Marcin Wichary:
As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.
[…]
Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
Adam Engst:
Wichary is best known for Shift Happens, his multivolume masterwork about keyboards, edited by TidBITS contributor Glenn Fleishman. While Shift Happens is a visual tour de force, it is limited by the constraints of paper.
In contrast, Frame of Preference animates these historical interfaces in a charmingly interactive way. Each illustration is actually a fully emulated Mac from that era, thanks to Mihai Parparita’s Infinite Mac project. So you don’t just read about Susan Kare’s original Control Panel; you open it on the virtual Mac’s screen. Instructions in the text are shown with odd squares that turn out to be empty checkboxes—complete the action described, and you get a highlight and checkmark. If you click the Details button on the label by the emulated Mac, you’ll find “extra stuff to play with.” As you work your way through the evolution of control panels, you’ll encounter nine Macs and a NeXT Cube.
Dr. Drang:
Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted to turn the clever thing off so I could get the battery to 100% just for that day.
You will probably not be shocked to hear that I didn’t find the solution by simply opening System Settings and scanning the Battery panel—I had to do a Kagi search for it. It wasn’t that the toggle was buried several layers deep or that it was outside the Battery hierarchy. No, the problem was that Apple had put the toggle in a place where toggles—or any kind of control or data entry field—don’t belong.
Marco Arment:
I still can’t find anything in the System Settings app.
Previously:
Battery Life Design History Mac macOS 15 Sequoia System 6 System Preferences
Ryan Jones:
I am so out of patience for “Optimize Storage” on Apple devices.
Now I have to take half my day to figure out how to reduce Photos and Messages without nuking them.
My best solution: Disconnect iCloud Photos. That will delete all local photo copies. Then reconnect it. 🤷♂️
That worked. All local photos were offloaded.
Except for the Shared With You stuff from Messages.
Alex Greenland:
Yesss! My biggest gripe. With Photos and iCloud Drive on macOS and iOS.
“Optimise Storage” should leave me with comfortable space, not just leaving me a few gigs of headroom.
It’s like it tries to fill up your disk first, then takes files away, but never enough.
I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.
Nick Spreen:
I feel like that’s not really a problem in comparison to 300gb system data
Previously:
iCloud iCloud Photo Library iOS iOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Messages in iCloud Messages.app Photos.app Storage
Jamf Threat Labs:
After downloading and inspecting the binary, we confirmed that it was indeed both code-signed and notarized — a detail that raised immediate concern given its malicious nature.
[…]
The application itself is named “Gmeet_updater.app,” though there’s little effort to align that branding with the user experience, suggesting a rushed or careless repackaging process.
After confirming that the Developer Team ID was used to distribute malicious payloads, Jamf Threat Labs reported it to Apple. Since then, the associated certificate appears to have been revoked.
[…]
Jamf Threat Labs identified at least three distinct macOS infostealer samples that were successfully signed and notarized using the same Team ID (A2FTSWF4A2) and later distributed in the wild.
Thomas Clement:
Notarization is a sad story. It doesn’t provide great security and is a barrier for many groups of people (young, indie, game developers, developers whose primary platform is not the Mac, etc…) to publish an app on the Mac. If Apple wants more games on the Mac, the first step is to make notarization free. Just make it free.
Or just get rid of it? It’s still a major pain, adding time and friction to each build. The notarization server still goes down at the most inconvenient times. There are some basic package structure and code signing checks that are useful, but these would be better if made available locally as part of Xcode. It’s not clear to me that the malware checks are adding much value over what we already get from code signing and macOS’s built-in malware detection.
rameerez:
I’ve lost this week trying to get my macOS app notarized
Notarization jobs would just stall and get stuck on Xcode for days!
So I wrote an email to Apple Developer Support
And the next thing I know is they TERMINATED my entire Developer Account?!
Previously:
Apple Developer Account Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Malware Notarization Security
VDT Labs (via Dave DeLong):
View and edit your JSON files in “tree” or “text” mode. “Tree” mode offers a great and error proof way to manipulate your JSON, by allowing you to easily add, reorder, delete, copy & paste the items. The “text” mode offers a quick way to interact with the raw text which makes up the JSON and to investigate invalid JSONs.
[…]
The powerful HTTP Client included in the app, at no additional costs, allows you to easily create and perform HTTP requests. While its main purpose is to ease the fetch of JSON content from a server, it can be used to get or upload any content, including binary.
Fat Cat Software:
Mac and iOS developers must edit a variety of property list and JSON files while developing their applications. PlistEdit Pro makes editing these files easier by providing an intuitive and powerful interface. In addition to being able to copy and paste or drag and drop property list data around, PlistEdit Pro also offers powerful find and replace functionality, as well as structure definitions which provide easy access to commonly used keys in various standard property list files.
Previously:
Developer Tool JSON Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Property Lists
