Archive for June 20, 2016

Monday, June 20, 2016

End of the Road for MacNN

Charles Martin:

It’s kind of amazing we made it this far - only TidBITs and MacWorld are older and still around - but we’ve been told we’re packing it in. We’ve joked before that Apple becoming a huge mainstream company is the worst thing that ever happened to us, but it’s true: there’s less need for an Apple-specific news site when news about Apple is plastered everywhere, on every site, all the time. This is not the sole reason why we’re having to give up our comfy home (and just after repainting it, too!), but it’s part of the reality we’ve been working in.

I’ve been reading MacNN since the beginning. It was one of the essential “blogs” from the early Mac Web, along with sites like MacInTouch, MacFixIt, MacCentral, and The Mac Resource Page.

Update (2016-07-09): Adam C. Engst:

Sadly, the Mac news site MacNN, founded in 1995, has announced that it will no longer be publishing regularly, and the venerable New York City Apple reseller Tekserve is closing its doors for retail sales and service. On the upside, particularly for those trying to establish the technical particulars of some older Mac model, the Apple spec site EveryMac.com celebrated its 20th anniversary on 2 July 2016 and the spec app Mactracker marked its 15th anniversary back on 14 May 2016.

Disabling Xcode 8 Font Smoothing

Since Mac OS X 10.9, Xcode hasn’t followed the normal system preferences for controlling font smoothing. Lately, I’ve been using a plug-in to work around this. Xcode 8 has a new editor extensions feature but won’t load old-style plug-ins. Fortunately, Xcode 8 has changed so that it now respects the standard screen fonts preference, without having to use a plug-in:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled -bool YES

Note that whereas before, the preferences window would obey the setting but the text editor wouldn’t, now it’s the reverse. You can’t see the actual fonts as you’re choosing them, but they do work when you’re editing code. Unlike in other apps, the font smoothing in the editor seems to be either completely off or completely on. It does not respect the AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold setting to only disable smoothing for smaller sizes.