Tahoe AppleScript Timeouts

A reader writes:

As a fellow AppleScripter, I thought you might enjoy knowing about a small Tahoe Finder bug that I have not seen mentioned anywhere and that caused all my carefully crafted (and expertly developed, of course) automations to grind to a halt and collapse, seemingly at random.

For some unfathomable reason, it is no longer permitted to tell application "Finder" to empty trash when the trash is already empty: instead of erroring out or, as before, working silently, the operation now hangs indefinitely. This means that scripts that include this seemingly throwaway line to clean up after themselves will randomly start failing with no error message. In Keyboard Maestro, inline scripts fail quickly with a timeout message, but external scripts just hang.

The trick is simply to substitute if ((items of trash) as list) is not {} then empty trash.

For me, running that script through Script Editor or other means fails with a timeout (error -1712, a.k.a. errAETimeout) after 2 minutes. Recording an Activity Monitor sample of Finder seems to show that Finder is not busy doing anything related to the script. It’s as if it never received the command or else it replied but the reply got lost.

A small percentage of SpamSieve users are seeing a similar issue with Apple Mail on Tahoe. Some very basic/quick commands to Mail time out, with Mail also looking like it’s not even processing the command. Sometimes AppleScript reports error -600 (a.k.a. procNotFound) instead of a timeout. Oddly, this seems to almost exclusively happen with POP accounts.

There was a similar bug in macOS Bug Sur, but it only affected apps running in Rosetta.

Previously:

• macOS Tahoe 26
• Remaining Issues in Big Sur
• Script Debugger 8

Update (2025-09-24): I’ve now seen several more cases of macOS Tahoe reporting AppleScript timeouts when it should be reporting other types of errors. For example, scripts that ask Mail for properties that don’t exist will intermittently hang for 2 minutes and then time out. This also seems to be the case with the POP errors that some SpamSieve users are seeing. The underlying issue seems to be a new error that Mail is encountering when accessing the junk mailbox, but instead of reporting the error back to the script it waits and then times out.

Previously:

• SpamSieve 3.2

Update (2025-10-04): Adam Tow:

In macOS 26 Tahoe, it’s the retrieving of the error which is dramatically slower over the same code running on macOS 15 Sequoia. I had hoped that Apple would fix this bug (FB20174869), but the later betas and GM release brought no relief.

Apple Mail AppleScript Bug Finder Mac macOS Tahoe 26 MsgFiler POP SpamSieve

DropDMG 3.7

DropDMG 3.7 updates my app for creating and working with Mac disk image files for macOS Tahoe 26. This version adds support for Apple Sparse Image Format (ASIF) disk images and Liquid Glass icons.

Some interesting issues were:

• Kenichi Yoshida redesigned the app icon, keeping the same concept but adapting it for the Liquid Glass style and macOS’s new volume icon. As a utility app, it uses a gray squircle.

• I’m not in general a fan of Tahoe’s menu item icons, but I think they work pretty well in DropDMG’s File menu. These are concrete commands that straightforwardly map to icons, and most of them already used these same icons in the toolbar, anyway.

• Tahoe changes the mounted disk image icon for the first time since Big Sur, so DropDMG’s badged icons now use a different size and perspective.

• ASIF disk images ended up being a lot more work to support than previous new formats. This is because they’re manipulated using diskutil instead of hdiutil. The two tools take different command-line arguments and don’t support all the same features or handle edge cases in the same way. I’ve tried to make ASIF appear in the user interface as just another format, but under the hood it’s using different tools (or combinations of tools) for different operations. There are lots of different combinations of source and destination formats, some of which require special handling.

• There seems to be a Tahoe bug related to Auto Layout for toolbar overflow that can cause a crash. It doesn’t like directly resizing the window to a much smaller size, e.g. because of restoration at launch or because you dragged the window corner too quickly. If the app is crashing at launch, you can reset the saved window size to avoid the problem. I’ve also adjusted the initial window size for new installs.

Previously:

• ASIF Disk Images in macOS Tahoe
• DropDMG 3.6.9

Update (2025-09-26): Mario Guzmán:

I’m so ready for #macOSTahoe 26.1 or 26.2 because damn, the amount of bugs 26.0 is pretty crazy.

I’ve already had 3 native, first-party apps crash when attempting to modify their toolbars.

As soon as I add or remove item and click OK, boom. Crash.

This has included Finder, Mail, and Notes.

I just got a customer report saying that a particular disk image file doesn’t mount on Tahoe but that the very same file works just fine on multiple Macs with other OS versions.

Auto Layout Bug Design Disk Image DropDMG Icons Liquid Glass Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26