Archive for July 16, 2024

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

macOS 15 Sequoia Public Beta

Juli Clover:

Apple today released the first beta of an upcoming macOS Sequoia update to its public beta testing group, giving the general public a chance to try out the new operating system's features ahead of its fall launch. The first public beta includes the same content as the third developer beta.

[…]

All of the Apple Intelligence features coming to iOS 18 will also be available in macOS Sequoia , but Apple does not plan to add these until later in the beta testing process. Apple Intelligence includes Writing Tools for editing, proofreading, and summarizing text in apps, and an Image Playground allows for AI images to be created from prompts.

Here are the release notes. Curiously, there was just a second developer beta 3 update. It’s really frustrating that they’re calling this a beta, and presumably not moving the release date back, even though it’s far from feature complete.

Jason Snell:

Every so often, Apple comes out with a new operating system feature that takes me completely by surprise. So it is with iPhone Mirroring, a new app that lets you view and operate your iPhone from the comfort of your Mac.

[…]

The screen appears flawless, operating at high frame rates and even transmitting audio back to the Mac. I was able to click around and play games as if I were running the apps right on my Mac.

That said, I did encounter some issues. Apple says that the screen will automatically rotate into horizontal orientation when an app requires it, which I found to be true, but there seems to be no way to force a rotation when you’d prefer to use an app horizontally that also works vertically. I also couldn’t seem to bring up Control Center, enter “jiggle mode” to move or remove apps or widgets. And when I was in horizontal orientation, I kind of wished I could make the window bigger—even if all it did was blow up the content from the iPhone.

[…]

Depending on how you feel about the new Photos app interface—and it’s definitely got some issues—it might be a blessing that Apple has passed over the Mac. But I don’t love the idea that at last, Apple’s building a proper tool for removing background clutter for images… and apparently the Mac’s not going to get that feature this year?

John Voorhees:

iPhone Mirroring isn’t a feature I’ve found myself using daily, but it can come in handy. For instance, the app that controls my Roomba isn’t available on the Mac. When the vacuum is on another floor of my house, I like to check in on it to see if it’s gotten stuck or needs emptying. In the past, that has meant checking the app on my iPhone from time to time as the Roomba does its thing. With iPhone Mirroring, I can simply open that app in a window on my Mac and flip over to it for a quick status check now and then. It’s still an interruption of what I’m doing, but it’s less so than grabbing my iPhone.

As much as I’ve enjoyed iPhone Mirroring, it has been buggy. In fact, for most of the past week, it didn’t work at all. […] Nothing I tried would fix the problem until, on a whim, I opened the microphone access section of my Mac’s System Settings and toggled microphone access off and then on again for one random app I haven’t used in months, which fixed it.

[…]

Why it took macOS until 2024 to include basic window tiling is beyond me, but it will finally arrive with Sequoia, and it is nicely done. There are too many third-party apps that have filled this gap in macOS to list, but as well as window tiling is implemented in Sequoia, I don’t think the best third-party apps have anything to worry about.

Previously:

Update (2024-07-25): Norbert Doerner:

The ugly “System Settings.app” claims that the Mac is not connected to the Internet, which is utter crap, as it is.

And then it claims my Apple ID is not enrolled in the dev programme, which of course it is.

[…]

Two hours and another FIVE reboots later, macOS 15 was finally able to download something[…] But after ANOTHER two hours, it was still stuck there, nothing moving.

Update (2024-07-30): Ilja A. Iwas:

Seems there’s a change in macOS Sequoia’s KVO mechanism, which causes crashes in GarageSale. Our custom ORM layer uses proxy objects, which queue KVO observations until their actual target object is loaded. The OS doesn’t seem to like that anymore. 😢

Update (2024-07-31): Stephen Hackett:

I filed this as Feedback FB14077154, and I have some good news! In our continued tradition, the Reminders team at Apple have heard our collective cry and have taken action, adding a new control to the Inspector in Reminders on the Mac.

But you still can’t move tasks with drag and drop. The similar looking Passwords app has the same problem. Is this hard to do with SwiftUI?

Previously:

Update (2024-08-08): Juli Clover (9to5Mac):

Apple today released the third beta of an upcoming macOS Sequoia update to its public beta testing group, giving the general public a chance to try out the new operating system's features ahead of its fall launch.

Previously:

An Ode to the Volume Swipe

M.G. Siegler:

I found myself thinking about the AirPods…

Specifically, how truly great the volume swiping mechanism is on the AirPods Pro. This must be my most-used gesture in life beyond perhaps swiping up to unlock my phone. I have AirPods in my ears a good percentage of the day and I’m constantly swiping up or down on the stems to raise or lower the volume of whatever I’m listening to. It’s so handy, literally. It’s done so casually now that it’s second-nature.

Sebastiaan de With:

Reddit comments 8 years ago, when the AirPods were first introduced. Eight years later, AirPods are a bigger business if broken out in revenue than McDonalds or Nike.

Deservedly so. Amazon currently has a Prime Day deal with AirPods Pro 2023 for $168.99 (i.e. $10 more than the original AirPods).

Previously:

Update (2024-07-18): Flo Crivello:

TIL: there are more transistors in the AirPods Pro than in the CPU of a MacBook Pro from 2010

One is a professional laptop, the other earphones running on a battery weighing about 1 gram

Moore’s Law’s one hell of a thing

See also: John Gruber.

NSCopyObject, the Griefer That Keeps on Griefing

Wade Tregaskis:

Almost nobody intentionally uses NSCopyObject, but your superclass might, and therefore you might.

[…]

Someguides specify a better method, which is to manually zero out the copied object’s ivars and then repopulate them via formal property setters. That actually works with or without ARC, although it may break – causing memory leaks – if the superclass ever stops using NSCopyObject (or if NSCopyObject ever gets upgraded to understand reference-counted ivars that it currently does not). It’s also only possible in Objective-C because Swift doesn’t provide direct access to instance variables.

[…]

It appears that the best you can do [in Swift] is assume the superclass will always use NSCopyObject, if it does currently, and just manually increment the retain count. Like Objective-C with ARC, the language & standard library really don’t want you to actually do this, but at least in Swift it’s relatively straightforward[…]

[…]

And yet, Apple still use NSCopyObject themselves to this very day, in their own applications and frameworks – including major frameworks like AppKit that almost all 3rd party developers rely on. NSCell is still broken, three decades later, as is NSImage & NSImageRep, and NSAnimation. Most of those are explicitly designed to be subclassed, despite Apple’s own very clear instructions to never mix subclassing with NSCopyObject.

Maybe Apple doesn’t want to dig into that old code and possibly break apps. However, with recent major changes to NSView, perhaps it’s not entirely off the table.

Previously:

Update (2024-07-17): See also: Hacker News.

Chromium Browsers Preferencing *.google.com Domains

Simon Willison (Hacker News):

It turns out Google Chrome (via Chromium) includes a default extension which makes extra services available to code running on the *.google.com domains - tweeted about today by Luca Casonato, but the code has been there in the public repo since October 2013 as far as I can tell.

It looks like it’s a way to let Google Hangouts (or presumably its modern predecessors) get additional information from the browser, including the current load on the user’s CPU.

Since the code is in Chromium, it also affects Brave and Edge.

Luca Casonato:

This is interesting because it is a clear violation of the idea that browser vendors should not give preference to their websites over anyone elses.

The DMA codifies this idea into law: browser vendors, as gatekeepers of the internet, must give the same capabilities to everyone.

John Gruber:

I frequently bemoan the DMA’s ambiguity but here I’d say it’s crystal clear. Chrome is a designated gatekeeping platform, and granting system-monitoring privileges only to Google’s own websites is clearly in violation. Here’s a Hacker News comment from a purported Google employee who calls the feature “mundane” while admitting that Google Meet uses it as a tool to debug bad connections, even though no other web-based meeting app has access to it. I can think of no better example proving that Google views the open web as a platform that it owns.

Previously:

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