Archive for September 17, 2025

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

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:

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:

Previously: