

I've only been playing against the computer opponents; if you choose their highest skill level, you probably won't win, even with the aim lines on—they make some absurd shots! The only mode that's lacking is a straight practice mode where I could position the balls as I like to try various shots. But that's a minor nit; Pool Break is a very nice pool simulation…whether it will help my real-world ability to see various angles or not, only time will tell!



iOS App: Jollyturns tracks your day on the mountain

I spent yesterday at Mt. Bachelor, enjoying a bunch of fresh snow and surprisingly light crowds. To track my tracks, I've been using an app called Jollyturns Ski & Snowboarding. The app is free and includes one ski area; you can buy five more for $3.99, or $9.99 gets you "every ski area in the world."

For each area, you can see a summary page with current conditions and info on lifts, runs, and restaurants, as well as a zoomable scan of the official trail map. (For Mt. Bachelor, that means four maps, as they have quite a bit of terrain.)

You can drill down into run type to find a specific run; it'll be highlighted on the map. (Though if your area has more than one map, you may need to switch views to see the run on the proper map.) Click on a lift name, and it will be similarly highlighted on the map. Ditto for restaurants.

Jollyturns can also find and map your friends on the mountain, assuming they're using the app, of course. I haven't yet tested this social aspect of the app.

The one thing Jollyturns doesn't do is track your runs on a map—there's no way to see exactly what you skied in a given day. This is no longer true as of the latest update—you can view your tracks on Google Earth on the iPhone, or export as KML (or a couple of other options). As an example, here's a map from my February trip to Mt. Bachelor, as seen in Google Earth on the iPhone:

Beyond the map, you can also see how much you skied (vertical feet), how far you skied (miles), and your peak speed. I'd love it if it would map my day (I assume there are other apps that do this, but I haven't gone looking…recommendations?), but what it does do, it does well.

Jollyturns also includes an Apple Watch app—it provides a quick view of your vertical feet, distance, and peak speed. I much prefer a glance at my watch versus digging out the iPhone from multiple layers of clothing.

The one caveat I will add is that running Jollyturns can suck your battery down, as it's updating location info via GPS, and doing so quite often. Yesterday, after 4.5 hours of continuous skiing, my phone was down to about 25% battery. So if you want to make sure you get all-day phone battery life while skiing, Jollyturns is probably not the app for you.



Limited ports limit my interest in new Mac laptops

As I sit here working on my late 2013 13" Retina MacBook Pro (rMPB from here on), I wonder if it will be the last Mac laptop I ever own.

That's a strong statement, I know, but Apple's pursuit of an insanely stupid "as thin as a knife edge at all costs" design goal has led to a new generation of machines that make them much less portable than they were before…despite being thinner and lighter.

Here't the thing, Apple: Beyond a certain point, thinness is irrelevant. And honesty, you've more than reached that point with every laptop you make. You reached that point, in fact, a few years ago.

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Disable local Time Machine backups on laptops

Just noticed this post over on iMore…did you know that Time Machine automatically creates local backups on your laptop Mac? As described by iMore…

On Apple laptops, like the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, Time Machine includes the added feature of creating local snapshots so that, if you disconnect your MacBook from its external hard drive, you'll still have backups stored on your internal hard drive so you can recover data if you need to.

While the iMore article points out how to disable/enable the feature (sudo tmutil disablelocal or …enablelocal in Terminal), here's a bit more detail not provided in the article.

First, this is not some hidden hack; you're merely changing a setting using an Apple-provided command line interface to Time Machine. Apple, for whatever reason, chose not to include this setting in the GUI, but you're not risking anything by making this change.

Second, you'll find the local backups in a root-only folder named .MobileBackups, at the top level of your hard drive. You can—sort of—see how much space they take up by selecting About this Mac from the Apple menu, then clicking on the Storage tab. On my MacBook Air, which has a 2GB local backup, I see 4GB of purgeable space, which I assume includes that backup.

To get the actual size of the local backup, run this command in Terminal:

sudo du -h /.MobileBackups/

Provide your password, then wait a bit. The last line of the output will be the total size of the folder, stated in gigabytes…

…
…
 23M	/.MobileBackups//Computer/2017-02-16-092144
2.0G	/.MobileBackups//Computer
2.0G	/.MobileBackups/

And finally, if you disable this command, how do you know you've done so, months from now when you've forgotten about this? Time Machine itself will tell you, on its System Preferences panel. (Sorry for the low-res shot; I only have local backups enabled on my 11" Air!)

As seen, after disabling the setting, Time Machine's System Preferences panel will no longer list local backups as one of the tasks it performs.



See the launch date and time for any app or process

I was working on something with Peter about Moom and its disk usage (it doesn't use much), and I was curious as to just how long Moom had been running on my Mac. I last rebooted my Mac a week ago, but I often quit and relaunch our own apps to run test versions.

Finder has this info, but that requires finding the running app in Finder. I wanted a quicker solution. In Activity Monitor (and ps in Terminal), you can see how much CPU time an activity has taken…

…but that doesn't really help at all with knowing when the app (or process) launched. As long as you're in Activity Monitor, you can get the information by doing the following:

  1. Click once on the app or process of interest.
  2. Press Command-I or click the small 'i' icon in the toolbar.
  3. In the new window that opens, click Sample, then wait.

When the sample is complete, you'll see its output, and included there is the selected item's launch date and time:

...
Analysis of sampling Moom (pid 89861) every 1 millisecond
...
Parent Process:  ??? [1]

Date/Time:       2017-02-15 07:41:18.611 -0800
Launch Time:     2017-02-13 19:44:11.957 -0800
...

That's all fine if you're in Activity Monitor, but a bit of a pain if you need to launch it, find the app, run a sample, etc.

As you might expect, there's another way via Terminal: The lsappinfo command, which queries CoreApplicationServices about any app or process on your Mac.

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A possible fix broken search in macOS Mail

Over the weekend, I wrote about my totally useless search in Mail. I got so frustrated by my inability to search in Mail that I decided it was time to for a complete rebuild. I exported all my locally-saved mail, deleted my accounts, quit Mail, trashed its prefs and data files, rebooted, then rebuild it mailbox by mailbox, account by account.

I started with my iCloud account, which I barely use for anything—it has a total of seven messages in the inbox (four of which are iTunes Store receipts), and only 121 sent messages. As a test, I searched for Linea, an excellent drawing app that I had recently purchased. No matches.

At that point, I decided to quit Mail and force Spotlight to rebuild its index overnight. In Terminal, sudo mdutil -i on / will do just that (and take many hours). Today, opened Mail, and search was still dead. Argh! (I had also tried this suggested fix, but it made no difference.)

But doing some random testing today, I discovered a fix! It's a weird fix, but it seems to work:

If I move all the messages from an inbox or local storage folder into a different local storage folder, they'll be indexed and findable. I can then move them back into the inbox or source folder, and they remain findable.
Even more important, newly-added messages seem to be properly indexed, in both the inboxes and the local storage folders.

This doesn't make any sense to me, as any one of my recent actions—rebuilding mailbox indexes, reimporting, and redoing the entire Spotlight index—should have been enough to force a rebuild. But for whatever reason, only manually moving the messages seems to force a rebuild.

Now pardon me while I go back to manually dragging a quarter-million email messages around…



Transport the cursor to the center of frontmost window

My home workspace is a 27" Retina 5K iMac (2560x1440) paired with a vertical 4K display (scaled to view 1440x2560). While I love this setup in general, there's one time it's annoying: When I need to move the cursor between displays, and it's located far away from its destination.

There are many ways to solve this problem, including our own Keymo, which I still use when I want to teleport a drag across displays. But what I really wanted was a fast way to move the cursor to the other display when I switched to a window on the other display—because generally, if I've activated the window, I'm probably going to use the mouse in that window at some point.

Using Keyboard Maestro, it's possible to create a macro to make this happen automatically:

This macro will activate every time you switch applications, and then move the mouse to the center of that newly-frontmost window and highlight its location with a quick circle. Having tested this, however, I can say it's a non-ideal solution: Most of the time when I switch an app, I do not want the cursor to move. I found it more annoying—much more annoying—than useful.

As useless as the above macro is, with one minor change it quickly became one of my most-used macros…

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macOS app: Use HoudahSpot for enhanced searches

As I lamented in a recent entry here, macOS Mail search is totally broken for me. I pointed out that I can use Spotlight, but also alluded to a third-party app. That app is HoudahSpot, and it's what I use to not only search Mail, but any time I need a more-powerful search than I can get through Spotlight's interface.

Houdah's UI is a large multi-paned window, with search criteria on the left, results in the middle, and one of file info, Quick Look preview, or text preview in the right-hand pane. Here's how it looked for the same search that failed in Mail:

Using HoudahSpot for a search like this, though, is really overkill—I'd see similar results in Spotlight, because it's a very specific search term that's not going to find a lot of matches. Where HoudahSpot shines is in its ability to build more complex search queries.

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On the uselessness of search in macOS Mail

For the last couple macOS releases, I've had nothing but trouble searching in Mail. Note that I didn't write "trouble searching mail," but rather, "trouble searching in Mail." For example, today I needed to find an email from my business partner Peter about a hidden pref in Butler. (I was hoping this pref could help a user who was having problems with the pasteboard in a certain app.)

Update: See this post for a possible solution.

Based on a document on my hard drive, I knew the name of the default was Pasteboard Normalization Interval, but I couldn't remember the syntax of the defaults write command to set its value. So I searched in Mail…

So clearly, no emails in my database contain the words I'm looking for, right? Here's the exact same search, run in Spotlight:

Not one but two email messages match my search, and provided the needed syntax for the command.

Wait, I know what you're thinking: "Ahh, look, it's in quotes!" Doesn't matter; searching Mail for "Pasteboard Normalization Interval" still results in zero matches. Searching on even one word of the phrase, like Normalization, also finds no matches.

Again, I know what you're thinking: "Oh, I bet the Mail index is screwed up." Nope; even after rebuilding the index on all 250,000+ messages in my database, no matches are found. (And yes, I let the index complete its rebuild, which took hours.)

I've heard from others that search in Mail works for them. But it's a no go for me, and I know, for others. So something's wrong, but I don't know exactly what it is, nor how to fix it.

So for now, I have to rely on Spotlight to search Mail…or a third-party app, but more on that in a bit.