Archive for October 15, 2019

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Catalina System Issues

Patrick McCarron:

The (null) version of Mac OS Catalina is finally out!

Dave Mark:

And my Catalina install grinds to a screeching halt.

Logged in, got the “Find My” screen (see pic), tapped Continue, and I’ve been frozen for about 15 minutes.

Regret doing this? Why yes, yes I do. 😐

Peter Cohen:

Stuck in an endless iCloud authentication loop after upgrading to Catalina? This fixed it for me.

Christina:

Aaaand another edge case hit: If you are stuck in an iCloud Terms and Conditions loop after upgrading to #Catalina, go to System Preferences > Internet Accounts, click the “inactive” Apple ID used for iTunes/App Store, wait for Terms and Conditions sheet to appear and agree.

Matthias Gansrigler:

Wow, Catalina seriously f**** up Bluetooth connections. To Apple devices. Like the Magic Trackpad. Only reacts after a 1-2 second delay.

Never experienced that in the beta.

David Sparks:

Blasted through my flagged email this morning on my Mac. Interesting issue though. Apple Mail now has a different flag count on every device I own: Mac - 0; iPad - 90; iPhone - 29. All running latest (non beta) releases.

Ugh.

Chris W:

Love how Apple’s new Music app is so lightweight and free of bloat compared to iTunes

Gus Mueller:

In 10.15 AppleFileServer is sandboxed, and it’s unable to read any volumes that I have shared out to Kirstin since upgrading. I guess I can fix this, but how is anyone that’s not a developer supposed to handle this?

Tyler Hall:

My wife’s local account password (not iCloud) on her iMac is an all-lowercase, seven character, simple English word.

Upgraded to Catalina. No problem.

iMac went to sleep. Woke up. Will no longer accept her password. 🤷‍♂️

Corbin Dunn:

I upgraded my laptop to macOS Catalina. No problems, so I did my older iMac yesterday. That was a mistake...I’m now trying to figure out why my login won’t work and where my data went (ah...readonly volumes....)

I used to always relocate my home directory to another partition when I did development on macOS so I could install multiple versions and use the same home dir. Apparently this really confused the migration to Catalina, and really messed up stuff.

Mike Epstein:

Worse still, when you update a phone, tablet, or computer to the new version of Reminders, all of the updates you’ve created using that device will be deleted across all platforms, new and old.

Even if you’ve upgraded, though, there’s still a chance that you could lose your info. The new Reminders app asks you to confirm the update the first time you turn it on. If you’ve made Reminders on your iOS 13 or iPad OS device using a secondary app or process before opening the app, those reminders will get deleted when you open the app and press “upgrade now.”

Windows users are also getting hit especially hard by the change. The new iCloud web app supports the new version of Reminders, but Apple says the iCloud for Windows app “can’t see iCloud Reminders” after the update.

Armin Briegel:

System Image Utility is gone from macOS Catalina.

It is not possible to build a NetBoot or NetInstall nbi based on Catalina.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Judging by the Catalina GM seed, macOS Catalina is gonna ship with nonfunctional SceneKit in Catalyst on older Nvidia GPU-powered Macs (like my 2012 iMac). If you have SceneKit in your app, it will just render as an empty scene on these configurations. No workaround for users

Simon Gredal:

I’m able to buy a $0.99 Catalina-incompatible 32-bit app from Mac App Store. It even lies to me and say that it will work on my Mac.

Dave DeLong:

Turns out that sharing Maps collections only shares a snapshot. Recipients can’t modify your collection. This leaves joint trip-planning as impotent as it was before. (FB7372447)

And of course, collections don’t exist on Mac. 🤦‍♂️ (FB7372437)

Michael Flux:

Gotta say, Catalina is without a doubt the most shitshow macOS update in years.

On a completely fresh install to eliminate any potential upgrade bugs, somehow everything from photos to iCloud Drive to system apps have large enough bugs to prevent basic usability.

Issues I’ve run into:

Previously:

Update (2019-10-16): See also: Mr. Macintosh’s macOS Catalina System Status.

Update (2019-10-17): LeeW (via Jeff Johnson):

Many [Mac mini users] are having issues getting a basic HDMI connection to work at all or only through weird and wonderful workarounds. Apple has confirmed to me they are aware of the issue and they advised it was an issue they could replicate when using HDMI -> HDMI.

Update (2019-10-18): Matt Henderson:

I wish I hadn’t upgraded to Mac OS X Catalina:

- iCloud Drive has been stuck permanently uploading two small files. (No idea what they are.)

- Safari bookmarks no longer syncing across my devices.

- Messages permanently reporting “Downloading Messages from iCloud”.

Update (2019-10-21): Howard Oakley:

There are several reports of problems getting Catalina to accept and load kernel extensions (KEXTs). This article looks briefly at how they can arise, and whether you can do anything about them.

See also: MacInTouch.

Martin Steiger:

For some OCR’d scanned PDFs, you cannot select the last page in the rewritten Preview.app, the selection jumps to the second last page

Christopher Moss (via Leo M):

Louis Rossman - better known for his hardware repair videos - has made a brief video describing an issue with Catalina bricking machines, and refers to a fix that Apple is assiduously removing from their support forums. [links added]

The issue and purported solution are not very precisely described and don’t make sense to me as written. The referenced file is not 32-bit, and I do not recommend deleting it.

Howard Oakley:

Every major upgrade to macOS brings howls of complaint. It’s the worst upgrade yet, many Macs are bricked by it, it’s full of bugs, and so on. But are those claims really true? What’s the evidence?

Last week I was surprised to see two main threads of complaint: one that Apple was advising internally that the latest Mac mini shouldn’t be upgraded to 10.15 at all because of serious issues, the other that 10.15 made an unholy mess of iCloud Drive for many users.

[…]

The document in question was a PDF, and its every aspect made obvious that it was fake.

[…]

Drilling down on the iCloud Drive problems, I noticed that quite a few of those reporting them mentioned using Catalina betas, and it occurred to me that, although some had clearly never let a beta near their Mac, a significant proportion of those now complaining of iCloud problems in 10.15 release hadn’t cleared up the mess which earlier betas had produced.

Update (2019-10-22): CogSci Apps:

When iCloud sync is enabled under Catalina (10.15), Notes’ AppleScript is almost completely useless. Even just accessing a note object can cause a -10000 error.

[…]

Catalina (10.15) Notes AppleScript is broken, lots of -1700 errors when interacting with note objects

Update (2019-10-25): Brent Simmons:

On Catalina, setting NSSavePanel’s nameFieldStringValue works on the first call but not on subsequent calls.

Let’s say you have an accessory view, and a change there needs to be reflected in the proposed file name. Works in Mojave, but not in Catalina.

I’ve also found that sheets no longer work with NSSavePanel.

Update (2019-10-31): Marco Arment:

oh my god

Thomas Tempelmann:

Caveat when upgrading to #Catalina: If you have Finder Aliases, they may get broken. That’s because the new Data volume will use different File IDs, and Aliases use them to locate renamed or moved targets of Aliases.

Update (2019-11-05): Omer Lev:

I haven’t seen this reported, but I’m encountering a consistent bug in Catalina’s Preview, in which removing a page from a PDF corrupts it in a way that it cannot be opened by Adobe Reader.

Update (2019-12-17): Gus Mueller:

Update to this- looks like NSFontManager’s availableMembersOfFontFamily: is busted on 10.15, and that’s why it’s only coming up as an issue now.

Howard Oakley:

Just when you think it’s safe to upgrade to macOS Catalina, we start hearing of strange and serious problems, like its security checks getting completely out of hand and slowing app launch drastically. Over the last few weeks, as more Mac users take the plunge and upgrade, I’ve been hearing of more and more such cases. Are these bugs and should we still hold off upgrading?

eurozerozero:

Another Catalina issue if you want to note it - weird issue with crons where they never go away and the system runs out of resources and can’t even shut down.

Update (2019-12-23): Kirk McElhearn:

Since the release of macOS Catalina, Time Machine doesn’t work with Apple Mail. If you enter Time Machine from Apple Mail, you are supposed to be able to see your email in all your backups. But if you try to do this is Catalina, Mail crashes.

I reported this during the beta period.

Update (2020-02-28): Marco Arment:

I’m finding that Catalina introduced LOTS of little delays involving Finder integration: displaying open/save dialogs, displaying changed files, starting moves/copies, deleting files…

Update (2020-03-27): Drummond:

This year I opened my 2019 organizer PDF and Preview did not recognize it as a form. The only way I can edit it is by manually using the Markup bar, which would take forever.

[…]

So then I went back to my old machine (a 2015 MacBook Pro still running Mohave) and sure enough, BOTH PDFs were editable as forms.

So what’s going on? Why can’t Preview under Catalina edit a PDF form?

Paul Haddad:

I just got bit by a 10.15 issue earlier today, for some reason my printer/scanner thing is only recognized as a printer now. Booted up a 10.14 VM and it scanned fine. Not quite worse OS X ever, but pretty close.

It also doesn’t like Tripp Lite UPS hardware.

Catalina Reviews

Catalina App Issues

Adobe:

Lightroom Classic 8.4.1 work with macOS 10.15 (Catalina) but have these known compatibility issues. You may want to remain on your current version of macOS until these issues have been resolved.

Adobe:

Photoshop 20.0.6 and later versions work with macOS 10.15 (Catalina) but have these known compatibility issues. You may want to remain on your current version of macOS until these issues have been resolved.

Dave Nanian:

As you might expect, the “new way” Catalina splits your drive into two parts makes things more complicated. The details are hidden from you by Apple for the most part, but SuperDuper has to know, and handle, all the various tricky cases that arise from that split (not to mention the technical details of tying the volumes together, which we figured out early in the summer). […] That beta works great for most users, but will have some limitations around images[…]

Keith Gugliotto:

One other thing – the Add iTunes button and menu item won’t work, and dragging directly from Music will also fail. Work around that by dragging the tracks you need directly from the Finder.

Noodlesoft:

As of this time, Hazel is not compatible with Catalina. Catalina introduces a number of changes and bugs which affect Hazel, many of which are still unresolved. It is strongly advised that you do not upgrade to Catalina if Hazel is an important part of your workflow.

Paul Kim:

Apple: We would like to contact you concerning a crash. Could you please file an FBA?
Me: You’re contacting me now, but sure. files FBA #1
Apple: marks FBA #1 as unactionable
Me: files FBA #2
Apple: crickets
Me: files DTS to look at FBA #2
Apple: crickets*

Motif:

There are two issues you will encounter if you upgrade to Catalina currently:

The first: Upon opening an existing project, all images on all pages are missing

[…]

The second: Images in the image tray appear pixelated

CoreCode:

Specifically, a bug in ‘Paddle’ may cause MacUpdater to ‘forget’ its license-information if you upgrade to ‘Catalina’. Therefore, please make sure that you know your license-code if you plan to upgrade to ‘Catalina’ soon.

tunabelly:

Since all of us developers have been given 3 days notice from Paddle to either update to the newest V4 framework or migrate from V3->V4 for every app, before macOS Catalina is released, they need to step to the plate.

It’s not realistic that we can all do this within 3 days, so I’m proposing that Paddle email everyone who’s purchased a Mac app telling them that they regret the situation and wish that the developers could have had more time. Explain that updates are coming from all developers and that each app will need the license key re-entered after upgrading to Catalina.

OskarGroth:

Seriously, does Paddle have anyone running the ship over there these days? How is it that Catalina has time to go public before you realise that your SDK is completely broken? […] I couldn’t believe it when I got the email saying “We have increased the number of activations for all end users who didn’t previously have any remaining. This way they can activate normally after installing Catalina without contacting your support team.”. Do you seriously not realise what an extreme hack of a temporary solution this is? Not to mention corroding the trust between Paddle and Merchants as you tamper with their activation limits to solve your own front-end bugs?

Matthias Gansrigler:

Since I’m having trouble with the macOS Catalina-compatible ScreenFloat v1.5.17 update getting through review, I thought it’d be best to publish a quick note about how to make sure ScreenFloat works for you on macOS Catalina. Otherwise, you’ll probably end up with screenshots of your Desktop, instead of the actual windows you’re trying to take a screenshot of.

Objective Development:

When you install Little Snitch on macOS Catalina, you may get an error message “Little Snitch version mismatch detected” after restarting your Mac. This is due to a new bug in the operating system.

Catalina sometimes refuses to perform the necessary boot cache update for the newly installed kernel extension. As a consequence, macOS still uses the previous version of the kernel extension from the outdated cache, which then results in a version conflict with all other updated components of Little Snitch.

Houdah Software:

macOS 10.15 Catalina bans third-party applications from searching the Mail.app Spotlight index. On macOS Catalina, HoudahSpot will thus no longer be able to find your Apple Mail messages.

Pilotmoon Software:

If you use the Alfred, Fantastical or TaskPaper extensions for PopClip, you’ll need to download updated versions of those extensions (by clicking the links in this sentence).

Dolphin Emulator:

macOS users: If you want to continue using Dolphin in macOS, please do not update to macOS 10.15! Every macOS release tends to break Dolphin in some way, but this year is especially problematic. We’ll have details on this in the future.

See also: known issues for my apps.

Previously:

Update (2019-10-31): Thomas Warfield:

It has become clear that macOS 10.15 (Catalina) is Apple’s buggiest Mac update ever.  We have identified a number of bugs in Catalina that are causing crashes to our apps.

MeldaProduction:

So the real question is, do you want the developers of your DAW and plugins to spend their days trying to fix the problems arising from system upgrades, or to improve their own software products, making them more functional, more powerful, faster, stable and easier to use? If it's the latter one, then the only solution seems to switch to Windows. The only one, who can make a difference is you, the customer.

See also: Arduino.

Apps Lost With Catalina

Jim Dalrymple:

For those that have been following along, 64-bit is not that new. Apple has been talking to developers about the 64-bit transition for several years. Chances are your apps have already been updated to take advantage of the architecture.

However, if your apps haven’t been updated, they won’t run on the new operating system. You should be aware of that before you upgrade.

Peter Cohen:

Important macOS Catalina upgrade tip: Remember that checking your Mac hard drive for 32-bit apps only reveals the apps that won’t work which you have installed. It won’t show you anything about the state of apps you have in the cloud, via app stores like the MAS, Steam, etc.

A. Lee Bennett Jr.:

Not that I’m updating from macOS 10.12 to 10.15 super soon, but I’m looking at the non-64-bit apps and worrying[…]

TLA Systems (previously):

DragThing is written using the 32-bit Carbon APIs that Apple have now removed in macOS 10.15 Catalina. It will no longer run if you update to Catalina, and there are no plans to make a new version that will.

We are sorry to say, DragThing has launched its last app.

John Gruber:

I haven’t used DragThing in many many years, but for a long time it was essential to my workflow, and I firmly believe it was a much better launcher than Apple’s own system Dock ever has been. DragThing had features — like the ability to create custom palettes that only appeared in a certain app — that I don’t know how one would replicate today.

Fetch Softworks (previously):

Apple had made it clear that 32-bit apps like Fetch 5.7 weren’t long for this world, so it looked like the time had come to lay Fetch to rest for good. But I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye, and it occurred to me that there was a third option, something between finishing Fetch 6 and letting Fetch die: I could port Fetch 5.7’s Carbon user interface to Cocoa and make a 64-bit Fetch 5.8. […] Fetch 5.8 is now in beta testing; you can sign up to test it here. It currently implements about 90% of Fetch 5.7.7’s features with about 50% of Fetch 5.7.7’s reliability.

AccountEdge:

While AccountEdge is currently a 32 bit application, we have been hard at work on a 64-bit version.

[…]

We do not have an update and we still strongly encourage you to delay your upgrade to macOS Catalina until we have released a compatible version of AccountEdge.

Nilay Patel:

Every late-2000s tech blogger take a moment of silence: the legendary Turbo.264 HD video encoding dongle will never get a 64-bit app and so is now officially dead

Fujitsu (previously):

The 64 bit application for macOS is not provided for the old scanner models such as ScanSnap S1500, S1500M, and etc. because their support periods have already expired. If you wish to have the 64 bit application for macOS, please consider purchasing ScanSnap products that are currently available on the market.

Brent Simmons:

It’s not my intention, and it’s not what I want to happen — but NetNewsWire 3.3.2 apparently does not launch in the next version of macOS (10.15, Catalina).

[…]

NetNewsWire 3.3.2 was the last release of the full version that I worked on, before selling NetNewsWire to Black Pixel, and I’ve heard from lots of people that they’ve been using it ever since. They never switched.

That version is still unequaled, in certain respects.

Stickshift Software:

Mailsmith is no longer under active development. It will not be upgraded for 64-bit macOS compatibility.

PowerMail also looks like it will not get a 64-bit version.

rolleiflex (John Siracusa):

I know there is a contingent of people who are stuck at Adobe CS6, whose certain critical components are 32 bit. Since Adobe no longer sells permanent licenses, opting to only rent their software instead, it’s impossible to get these updated. And these expensive and still-in-use licenses are going to die the moment people update to Catalina.

Toon Boom (via Ben Juwono):

If you have Harmony 16 or Storyboard Pro 6 (or prior versions), they will not open in Catalina. Harmony 17 and future versions of Toon Boom’s software will be compatible with macOS Catalina.

Casey McDermott (Hacker News):

Sadly, we just decided to abandon the Cocoa update for our app. It’s not easy to walk away from 3 years of work, but better 3 years lost than 5. Time will be better spent on our Windows version.

TurtleSoft started Mac-only with Excel templates in 1987. The first prototype of our current stand-alone accounting app was in the early 90s. Since then, programming for Mac has gone through four primary programming languages (Pascal, C++, Objective C, Swift). Three, soon to be four chip architectures (680x0, PPC, Intel, ARM). Four frameworks (MacApp or Think Class Library, PowerPlant, Carbon, Cocoa).

Casey McDermott:

The plan was to subcontract the Cocoa conversion in parallel. We assumed there would be tons of experienced Carbon->Cocoa programmers so late in the game who could whip it out in a year or less. The bigger offshore subs would only touch it on an hourly basis, estimated $100K to $200K. One QT guy quoted $30K for both platforms, which was pretty much our maximum budget. He took the first draw payment then failed. 3 others tried pure Cocoa for a similar price, but got nowhere.

In 2015 we finished the 64-bit prep, and started work on Cocoa in-house. Based on past updates, 4 years seemed like plenty of time. Now, after 2 or 3 programmer-years, a realistic guess is another 2 or 3 needed to finish. Our app has a lot of interface code. Running a construction business is complicated. We do a lot more than QuickBooks.

Casey McDermott:

Yesterday I checked up on a few other companies we know who have Mac software in the AEC market. Most died off years ago. Two are now Windows-only. Three will have 64-bit apps “soon”. So far, nobody is ready for Catalina yet.

TextWrangler:

PSA: with macOS Catalina coming soon, you’re going to need a 64-bit TextWrangler. @bbedit is it. (Seriously: you’ll feel right at home.)

Tyshawn Cormier:

What I missed is with 32-bit support gone, iPhoto and Aperture no longer launch. That’s a little strange. System Information definitely reported both of those apps as 64-bit.

Howard Oakley:

If you need to retain access to key 32-bit apps, or anything else which won’t run in Catalina, a VM running Mojave or earlier is a highly practical solution, and very straightforward to set up using the latest Parallels Desktop 15.

My brother has had trouble even getting Aperture to work in a macOS 10.14 virtual machine. See also: Capture One.

jessamyn:

Super disappointed in @OverDriveLibs decision to not create a 64 bit app so Mac users could listen to audiobooks with their existing app. Instead, their whole system silently fails and we have to dig around in help files to figure out wtf is up.

Joe Fabisevich:

Apple deprecating 32-bit support is completely reasonable but I can’t believe I’m going to have to run a VM to download library books now. Gotta have my library books.

Kyzrati (via Steve Troughton-Smith, Hacker News):

Clearly I was already on the fence about the whole Mac thing before, otherwise it might’ve happened earlier (I did spend a while researching and testing the potential for a solution on Macs, in preparation for a potential future public release), but Apple has time and again taken actions which are clearly hostile to developers as they continue the trend of building and reinforcing their own walled garden.

Among their latest moves, Apple’s newest OS drops support for 32-bit applications, which will unnecessarily render a huge library of software and games unusable on Macs, compared to Microsoft which does a great job of maintaining Windows backwards compatibility in that area even as most modern software tends to be 64-bit. This makes it far easier to hold together Cogmind’s existing tech so I can focus on things players actually care about, like more features.

Aspyr (Hacker News):

Any 32-bit Aspyr games not listed above will be incompatible with MacOS 10.15.

jasper:

in a few days with the launch of the new 64 bit-only mac os, millions of games will no longer work, including my own. how are are other developers approaching this? will you remove your 32 bit games from Steam etc?

The Tape Drive (via Hacker News):

A bundle called IncompatibleAppsList.bundle found in /Library/Apple/Library/Bundles/ in macOS Catalina contains [a list] of 235 apps that are incompatible with Catalina. This list is used by the Catalina installation process to show the user a list of currently installed apps that are incompatible. Many of the apps listed are included only because older versions of the apps are incompatible as noted by the strings included with the bundle.

Previously:

Update (2019-10-17): Rob Griffiths:

With the release of Catalina, though, we’ve decided to remove Witch 3 from the Mac App Store, effective today. Why? Because Witch 3 is 32-bit code, and it will not run in macOS Catalina. Unfortunately, the App Store will lie about this if you look at the Witch 3 listing in the Mac App Store[…] In addition, it’s been three years since we released Witch 4, which is a very generous “sunset period” for the prior release. Hence, it’s time for Witch 3 to retire from the Mac App Store.

Update (2019-10-21): Qdea:

Because Synchronize! Pro X is a 32-bit application, it is not supported by Apple on MacOS 10.15 Catalina and later operating systems. A 64-bit version of Synchronize! Pro X is not planned.

Update (2019-11-26): Fat Cat Software:

Unfortunately, the new Music app does not provide the necessary hooks for PowerTunes to be able to function with it the way it could with iTunes. Therefore, I’ve decided that I’ll be discontinuing development of PowerTunes.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Somebody should tell Apple that AppleGlot doesn’t install on Catalina, which makes their localization page and glossary downloads pretty useless 😛

Previously:

Update (2019-11-27): Levelator is not making the transition to 64-bit and so won’t run on Catalina.

Update (2020-01-03): Apple3Forever:

Steam / Catalina 32-bit App-ocalypse notes:

I had roughly 1000 Mac games in my Steam library pre-Catalina.

Today, the number of runnable 64-bit Mac games sits at 278.

~72% of my Mac Steam library was killed off.

See also: SwiftOnSecurity.

Nathalie Lawhead:

Our idea of progress shouldn’t come coupled with destroying the past. This is counterproductive to the art movement in games because art requires an actual history. We can’t have that if we’re constantly losing work from the small devs that don’t make enough money to be important to large corporations like Apple.

[…]

Games aren’t a service. It’s like asking for a director to keep updating a movie, or for a musician to keep changing their song so it can keep running.

Matt Birchler:

I know this is more complicated than can be shared in a tweet, but preserving older software is important and these sorts of stats are brutal.

“Devs were told to update” works for active devs, but games built by studios that don’t exist anymore don’t have that option.

Unfortunately, I think the only solution for preserving history is emulation.

Sophie H:

Thread of LRT is absolutely right about Apple effectively expelling all smaller developers who create experimental work. My ability to cover a $100 fee annually has varied WILDLY and even tho I can justify it right now, there’s no fucking way I can justify notarising every project

Rosyna Keller:

I want to reiterate that on November 18th, CodeWeavers released the first beta of a Wine that can run 32-bit software (in bottles) on 64-bit-only macOS.

Update (2020-04-20): AccountEdge (tweet):

We are disappointed to share that we will not be able to offer a Catalina-compliant version of AccountEdge - now or in the future. In the end, AccountEdge’s 30-year-old codebase proved too outdated to establish compatibility with Apple’s newest operating system. In spite of a multi-year project that involved a team of developers and analysts, it’s a project we will not be able to complete.

Catalina Supplemental Update

Eric Slivka:

Alongside iOS 13.1.3, Apple today also released a supplemental update for macOS Catalina, addressing several bugs from the initial public release version, including a problem with Setup Assistant hanging during Catalina installation.

Presumably, if the Mail issues were fixed they would have been called out in the release notes.

masterleep:

Wish they would call it [macOS 15.0.1] and dispense with unversioned “supplemental updates”.

Who knows which version you’ll get if you specify “10.15” when downloading an installer.

Howard Oakley:

It’s just under a gigabyte in size, which is quite substantial for such an early update before the first full update to Catalina.

Update (2019-10-16): Jeff Johnson:

The “Supplemental Update” supplemented my Desktop with this.

Mine, too. Slightly worrying to find system stuff in there, not just the expected files.

See also: MacRumors.

Update (2019-10-23): Howard Oakley:

If you’re really lucky, the same can happen again, during a Catalina update, or when upgrading from a Catalina beta version.

[…]

Some users have reported that certain files which get put in the Relocated Items folder are protected by SIP, and can’t be trashed. If that’s the case, you should be more attentive to those items, and this suggests that there might be a problem with your Catalina installation. All system files protected by SIP should be relocated correctly, the great majority moving onto Catalina’s new System volume.

Update (2019-10-25): Max Seelemann:

Two of my fav features in one picture: Relocated items and deprecated 32bit apps

Update (2020-04-17): Jesse Squires:

When I first upgraded to macOS Catalina, there was a “Relocated Items” folder on the desktop. Well, actually it was an alias to /Users/Shared/Relocated Items/. This was expected, given the new “security features“ in Catalina, which includes a new read-only system volume. What I did not expect was to see this folder reappear with every single update.

Catalina “softwareupdate” Can Download Old Installers

Armin Briegel:

The softwareupdate command has gained a new option in Catalina:

% softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer

Will download the latest ‘Install macOS’ application to this Mac’s /Applications folder. This is extremely useful for many admin tasks.

The --fetch-full-installer flag has a sub-flag: --full-installer-version which allows you to download a specific version.

% softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.14.6

Oddly, specifying either 10.14 or 10.14.0 works, but to download Catalina you need to specify 10.15 or else it will fail with an “Update not found” error.

These installers can be used with DropDMG’s Create macOS Install Disk command.

Previously:

Update (2019-10-16): There are some questions about which old versions this works for.

Update (2020-06-01): Helge Heß:

I was refusing to install Catalina on my machines for a loong time, living on 10.14. Eventually I did, Xcode 11.4 told me I had to.

You can’t imagine how hard it is to rebuild a working 10.14 dev install. No simple “download installer and put it on a partition” 🤷‍♀️ Wasted hours.

A problem is that the Mojave installer doesn’t run on Catalina, can’t be used to install it on a different partition from within 10.15. And the rescue system brings up 10.15 (or 10.10). So I’m trying to go with the external boot volume thing next …

See also: How to Downgrade a New Mac to Mojave From Catalina, Xcode 11.4 and Swift 5.2.

Update (2021-12-20): See also: Howard Oakley.

Twitter for Mac Returns

Twitter:

The new Twitter for Mac app is here! We’re rolling out an updated Twitter experience made especially for those of you on Mac. Available in the App Store.

Christopher Wong:

The new @Twitter for Mac app is truly one of the funniest (read: worst) pieces of software I’ve ever used. Screenshot below of the full screen compose window.

Project Catalyst seems like an unmitigated disaster

Mario Guzmán:

I mean, naturally, you drag a slider with your finger or holding down on the mouse... Well, that’s what I was trying to do with the slider in the Twitter iPad app for Mac... didn’t go so well. LOL #Catalyst

Ben Sandofsky:

Twitter’s new Mac app uses less than half the memory of the website, and the experience is way better.

Owen Williams:

Wait so Twitter made a Mac app using Apple’s ‘Catalyst’ tool for converting iPad apps.... and it’s...worse than their Progressive Web App? Color me surprised, the iPad app sucks too.

Matt Birchler:

Text selection in the new Twitter app for Mac is insane.

Nolan O’Brien:

A lot of engineering went into bringing the full iOS feature set over to Mac in a very tight timeframe.

There are definitely areas to follow up and improve. We’ll keep iterating and making things better, but in the meantime, check out some of the great features Twitter for Mac offers

Photo uploads get a real boost on Mac. WebP, HEIC and TIFF images now supported in addition to PNG, JPEG and Twitter for Mac supports up to 4096x4096 photo uploads, that’s 16 megapixels!

You can view those UHD images on Twitter for Mac too, of course!

We’ve added support for multiple composition windows at the same time with the ability to resume them if you quit Twitter before you Tweet.

Drag & Drop of photos and GIFs feels very natural on Mac too. We have some work to do for copy & paste of images into composer, so look for that improvement in future iterations too.

[…]

And lastly, don’t forget all the great features that Twitter for iOS has that have never been in a native Mac app before, all here from the get-go. 🥳

Previously:

A Better Finder Rename 11

publicspace.net:

Version 11 allows you to add multiple file filters to your action list, so that different types of files can finally be renamed differently within a single multi-step rename.

You can preview both the file names and the filter criteria directly in the preview table.

[…]

Version 10 introduced support for using meta-data tags, such as shooting dates, camera, image or song information to rename files. Version 11 builds on that foundation and adds new meta-data tags, vastly extends the range of supported file types and improves the speed and reliability of meta-data handling.

[…]

We have now added using natural language analysis technology for identifying grammatical structures and lexical classes, so that we can implement conventions, such as capitalizing proper nouns, etc.

It’s great to see that this utility, which has been around since System 7, is still going strong, despite the basic bulk renaming feature that Apple added to Finder.

There’s an interesting pricing strategy. It’s $20 for a new license or $13 to upgrade. You can also pay $40 for a new license or $20 to upgrade to get a “forever” license that includes “all future product upgrades.”

FAQ:

Yes, all of our current Mac OS X products are available on the Mac App Store.

Unfortunately, Apple have forced us to change the name of most of our products resulting in more than a little confusion. The table below shows the correspondances between the different products and their Mac App Store counterparts.

[…]

We are trying to keep feature parity between the Mac App Store versions and the ones that we sell directly, but Apple’s Mac App Store submission guidelines makes this quite hard and we will probably in future have to remove further features from the MAS versions of our products.

See also: reviews from 1999 and 2006.

Jira Cloud for Mac

Atlassian:

Jira Cloud for Mac is a snappy and simple way for software developers to work with tasks and update their team on progress.

[…]

For a powerful product like Jira, building a Mac application from scratch would have taken significantly longer. But thanks to Mac Catalyst, our iOS developers became Mac developers overnight. It was that easy.

Here’s the App Store link.

Matt Birchler:

I’m sad to say the Jira Mac app is a massive disappointment. It’s ungodly slow, spikes CPU usage to 150%+ whenever I click anything, has poor keyboard shortcut support, is less powerful than the web, and has terrible text entry.

Hard uninstall 🙁

Copyright © 2000–2024 Michael Tsai.