For IT/Security folks looking for a good rundown of what's new we put this together, talks about Passkeys, RSR, Gatekeeper improvements, and Lockdown mode.
They’ve been listing it as a Ventura upgrade, and all the marketing (more or less) points to this as a Ventura-and-later feature, but it’s on Big Sur and Monterey too.
What's the best place to read technical details about new Mac releases? This has a bit, as do other sites like https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/macos-13/, but I wonder if there's something with a more exhaustive list -- something that reads like actual "patch notes".
What is with that extended scrolling thing though. I want to look at the scrollbar to know how long a document (including a web page) is, not have it keep changing as I move farther into it.
'Oh people don't like looking at long documents' - then they're not your target customers and you should just ignore them and stop listening to the ad sales person who is paid by commission.
They stopped being thorough after John Siracusa stopped writing them.
Seriously, back in the days John Siracusa would dive into internal details. For example in 10.7 Lion (in 2011) Apple introduced full disk encryption. John didn't just stop at the usual description of the functionality, screenshots and performance metrics. He described Apple's then-new logical volume manager implementation to get this feature to work. He then speculated on Apple's future plans for the technology (pooled storage aka a single logical volume group spanning multiple physical drives) which became the reality in 2012 with Fusion Drive. This is the kind of review I wanted to read.
The Ars Technica review is thorough, and acts as a good set of "release notes", but it's published upon release, and obviously doesn't cover the stuff that devs and users discover throughout the following year.
I recommend the excellent EclecticLight blog (by H. Oakley). He doesn't try to do a comprehensive overview (you have Ars for that), but has done many technical deep-dives covering changes that haven't been talked about anywhere else, and I can't praise him enough for that.
Michael Tsai also has a great blog (mjtsai.com/blog/) that functions as a news agregator for Apple stories and commentary, and though his blog's not dedicated to only macOS, you'll find regular stories on technical details there.
Lockdown mode looks very usable despite the messaging that it is "designed for the very few individuals." Users can even exclude applications from Lockdown mode.
When Lockdown Mode is enabled, some apps and features will function differently, including:
Messages - Most message attachment types are blocked, other than certain images, video, and audio. Some features, such as links and link previews, are unavailable.
Web browsing - Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
FaceTime - Incoming FaceTime calls are blocked unless you have previously called that person or contact.
Apple Services - Incoming invitations for Apple Services, such as invitations to manage a home in the Home app, are blocked unless you have previously invited that person.
Shared albums - Shared albums are removed from the Photos app, and new Shared Album invitations are blocked. You can still view these shared albums on other devices that don’t have Lockdown Mode enabled.
USB accessories - To connect your device to a USB accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked.
Configuration profiles - Configuration profiles can’t be installed, and the device can’t be enrolled in Mobile Device Management or device supervision while in Lockdown Mode.
Phone calls and plain text messages continue to work while Lockdown Mode is enabled. Emergency features, such as SOS emergency calls, are not affected.
Lockdown mode looks very usable despite the messaging that it is "designed for the very few individuals.”
Apple said at the rollout that relatively few people should need this, which is likely correct. The vast majority of people don’t have a state-level attacker going after them.
Also it makes sense that the UI/UX is accessible; many of the people who need this aren’t necessarily tech experts. And even if you are a tech expert, you don’t want a complex UI when you’re under attack.
I’m usually excited about macOS releases but this one is an underwhelming update and don’t see any reason to update any time soon.
Stage manager seems like a half measure to introduce better window management in macOS and it doesn’t help that it doesn’t support a keyboard only workflow, from what I can tell from the demos.
Coming from i3wm, I found Yabai to be an excellent keyboard-first window manager. I do wish something like Yabai was built into macOS.
Historically, the uninspiring and underwhelming major releases of OS X and macOS have ended up being the ones that users ended up having the most positive feelings about over the long term. They have tended to focus on faster performance, refining past features, and security improvements without the simultaneous introduction of fresh annoyances.
However, since you aren't really missing anything in terms of new features, it also doesn't hurt to wait for a couple point releases to let other people find remaining bugs first.
I've been testing Stage Manager since the first developer beta of Ventura and it did feel awkward, as it had no keyboard control, and I feel slower when pointing and clicking to switch apps.
But after adding support for it in my rcmd app (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd), and tuning yabai's grid a bit, I found it quite useful for my workflow.
Here's a video on how I use Stage Manager with the keyboard shortcuts in rcmd, if you'd like to see if the same workflow would be useful for you: https://youtu.be/dlwjSf7aIy8
I'm also giving out some promo codes for rcmd to give people a chance to try this functionality and see if they like it:
Not to diminish the work put into making this workflow easier to use, but you can completely replicate this workflow (and then some) with out of the box macOS tooling by creating an "Open <xyz.app>" script in Shortcuts, moving them into the Quick Actions folder and then jumping to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services and then assigning key combinations to launch Shortcuts.app Quick Actions.
For sure you can. I had this workflow with manually added keybindings through many methods over the years: skhd, Hammerspoon, BetterTouchTool etc.
I just found that the functionality is useful enough to warrant an app that can dynamically assign these hotkeys based on the apps I use.
For example I change browsers often to test new additions. And because I have rcmd-B set to focus/launch/hide my current browser app, I can keep my muscle memory even after switching from Safari to Firefox. In rcmd I just press rcmd-ralt-B to reassign that hotkey, in previous workflows this involved editing a specific file, or opening a preferences window and finding the right setting to change.
The experimental window switching/opening using Right Option is also something very useful and really hard to replicate using default macOS tools.
Mac App Store app, click your user name in the lower left corner. Now the upper right corner has a link button "Redeem Gift Card". Click that, enter the code.
I’ve been on the betas all summer; Continuity Camera is probably the most Apple-like feature in Ventura. It seems almost magical in how it “just works”.
I don't understand why it is not avaliable for iPad. Usually, I am using my macbook lid closed and I have an iPad in my desk. It would be very good to use its camera and mics for video calls.
Why can’t we have no features AND unstability? If the rumor spreads that Apple doesn’t succeed to fine enough OS-level programmers, it’s precisely because all of usability + stability + innovation are going down at the same time. Gone are the days where you’d expect Apple to launch a new APFS, encryption, or a general SSO solution for employees across all Apple devices.
Which is sorely needed.
Because honestly I’m afraid of paying $12 to $24 per device per employee and per month for an SSO+MDM solution that would make me depend on a dodgy Windows-style UI (Jamf) or worse, all my employees’ ability to login would depend on Okta.
> it’s precisely because all of usability + stability + innovation are going down at the same time
What are you basing that claim on? The only part recognizable from experience for me is the innovation claim and even that is dubious since the entire industry is plateauing as things mature.
The feature that made me jump into beta is that Shortcuts now appear in the share sheet so it’s the same experience like iOS. Much easier to create/test shortcuts on the mac
Wouldn't it be awesome if Apple added window-snapping, and i3wm-like keyboard support? They'd leapfrog every other OS in an area where they've been behind for a while, and gain tons of praise from power users. There's so much low-hanging power-user-fruits that Apple's bizzarely not picking, like uBlock Origin support in Safari, better window management, and a Homebrew-like package manager.
Yeah, that's what I use. There's just no good reason not to Sherlock it; if not for the fact that every single Mac power user would expect Apple to bundle a crippled, simplified version, to "dumb it down for the masses". Sigh.
Honestly, the somewhat limited experience works for me as every time I touch linux I get distracted by (endlessly) tweaking it. That's more of a problem with me I suppose!
Guys, which freaking keyboard-only window management yall looking for so hard? My daily workflow is jumping between 10 apps on different spaces, some of them are full-screen, some are just piled on one desktop, and the CMD+Tab just works perfectly all the time, you just press the CMD+Tab, select the app you need, jump to it, no focus lost, only distraction is the damned sliding animation (which
everyone wants to turn off for 10 years). What other damn bicycle you need to jump between apps lol
It helps if your problem is only the visuals, but sadly reduce motion keeps all the delays the same. There's a 1.5 second delay when switching spaces with the touchpad gesture (on 120Hz screens; the animation takes longer the higher FPS it's running at), and that animation turns into a 1.5 second fade animation with reduce motion. The new space doesn't gain focus any faster.
Yeah, it used to be possible, but hasn't been for a long time. There are some old stackoverflow posts with `defaults write` commands in them, but they don't work anymore.
I used to be a fairly heavy spaces user with 60Hz macbooks; the delay was too high, but just low enough to not drive me completely insane. But after I got one of the new 120Hz ones, I've almost entirely stopped using spaces, since I just can't stand the extremely long wait where my keyboard inputs still go to the application I'm coming from.
I agree with you but take it further, what's the point of different spaces? Just put all apps to full screen size (not "fullscreen") on the first screen and alt tab instantly
I like some of my apps full-screen, like nvim in the iterm should be full-screen. The top bar, tab bar and controls is not something i wanna see all the time there, as i'm using only keyboard in my workflow. I'm mostly into zen black screen with 100 columns of text in the center when it comes to editing documents, and nvim + iterm can provide such flawless black zen screen. Also games, books, graphic apps, all look better taking 100% of the height not 80%, as the 20% on top is usually mouse controls for those who don't remember any hotkeys
Cmd-Tab -> switch apps, in most recently used order, keep Cmd held down and repeatedly tap Tab to cycle though the switcher bar
Cmd-` -> switch windows of current app
Cmd-H -> hide current app
Cmd-Opt-H -> hide other apps
Actually, can't recall any recent release of Mac OS that excited me. It's mostly updates to apps I don't use or don't plan to use plus minor tweaks and window dressing. I usually just wait a few months until they fix all the "oops we bricked your hardware bugs" or "oops, this stuff is now broken" bugs.
Safari, Mail, Messages, Photos, I don't use any of it. So couldn't care less about that. This is not an OS update but a list of app updates. Other than that it's mostly window dressing. Some tweaks to settings and a new stage manager thing to replace the launcher thing that I also don't use.
What intrigues me is the ios webcam support and the fact that they use mac book pros without a notch in the mockups of that. Yay to no notch. But does that mean they are removing the web cam in future macs? Kind of relevant because I have an Android phone and no interest in switching to IOS. And I do use the webcam. If not, what's the point of this? Maybe they should just put better cameras in their screens and laptops? Also, what holds up the phone here? This looks very gimmicky to me. Anyway, absolutely nobody I know uses Facetime (I live in Europe, just not a thing here; same with iMessage) and I bet it doesn't work outside of that. I use macs at work, so things like Zoom, MS Live, Meets, Webex, etc. are where I use a webcam.
So, short, stage manager thingy, spotlight tweaks, some deckchair rearranging in the settings and metal 3.
Ventura and iPadOS 16 dropped (along with iOS 16.1), but not Xcode 14.1 (which is still RC). I don't recall them ever not releasing Xcode at the same time as an OS update.
I’ve been running Homebrew on Ventura beta all summer; if you don’t want to install the entire colossal Xcode 14.1, you probably just need the latest command line tools [1].
iOS 15.7 got a bunch of security updates [1] last month; it’s still a supported operating system. There’s no reason to believe there won’t be future security updates if they’re necessary.
Apple released a security update for iOS 12 a couple of months ago [2], an operating system released a little over 4 years ago. I think you’re good.
> iOS 15.7 got a bunch of security updates [1] last month
And nothing this month which means it's already vulnerable to pretty much all of the vulnerabilities that got fixed. Some could be iOS 16 specific but the vast majority are not.
> Apple released a security update for iOS 12 a couple of months ago
And fixed a single vulnerability because it was actively exploited in the wild, leaving the OS with hundreds of other vulnerabilities unfixed.
Not arguing Apple should keep OS versions supported forever but the reality is that unless you're on the latest major version you're pretty much out of luck.
And nothing this month which means it's already vulnerable to pretty much all of the vulnerabilities that got fixed. Some could be iOS 16 specific but the vast majority are not.
The fact that there hasn’t been a second security update for iOS 15 doesn’t mean another one isn’t coming which it almost certainly is.
unless you're on the latest major version you're pretty much out of luck
As I just mentioned, iOS 12, a 4-year old operating system got updated a couple of month ago and iOS 15 will continue getting updates obviously.
To put things in perspective, updating iOS 12 means devices as old as the iPhone 5s were updated. The iPhone 5s first shipped September 2013—over 9 years ago!
I suspect Android devices released 9 years ago haven’t been updated in a long long time.
Besides, by the summer of 2023, something like 80+% of the installed base will be on iOS 16, which is what happens every year. iOS 16 is already a little ahead of where iOS 15 installs were at the same time last year [1].
The iOS 12 update was a one-off fix to an actively exploited vulnerability in Safari. Plenty of other bugs are still unpatched.
Plenty of old Android devices get some security updates too. For example, Chrome on Android is updated to the latest version on all phones running Android 6, which was released in 2015. Android long-term support isn't great, but that doesn't mean that old versions receive no security patches at all.
Depending on your Android version the equivalent is either webview or Chrome.
The requirements for which are Android 5 and Android 4 respectively (according to a 3rd party website I found- the play store annoyingly doesn't list system requirements).
These were released 2014 and 2011.
Sometimes I think Google should be more in your face about app updates, especially ones that would be considered part of the operating system in other ecosystems.
In my experience using linux vms mainly for database workloads Parallels is nearly 10x faster than both UTM using Qemu and even Apple Virtualization (just tested it this morning using Ventura and the latest UTM 4.0 version with Ventura updates).
Countless person-years of engineering effort, and Spotlight is still mostly useless.
All I want is to hit Command-F to quickly search the filenames in the current folder (not start a sluggish scan of my entire hard disk). There used to be workarounds for this, but then they removed "Find by Name..." from Finder just to make our lives harder. Does anyone know a workable alternative?
Like in a Finder window? I just start typing a filename and it jumps to the letters I typed. In the column view, you can use tab and shift-tab to switch between columns, allowing quick navigation into a directory tree. I may be misunderstanding you?
wow - how is this not the default? It's always the behavior that I expect to happen, and I'm pretty much always surprised and disappointed when it does a global search instead.
Windows also defaults to full text file searches instead of filenames, which is super annoying when you have thousands upon thousands of documents. It's often faster to open a terminal window, type 'dir search string and open the file from the terminal.
This is just speculation, but based on a conversation with my partner, there are two types of computer users. The first group makes use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give them a rough idea of where any file might be. The second group has never heard the term "file systems" and just stores everything with an arbitrary name in whatever location the originating application uses by default.
The first group would prefer to search the given directory, because the supplied context (of which folder to start the search in) drastically improves/speeds search results. The second group prefers to search the entire disk, because supplying that additional context is impossible - any file might appear anywhere.
The set intersection between the first group and "people who change their default settings" is much higher than it is with the second group. Consequently, the whole disk search is enabled by default.
Additionally, given the addition of an "All My Files" view in Finder (a feature which the first group would probably find baffling), Apple may also believe that the latter group outnumbers the former.
Funny, I'm in the first group but I'd much rather have it search everything by default: because I organize my files, if I'm searching for one that means that I don't know where it is, so I need to look everywhere.
Yeah this is true, friends that are professors say they now have to have a basic class early in the semester that explains folders, files, and other basics to students.
Very much an intentional goal of the OS when it came out, the hope being that the concepts of files and folders might never be needed. A bold move to get rid of a mental overhead for using a computer that was never natural or intuitive to non-tech users. They eventually had to back off a bit, but it’s an amazing accomplishment that most users can still use these devices as if files weren’t a thing.
To me this is definitely it. Using non-technical people's computers is eye-opening. Thousands of files scattered around on the Desktop, Documents, or wherever they just happened to go. Finding something in a specific directory would be a completely foreign concept.
Well, count me in the third group: I make use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give me a rough idea of where any file might be. I also fail miserably at it (apart from dev/programming stuff, which all is in `~/dev/<project name>`) and rely heavily on search to find anything again.
As search is fast enough nowadays with indexing, I'd rather have it search the whole disk every time than the directory I'm in just to realize I've put it someplace else.
I'm interested in what you mean by "setup script" - I assume you have a script of some sort you run when / if you re-install the OS? I'd love to hear more about this!
I have a simple shell script that does a bunch of setup for me to automate things.
It grabs my dot files and restores them, installs Homebrew and a bunch of programs, restores their plists (I have backup script that backs up all their plists) and writes a bunch of macOS settings via the `defaults write` command.
I can install/wipe macOS, follow the initial setting screens then when on the desktop I just connect to my NAS, copy over one script and run it in the Terminal to get my machine setup how I like it. It isn't perfect but it does about 97% of the work for me with the added bonus that it is consistent/reproducible for the most part so avoids me forgetting to change a setting some place.
I don't go crazy with it as I don't wipe my machine often enough to justify going all out with a fully automated system. Honestly it is less to save time and more to maintain consistency and have a 'documented as code' record of my environment setup (not quite infrastructure as code levels :)
# Trackpad: enable tap to click for this user and for the login screen
# Trackpad: map bottom right corner to right-click
# Disable “natural” (Lion-style) scrolling
++2 for Alfred. AND it has plugins so you can search your Chrome or Brave tabs with Alfred as well. I just hit CMD + Shift + T and it'll search all my open tabs without the browser being in focus. I had to pay but it wasn't much. Use it everyday! https://github.com/epilande/alfred-browser-tabs
BTT does work with the TouchBar, but the "Touch" in the name comes from "touchpad" since it originally was used to add various macros/gestures to the touchpad and mouse. TouchBar support was added later.
Most new Macs come with full-size function keys, including a massive escape key the same size as the tab key. (At least on the en-US layout; can't speak to others.)
Interesting. What other gestures do you use?
I've tried to setup BTT to emulate cmd+tab with swipe right or left but it wasn't a smooth experience so I've made Touch-Tab https://github.com/ris58h/Touch-Tab
I have a lifetime/powerpack Alfred license, and i don't use it much, if at all. I have it installed, but in my experience Spotlight has gotten a lot better in recent years, at least to the point where i just use that.
My only excuse for using Alfred is Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash), which integrates with Alfred, but these days so does just about every editor i use (including Vim, Emacs and Sublime Text), so i very rarely find myself using Alfred for it anymore.
Short answer
Large number of users don’t use folders to organize their files. They just depend on searching everywhere to find files that may have dropped in any random location. Those people are less likely to find the setting that makes current folder the default search target.
That searches the _contents_ of the files in the current folder. I just want to search the names (the way Cmd-F works in, you know, every other application: it searches what you see in the window).
Having grown tired of the design of Alfread and not wanting to commit to VC-backed Raycast, this is a nice discovery! Edit: A plugin system is on the TODO and that'd be the clincher.
Basic file search is broken. Still nothing like VoidTools Everything-like SMB share indexing either. Maybe Spacedrive will have these things when released? *crosses fingers
No they didn't. Find by Name… still exists. It's ⌃⇧⌘F (ctrl-shift-cmd-F). You might have missed it because it's a dynamic menu item (Find turns into Find by Name… once you press ⌃⇧).
Tip: Use the Help menu to search menu items. I just pressed ⌘? and typed "Find" and Find by Name… popped up.
The "Help" menu item is a major lifesaver and especially in complex apps (that is, those which actually take advantage of macOS' native menus, which sadly isn't a given nowadays).
For example Photoshop (and its colleagues) is darn near impossible for me to use on Windows — and at least 50% of the reason is absence of the "Help" menu search feature.
Ctrl-Shift-Cmd-F? Are you forking kidding me? I know sometimes you can press Option to show secret menu items (which I bet <10% of Mac users know) but Ctrl and Shift too? So now you have to press 7 different combinations of modifier keys just to discover what menu commands are available. Just wow.
Thank you for showing me that menu command! That'll be a lifesaver going forward. Usability achieved despite Apple design, not because of it.
I actually solved that by using the native macOS fsevents API which can watch the whole filesystem for changes, and I can instantly update the SQLite db I use for the index through that.
The problem is actually enumerating and searching the whole database, that's the slow part. Right now I have over 5 million rows in it and passing the SELECT results to fzf is the slowest part, taking a few seconds at least on an M1 Max.
I'm not sure how Everything presented the results so fast, with metadata and everything.
The fsevents part is interesting, didn't know that!
To your point regarding the slowness - in that case it's not really acting as an index though, is it, if you're scanning the whole list and passing it to fzf?
A proper fuzzy text search index (I think elastic and similar engines have these built-in) should yield orders of magnitude better performance.
Yes, you're right. I did try Meilisearch for this but I wanted close-to-instant Smith-Waterman fuzzy searching which is why I settled on FZF.
In the end I might have to reimplement that in Swift with an always cached index and native Spotlight like search bar to really make this as easy to use as I want.
It's not practical to reach for the browser or Terminal to do this search.
Fyi, it does not work. I get this error when opening Finda on macOS Ventura 13.0 (22A380):
"This version of Finda (629.0.0+df7956) is not compatible with your operating system version (22.1.0). Press Enter to download the latest version or Command+ to quit."
EDIT: e-mailed the Developer, beta release coming tomorrow...
sometimes I think MSFT should buy Everything and replace Windows search with it. There are some plugins that use it for other file managers.
But then again, they will almost certainly screw it up, given that Windows Search still can't search my start menu reliably without pauses. And their history with acquisitions and integrating tech isn't very good.
Things like that infuriate me and make me want to throw my laptop out of the window. There's no excuse for the start menu search not being instantaneous, but Windows isn't the only offender. Searching for an app on Android is also slow.
With Windows, it is death by a thousand paper cuts. With Linux, you might get your arm chopped off while getting every device (or sleep) to work flawlessly, but once it works, it stays working. And small things like search work like you expect them to.
I continue to not understand this -- The Everything app was capable of instant search on Windows in like 2008, and yet on modern devices, with SSDs, far more RAM, and faster CPUs, I have to wait a good 2-3s for results to appear.
How did one dev managed to achieve what, apparently, no corporate entity ever has?
It should be embarrassing how much faster Alfred's search is. Using Alfred to just search feels like using a Ferrari to pick up groceries, but it really is just better – and has been for as long as I can remember.
Raycast is great. imo better than Alfred. Love the menu-search functionality.
But I still use both, because Raycast doesn't support "folder search". I use folders in general because they don't change, and I usually know what I'm looking for. It (should be)/is also faster than searching all files.
When I'm looking for a file or it's contents, I'll fall back to spotlight
Just start typing the name. Not in the search field of Finder. You'll get focus on a file or folder that starts with whatever symbols you just typed. Very convenient and fast. Having "sort by name" by default in every folder helps a lot too.
Mentioned elsewhere, Everything search by voidtools: https://www.voidtools.com. It does funky things with monitoring some component of the NTFS filesystem to maintain a up-to-date index of every filename on your computer, and makes them searchable literally as fast as you can type.
There seems to be two kind of searching people do. Some people want a search tool that searches in documents. Some people want a search tool that searches filenames.
Everything search is exclusively the second. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years (and for those cases, grep has worked fine, even on windows!).
For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
> I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years
If you want to search documents you have created, I can imagine that you may not use the feature much. But e.g. for research papers, the downloaded copy rarely reflects the contents/authors, so it is really handy to be able to search the contents.
> For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
Weird. For me windows don't seem to search inside documents, or at least not in all documents.
Spotlight is great for those lone cold weather nights: whenever I feel down, it will start indexing and spin up all the fans and make a lot of heat and noise, making me feel warm and loved
I still use it as fast calculator. And sometimes it can convert units ... sometimes. That's it. I don't think it has EVERY found the file I'm looking for, but Windows search ain't much better. As someone who develops on all three OSes daily, nothing beats `find | grep` or `find | xargs grep`.
One trick is to know that spotlight indexes content and metadata separately, and most search interfaces default to content. Typing in "README.md" in system spotlight will look for documents that contain a reference to that name, while "name:README.MD" will look for ones marked as _having_ that name.
The search interface in finder has a builder for predicates (start a search then hit the plus on the right side of the search bar). There you can start to see some of the friendly prefixes for filesystem items such as extension:, kind:, date:, tag:.
You can also see the mass of file specific metadata - like width, audio bit rate, city, genre.
I have not, however, found a handy way to translate between English description, friendly prefix, and the internal query names like kMDItemContentType.
Fun aside - some of these used to work in the Mac app store - for instance, you could search for listed applications which could open exotic document types.
The "uselessness" IMHO is mostly in that it exposes the most simplistic interface possible, and people just don't know where to go from there (other than terminal users going `man mdfind` I suppose). That gap is only widened by how different it is from other filesystem-based mechanisms for power users, which have more established commonalities like regex and filesystem globbing.
Finder and File organization is the worst part of Mac experience, it's terrible - I still can't get used to it after 3 years.
Windows Explorer is so much better.
Aswell as not searching the current folder, I find it so infuriating that Save-As does not default to the Current folder, just picks a random one!!
Personally I have Spotlight indexing completely disabled, except to index items in `/Applications` so I can use it as a quick-launcher. This was not easy to configure, and I'll probably have to do it again next time I update the OS. But it did seem to help with performance - Spotlight was often the cause of unpredictably high CPU usage spikes.
A Spotlight search never starts a scan of your disk. The disk is always fully indexed and returns results out of the index very fast. The only exception is typically when the system is updated (or some other big event) and it reindexes everything.
That being said, as others have pointed out, there is a setting to make a Finder window search apply only to the directory in the current window.
My friend has some issues with using the `scp` command on Ventura to copy files to a Synology NAS.
It turns out the `scp` has been updated to use sftp protocol since OpenSSH 8.9 and Synology seems to use a different port for sftp, causing some hard to understand errors.
All those improvements and the Mail experience is still lousy when you need to quickly move messages to folders. I have been relying on MsgFiler[1] for years, but it's been over two decades and Mail.app has not improved much (and mind you, I still prefer using Mail.app over anything else on a Mac). Thank goodness we still have plugins.
They are preparing us for when they put phone grade cams in the MacBook: “We compressed everything you love about the iPhone camera, and it’s entire ecosystem, into this tiny, adorable little bump on the lid” complete with a $5M, 30 second video intro. And then it will be the coolest wart ever.
Given that Steve Jobs actively colluded with Eric Schmidt to depress worker wages, maybe he was just a bad person and should be memory-holed. We can build a better world without him.
wtf is this foto, like how is this iphone half the size of the mac? also, is it taped to the mac? I bet it would actually just drag the lid down with its weight. so it stands on something?
> like how is this iphone half the size of the mac?
That part looks correct to me?
I don't have an iPhone to compare, but my phone is easily half the size of a 14" MacBook Pro when placed like that... and Google tells me that some iPhones are basically the same size as my phone.
Very excited about the ability to run x86 VMs through Rosetta. This will make x86 virtualization a lot more straightforward on Apple Silicon (no more reliance on qemu).
"We could increase the BOM cost putting a bigger camera in but the thickness of the laptop lid is so thin it would never be as good as the phone you most likely already own, so we made it easer for you to use that".
It's all a matter of perspective. :) I love the ability to use my phone as a webcam.
Try https://getlumina.com/ for a phone quality looking webcam with nice background blur and center-stage type auto-framing. Or, Logitech Brio w/ Xsplit Vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam (but Lumina does a better job auto-starting with videoconf tools).
Alternatively, get Reincubate's Camo to do Continuity with both iPhones and Android phones, and tons more features:
That sounds like a US thing to me. I know many people who use Macs because they're good value for money, but also use $300 Androids because they're good enough and they're JUST PHONES after all. The cheapest plain iPhone 14 costs $1070 here (or $80 cheaper from my carrier, but that's with an expensive contract, so fuck that).
I got my first iPhone after over 8 years of daily-driving a MacBook, and it's the most expensive phone I've ever had.
It's nice to have the option of buying and using a single brand of smartphone to use as your laptop's webcam; but I'd prefer to use the laptop's webcam as the laptop's webcam, or use my phone as a webcam. It's all a matter of perspective. :)
And yet they insist on putting a notch on all new MacBooks. Seems like adding a webcam-free option and expanding Continuity Camera support to Android would be a pretty easy win.
Hahaha. Don't hold your breath. It's not going to happen for a couple of reasons. The large variety of Android devices would make reliability and support quite challening, mostly at Apple's expense. Which brings us to the second point: Tim Cook says "buy your mom an iPhone".
This is actually the feature I upgraded for this morning. I always use a USB webcam on a stand in front of my 43" display. The laptop positioned usefully would block a huge part of my view. Now one less cable cluttering my desk and much higher quality (it's night and day honestly vs the Logitech I was using).
And the legions of System Settings, Control Center, and Share Panel accessibility problems remain intact. I don't even understand the point of filing bugs during these betas anymore; macOS seems destined to be an unusable quagmire.
They have fixed date to release. They can't postpone release because of bugs they don't consider critical. Any mature and big project has thousands of known bugs which will never be fixed as it makes no financial sense. Sad but true.
Some bugs probably will be fixed in the upcoming patches. Some will not.
To switch to another window, we already had Command-Tab, Mission Control, Expose (now part of Mission Control if I understand correctly), and also clicking on the icons in the Dock. And now we have Stage Manager. I had to use Windows 10 as my main workstation for a few weeks at work, and I'm starting to think windows management is – perhaps – one of the rare things Windows does better than macOS. But of course I should probably try Stage Manager before ranting about it here :)
I concluded that Windows has a better window management too. It is no coincidence that Mac users have hundreds of windows open while Windows users stay relatively organized.
Windows has such great window management its users have much less windows open and thus manage much less windows than the MacOS, which has such bad window management its users manage hundreds of windows.
Windows has great window management = less chaos, less orphan open windows
Mac OS has inferior window management = chaos, hundreds of open windows
The main reasons stems from the fact that Windows open window discoverability is higher. Open windows are always displayed in the menu bar. MacOS only displays the app icon but provides no information about the open windows except for pressing F3.
Mac OS displays exactly the same information, Windows groups windows under one icon as well. Windows shows miniatures of the windows on hover, Mac OS pops them all up to the foreground if you click the icon and lists them on right click/control click.
This theory is a subtle UX difference with larger outcomes. MacOS requires additional steps to see open windows while Windows does not.
The right click Mac OS solution is the best example. By default, right click on MacOS is deactivated. Even if someone right clicks on an app icon, that person has to click AND process the titles windows instead of seeing a visual preview as on Windows of the window.
So when you start asking questions, that terrible UI becomes a subtle UX difference.
That’s why this is all armchair designery about pet issues. You may like the way Windows works, that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean MacOS works ‘terribly’. It’s mostly just different from what you’re used to.
Nobody said that macOS has "terrible UI". Some people expressed that the window management in MacOS is inferior to Windows. I laid out UX reasons why macOS window management is inferior to Windows.
In my experience, the miniatures showed by Windows on hover are very convenient. I miss them a bit on Mac. And also the ability to quickly snap windows on sides or corners.
> It is no coincidence that Mac users have hundreds of windows open while Windows users stay relatively organized.
Personally, I leave tons of windows open because I feel no need to keep things "organized". I rarely feel the need to constantly micro manage things that are running because cmd+tab and cmd+` along with mission control/expose/spaces makes it pretty simple to find what I'm looking for. My individual windows go into pretty specific positions and they rarely move, and I also rarely fully close applications.
Great shout. Just sounds like typical marketing nonsense naming on iPad/Mac and also doesn’t seem to immediately bring much to the table but makes total sense if this is the case. Fits in with Shakespeare’s famous observation that “all the world’s a stage”.
I feel I've regained some sanity with https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai - even without messing with System Integrity Protection. It's a shame there's no real Api to enable proper screen/desktop/wm on macos though.
Completely agree. I use Rectangle, largely for the most basic thing that MacOS gets wrong: maximizing windows. It shouldn't be the same as "full screen". I know that you can double tap a window's top bar to maximize, but this should be swapped with the full-screen toggle. And cmd+shift+f should maximize the window instead of going to full-screen.
Well, the new Mission Control is the same as the old Exposé, just a rebrand with a few changes. But you forgot Command-` (backtick) which cycles windows from the same (current) app.
option + < on german systems/keyboards. keyboard shortcuts are not very accessible to the beginner user though. When my older relatives open youtube videos in fullscreen mode, they do not find their other browser window anymore
I've been maximizing the windows for every app on the built-in screen since forever. More recently I've been using Rectangle when my MBP is connected to my new 27" screen. It works quite well but the layouts require a bit of nannying, I guess it's just a matter of me familiarizing myself with the keyboard shortcuts.
A fairly good description of what's (optionally) new and what hasn't changed at all.
>Apple wisely takes an ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach to macOS's standard multitasking model in Ventura by turning Stage Manager off by default and making people go hunting for it if they want to use it. You can't change your Mac's UI in a major way by accident.
If you haven't used it, Stage Manager differs from standard macOS multitasking by offering a column of recently used apps on the side of your screen (it's the left-hand side by default, but it will switch if you've got your Dock set to use the left-hand side of your screen instead). But unlike minimizing or maximizing an app from the Dock, each "stage" can contain multiple app windows from multiple apps; switch from one stage to another, and every window on that stage will pop back up on your screen in exactly the arrangement you were using before.
Within a given stage, app windows work exactly as they do anywhere else on your Mac. You can move, resize, and rearrange them any way you want, including shoving them all the way to the edges of the screen. The recent apps column will persist on the side of the screen by default, but it will get out of the way if you move an app window over it; you can bring the apps back up by moving your cursor to the right edge of the screen.
Stage Manager integrates seamlessly with macOS's other window management systems. Do you still want to use some apps in Full Screen mode? Great—they don't appear in your recent apps tray, and you can access them with a trackpad swipe, the same as you could before. Do you like Mission Control? Also cool. Apps in your tray slide gracefully up into Mission Control mode, along with any open apps that aren't in your tray.
I disagree. Nothing beats macOS's multiple desktops that you can swap between by swiping with three fingers. I know exactly where my windows are, exactly how to get to them from anywhere, and their order is never changed. Leagues better than alt+tab.
For my usage/preferences, the Windows taskbar and alt-tab switcher scale extremely poorly. They drive me to keep no more than 3-4 windows open, because any additional windows beyond that make my desktop progressively more difficult to manage which feels utterly absurd on a tower with a 5950X and 32GB of RAM which I should feel empowered to heavily multitask with.
Good point. Never thought about it. Probably did not use Windows long enough. What is not scaling well with that model? The miniatures are taking too much vertical space when hovering an app icon in the task bar?
For the taskbar, what doesn’t scale nicely is its window buttons.
Keeping the taskbar in its icon only default mode makes it basically like the Mac dock, which isn’t too bad, except that having more than one window open in a program which causes the button to “stack” for each window, then requiring an additional click or an awkward hover-dance to surface one of that program’s windows. If I disable stacking and enable window names, making it like the Win9x taskbar, I get back single click window summoning but the taskbar fills up very quickly and becomes noisy. Either way comes with drawbacks.
Alt-tab scales badly simply because of the sheer number of tab-taps it takes to switch to any given window when you have more than a handful of windows open. Without any logical grouping (like with macOS Command-Tab app grouping), it gets too full too quickly.
Windows also lacks a universal shortcut to cycle through only windows of a single application (Command-` on macOS) which I often miss.
My ability to accidentally hit Command-Q instead of Command-Tab, even after years of doing it astounds me. You'd think muscle memory, or at least the size of the keys would give my fingers and brain a clue, but nope. Some apps will give you quit prompts but many just disappear instantly, leaving me befuddled about what the hell I just did.
I assume some Chrome product manager is as clumsy as I am (bless their heart), so it will insist you hold down the Q key. If only that was the default.
Well to be fair the macOS PM's probably didn't give the marketing team anything to work with. Likely told them to just file radars/feedback if they had any questions.
Web Push won't come to iOS until a mid-cycle release, probably by March, maybe a bit sooner.
Personally I hope they have some sort of scoring to alert people if they are subscribed to notifications that others have reported as being scammy. They hopefully learned from the Calendar spam problems.
It's OK to double up trademarked brands as long as it's in a different market. But you have to pretend to be upset about it in court to avoid claims that you have abandoned your trademark, which is why Apple sues every company with a name like 'Apple fruit company'.
> The Weather and Clock apps come to Mac with all of the features users know and love from iPhone, and do things like check local forecasts, create alarms, set timers, and more.
I hear you that it took forever, they did a really good job with the dark sky acquisition and building a high quality app though. I find the new weather app more compelling than third party apps. Nice snappy radar, surprisingly good rain push notifications (I’ve gotten 5+ accurate push notifications for some unexpected San Diego rain this week!) and the air quality integration is far better than I would have anticipated!
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadhttps://www.kolide.com/blog/the-security-and-it-admin-s-guid...
They’ve been listing it as a Ventura upgrade, and all the marketing (more or less) points to this as a Ventura-and-later feature, but it’s on Big Sur and Monterey too.
'Oh people don't like looking at long documents' - then they're not your target customers and you should just ignore them and stop listening to the ad sales person who is paid by commission.
Seriously, back in the days John Siracusa would dive into internal details. For example in 10.7 Lion (in 2011) Apple introduced full disk encryption. John didn't just stop at the usual description of the functionality, screenshots and performance metrics. He described Apple's then-new logical volume manager implementation to get this feature to work. He then speculated on Apple's future plans for the technology (pooled storage aka a single logical volume group spanning multiple physical drives) which became the reality in 2012 with Fusion Drive. This is the kind of review I wanted to read.
I recommend the excellent EclecticLight blog (by H. Oakley). He doesn't try to do a comprehensive overview (you have Ars for that), but has done many technical deep-dives covering changes that haven't been talked about anywhere else, and I can't praise him enough for that.
Michael Tsai also has a great blog (mjtsai.com/blog/) that functions as a news agregator for Apple stories and commentary, and though his blog's not dedicated to only macOS, you'll find regular stories on technical details there.
(I miss John Siracusa's reviews for ArsTechnica)
When Lockdown Mode is enabled, some apps and features will function differently, including:
Messages - Most message attachment types are blocked, other than certain images, video, and audio. Some features, such as links and link previews, are unavailable.
Web browsing - Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
FaceTime - Incoming FaceTime calls are blocked unless you have previously called that person or contact.
Apple Services - Incoming invitations for Apple Services, such as invitations to manage a home in the Home app, are blocked unless you have previously invited that person.
Shared albums - Shared albums are removed from the Photos app, and new Shared Album invitations are blocked. You can still view these shared albums on other devices that don’t have Lockdown Mode enabled.
USB accessories - To connect your device to a USB accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked. Configuration profiles - Configuration profiles can’t be installed, and the device can’t be enrolled in Mobile Device Management or device supervision while in Lockdown Mode.
Phone calls and plain text messages continue to work while Lockdown Mode is enabled. Emergency features, such as SOS emergency calls, are not affected.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212650
- I never want executable content sent to me via messages.
- I already block web fonts everywhere I can. I do want to know what other "complex web technologies" are blocked.
- I don't care about Facetime.
- I don't use Apple services or Icloud.
- Ignoring USB when locked should be a default.
JIT compilation, WASM, WebGL, Speech Recognition API, and the Web Audio API
And if you plug your laptop into a docking station while the lid is closed...?
Apple said at the rollout that relatively few people should need this, which is likely correct. The vast majority of people don’t have a state-level attacker going after them.
Also it makes sense that the UI/UX is accessible; many of the people who need this aren’t necessarily tech experts. And even if you are a tech expert, you don’t want a complex UI when you’re under attack.
{
state-level attack
targeted attack
mass targeted malware/rootkits
}
If it works some of the time for state-level, it should work almost all of the time for anything below.
Stage manager seems like a half measure to introduce better window management in macOS and it doesn’t help that it doesn’t support a keyboard only workflow, from what I can tell from the demos.
Coming from i3wm, I found Yabai to be an excellent keyboard-first window manager. I do wish something like Yabai was built into macOS.
However, since you aren't really missing anything in terms of new features, it also doesn't hurt to wait for a couple point releases to let other people find remaining bugs first.
But after adding support for it in my rcmd app (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd), and tuning yabai's grid a bit, I found it quite useful for my workflow.
Here's a video on how I use Stage Manager with the keyboard shortcuts in rcmd, if you'd like to see if the same workflow would be useful for you: https://youtu.be/dlwjSf7aIy8
I'm also giving out some promo codes for rcmd to give people a chance to try this functionality and see if they like it:
EDIT: Dang, you guys are fast. Here are 10 more codes, and if you want more, there's also a Twitter giveaway here: https://twitter.com/lowtechguys/status/1584596195326177281ps: I used the YP33H9AP9NFH code, so try the other ones.
I just found that the functionality is useful enough to warrant an app that can dynamically assign these hotkeys based on the apps I use.
For example I change browsers often to test new additions. And because I have rcmd-B set to focus/launch/hide my current browser app, I can keep my muscle memory even after switching from Safari to Firefox. In rcmd I just press rcmd-ralt-B to reassign that hotkey, in previous workflows this involved editing a specific file, or opening a preferences window and finding the right setting to change.
The experimental window switching/opening using Right Option is also something very useful and really hard to replicate using default macOS tools.
I’ve been on the betas all summer; Continuity Camera is probably the most Apple-like feature in Ventura. It seems almost magical in how it “just works”.
What? Finally!
If they focus on stability, everyone says, "Not enough new features to be worth the upgrade".
I guess no one can be happy. Or they expect a ton of new instantly stable features...
Which is sorely needed.
Because honestly I’m afraid of paying $12 to $24 per device per employee and per month for an SSO+MDM solution that would make me depend on a dodgy Windows-style UI (Jamf) or worse, all my employees’ ability to login would depend on Okta.
What are you basing that claim on? The only part recognizable from experience for me is the innovation claim and even that is dubious since the entire industry is plateauing as things mature.
For those on Windows, there is an equivalent app called bug.n that mimics dwm.
This keeps the workspace nice and clean
For switching apps, either cmd-tab or cmd-` or with Alfred App
Indeed, for moving windows to left/right/etc, you may need an app like Rectangle
You _could_ add custom shortcuts in Settings - Keyboard for menu items like Zoom or "Move Window to Left Side of Screen" but it's a bit limited.
What is missing? I guess some people like live preview in cmd-tab, but I've been ok without it.
(Reduced motion iirc, I don’t have my Mac with me now)
I don't remember the details, but it was similar to the approach from this (very dated! please search yourself) article: https://osxdaily.com/2012/02/14/speed-up-misson-control-anim...
I used to be a fairly heavy spaces user with 60Hz macbooks; the delay was too high, but just low enough to not drive me completely insane. But after I got one of the new 120Hz ones, I've almost entirely stopped using spaces, since I just can't stand the extremely long wait where my keyboard inputs still go to the application I'm coming from.
If you want more options, try Alt-Tab app: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
Safari, Mail, Messages, Photos, I don't use any of it. So couldn't care less about that. This is not an OS update but a list of app updates. Other than that it's mostly window dressing. Some tweaks to settings and a new stage manager thing to replace the launcher thing that I also don't use.
What intrigues me is the ios webcam support and the fact that they use mac book pros without a notch in the mockups of that. Yay to no notch. But does that mean they are removing the web cam in future macs? Kind of relevant because I have an Android phone and no interest in switching to IOS. And I do use the webcam. If not, what's the point of this? Maybe they should just put better cameras in their screens and laptops? Also, what holds up the phone here? This looks very gimmicky to me. Anyway, absolutely nobody I know uses Facetime (I live in Europe, just not a thing here; same with iMessage) and I bet it doesn't work outside of that. I use macs at work, so things like Zoom, MS Live, Meets, Webex, etc. are where I use a webcam.
So, short, stage manager thingy, spotlight tweaks, some deckchair rearranging in the settings and metal 3.
[1]: https://download.developer.apple.com/Developer_Tools/Command...
You may also need to run sudo xcode-select -switch /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
Apple released a security update for iOS 12 a couple of months ago [2], an operating system released a little over 4 years ago. I think you’re good.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213445
[2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213428
And nothing this month which means it's already vulnerable to pretty much all of the vulnerabilities that got fixed. Some could be iOS 16 specific but the vast majority are not.
> Apple released a security update for iOS 12 a couple of months ago
And fixed a single vulnerability because it was actively exploited in the wild, leaving the OS with hundreds of other vulnerabilities unfixed.
Not arguing Apple should keep OS versions supported forever but the reality is that unless you're on the latest major version you're pretty much out of luck.
The fact that there hasn’t been a second security update for iOS 15 doesn’t mean another one isn’t coming which it almost certainly is.
unless you're on the latest major version you're pretty much out of luck
As I just mentioned, iOS 12, a 4-year old operating system got updated a couple of month ago and iOS 15 will continue getting updates obviously.
To put things in perspective, updating iOS 12 means devices as old as the iPhone 5s were updated. The iPhone 5s first shipped September 2013—over 9 years ago!
I suspect Android devices released 9 years ago haven’t been updated in a long long time.
Besides, by the summer of 2023, something like 80+% of the installed base will be on iOS 16, which is what happens every year. iOS 16 is already a little ahead of where iOS 15 installs were at the same time last year [1].
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/09/14/ios-16-adoption-s...
Plenty of old Android devices get some security updates too. For example, Chrome on Android is updated to the latest version on all phones running Android 6, which was released in 2015. Android long-term support isn't great, but that doesn't mean that old versions receive no security patches at all.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213428
Depending on your Android version the equivalent is either webview or Chrome.
The requirements for which are Android 5 and Android 4 respectively (according to a 3rd party website I found- the play store annoyingly doesn't list system requirements).
These were released 2014 and 2011.
Sometimes I think Google should be more in your face about app updates, especially ones that would be considered part of the operating system in other ecosystems.
The fact that there hasn’t been a second security update for iOS 15 doesn’t mean another one isn’t coming which it almost certainly is.
And it certainly did. [1].
[1]: APPLE-SA-2022-10-27-1 iOS 15.7.1 and iPadOS 15.7.1
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213490
I kind of want to play some old school windows games, but I don't want to pay for parallels.
All I want is to hit Command-F to quickly search the filenames in the current folder (not start a sluggish scan of my entire hard disk). There used to be workarounds for this, but then they removed "Find by Name..." from Finder just to make our lives harder. Does anyone know a workable alternative?
When performing a search:
Search the current folder
[0] https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
This is just speculation, but based on a conversation with my partner, there are two types of computer users. The first group makes use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give them a rough idea of where any file might be. The second group has never heard the term "file systems" and just stores everything with an arbitrary name in whatever location the originating application uses by default.
The first group would prefer to search the given directory, because the supplied context (of which folder to start the search in) drastically improves/speeds search results. The second group prefers to search the entire disk, because supplying that additional context is impossible - any file might appear anywhere.
The set intersection between the first group and "people who change their default settings" is much higher than it is with the second group. Consequently, the whole disk search is enabled by default.
Additionally, given the addition of an "All My Files" view in Finder (a feature which the first group would probably find baffling), Apple may also believe that the latter group outnumbers the former.
As search is fast enough nowadays with indexing, I'd rather have it search the whole disk every time than the directory I'm in just to realize I've put it someplace else.
Maybe we need a name for this behavior, I propose "idiot-driven-development".
It grabs my dot files and restores them, installs Homebrew and a bunch of programs, restores their plists (I have backup script that backs up all their plists) and writes a bunch of macOS settings via the `defaults write` command.
I can install/wipe macOS, follow the initial setting screens then when on the desktop I just connect to my NAS, copy over one script and run it in the Terminal to get my machine setup how I like it. It isn't perfect but it does about 97% of the work for me with the added bonus that it is consistent/reproducible for the most part so avoids me forgetting to change a setting some place.
I don't go crazy with it as I don't wipe my machine often enough to justify going all out with a fully automated system. Honestly it is less to save time and more to maintain consistency and have a 'documented as code' record of my environment setup (not quite infrastructure as code levels :)
this is old-lenovo-hacker style
Have you tried using the trackpad at its default settings? They actually make a ton of sense.
But it seems this project has fallen behind on PRs.
If you would like to have this fix, you can do this after cloning the repo:
Use Alfred; I've been using it for years (10 maybe?) -- solves this problem and is extremely useful in general
Physical function keys are a must-have for every mac imo
Most new Macs come with full-size function keys, including a massive escape key the same size as the tab key. (At least on the en-US layout; can't speak to others.)
> Physical function keys are a must-have for every mac imo
While it wasn't the case for a while, they all do now.
Also four finger press for cmd+`
My only excuse for using Alfred is Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash), which integrates with Alfred, but these days so does just about every editor i use (including Vim, Emacs and Sublime Text), so i very rarely find myself using Alfred for it anymore.
One tool i do use at lot though is Hook (https://hookproductivity.com/).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Short answer Large number of users don’t use folders to organize their files. They just depend on searching everywhere to find files that may have dropped in any random location. Those people are less likely to find the setting that makes current folder the default search target.
Tip: Use the Help menu to search menu items. I just pressed ⌘? and typed "Find" and Find by Name… popped up.
Damn, been using macOS for 9 years now and just found out about this :o Thanks!
For example Photoshop (and its colleagues) is darn near impossible for me to use on Windows — and at least 50% of the reason is absence of the "Help" menu search feature.
Thank you for showing me that menu command! That'll be a lifesaver going forward. Usability achieved despite Apple design, not because of it.
I wrote my own solution using fd + sqlite + fzf but it's nowhere as fast as Everything, and it also requires me to focus the Terminal to use it.
How it catches all file writes to update that index near instantaneously, I have no idea.
I actually solved that by using the native macOS fsevents API which can watch the whole filesystem for changes, and I can instantly update the SQLite db I use for the index through that.
The problem is actually enumerating and searching the whole database, that's the slow part. Right now I have over 5 million rows in it and passing the SELECT results to fzf is the slowest part, taking a few seconds at least on an M1 Max.
I'm not sure how Everything presented the results so fast, with metadata and everything.
To your point regarding the slowness - in that case it's not really acting as an index though, is it, if you're scanning the whole list and passing it to fzf?
A proper fuzzy text search index (I think elastic and similar engines have these built-in) should yield orders of magnitude better performance.
In the end I might have to reimplement that in Swift with an always cached index and native Spotlight like search bar to really make this as easy to use as I want.
It's not practical to reach for the browser or Terminal to do this search.
Don't know if it works on Ventura, not upgrading until I know.
"This version of Finda (629.0.0+df7956) is not compatible with your operating system version (22.1.0). Press Enter to download the latest version or Command+ to quit."
EDIT: e-mailed the Developer, beta release coming tomorrow...
But then again, they will almost certainly screw it up, given that Windows Search still can't search my start menu reliably without pauses. And their history with acquisitions and integrating tech isn't very good.
With Windows, it is death by a thousand paper cuts. With Linux, you might get your arm chopped off while getting every device (or sleep) to work flawlessly, but once it works, it stays working. And small things like search work like you expect them to.
How did one dev managed to achieve what, apparently, no corporate entity ever has?
• Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced -> “When performing a search: Use the Previous Search Scope”
• On any Finder window, CMD-F -> Search: This Mac / [ FolderName ]
• On the loupe: “Filename” instead of “Everything”
Enjoy
https://www.alfredapp.com/
I think it, yes, uses the Spotlight index for finding files, although I wouldn't be surprised if Alfred does some clever stuff on top of it too.
https://www.raycast.com/
But I still use both, because Raycast doesn't support "folder search". I use folders in general because they don't change, and I usually know what I'm looking for. It (should be)/is also faster than searching all files.
When I'm looking for a file or it's contents, I'll fall back to spotlight
find . -type f -name “somestring”
but yeah that seems like more typing than one might want compared to a simple text entry field in the GUI.
(But your "find" will search in and below the current directory for files that exactly match "somestring".)
Yeah I realize that, but find is a stronger tool for the use case because it also allows wildcards to be specified in the name.
>your "find" will search in and below
Your "mdfind" will also search in and below the current directory.
find also has -depth which can be used to tell it to search only this directory.
mdfind has -onlyin to tell it what directory to search in, but it still recurses down. Does it have an option to limit this? Please do tell.
>for files that exactly match "somestring"
Well find also allows wildcards though. So not necessarily exactly… somestring is just an example.
Does mdfind allow wildcards?
Also find is fun to combine with grep to inspect file contents, especially since it has the -print0 option…
Please tell me how to do this with mdfind, I would love to know!I moved back to Windows a couple of years back. Spotlight is the second thing I miss most from macOS, with the first being Preview.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321000)
There seems to be two kind of searching people do. Some people want a search tool that searches in documents. Some people want a search tool that searches filenames.
Everything search is exclusively the second. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've wanted to search inside documents in the last 10+ years (and for those cases, grep has worked fine, even on windows!).
For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
If you want to search documents you have created, I can imagine that you may not use the feature much. But e.g. for research papers, the downloaded copy rarely reflects the contents/authors, so it is really handy to be able to search the contents.
> For some reason, searching inside documents seems to be the default for both windows and os x search, and it's super annoying.
Weird. For me windows don't seem to search inside documents, or at least not in all documents.
I use it all the time to run binaries. For instance, "cmd-space mail". I wouldn't know the names of the files I want to search anyway.
The only way to fix it is to do some command line mumbo jumbo like rebuilding the Spotlight index and deleting index folders.
The search interface in finder has a builder for predicates (start a search then hit the plus on the right side of the search bar). There you can start to see some of the friendly prefixes for filesystem items such as extension:, kind:, date:, tag:.
You can also see the mass of file specific metadata - like width, audio bit rate, city, genre.
I have not, however, found a handy way to translate between English description, friendly prefix, and the internal query names like kMDItemContentType.
Fun aside - some of these used to work in the Mac app store - for instance, you could search for listed applications which could open exotic document types.
The "uselessness" IMHO is mostly in that it exposes the most simplistic interface possible, and people just don't know where to go from there (other than terminal users going `man mdfind` I suppose). That gap is only widened by how different it is from other filesystem-based mechanisms for power users, which have more established commonalities like regex and filesystem globbing.
https://github.com/sharkdp/fd#installation
assuming you are "in the current folder" in the terminal...
But maybe that more nostalgia than actual memories ;)
A Spotlight search never starts a scan of your disk. The disk is always fully indexed and returns results out of the index very fast. The only exception is typically when the system is updated (or some other big event) and it reindexes everything.
That being said, as others have pointed out, there is a setting to make a Finder window search apply only to the directory in the current window.
Terminal and /usr/bin/find
It turns out the `scp` has been updated to use sftp protocol since OpenSSH 8.9 and Synology seems to use a different port for sftp, causing some hard to understand errors.
https://lwn.net/Articles/835962/ for context.
This applies to Ventura, Windows 11, Android 12, and iOS 16. I tried updating to some of these, only to regret it later and downgrade.
Also, scp was in fact broken, and they fixed it by changing it to use the SFTP protocol under the hood.
The flat look and feel is exactly that.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/msgfiler/id418778021?mt=12
[1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HQ642ZM/A/belkin-iphone-m...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/42322/steve-jobs-chill...
That part looks correct to me?
I don't have an iPhone to compare, but my phone is easily half the size of a 14" MacBook Pro when placed like that... and Google tells me that some iPhones are basically the same size as my phone.
I thought it was only able to run ARM VMs which can _utilize_ rosetta to run x86 code?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
It's all a matter of perspective. :) I love the ability to use my phone as a webcam.
I think that most would be surprised to see a company selling a laptop for $1700 (CAD) in 2022 with a 720 webcam
https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/
Doing this, then advising you can use your phone's camera seems like an ugly hack.
It is also really awkward to be on a conf call using your phone as a webcam, then needing your phone because something important has come up.
Alternatively, get Reincubate's Camo to do Continuity with both iPhones and Android phones, and tons more features:
https://reincubate.com/camo/
Why? I'm in the overlap, and I don't think I'm that unusual.
I got my first iPhone after over 8 years of daily-driving a MacBook, and it's the most expensive phone I've ever had.
Hahaha. Don't hold your breath. It's not going to happen for a couple of reasons. The large variety of Android devices would make reliability and support quite challening, mostly at Apple's expense. Which brings us to the second point: Tim Cook says "buy your mom an iPhone".
(ref: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rc...)
https://smile.amazon.com/Continuity-Ventura-MagSafe-Laptops-...
Or $19:
https://smile.amazon.com/Continuity-MacBook-Compatible-Magsa...
They work quite well with the Magsafe iPhones.
This stuff was noticed months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669950
Some bugs probably will be fixed in the upcoming patches. Some will not.
I tried out uBar for Mac OS https://ubarapp.com/. Too buggy though.
It does not make a whole lot of sense.
Windows has great window management = less chaos, less orphan open windows Mac OS has inferior window management = chaos, hundreds of open windows
The main reasons stems from the fact that Windows open window discoverability is higher. Open windows are always displayed in the menu bar. MacOS only displays the app icon but provides no information about the open windows except for pressing F3.
I hope that answer makes sense.
This theory makes little sense.
The right click Mac OS solution is the best example. By default, right click on MacOS is deactivated. Even if someone right clicks on an app icon, that person has to click AND process the titles windows instead of seeing a visual preview as on Windows of the window.
That’s why this is all armchair designery about pet issues. You may like the way Windows works, that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean MacOS works ‘terribly’. It’s mostly just different from what you’re used to.
Nobody said that macOS has "terrible UI". Some people expressed that the window management in MacOS is inferior to Windows. I laid out UX reasons why macOS window management is inferior to Windows.
I will not participate in further discussion.
Personally, I leave tons of windows open because I feel no need to keep things "organized". I rarely feel the need to constantly micro manage things that are running because cmd+tab and cmd+` along with mission control/expose/spaces makes it pretty simple to find what I'm looking for. My individual windows go into pretty specific positions and they rarely move, and I also rarely fully close applications.
If you take away the background, the way that it's arranged feels very AR-y to me.
I've been maximizing the windows for every app on the built-in screen since forever. More recently I've been using Rectangle when my MBP is connected to my new 27" screen. It works quite well but the layouts require a bit of nannying, I guess it's just a matter of me familiarizing myself with the keyboard shortcuts.
[1]: https://rectangleapp.com/
>Apple wisely takes an ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach to macOS's standard multitasking model in Ventura by turning Stage Manager off by default and making people go hunting for it if they want to use it. You can't change your Mac's UI in a major way by accident.
If you haven't used it, Stage Manager differs from standard macOS multitasking by offering a column of recently used apps on the side of your screen (it's the left-hand side by default, but it will switch if you've got your Dock set to use the left-hand side of your screen instead). But unlike minimizing or maximizing an app from the Dock, each "stage" can contain multiple app windows from multiple apps; switch from one stage to another, and every window on that stage will pop back up on your screen in exactly the arrangement you were using before.
Within a given stage, app windows work exactly as they do anywhere else on your Mac. You can move, resize, and rearrange them any way you want, including shoving them all the way to the edges of the screen. The recent apps column will persist on the side of the screen by default, but it will get out of the way if you move an app window over it; you can bring the apps back up by moving your cursor to the right edge of the screen.
Stage Manager integrates seamlessly with macOS's other window management systems. Do you still want to use some apps in Full Screen mode? Great—they don't appear in your recent apps tray, and you can access them with a trackpad swipe, the same as you could before. Do you like Mission Control? Also cool. Apps in your tray slide gracefully up into Mission Control mode, along with any open apps that aren't in your tray.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/macos-13-ventura-the...
For my usage/preferences, the Windows taskbar and alt-tab switcher scale extremely poorly. They drive me to keep no more than 3-4 windows open, because any additional windows beyond that make my desktop progressively more difficult to manage which feels utterly absurd on a tower with a 5950X and 32GB of RAM which I should feel empowered to heavily multitask with.
Keeping the taskbar in its icon only default mode makes it basically like the Mac dock, which isn’t too bad, except that having more than one window open in a program which causes the button to “stack” for each window, then requiring an additional click or an awkward hover-dance to surface one of that program’s windows. If I disable stacking and enable window names, making it like the Win9x taskbar, I get back single click window summoning but the taskbar fills up very quickly and becomes noisy. Either way comes with drawbacks.
Alt-tab scales badly simply because of the sheer number of tab-taps it takes to switch to any given window when you have more than a handful of windows open. Without any logical grouping (like with macOS Command-Tab app grouping), it gets too full too quickly.
Windows also lacks a universal shortcut to cycle through only windows of a single application (Command-` on macOS) which I often miss.
I assume some Chrome product manager is as clumsy as I am (bless their heart), so it will insist you hold down the Q key. If only that was the default.
Now there's a nothing burger sentence to start us off.
So, ground level?
https://webkit.org/blog/13399/webkit-features-in-safari-16-1...
Web Push won't come to iOS until a mid-cycle release, probably by March, maybe a bit sooner.
Personally I hope they have some sort of scoring to alert people if they are subscribed to notifications that others have reported as being scammy. They hopefully learned from the Calendar spam problems.
It's listed on this page (search for "2023"): https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-16/features/
nvm, https://0x0.st/oxdZ.ttc
Apple Color Emoji
Version 18.0d4e1
Glyph count 3 574
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura
And yet there is no Apple weather app for iPad!