I find it really hard to maintain a mental model of all the settings now - I wish there was a “save as text” (that had better structure than the direct output of “defaults read”) that would show all the Boolean switches. Maybe have a comment for “or one of these” for something that had an enumerated value (like scaling). Hmm. (Starting to sound like a “I should just damn well go write that and quit complaining”)
The options listed in the post are in my opinion exactly the ones that are exactly where they need to be. You want to change something about email - you go to the Mail app, something about calling - FaceTime etc.
The system settings app itself has been undergoing changes to make it more similar to iOS, I like that now I can find things on the same place they’re on my phone… but it gets confusing for more desktop-specific items (e.g. display/screen saver/night shift options are in different sections etc)
Because it my mind at least, it’s not “the Mail app the product” but “the Mail app the activity”. It’s where you’d go to deal with email stuff (same applies to Calendar, Notes etc). I also use a different email client which comes with its own settings and that’s perfect, but to configure aspects of macOS I would first check the system provided app.
People who are enamored of Apple's commitment to privacy on the one hand and esteemed UX on the other should really try using a Mac without an Apple account for a while.
I just went to systems settings. I searched for mai...
I see the top hit is internet accounts. No other option internet account does describe mail so I click it. Up pops a bunch of choices as well as an add account button...
The problem is not adding an account, but the fact that you can't open Mail to change the default email client without first configuring an email account in Mail... which you're not going to use because you were trying to switch to a different client in the first place!
* To change settings in Mail, you must first have added an email account in Mail. If you don't want to do that, open the other email app that you want to use, then check its settings for a similar way to set the default email reader.
This is at the bottom of this page. I still don't understand the problem.
The problem has been explained very clearly in multiple comments, from different perspectives. You should try really really hard to not understand it at this point.
I understand the issue now. I admit it took me longer than most people to understand. I hope you can admit that it is a very subtle issue.
This is Apple babysitting their users. Apple needs to make sure that if their customer think that email is configured certain services are active. If an Apple customer has to make sure that each service is configured and it should be done by whatever email client the customer chooses.
I disagree that the issue is severe. My assumption is that if one is setting up another email application the host operating system assuming they will provide the users of the alternative email client will also provide the mechanism for making it the default email client.
That is not an unreasonable assumption for the host OS to make in my view. Email is a little different than browsers in at least 2 respects
The biggest difference is that an established legal precedent that a host OS should provide a direct interface for selecting the default browser. The browser is also a single protocol application http:.
The second is that an email client is multiple protocols. Do you want different default accounts depending if it's pop or imap? What about sending which accounts to do you to use and how.
All of these options are in Mail.app and I have used many variations where default account might not cut it.
I'm also willing to drop the whole thing because I bet at some point it won't be an issue if it is an issue.
To me this exemplifies the Mac way of doing things - to me if I want to change any setting that is system oriented or interacts with the system should go into System Preferences. Anything that tweaks how the app itself behaves should go under the Preferences of the app.
But once you get used to the Apple way then you tend to not question these things as much.
> if I want to change any setting that is system oriented or interacts with the system should go into System Preferences
Right. It is not the place of some random 'app' to administer my fucking system. I never, ever want my web browser or text editor or any other app to nag me with some intrusive pop-up about making it the default (in general or for some specific file type).
From my perspective, the whole 'the app should handle it' attitude is another perverse adaptation to Apple neglecting to build competent power user features (in this case an administrative interface for default application associations), like the slew of apps in the ecosystem trying desperately to hack in decent window management, audio stream management, middle click via trackpad (lmfao), key remapping, etc., etc. The whole culture of the OS and its userbase just takes it for granted that huge classes of functionality will and even should be implemented by various 'apps' leveraging otherwise invisible, sometimes undocumented, and always breakage-prone OS behaviors.
> It is not the place of some random 'app' to administer my fucking system. I never, ever want my web browser or text editor or any other app to nag me with some intrusive pop-up about making it the default (in general or for some specific file type).
Somewhat related: It's not the place of some random web site to administer my fucking system. I never, ever want any web site (looking at you, Google!) to nag me with some intrusive pop-up about installing their freaking browser just because I'm looking at their site.
Somebody definitely seems brainwashed around here. Most people want the MacOS to act whatever else they know. Then they claim the Mac can't do this x cause y.
At least 75% the person is simply mistaken. Then you the people that insist there couldn't possibly be any logic to this thing makes know sense to me.
You never once have to touch the apple apps. That setting is in the stock apps because these are set to the default on a blank install and by putting it here, you now have the option to change it when the app launches.
1. Opened Vivaldi email
2. Opened settings
3. Didn't see the option
I saw it when I touched the Mail.app, though
So tell me again why complaining about the lack of the most basic thing: being able to configure your system via a dedicated system configuration app is "invented drama"
Your explanation is also irrelevant as it doesn't address the issue why it's NOT in the system settings app, not why it's also in some other app
They want to paint it like it's anti competitive or some dark pattern as if the consumer's choice to buy an apple computer was not influenced by the software that it comes with.
For a lot of users changing email settings from the email app's settings makes the most sense, going to the system settings to change email isn't their first thought.
In a similar thought, a mac user goes to the Finder to change default apps for file associations. So the thinking here by some users is that this should also be moved to the system settings?
While I can see both sides of having it in one place or another. I also see the value of not putting the same setting in many different places. I also think there is value in simplifying the system preferences and that it's pedantic to argue that it must be one place or another.
I use Thunderbird since 2003. So you expect me, someone who never has used another program, to know I have to start Mail in order to change the default to Thunderbird.
That doesn't make any sense. If it is a setting that influences the system it should be a system setting not in some different program I might or might not use.
It's even worse: you can not access Mail's settings until you have configured an email account in Mail. Before that the settings options is greyed out.
The true meaning of 'it just works' in Apple-speak is 'no configuration is required to start using it'. Once you realize this, you also realize the following:
In practice, 'it just works' often simply means 'you cannot configure it'.
It's not a claim about simplicity, robustness, compatibility, etc. It's about taking a stance against configuration.
This default mail app thing is just another case of it, on the less extreme side of the spectrum (you cannot configure it for now... first you have to do some stupid bullshit).
I do think that sometimes configurability can be a crutch or a hasty solution that developers resort to instead of thinking through their defaults or adding a bit of intelligence to their program's behavior. Apple definitely aims to avoid that pitfall with their 'just works' approach, and I think that's valid.
But they take it too far for my tastes. And the lack of configurability makes those times when the UX is disagreeable or just plain wrong feel like an insult as well as a defect.
> "intuitive" is just fricking hype
I think I remember my dad once saying that there's only one intuitive user interface for mammals: the nipple. After that, you're learning, whether you admit it or not!
The only people who think iOS is intuitive are the ones that have been using iOS since it went to material design. As someone who has almost exclusively used Android, the interface is terrible, unpredictable, and undiscoverable. Gesture based navigation feels completely random if you have not been taught it.
But it does not just work. I had a Blender Animation to render over night. On Linux or Windows this literally just means switching the energy profile to one where the computer stays on and hit render.
On MacOS you do that, but it will still interrupt the render. No, you have to install caffeine, a piece of software that tells the OS to stay awake because deactivating sleeping in the system preferences won't work.
Maybe it "just works" if you are using the machine exactly as intended, sure.
You're inventing a scenario that doesn't exist. You would simply change it from Thunderbird's settings (General->System Integration.)
A similar function exists in all apps that can take possession of default behaviours.
The reason these defaults are per-app is because this approach pre-dates the concept of putting all default behaviours into a unified panel in the system settings: something which would invariably lead to an incomplete list of available applications.
> this approach pre-dates the concept of putting all default behaviours into a unified panel
When are we allowed to ask Apple to step it up, then? Because this has been available on other operating systems for many years.
> something which would invariably lead to an incomplete list of available applications
1. What makes you think this? Many operating systems handle this just fine, right now, today. Apps register themselves with something like XDG services or Android Intents of whatever and in that way the OS gets a comprehensive list of them.
2. So? Even if a user wants an 'unregistered' app to be a default, you could always let the user browse to a .app folder or an executable or provide a command to execute (with some kind of pattern system for passing a file to be opened as an argument and so on).
> this approach pre-dates the concept of putting all default behaviours into a unified panel in the system settings
Apple MacOS 8.5 from 1998 had the "Internet" control panel that let you choose your default web/mail/nntp clients. The concept isn't new, even to Apple.
> which would invariably lead to an incomplete list of available applications
Every app already registers its supported protocols with the OS so it can show the menu of supported apps without it being stale (this is how the menu in Safari/Mail etc shows third-party apps already)
Realistically a lot of these aren’t even system settings, they’re user settings and while system settings already exposes a lot of user settings, which are which are very poorly indicated. Beyond that, putting all these in system settings also means you wind up with a UI for every single type of app, which seems like it would get both unwieldy in short order and out of date.
It makes me miss the old type and creator codes from classic Mac os, where you could individually specify preferred apps for opening specific file types, or files created by specific creator apps from the “get info” settings for the file. That mapping was stored globally, but could be changed from any relevant file’s info window and thus was extensible simply by the nature of just needing metadata from the file and a pointer to the app.
I guess the big flaw with that for apps like mail, or calls is that you don’t really have a file. You’d need some interface for mapping uri schemes to apps, and good luck making that intuitive to the end user without either needing every app to expose that in its own settings, or some sort of central uri to human readable thing mapping, which again suffers from the unwieldy and out of date problems.
Why can none of the OS provide a simple everything-fuzzy-searchable interface with both directory and tag organization and sets to make the huge mess of poorly accessible configs they've created more palatable?
KDE's settings app is not bad in this regard. Gnome's is OK too but there is not many configurable things there. Everybody installs gnome-tweaks which provides a separate gui.
Before the System Settings redesign, this was quite possible. Even more so if you use Alfred. I’m Catalina I think I’ll get the right setting 1 out of 5 times, if that much. The redesign is absolute garbage.
no I'm not, regedit is another usability nighmare which doesn't fulfill any of the conditions I've described, and search is not only not fuzzy, but also slow (Everything can search through the whole filesystem in less than a second, Regedit takes it sweet time)
And it also lacks any visual cues, so if you're used to some icon in the main settings apps, you'll not see it in regedit
Even if it were fuzzy (which can be tested piping Powershell's 'Get-ChildItem hklm:\' into fzf for instance), you'd need a lot of filtering to make that useful though (I'm guessing you don't want to see recent files whichhappen to contain the name of the thing you're looking for) and/or search specific trees only and/or limit depth. But even that won't immediately solve the usage of cryptic names.
Better starting point would be Group Policy, which is mostly a layer over the registry but containing pretty good descriptions of what a setting does. It has a Powershell module, so combining that with fzf and a preview pane which shows the description might ctually be pretty neat, but probably not very fast.
The settings in MacOS have become increasingly more frustrating. Especially security or privacy permissions given to applications.
I installed a capture card recently that needed a kernel extension and after agreeing a confirmation box to install the extension I couldn’t find anywhere in the settings to remove it. In the end I just deleted the file and rebooted.
I had Teams in the browser ask if it could access files in my Downloads directory which I mistakenly agreed to, this took a good ten minutes to find and revoke and I can’t remember off the top of my head where the setting even was.
A lot of this is down to more granular privacy and security settings but it’s difficult to find the settings you are looking for.
One that’s been at least mildly annoying to me personally is that there’s no way to fly elk the OS that a “removable” drive isn’t. My chained to my desk Mac Studio has 4TB of external aSSD (some old stuff, Time Machine, but also where I tore big stuff like AI models since I only have the base Studio with 512G
Constant pop up’s every time a new app wants to look at those files… so get a n admin populists that just be felt with. It’s not a huge deal for a single instance, but when it’s coming up 4 or 5 times a day…
Ill I want is a per-volume checkbox “treat as internal”.
This sounds like a bad pattern (I posted about this above).
“Mark as internal” seems like a really crude fudge when the real problem is you can’t give access to single directories rather than a whole drive. Also a “don’t remind me again” option on the external drive pop-up.
I mean, you can do a lot of things (osx-fuse etc.) - but it really feels like it should be supported by the Operating System as a standard feature. The permission system just makes very little sense being as broad as it is.
The other thing is that on Linux that would probably work consistently once it's done whereas on macOS you'd always be waiting for it to break, or it would need to be set up again after every update etc.
Sadly, on macOS it always feels like you're fighting against Apple to use your machine how you want - a certain amount of the bad experience feels like dark patterns because you didn't pay Apple's through-the-roof storage prices in the first place. The same is true of how Mac's limit external displays in software but that's a whole other kettle of fish.
GP apparently refers to storage in the computer, not in the Cloud. The prices are indeed outrageous, but then customers pay them, so in the end it works out for Apple.
I think it is possible if you create an /etc/fstab file. I'm using fstab to mount an SD card readonly and prevent automatic mounting of a specific external drive.
Doesn't help. Mac verifies access at this level no matter how many layers of indirection you use. Like, the permission is actually on, in linux terms, /dev/diskdevice instead of /mnt/drive.
No, I don’t. I want to give access to she whole drive, for every app. It’s just bulk file storage. I want the password pop up’s ti go away. My machine is a desktop that is well secured in my home.
Nothing security related is unencrypted on the externals… it’s just my steam library, downloaded ai models, stuff like that.
I previously gave access to an app to access removable storage (because there was no more granular way to just give the app access for a single folder - which is a serious freaking defect if anyone from Apple is reading this - that’s just plain bad), did some editing, then revoked the access.
The problem is the access wasn’t revoked and it could still access the whole drive. Checked the settings pane - definitely no access to removable drives (and no full disk access), went back to app and it could still access.
Went through tcc on the command line and it showed that the access was revoked but still it persisted reboots.
In the end I had to completely reset the machine and start from scratch just to revoke that drive access.
macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.
> macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.
This has always been a myth. Snow Leopard had some massive changes "under the hood", and OS X 10.6.0 was very buggy, as can be seen by the release notes for 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.
What people remember fondly about Snow Leopard was in actuality the 2 full years of bug fixes that occurred after its release.
What Apple needs to do is end the yearly major OS release cycle. It doesn't leave enough time to fix the bugs before Apple engineers start working on new features for the next release.
> Focusing on changes "under the hood" instead of flashy new user-visible features was the entire point of that release
Yes.
> it's not a myth at all.
The myth is that no flashy new user-visible features meant that Snow Leopard was a "stable" release. It wasn't a stable release, any more so than any other major new OS version. Snow Leopard became stable over time, after many minor bug fix releases.
Note the specific words I was replying to: "macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release."
macOS doesn't need any new major OS updates. Snow Leopard didn't help. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was in fact much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8 preceding it. What macOS needs is a long series of minor bug fix releases.
This is crucial: as soon as you acknowledge that 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8, the whole idea that "we need another Snow Leopard" goes out the window.
The old saying was you never run a X.0 release. You let all of the other "testers" to run it, and wait for the X.1 release to follow. I've even seen it annotated to not running an even version number.
Yeah, each OS version is much better a year after release than at release. If they had a two year release cycle, you could spend most of your time on a stable version of the OS as long as you weren't installing the new major version right away. With a one year cycle, you're upgrading to the new buggy thing shortly after the previous one got to a decent state.
Unfortunately as an iOS developer just not upgrading isn't an option - Xcode drops support for the previous version of macOS a few months after the release, and submitting to the app store requires using recent versions of Xcode. You can lag at most about a year behind.
What hostile application is running on your computer that you fear about giving drive access as opposed to folder access? Uh.. So if you do.... What will that app do? Why are you using such an app then?
Isn't the idea like if you install an application on your own machine, it shouldn't be hostile to you and the app is trusted so why should I "fear" that the app has some access?
That works for “Did I give Foo permission to Bar?” Questions, somewhat for “Who did I give permission to Bar?” questions (the UI would need updating to decrease the needed number of mouse clicks), but is utterly annoying for “What permissions did I give Foo?” questions, where the number necessary clicks is even higher.
I think an ideal system would make answering all three easy.
At one point my Logitech GHUB drivers bugged out and wouldn't launch anymore. Interestingly, the G502 mouse still had a 1000hz polling rate, even after uninstalling the drivers and every trace (as far as I could find).
After trying for over a year to install new drivers, they released a version which added 2 new kexts that they don't remove on uninstall. The only way to uninstall them is to go into safe mode, disable SIP and remove them.
All the default* options belong to the system settings, not to the specific app.
The system delegates specific functionality to a corresponding app.
Still, I admit that the whole settings structure is confusing and Apple should implement something similar to VsCode where you can globally search for all existing settings.
there is a search, yes. but it's not working as good (and simple) as the search in VsCode...
Just an example... search for "Scrolling speed" and you won't get any result.
But if you click on "Mouse" in the left navigation you will find indeed a setting "Scrolling speed".
Same for "Lock Screen" > "Show message when locked".
Many settings will just not be found.
Other settings will be found but the search result label is weird.
For example if you search for "position" to change the "Dock position", you will indeed find "Dock settings" as a search result. But it's not "Dock position" so you could assume that there is no position setting existing. This is inconsistent to other search results, i.e. "Highlight colour" will produce a much better search result "Highlight colour - Appearance".
Honestly the one I use the most often is frequently a PITA to get to.
I often am enabling or disabling cellular data access to applications. Unfortunately this setting lives in 2 places and is difficult to reach.
There is a list of all apps in the cellular settings that allows changing this but the list has 100s of apps, has no search/filter and cannot be sorted alphabetically.
You can also go the app specific settings in the settings app but this also sucks to get to because spotlight search sucks and the actual list is again, not in alphabetical order. (Apples own built in 50+ apps are strewn about in a haphazard order).
There is also user.template that lives in a directory.
This file acts like a skel file and holds all the standard settings for new users created on that machine. This can be used to customize settings and folders.
I wonder if the program i use to manage my dotfiles could help manage your scripts and extend your setup to all your desktops? Its called yadm (https://yadm.io/) it makes it so easy to have a laptop and a desktop or two.
Edit: seems to support doing a diff and reverting/modifying right in yadm, i just do t really use thst bit myself: https://yadm.io/docs/common_commands#
Beware that some settings won't show up this way, and some settings that you can witness through `defaults read <some plist file>` cannot be safely edited through `defaults write`.
Power management settings, for example, will break some System Settings panes when manually written, in addition to not effectively modifying the relevant setting. Those, you have to modify with the `pmset` command instead.
At least virtually all applications use the same configuration mechanism, which is a lot nicer than many custom formats scattered everywhere (though more and more applications seem to use .config on Linux now).
True. I use GNU stow to symlink config files from my centralised "dotfile" repo which is version controlled and distributed via git which overcomes the scattered aspect. Different formats don't annoy me too much because some programs have a legitimate reason for using particular configuration formats and it's better than trying to shoehorn domain specific languages into YAML, for example. It would be nice to have the whole system configured in a language like Lisp or Python, though.
I actually prefer programs to have their own configuration files with well-intentioned format choices. Where Linux has adopted these registry-style configurations accessible only through GUI or arcane CLI commands nobody is supposed to actually utilize, it becomes far less accessible and goes against the *nix spirit, IMHO.
I’d appreciate seeing those statements added to the linked article. Thank you for sharing it! I hope the author sees your comment and uses this technique to add them.
> It's now a habit to save all my changes in system and app preferences in a script.
The end game of this type if thing is NixOS where your OS is created from a declarative and reproducible Nix file as are all of it's programs as well as their dependencies.
Nix-Darwin and/or Home Manager on macOS can provide a nice, slow way to transition into the Nix world as well, for folks who are hesitant to jump in with NixOS and like to have other options around. There's even a very nice Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin to let you manage Homebrew from Nix if you want to Nixify without giving up Homebrew!
It doesn't feel nearly as 'safe' as NixOS, in that OS upgrades are less predictable and can break a lot of things (not limited to Nix). But all-in-all, it's really not bad, and for some use cases it might be better.
Apple's settings and preferences are a blue-ribbon clusterf**k.
The other day, someone was complaining that they couldn't read their screen, and I (foolishly) indicated that I could fix it easily, because "I'm an expert."
I ended up searching through multiple pages of settings, in order to find the one they needed.
At least they got a good laugh out of it.
Zoom's settings are right up there, with Apple's.
Information architecture often tends to follow political and organizational structure, as opposed to good common sense usability structure.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadSounds good to me.
The system settings app itself has been undergoing changes to make it more similar to iOS, I like that now I can find things on the same place they’re on my phone… but it gets confusing for more desktop-specific items (e.g. display/screen saver/night shift options are in different sections etc)
But more importantly - you know you can have the same config in multiple places
I just went to systems settings. I searched for mai...
I see the top hit is internet accounts. No other option internet account does describe mail so I click it. Up pops a bunch of choices as well as an add account button...
What is the problem?
This is at the bottom of this page. I still don't understand the problem.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201607
This is Apple babysitting their users. Apple needs to make sure that if their customer think that email is configured certain services are active. If an Apple customer has to make sure that each service is configured and it should be done by whatever email client the customer chooses.
I disagree that the issue is severe. My assumption is that if one is setting up another email application the host operating system assuming they will provide the users of the alternative email client will also provide the mechanism for making it the default email client.
That is not an unreasonable assumption for the host OS to make in my view. Email is a little different than browsers in at least 2 respects
The biggest difference is that an established legal precedent that a host OS should provide a direct interface for selecting the default browser. The browser is also a single protocol application http:.
The second is that an email client is multiple protocols. Do you want different default accounts depending if it's pop or imap? What about sending which accounts to do you to use and how.
All of these options are in Mail.app and I have used many variations where default account might not cut it.
I'm also willing to drop the whole thing because I bet at some point it won't be an issue if it is an issue.
But once you get used to the Apple way then you tend to not question these things as much.
Right. It is not the place of some random 'app' to administer my fucking system. I never, ever want my web browser or text editor or any other app to nag me with some intrusive pop-up about making it the default (in general or for some specific file type).
From my perspective, the whole 'the app should handle it' attitude is another perverse adaptation to Apple neglecting to build competent power user features (in this case an administrative interface for default application associations), like the slew of apps in the ecosystem trying desperately to hack in decent window management, audio stream management, middle click via trackpad (lmfao), key remapping, etc., etc. The whole culture of the OS and its userbase just takes it for granted that huge classes of functionality will and even should be implemented by various 'apps' leveraging otherwise invisible, sometimes undocumented, and always breakage-prone OS behaviors.
Somewhat related: It's not the place of some random web site to administer my fucking system. I never, ever want any web site (looking at you, Google!) to nag me with some intrusive pop-up about installing their freaking browser just because I'm looking at their site.
Alternative spelling: Once you get brainwashed by the Reality Distortion Field you tend to not question Apple.
How to recognise when people have been: When they deny not only that they've been brainwashed, but the existence of the RDF.
At least 75% the person is simply mistaken. Then you the people that insist there couldn't possibly be any logic to this thing makes know sense to me.
They are just completely wrong.
2. Choose settings.
3. Set as default.
You never once have to touch the apple apps. That setting is in the stock apps because these are set to the default on a blank install and by putting it here, you now have the option to change it when the app launches.
HN tries too hard to invent drama.
I saw it when I touched the Mail.app, though
So tell me again why complaining about the lack of the most basic thing: being able to configure your system via a dedicated system configuration app is "invented drama"
Your explanation is also irrelevant as it doesn't address the issue why it's NOT in the system settings app, not why it's also in some other app
They want to paint it like it's anti competitive or some dark pattern as if the consumer's choice to buy an apple computer was not influenced by the software that it comes with.
For a lot of users changing email settings from the email app's settings makes the most sense, going to the system settings to change email isn't their first thought.
In a similar thought, a mac user goes to the Finder to change default apps for file associations. So the thinking here by some users is that this should also be moved to the system settings?
While I can see both sides of having it in one place or another. I also see the value of not putting the same setting in many different places. I also think there is value in simplifying the system preferences and that it's pedantic to argue that it must be one place or another.
I think the current method makes more sense. I have no objection to Apple also implementing in system settings but who cares.
That doesn't make any sense. If it is a setting that influences the system it should be a system setting not in some different program I might or might not use.
In practice, 'it just works' often simply means 'you cannot configure it'.
It's not a claim about simplicity, robustness, compatibility, etc. It's about taking a stance against configuration.
This default mail app thing is just another case of it, on the less extreme side of the spectrum (you cannot configure it for now... first you have to do some stupid bullshit).
But they take it too far for my tastes. And the lack of configurability makes those times when the UX is disagreeable or just plain wrong feel like an insult as well as a defect.
> "intuitive" is just fricking hype
I think I remember my dad once saying that there's only one intuitive user interface for mammals: the nipple. After that, you're learning, whether you admit it or not!
On MacOS you do that, but it will still interrupt the render. No, you have to install caffeine, a piece of software that tells the OS to stay awake because deactivating sleeping in the system preferences won't work.
Maybe it "just works" if you are using the machine exactly as intended, sure.
A similar function exists in all apps that can take possession of default behaviours.
The reason these defaults are per-app is because this approach pre-dates the concept of putting all default behaviours into a unified panel in the system settings: something which would invariably lead to an incomplete list of available applications.
When are we allowed to ask Apple to step it up, then? Because this has been available on other operating systems for many years.
> something which would invariably lead to an incomplete list of available applications
1. What makes you think this? Many operating systems handle this just fine, right now, today. Apps register themselves with something like XDG services or Android Intents of whatever and in that way the OS gets a comprehensive list of them.
2. So? Even if a user wants an 'unregistered' app to be a default, you could always let the user browse to a .app folder or an executable or provide a command to execute (with some kind of pattern system for passing a file to be opened as an argument and so on).
Apple MacOS 8.5 from 1998 had the "Internet" control panel that let you choose your default web/mail/nntp clients. The concept isn't new, even to Apple.
> which would invariably lead to an incomplete list of available applications
Every app already registers its supported protocols with the OS so it can show the menu of supported apps without it being stale (this is how the menu in Safari/Mail etc shows third-party apps already)
It makes me miss the old type and creator codes from classic Mac os, where you could individually specify preferred apps for opening specific file types, or files created by specific creator apps from the “get info” settings for the file. That mapping was stored globally, but could be changed from any relevant file’s info window and thus was extensible simply by the nature of just needing metadata from the file and a pointer to the app.
I guess the big flaw with that for apps like mail, or calls is that you don’t really have a file. You’d need some interface for mapping uri schemes to apps, and good luck making that intuitive to the end user without either needing every app to expose that in its own settings, or some sort of central uri to human readable thing mapping, which again suffers from the unwieldy and out of date problems.
And it also lacks any visual cues, so if you're used to some icon in the main settings apps, you'll not see it in regedit
Better starting point would be Group Policy, which is mostly a layer over the registry but containing pretty good descriptions of what a setting does. It has a Powershell module, so combining that with fzf and a preview pane which shows the description might ctually be pretty neat, but probably not very fast.
https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/
(by the way, is it possible to change settings within the OS via this search interface?)
Maybe you could use one with nix-darwin on OSX? Not sure.
https://github.com/Celestialme/Nixos-Gui
https://snowflakeos.org/
https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui
I installed a capture card recently that needed a kernel extension and after agreeing a confirmation box to install the extension I couldn’t find anywhere in the settings to remove it. In the end I just deleted the file and rebooted.
I had Teams in the browser ask if it could access files in my Downloads directory which I mistakenly agreed to, this took a good ten minutes to find and revoke and I can’t remember off the top of my head where the setting even was.
A lot of this is down to more granular privacy and security settings but it’s difficult to find the settings you are looking for.
Constant pop up’s every time a new app wants to look at those files… so get a n admin populists that just be felt with. It’s not a huge deal for a single instance, but when it’s coming up 4 or 5 times a day…
Ill I want is a per-volume checkbox “treat as internal”.
[Edit] Either way, I’m gonna use it from now as a synonym for “tell [someone]”. Thank you for the inspiration!
I took it to mean "Gaslight" (in this case, gaslight the OS to believe that a removable disk is not removable).
“Mark as internal” seems like a really crude fudge when the real problem is you can’t give access to single directories rather than a whole drive. Also a “don’t remind me again” option on the external drive pop-up.
Although it’s an annoying workaround.
The other thing is that on Linux that would probably work consistently once it's done whereas on macOS you'd always be waiting for it to break, or it would need to be set up again after every update etc.
Sadly, on macOS it always feels like you're fighting against Apple to use your machine how you want - a certain amount of the bad experience feels like dark patterns because you didn't pay Apple's through-the-roof storage prices in the first place. The same is true of how Mac's limit external displays in software but that's a whole other kettle of fish.
Are Apple’s prices “through the roof”? They seem comparable/equal to Google’s
And what dark patterns exist if you only use the free plan?
Really? I thought this limitation was in hardware (which is just as bad and just as much Apple's choice)
Nothing security related is unencrypted on the externals… it’s just my steam library, downloaded ai models, stuff like that.
I previously gave access to an app to access removable storage (because there was no more granular way to just give the app access for a single folder - which is a serious freaking defect if anyone from Apple is reading this - that’s just plain bad), did some editing, then revoked the access.
The problem is the access wasn’t revoked and it could still access the whole drive. Checked the settings pane - definitely no access to removable drives (and no full disk access), went back to app and it could still access.
Went through tcc on the command line and it showed that the access was revoked but still it persisted reboots.
In the end I had to completely reset the machine and start from scratch just to revoke that drive access.
macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.
This has always been a myth. Snow Leopard had some massive changes "under the hood", and OS X 10.6.0 was very buggy, as can be seen by the release notes for 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.
What people remember fondly about Snow Leopard was in actuality the 2 full years of bug fixes that occurred after its release.
What Apple needs to do is end the yearly major OS release cycle. It doesn't leave enough time to fix the bugs before Apple engineers start working on new features for the next release.
Yes.
> it's not a myth at all.
The myth is that no flashy new user-visible features meant that Snow Leopard was a "stable" release. It wasn't a stable release, any more so than any other major new OS version. Snow Leopard became stable over time, after many minor bug fix releases.
Note the specific words I was replying to: "macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release."
macOS doesn't need any new major OS updates. Snow Leopard didn't help. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was in fact much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8 preceding it. What macOS needs is a long series of minor bug fix releases.
This is crucial: as soon as you acknowledge that 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8, the whole idea that "we need another Snow Leopard" goes out the window.
Unfortunately as an iOS developer just not upgrading isn't an option - Xcode drops support for the previous version of macOS a few months after the release, and submitting to the app store requires using recent versions of Xcode. You can lag at most about a year behind.
What hostile application is running on your computer that you fear about giving drive access as opposed to folder access? Uh.. So if you do.... What will that app do? Why are you using such an app then?
Isn't the idea like if you install an application on your own machine, it shouldn't be hostile to you and the app is trusted so why should I "fear" that the app has some access?
I mean, the redesign of Preference is more difficult to navigate and has some rought edges, but this setting is where one would roughly expect it.
I think an ideal system would make answering all three easy.
At one point my Logitech GHUB drivers bugged out and wouldn't launch anymore. Interestingly, the G502 mouse still had a 1000hz polling rate, even after uninstalling the drivers and every trace (as far as I could find).
After trying for over a year to install new drivers, they released a version which added 2 new kexts that they don't remove on uninstall. The only way to uninstall them is to go into safe mode, disable SIP and remove them.
Still, I admit that the whole settings structure is confusing and Apple should implement something similar to VsCode where you can globally search for all existing settings.
From that list I see (Trackpad) and goes on to other options
I typed posi and the Second option is Desktop & Dock
I typed Hig and the second option is under Appearance.
The search works for me.
https://support.apple.com/guide/script-editor/access-scripts...
App settings that aren’t found in the app
I often am enabling or disabling cellular data access to applications. Unfortunately this setting lives in 2 places and is difficult to reach.
There is a list of all apps in the cellular settings that allows changing this but the list has 100s of apps, has no search/filter and cannot be sorted alphabetically.
You can also go the app specific settings in the settings app but this also sucks to get to because spotlight search sucks and the actual list is again, not in alphabetical order. (Apples own built in 50+ apps are strewn about in a haphazard order).
First I do a
Then I change the setting in the app or System Settings, then back on the commandline, I do The change gets copied to a preferences.sh file with a whole bunch of statements like: Afterwards, I don't care where the setting is. I just set it in my preferences.sh file, and if I update any of it, I run that file.You can likely get a lot of this by just creating a new user.
This file acts like a skel file and holds all the standard settings for new users created on that machine. This can be used to customize settings and folders.
https://derflounder.wordpress.com/
Edit: seems to support doing a diff and reverting/modifying right in yadm, i just do t really use thst bit myself: https://yadm.io/docs/common_commands#
Power management settings, for example, will break some System Settings panes when manually written, in addition to not effectively modifying the relevant setting. Those, you have to modify with the `pmset` command instead.
The end game of this type if thing is NixOS where your OS is created from a declarative and reproducible Nix file as are all of it's programs as well as their dependencies.
It doesn't feel nearly as 'safe' as NixOS, in that OS upgrades are less predictable and can break a lot of things (not limited to Nix). But all-in-all, it's really not bad, and for some use cases it might be better.
The built-in options are listed in the modules docs starting here: https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html#opt-system....
but you can also define custom ones without writing new modules via CustomPreferences and CustomSystemPreferences: https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html#opt-system....
I track all of my `defaults` settings (aside from power management) in version control this way on my work machine. :)
On a Mac that's roughly equivalent to uninstalling Internet Explorer. One does not merely uninstall iTunes.
The other day, someone was complaining that they couldn't read their screen, and I (foolishly) indicated that I could fix it easily, because "I'm an expert."
I ended up searching through multiple pages of settings, in order to find the one they needed.
At least they got a good laugh out of it.
Zoom's settings are right up there, with Apple's.
Information architecture often tends to follow political and organizational structure, as opposed to good common sense usability structure.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/03/16/magnets