Archive for April 24, 2026

Friday, April 24, 2026

Git Tower 16

Tower 15:

This update introduces Automatic Branch Management, making it easier than ever to keep your repository tidy and clutter-free. We’ve also added significant improvements to the “History” view for better visualization of your work 😎

Tower 16:

Tower 16 for Mac is now in beta, and it introduces AI Commits, allowing you to generate commit messages and descriptions with the help of AI directly from your favorite Git client.

Every year there are lots of new features, but it still seems to me that they’re ignoring the basics:

Mario Guzmán:

Tower v15.0 got a new liquid glass icon but unfortunately, like some Apple-made icons early in the beta season, it looks blurry in the Dock.

Previously:

I Regret the Blood Pact I Have Made With iCloud Photos

Nick Heer (Mac Power Users Talk):

Apple’s next iCloud tier is a generous 6 TB, but it costs another $324 per year. I could buy a new 6 TB hard disk annually for that kind of money. […] A better solution is to recognize I do not need instant access to all 95,000 photos in my library, but iCloud has no room for this kind of nuance. The iCloud syncing preference is either on or off for the entire library.

[…]

So: the next best thing is to create a separate Photos library — one that will remain unsynced with iCloud. Photos makes this pretty easy by launching while holding the Option (⌥) key. But how does one move images from one library to the other? Photos is a single-window application — you cannot even open different images in new windows, let alone run separate libraries in separate windows. This should be possible, but it is not.

[…]

As a workaround, Apple allows you to import images from one Photos library into another — but not if the source library is synced with iCloud. You therefore need to turn off iCloud sync before proceeding, at which point you may discover that iCloud is not as dependable as you might have expected.

[…]

I have this library stored locally and backed up, or at least I though I did. I thought I could trust iCloud to be an extra layer of insurance. What I am now realizing is that iCloud may, in fact, be a liability. The simple fact is that I have no idea the state my photos library is currently in: which photos I have in full resolution locally, which ones are low-resolution with iCloud originals, and which ones have possibly been lost.

Colin Devroe:

I’m finally moving away from maticulously organizing my own library and just letting photos do it and using iCloud Photo Library. I’m syncing 170,000+ items. And it says “synced” when clearly it is not finished.

Previously:

Mac Easter Eggs

Doug Brown (Slashdot):

I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.

[…]

The “secret ROM image” text in particular seemed like it could be related to the picture shown above. I decided to dive deeper to see if I could figure out why the SCSI Manager contained these strings, in the hopes that I could solve the mystery. Would this be the clue I needed in order to figure out how to instruct the Power Mac G3 to display this picture?

[…]

When you open the newly-formatted RAM disk, you should see a file named “The Team”[…]

Howard Oakley:

This mythical animal from the Mac bestiary has been tucked away as an Easter egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer for many years. Type the letters clarus or moof (the sound it makes) into the search box of that viewer to see the two emoji figures of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance, as shown in the Page Setup window in recent macOS.

[…]

More inaccessible, but apparently present for even longer, is a PNG image showing marijuana leaves embedded inside the Chess app.

[…]

According to a recent report in MacWorld, the colour-matched wallpapers provided for MacBook Neos spell out MAC.

Previously: