Archive for August 29, 2025

Friday, August 29, 2025

SpotTest 1.1

Howard Oakley:

Spotlight is so substantial, almost silent in the log, and impenetrable that the best approach to diagnosing its problems is to test it out in a controlled way. Mints has been doing that by creating a folder of files containing an unusual word, then searching for that. Although that’s still useful for a quick test, we need something more focused and flexible, and that’s what SpotTest aims to deliver.

Following deep dives into how Spotlight indexes and searches metadata and contents of files, and how it can search text extracted from images and the results of image analysis, I’ve realised that different test files are required, together with alternative means of search. For example, the standard approach used in compiled apps, with NSMetadataQuery, is incapable of finding content tags obtained using Visual Look Up, which only appear when using the mdfind command. SpotTest takes these into account.

[…]

A perfect 13/15 result from NSMetadataQuery is only possible after waiting a day or more for background mediaanalysisd processing to recognise and extract the text in file I, a PNG image.

Howard Oakley:

As promised, this new version of my Spotlight indexing and search utility SpotTest extends its reach beyond the user’s Home folder, and can now test and search any regular volume that’s connected to your Mac and mounted in /Volumes.

Previously:

Sizes of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

Alexander Gromnitsky (via Hacker News):

At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes ‘AI’ (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: ’new’ and ‘old’.

It looks like a steady, pretty linear increase until you realize that the graph use a log scale…

Previously:

PaperVault 2.0

Miguel Arroz (Mastodon):

PaperVault stores information as sequences of QR Codes you can print and scan easily, protected by a password only you know. Data is secured using industry-standard robust encryption algorithms.

[…]

Vendor lock-in is a bad thing. Your data is yours and I don’t want to hold it hostage. Therefore, I’m publishing the data format used when printing to QR Codes. View the data format technical documentation ≫

Neat idea, seems to be easy to use and thoughtfully implemented, and it’s free. Scanning—and verification—can be done using an iPhone controlled from the Mac via Continuity. Larger documents get split into multiple QR codes, printed in a grid, but I was surprised how much one QR Code can store.

Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library

VintageApple:

Nick R. was generous enough to send me his entire vintage Mac programming library to be destructively scanned and shared with the community. We’ve added a few of our own for a pretty huge collection (over 150) of vintage Mac programming related books.

Via Rui Carmo:

[This] is a great resource for people interested in vintage Mac programming, including the original Think Pascal and Think C books I used when I was hacking away at 68k Mac apps.

The books are mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, so it doesn’t have the Rhapsody Developer’s Guide or the early books on Carbon, Cocoa, and the other technologies from NeXT.

Previously: