I’ve been on the release candidates and the OS is very stable and I haven’t found any major breakages or random crashes . Also, homebrew has been working great and lots of other open source software S
To be clear, I'm not a Kagi support person or anything, and also not arguing that anyone's wrong for saying it's not working for them. Just saying, it is working for some people on Mac and iPhone, so it's not totally borked.
True. I just followed the instructions again and it is working. Apparently I had to allow access on all websites again and change the search engine from DDG to Google for the extension to work.
Huh. I'm using it without problems. Any chance you're using multiple Safari profiles (new feature in Sonoma) and it's not enabled in the profile you have active?
I tried to use Orion, but when I tried to make a new tab group so I could close one of my windows and come back to all its tabs later, Orion made a new /empty/ tab group and closed all the tabs in the window. Worse, none of those tabs were recoverable with Cmd-Shift-T. I had to go back through ~3 days of History reopening things, discovering they weren't the right things, reopening more things…
I went bacb to Safari after I couldn't find an Orion way to make a new tab group without destroying the current window's tabs.
In Safari, could have made bookmarks for these tabs, I guess, but Safari doesn't give me an obvious indication of whether the current tab already has a bookmark. So, my Safari bookmarks sometimes have duplicates because I forgot I'd already made one and didn't burrow though the Bookmarks menu to check. So, Safari tab groups are more useful to me than bookmarks for anything that's part of an unfinished project/idea.
I was about to submit the same comment. This was the thing that would have prevented me from upgrading. I searched if it waa fixed. As it would have affected Little snitch and Mullvad VPN which is essential apps on my mac.
Does the built-in Apple firewall allow blocking of specific applications sending outbound traffic? I know you can block inbound traffic per application.
Depends on what you mean by builtin. The one in settings? No. pf does, however, allow you to do this. Murus is what you need if you want/need a frontend for pf.
> Notes: Users can view PDFs and scans of presentations, assignments, research papers, and more right inside Notes. They can also create links from one note to another to relate ideas and content.
Can I annotate on PDFs in Notes as well, obviating the need for Goodnotes and friends?
I look forward to them removing all this functionality in four or five years, and then reintroducing it as a stunning new innovation in another four or five years after that.
Adobe has been famous for this annoying behavior for over a decade.
Remove some cool features only to reintroduce them, sometimes years later, as a breakthrough. Annoying, but it didn't prevent them from quietly innovating.
Not really. Consumer behavior is not what technical people expect it to be. The main reason people update their phone OS is for new emoji. People love this stuff.
To get people to upgrade! It's extraordinarily effective. They seem to always do it in the first major patch after a major release, to kinda ensure everyone gets a stable version of the OS.
Apple advertises the things that 99% of the people buying their products care about. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing under the hood.
I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.
One of the last macOS versions had - click the mouse in the lower right corner and notes pop up. That's a new OS feature, really? I mean, I haven't really thought about it, but what's left for desktop OSes these days that they need to produce new releases every year.
A few years ago, people here were complaining that MacOS was too unstable from all the new features, and that they wish Apple would just do a few feature-less stability releases.
It’s their job to get people to click the upgrade button, so developers can rely on the new advanced libraries, and if the impression they make is “basic maintainance update with some colorful snazz” it is more likely to happen.
I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.
macOS has felt “feature complete” to me for years now. There is nothing I really want from an OS. I only upgrade for the security benefits and so I can keep all my systems on the same release, since new systems can’t be downgraded.
I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.
I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.
The new screen savers were bumped up the priority queue because Apple has a bunch of QD-OLED computers coming next year and they're worried about burn-in.
Update: simscitizen has confirmed below that 1Password 7 still works in Sonoma.
This will be the first macOS upgrade I won’t be doing for a while.
I’d like to try it out, but I need to figure out how to migrate off of 1Password 7 (standalone) first or to make sure it still works with Sonoma. (Edit: I'm expecting that 1Password 7 will break with the new OS and make me convert to their subscription product.)
Updated to clarify. My expectation is that 1Password 7 won’t work on Sonoma. In my experience, AgileBits requires an upgrade for new versions of macOS. IIUC, 1Password 7 is also the last version that you can buy outright rather than paying for by subscription.
I've never had a problem using 1Password 7 on updated versions of OSX. I'm in the same boat, and am still using 1Password 7 on Ventura after having upgraded through multiple OSs.
I reluctantly upgraded to the subscription for 1Pass after the last OS update but I'm glad I did. The features that the 1Pass team has added since then as well as the fact that the subscription includes apps for all their platforms has already paid itself off in my eyes.
I can't recall the exact details, but something didn't work anymore and all the things said "upgrade to 8" and it wasn't until after I got to 8 that I realized there were ways to keep 7 and keep it working.
Honestly, the feeling that I got "forced" into 8 is what makes me mostly dislike the company, and will eventually bounce me out once I get the motivation.
I was also reluctant to upgrade to 1Password 8, mostly out of principle. I didn't want to pay for a subscription.
But after having reconsidered my disaster recovery procedure, I swallowed the bitter pill after all. The problem is that I need to be able to recover my passwords when 1) my house was on fire AND 2) I left my phone behind during the evacuation.
My 1Password db was stored on Dropbox. But my Dropbox password is in 1Password. Furthermore Dropbox sometimes requires 2-factor auth via email... and my Gmail password is also in 1Password. And Google is quite a bit more serious about 2FA than Dropbox. So even if I write down my Dropbox and Gmail password on paper and store them at my parents' home, I still can't login to Gmail easily because I have lost my phone.
This can be solved by writing down even more stuff on paper. Or by storing a USB stick of the 1Password db at my parents' home (but now the stick should be encrypted, where do you store the key?). The point is: the rabbit hole goes deep, and you have to keep all that stuff updated. Plus my parents will have access to all my data. Not that I don't trust them, but what happens if someone breaks into their house?
All this can be much simplified by just getting a 1Password subscription. I store my 1Password secret key (not master password) at my parents' home. They can't do anything with just the secret key. I memorized my master password. All 2FA recovery codes are in 1Password. This way everything can be recovered without the risk that my parents or a burglar at their house can access my passwords. I think this simplicity in disaster recovery is worth the subscription price.
There is no way anyone familiar with the guy wouldn’t already know this, but his podcast Hypercritical was great and has aged well.
His is 1/3rd of ATP and there is content overlap. The main problem I find is that once he has complained about something, I can’t unsee it. It’s heavily Apple focussed and gives a lightweight and often hilarious version of his old reviews.
Episode 96 ‘Windows of Siracusa County’ was amazing.
Hah! Yes, I cursed him a few times for making me unable to see something slightly wrong. Like, friends don't point out kerning mistakes to friends. That stuff needed a content warning.
FINALLY we've come full circle and can have widgets on the desktop again!
It's not like a revolutionary killer feature for me, but I just always preferred having information always in my "peripheral" instead of having to actively check a separate menu.
DA's weren't widgets though. They were just regular apps with regular windows but with a black title bar. You couldn't stick them to the desktop or anything.
And Konfabulator was cool but it wasn't part of the OS.
The plist setting is interesting though -- definitely never knew about that. But again, not part of how they were designed to operate for the average end user.
On Mac OS X Tiger, I remember that you could open the dashboard, drag a widget, and close the dashboard before you release the mouse and keep the widget on the desktop. But I may remember wrong.
At least some versions of OSX let you pull widgets out of Dashboard (don't remember if that feature was there in the initial release of Widgets, and it required a defaults setting)
It failed before because system resources and horsepower were too low to make it work smoothly (&, let's be honest, because there were often poor UI choices going hand-in-hand with poor speed/smoothness). Plenty of ideas resurface, not because they were bad & people think they just might work, but because they weren't practical when they came up. There are plenty of faded-away applications & forgotten old OSes with ideas way ahead of the curve, needed speed and/or memory, & were laughed at & called stupid because of system limitations that will show up again in our systems, someday.
The dashboard and its animations were killer in 2005. For someone coming from Windows XP, where the UI could be often seen painted pixel by pixel, a smooth water drop over everything, including videos, was magic.
You'd be surprised how many people I see in daily life who like it, mainly my students but some fellow staff colleagues, too. They use it as a concentration aide.
Isn't that basically why you get Apple stuff in the first place, to have primitive but well-working things? They're not exactly famous for catering to professionals or people who want a customized experience.
No that is not "basically why you get Apple stuff in the first place". I have never in my life seen either Apple or its fan base market their products this way. That is a post hoc rationalisation for their operating system missing quite a basic feature.
Really? "It just works" isn't something you've ever heard from someone who uses Apple products? Or "I might not be able to change X, but at least I know what's there works well"?
I mean, it is present. Just because it's not as advanced as you'd like it to be, doesn't mean it's not there. You can move windows, you can cycle between different active windows, you can minimize windows and so on. That's window management.
Yes, super basic, but so is most features of Apple software. Simple, basic and without customization, just like how many Apple users like their software.
> They're not exactly famous for catering to professionals
If Mac OS wasn't famous for catering to professionals for a full decade, there would not be any Apple Computers inc. Of course the point still stands that Apple is famous nowadays for its phones, but macOS is still seen by many as the golden standard in window management. That it achieves its reputation without window snapping is a detail.
It supports halves (horizontal/vertical), thirds (vertical), quarters (vertical or 2x2), and sixths (3x2), plus some variations (move to edge, "almost maximize", bigger, smaller, etc). Also supports variations on those, eg. "middle two quarters" or "right two thirds" if that's your thing.
I have an ultrawide external display, and keyboard shortcuts to quickly tile two or three windows at once is where it's at, though it also supports dragging the window to an edge for various snap effects.
I moved from Fedora to MacOS a few months ago and its unbelievable the shortcuts apple added to make window management bearable and even still, it is impossible without an add-on. I refuse to believe anyone at apple thinks it is okay and is able to actually work at all.
Rectangle is one of the first things I always install when on a Mac... and yet I never use it anymore.
I remember using it a lot on Windows, but since I've switched to macOS I think I've migrated entirely to their Mission Control way of handling windows. I'm not sure why but I very rarely need to have 2 windows side by side anymore, maybe because I can just three-finger swipe to compare windows.
I still think Rectangle should be integrated as a native feature, but I think I understand why it's not.
This bugged me when I first switched, too. I highly recommend going with the flow and doing it the Apple way for a while. I was frustrated at trying and failing to make my Mac act just like Linux. It's bad at that.
I did the same transition because my work gave me a m1, cannot stress how good vanilla gnome is and how lackluster is macos desktop.
1. When opening 'mission control' in gnome, all the windows have the application icon at the bottom, it's easier to find what I am searching for. In macos I have to scan every window for the content I am looking.
2. If I don't find an app in 'mission control' in gnome I can just type and open it very quickly. In macos you need to close mission control and then open spotlight.
3. In gnome it's possible to close applications from 'mission control'. In macos if I want to clean up the space I have to go window by window.
4. Mission control arrangement sucks, sometimes windows overlap, position changes randomly.
5. In gnome, when moving a maximized window it resizes to a smaller size so you can easily interact with the windows behind (drag a file or whatever).
Those are the ones on the top of my head. It really kills my productivity and make me wonder if macos is worth the pain. Yes, it comes with lot of very polished applications but most of the time I am just using the basics.
I’ve been using Rectangle Pro for more than a year now and it works pretty great. However, I found that I don’t actually use snapping that much (maybe I’m just not used to it). My most used features is actually the move and resize modifier keys, which let me drag/resize a window without having to go through the pain (more or less, depending on the window clutter) of having to move my mouse to that small area where I can do that. Seriously, it’s been such a game changer for me that I wish Apple would make this a built-in feature.
Currently, snapped windows jump around Spaces and resize for every monitor connection/resolution change. It’s incredibly frustrating to not have any consistent behavior. 3P apps can’t solve this as there is no public API for managing windows with Spaces. Of course, the native window manager could solve this…
I agree to a certain extent, but I see people regularly using the 4 corner window snapping in Windows. Especially as 1440p and 4k monitors gain adoption.
after spending the last 2 months on desktop linux full time - I'd rather pay $12 and use macos than pay nothing and have a worse open source experience.
By some miracle, the seven-year old version of Slate continues to work with each new macOS update. I'm dreading the day that breaks, although I'm also worried about security vulnerabilities that might exist in it already.
Windows/Chrome has that feature. For example accessing https://github.com shows an install button, which creates icon for direct access and allows GitHub to have a dedicated window and notifications.
Are these separate instances/containers with regards to cache and cookies and such? I would love to have this because I have multiple Atlassian accounts I need to juggle and it is a pain today.
The first app I enabled it for is Slack. The calling functionality doesn't seem enabled there but everything else looked and felt great. Finally, don't need to use all my cutting-edge tech's capabilities just to run a bunch of chromiums side by side.
I still don't understand why Apple is so bent on coupling application updates together with OS updates.
I just want the new changes to Safari and Notes while I don't care about the other changes, why not have Safari be a normal application downloaded from the App Store, like the rest of us pleebs have to do when publishing apps?
RSRs [1] are sort of not this though. They’re still a bit weird, but can contain updates for WebKit and/or Safari in a very small update that installs very quickly. Also worth noting that WebKit is buried pretty deep in macOS (as it underpins a lot more than just Safari) so isn’t as easy to patch by itself.
Most of the new app features are tied to OS-wide and OS-APIs wide capabilities, so they can't release "just Notes" without the OS-level frameworks that support those features. Take for example the PDF editing/support in Notes now. Or the Pages compatibility. Or Note widgets for the desktop, etc. Similar case for Safari, as they offer the webkit widget and JSCore as an OS-level APIs too.
Plus of course everything is tested together (which is what Linux distros also do. They update their apps for minor releases and bugfixes but not major releases for the same distro).
I give you that some of the new features are tied to OS-wide updates, but many of them seems they're not. And if they wanted to, they could still decouple apps from OS updates and if you're on a old OS version and the new app update requires a newer OS, just block that specific update from happening.
> Plus of course everything is tested together
That makes sense, Apple's QA department seems to be held together with tape for the last decade or so, as every new update seems to break something, so maybe they're trying to make it as easy as possible now in order to recover.
Apple knows that you want the app updates. They want you to update to the latest OS for a variety of reasons (support, security, marketing, etc). They also know you paid thousands of dollars for your laptop and aren't likely to switch off of macOS entirely. So, they bundle the app updates to the OS update as an incentive.
I have a company-provided mac, I don't have an App Store account as it requires a phone number (and I'm not going to use my personal phone number to register it, it is not even allowed by policy) so I'm not going to update any app via the store
macOS is a BSD; the whole point of BSDs is that the OS and "base system" are vertically integrated (and, usually, living in a monorepo together) so that a dev can one day decide to add a new API to replace one currently used by first-party apps, by just adding the code and then doing a big Search+Replace to fix all first-party apps to use it, all in a single commit.
- Darwin is developed "as" a BSD — a vertically-integrated base-system monorepo that contains the kernel, the system libraries, and the low-level userland services and software. Rather than teams working on one component that has a contractual ABI with other components, there are no real "team-shear-layer" ABIs, except at the public API level that gets presented to users; and instead, anywhere below the userland public API level, is free to be modified as part of the project of modifying system software. (Think, by analogy, the introduction of pledge(3) in OpenBSD. Apple can insert new "technologies" like that throughout every layer of the system very easily—and they often do!)
- Darwin is installed and tested like a BSD: it's a whole base-system release, containing an inseparable kernel + base system. There is no way to test individual components in isolation (without a complete mock of the rest of the base system), as the components may all have circular dependencies — the kernel can depend on the base system just as the base system can depend on the kernel, because it's all one "layer." There's no package manager; no packaging; no components with separate build artifacts that get "integrated." You just build an entire base system, and have to wholesale swap your old base-system for the new one. (In the "old days" on minicomputers, the rootfs wasn't BSD per se, but was specific to booting that machine; while /usr was a BSD on tape, direct from Berkeley. An "OS upgrade" of a BSD was a new /usr tape for you to mount on next reboot. These days, macOS uses APFS system volumes to achieve almost exactly the same thing.)
AFAIK, there's no real good name for these properties besides "a BSD" — despite these properties not really being BSD-specific. Maybe let's call this "BSD-style OS architecture"?
macOS before OSX already had BSD-style OS architecture — though it was something closer to embedded OS architecture at first, shipping OS-on-ROM in early Macs, and only evolving toward updateable on-disk kernels with System 7-or-so. But the Apple development team's BSD-style "thinking", is what made the choice of merging macOS with the Jobs' NeXT Darwin BSD base-system, an "intuitive" operation, rather than something fraught with paradigm-conflict. It's the same reason that Apple ran NetBSD on the servers they ran to back WebObjects for iTMS, back when: "BSD-style" is how Apple engineers think.
I'm not sure why Notes needs to be bundled with the OS update, but Safari isn't. You can download Safari 17 for macOS Ventura as well! Only the features that require integration with other apps (such as auto-filling 2FA codes from Mail) require Sonoma.
I reckon it's more likely that Safari as a browser represents a more important set of security holes and therefore Apple feels greater obligation to patch patch problems (and that's easier to do by simply shipping the whole app rather than patches for old versions).
This is exactly it - as long as they support macOS for X years they need to release safari updates for that long, so they might as well decouple that one.
> One-Time verification code AutoFill from Mail helps you quickly sign into sites in Safari, without leaving the browser.
I’ve used SMS for 2FA even though it’s vulnerable to hijacking because AutoFill from SMS makes it so easy. AutoFill from Mail will be a welcome alternative.
An SDR content brightness slider for a non-apple HDR monitor/projector would be nice. Anyone knows if Sonoma has changes for this in stock?
Edit: Updated now and it seems like nothing changed :(. External monitor still becomes dim for SDR content if I flick on HDR, and no slider in sight to boost the intensity. There is a projector setting as a color profile, but that only changes the contrast and colors, but not the brightness.
> The implementations of the exfat and msdos file systems on macOS have changed; these file systems are now provided by services running in user-space instead of by kernel extensions.
This sounds interesting!
I really wish there was a native FUSE alternative on macOS; just recently I found myself in a pickle due to not being able to mount an ext4 boot volume on an SD card on my Mac at all. (Passing through to a VM works only via USB.)
Doesn't that require breaking glass in Secure Boot these days, just like macFUSE?
I'm not really willing to install a third-party kernel extension just for a custom file system I need once every few months anymore, especially given that Apple's native exFAT drivers now apparently run in the userspace.
They should just make that capability available to the actual-userspace!
I remember creating widgets in windows 98 by setting my desktop wallpaper to a local webpage that had a full-screen background image and some dhtml for interactivity.
I wish they did something so deleting files from the bin wouldn't take millenia on my iMac Pro. Yes, it's an old computer, but shouldn't that be a solved problem?
I think it's because for some reason they go through an first enumerate the files so they can later show you the progress. But the time spent to enumerate the files is time that could have been spent deleting?
Are you referring to the "exclusive advisory locks by default" policy it carried over from MS-DOS? If so, yes, I do feel like that's the worst architectural decision of Windows.
Ultimately, it's what makes software updates as hard as they are there: Just being able to do an "apt-get update" with applications open without anything exploding was a true revelation the first time I used a Unix.
This wasn’t slow for me unless I was deleting a node_modules folder or something with a gazillion files in it. Sounds like something’s weird on your not-that-old iMac Pro.
“DriverKit is the framework that allows developers to create device drivers that the user installs on their Mac. Drivers built with DriverKit run in user space, rather than as kernel extensions, for improved system security and stability. This makes for easier installation and increases the stability and security of macOS“
File Providers are useful in some scenarios, but they are also not really a FUSE equivalent.
They're more geared towards Dropbox-like synchronizing use cases. Some developers have made it work for SSHFS too, but even that's already a bit of a stretch; for more custom solutions it definitely falls short: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/681325
The only option currently seems to be to implement a network file server such as SMB (which is what Google Drive used to do before File Providers existed!) or NFS, for which there even is a FUSE bridge available: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t
It's unfortunate that fuse-t follows the same closed source model as MacFUSE did. It's really holding things back.
I was hopeful that Ganesha NFS [1] would suffice as a bridge for the various FUSE filesystems I need to use with macOS, but alas, they have abandoned the FUSE interface and moved to FSAL/FSAL_VFS [2].
It would be really nice to have a clear path to building a copy of Ganesha NFS that supported a whole host of the great FUSE filesystems out there built to this API.
Watch out for for the Mac SMB client. I found a bug in several MacOS versions which causes the SMB client to send an incorrect file handle in some file requests, causing random files to be deleted which are unrelated to the files you're operating on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37345855
If you've ever had a suspicion about files on an SMB share going missing, occasionally, when there's been a Mac client using the share, this does indeed happen.
Me too – I actually only found out it was still around (and not just around, but even supporting v4!) when I looked at fuse-t as an alternative to macFUSE.
That's a scary thought, I depend on mounting NFSv4 files systems. I'm not sure SMB is a replacement, almost certainly wouldn't be as performant [on 10/100 GbE networks].
Don't know if it counts, but RME Audio are now providing drivers for their pro audio gear via DriverKit instead of the ole kext. Installed yesterday, works just fine (modulo checking forums if any widespread issues)
I was just about to say that there isn't any changes worthwhile in this release and that Apple employees x people in the marketing sub department that takes care of the yearly releases and they will – regardless of anything else – do the yearly release fanfare with all the bells and whistles :-).
> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions
The number of 'system' features for an OS update is small. The most interesting one to me is the AirPods variable noise cancellation which is more along the lines of hardware accessory support. There's something not quite right when an OS update mainly updates web browser, apps, widgets, etc.
Is there another set of notes that has all the underlying API changes supported that 3rd parties can use?
I wonder how atypical I am as there was literally nothing in the list I cared about. In particular the widgets seems unfathomably pointless. I don't even use them on the phone, but at least there I can kind of see the point.
This release does add AV1 support, just only for devices with hardware decoding support [1]. I’m not entirely sure that restriction applies to desktop as well as mobile, it doesn’t work on my Mac without hardware support even after enabling the disabled feature flags, but I only upgraded Safari, not macOS.
Hardware-only is the right move IMO. Literally earlier today I was dealing with stuttering video that turned out to be caused by Chrome putting me on a software implementation of a “better” codec. These new codecs are only better on devices that can run them without stuttering, heating up, and chewing through battery.
<pendantic>That's not a macOS update, but a Safari update, and it wasn't there when I wrote that</pedantic>
Wow, that's actually great news. It's the first I have seen of Apple actually supporting it in any way (despite being a member of the consortium that created it).
I don't disagree wrt. phones and tablets, but my MBP laughs at decoding AV1 videos; it's really not that taxing for an M2. Anyway, the more important story here is that A17 (based on this) appears to have AV1 hardware. That's an important first step.
I empathize with your feeling, each OS release has been less and less interesting.
Widgets? I didn’t care for them on Leopard or iOS, why would I clutter my desktop with them now?
Notifications have gotten worse and worse to handle. System Preferences is awful to use now. All the cutesy apps you can’t uninstall…
I’d be happy to pay again for macOS if the list of ‘features’ included fixing long-standing bugs and annoyances, making things more stable, and bringing back features and UI that were both simple and effective.
> Keyboard: Autocorrect receives a comprehensive update with a transformer language model, a state-of-the-art on-device machine learning language model that improves accuracy. A refreshed design makes corrections easier to fix and inline predictions quickly finish sentences. Dictation brings next-level speech recognition and the ability to move fluidly between voice and typing.
Interesting detail from the detailed release notes:
> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions
* Screen Sharing: A new high performance mode in the Screen Sharing app delivers incredibly responsive remote access over high-bandwidth connections — enabling creative professionals to accomplish their work remotely.*
I noticed this for the first time today, despite running the betas on my laptop (you need to connect to Sonoma from Sonoma, and I don't upgrade across the board).
I suspect it's the underlying tech that streams macOS into the Vision Pro. The "High Performance" mode lets you select 1 or 2 virtual displays, and always blacks out the host machine completely.
I hope it can do DisplayPort Multi Stream Transport. Currently I have to connect one screen through TB4, and the other one through HDMI despite the TB4 screen being able to daisy chain through DisplayPort.
One screen is a 32 inch UHD 60Hz monitor and the other one is a 24 inch 2560x1440 90Hz screen which is rotated by 90 degrees.
The hardware supports it fine, if you ran any other OS it'd work.
OSX refuses to support it because it eats into their monitor sales that use an alternative TB-based multiplexing protocol (which is only available on Apple devices, which are, well, not the world's best monitors, yet somehow the most expensive per square inch in a lot of cases).
All the various incarnations as far back as Ivy Bridge's TB2 should have working support in Windows and Linux. I have physically tested it on my MBPR from that era, and it worked, and I know of other people's newer OS-swapped Macs also working.
Lack of MST support in OSX has historically blocked 4k early adopters: 4k screens exported themselves as two logical displays due to 4k monitors coming out ahead of HBR2-capable controllers.
As for ARM-era Macs, as far as I know, they licensed a common ASIC block for their DisplayPort transceiver, which is also what AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have done. So, their hardware should still support it fine, but I have no clue if Asahi's work on the GPU driver has gotten MST to work.
Of course the gardware supports it, otherwise I couldn't connect the second rotated screen through HDMI. But I couldn't figure out why OS-X fails to support DP-MST. If it's because they want to push their own screens then shame on Apple.
It's ridiculous that they refuse to support this. Iit's actually backfiring. Peoppe at work laugh when they see me attaching two cables to my Macbook ehile everyone else with different operating systems use their docking stations or daisy chaining. Even old Chromebooks support it.
It worked on Intel macs because it worked in Windows. May be a different story on Apple Silicon though. Maybe a challenge for the Asahi Linux devs. I have no idea where in the stack MST happens and whether it requires any hardware magic.
I need to check how I have my four displays attached to my MacBook, because I know one is the HDMI, one is HDMI via the dock, but I swear two are connected via some form of daisy chain.
Anyone know if there is any benefit to doing a reinstall vs just installing over current Ventura ? Is it for peace of mind, placebo?... Any quantitative comparisons ?
Any tips to setting up macOS dotfiles? I set up a new Mac today and was going to go that route but after trying to do a diff of "defaults read" and seeing that its thousands of lines largely unrelated to macOS I gave up and changed the obvious things using the settings menu and now just have to deal with all the other minor differences as they popup.
Used to that... but once I accumulated a heap of AU plugins I just couldn't bear the thought of spending a weekend reinstalling all that again (plus most of them won't work with the new macOS on day one).
I do this once a year, and takes like 2 hour. I don't consider this a waste of time as I can do it in the afternoon and not during work hours. I also have a secondary dev box so I could even do it while I'm working on other stuff.
Yup, using homebrew, I can install everything I need including GUI stuff. Without taking into MacOS install time into consideration, using my script it takes around 1 hour, tops.
I'm mostly a backend dev so I just install Docker and be done with my stack. The script installs the usual tools that I use for daily work, Slack/Discord, editors, browsers.
I’ve never reinstalled a Mac. I literally don’t know how to do that. I’ve upgraded my M1 Air to Sonoma yesterday and everything seems to be working, just as it did on Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura. My girlfriend still uses my 2013 MacBook upgraded all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur, and used as a dev machine most of that time, without an issue.
I didn't say that everyone should do it. I only started this about 3-4 years ago, and it was always working before that. I just like having a clean OS.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 532 ms ] thread* Little Snitch needs a nightly build (status: fixed)
* SoundSource doesn't work (status: fixed)
* SpamSieve v2 doesn't work because Mail.app removed plugin support in favor of extensions. (status: SpamSieve v3 is out now and works)
* Marked 2 broke on docs shorter than 999 visible bytes (status: still broken. Workaround: BBEdit text filter to add a bunch of lorem ipsum)
* Bartender 4 doesn't work. (status: Bartender 5 is out and works)
The OS itself and 1st-party apps have been mostly fine from the first beta.
Time to put all these damn shoves and pitchforks back ...
What the hell does that mean? If it is fixed, doesn't it means it works?
To be clear, I'm not a Kagi support person or anything, and also not arguing that anyone's wrong for saying it's not working for them. Just saying, it is working for some people on Mac and iPhone, so it's not totally borked.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/1708-inconsistently-redirects-to-...
If you go into Safari's extension settings, is their extension enabled for all websites?
I went bacb to Safari after I couldn't find an Orion way to make a new tab group without destroying the current window's tabs.
In Safari, could have made bookmarks for these tabs, I guess, but Safari doesn't give me an obvious indication of whether the current tab already has a bookmark. So, my Safari bookmarks sometimes have duplicates because I forgot I'd already made one and didn't burrow though the Bookmarks menu to check. So, Safari tab groups are more useful to me than bookmarks for anything that's part of an unfinished project/idea.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/9/22/macos-14-sonoma-firewa...
> Notes: Users can view PDFs and scans of presentations, assignments, research papers, and more right inside Notes. They can also create links from one note to another to relate ideas and content.
Can I annotate on PDFs in Notes as well, obviating the need for Goodnotes and friends?
https://apps.apple.com/gb/story/id1699686314
EDIT - COMMAND + R in the settings app will reload the page
I can't avoid the anecdata game, so: what generation are you? I don't know a single person who would update their phone for a new emoji.
OS to many consumers (and consumer extends even to web developers/data scientists) means graphical shell.
Some are quite funny.
If you are a dev, look for the release notes.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
I do wish they had a developer-focused version of these announcements, though. A lot of very interesting stuff usually never gets mentioned officially at all.
Can't win.
Some of the outrage you see is to be attributed to people expecting fixes of their pet peeves and not getting them, I think.
I upgraded to the beta version and am having a bug with an app that relies on WebKit so for me I wish I’d waited for the .1.
I actually appreciate not doing relentless “innovation” just for the sake of doing it. Microsoft does this by slapping new UIs on top of old every damn release. They often don’t even remove the old stuff, they just mask it with “innovation.” macOS does this too, but not nearly as bad. In Windows there are like 7 different layers of UI. You can click a half dozen times in the settings in Windows 11 and basically time travel back to Windows 2000.
I think the reason I don’t hate this stuff on macOS as much is because most of the changes are iOS-ification, and I use iOS so I somewhat intuitively know how to navigate the changes.
This OS upgrade looks like it's mostly slapping new UIs on top of old, so I'm not sure this is "doing it right".
This will be the first macOS upgrade I won’t be doing for a while.
I’d like to try it out, but I need to figure out how to migrate off of 1Password 7 (standalone) first or to make sure it still works with Sonoma. (Edit: I'm expecting that 1Password 7 will break with the new OS and make me convert to their subscription product.)
I was forced off standalone when they broke using dropbox as a sync backend, but it's really just a fancy keychain at this point ...
Honestly, the feeling that I got "forced" into 8 is what makes me mostly dislike the company, and will eventually bounce me out once I get the motivation.
- 1Password 7 desktop app
- 1Password 7 Safari extension, which seems to work fine (or at least the same way it always worked)
- The latest Chrome extension, which I believe does everything in the browser
So I don't know how well 1Password 7 works with Chrome.
But after having reconsidered my disaster recovery procedure, I swallowed the bitter pill after all. The problem is that I need to be able to recover my passwords when 1) my house was on fire AND 2) I left my phone behind during the evacuation.
My 1Password db was stored on Dropbox. But my Dropbox password is in 1Password. Furthermore Dropbox sometimes requires 2-factor auth via email... and my Gmail password is also in 1Password. And Google is quite a bit more serious about 2FA than Dropbox. So even if I write down my Dropbox and Gmail password on paper and store them at my parents' home, I still can't login to Gmail easily because I have lost my phone.
This can be solved by writing down even more stuff on paper. Or by storing a USB stick of the 1Password db at my parents' home (but now the stick should be encrypted, where do you store the key?). The point is: the rabbit hole goes deep, and you have to keep all that stuff updated. Plus my parents will have access to all my data. Not that I don't trust them, but what happens if someone breaks into their house?
All this can be much simplified by just getting a 1Password subscription. I store my 1Password secret key (not master password) at my parents' home. They can't do anything with just the secret key. I memorized my master password. All 2FA recovery codes are in 1Password. This way everything can be recovered without the risk that my parents or a burglar at their house can access my passwords. I think this simplicity in disaster recovery is worth the subscription price.
I should add I'm quite impressed Apple implemented import/export. It's not something I expected them to officially support.
Episode 96 ‘Windows of Siracusa County’ was amazing.
https://atp.fm/
Nowadays, most of his microphone time goes into podcasts like <https://atp.fm>, and he doesn’t have to worry about the voice recognition screwing up.
It's not like a revolutionary killer feature for me, but I just always preferred having information always in my "peripheral" instead of having to actively check a separate menu.
Years ago they were on a separate dashboard screen but that wasn't the desktop.
This seems entirely new, not any kind of full circle.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm talking about on Macs, not Windows.
https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:1020x765/2400x1800/...
Konfabulator was a much more modern precursor to Dashboard, and existed in the early 00s. It put them directly on your desktop.
Also you could make Dashboard widgets stick around by changing a plist setting
And Konfabulator was cool but it wasn't part of the OS.
The plist setting is interesting though -- definitely never knew about that. But again, not part of how they were designed to operate for the average end user.
I used to keep a few on my desktop with this.
Yes, super basic, but so is most features of Apple software. Simple, basic and without customization, just like how many Apple users like their software.
If you don't use them, that's fine, but they do exist and they are well-used.
If Mac OS wasn't famous for catering to professionals for a full decade, there would not be any Apple Computers inc. Of course the point still stands that Apple is famous nowadays for its phones, but macOS is still seen by many as the golden standard in window management. That it achieves its reputation without window snapping is a detail.
I have an ultrawide external display, and keyboard shortcuts to quickly tile two or three windows at once is where it's at, though it also supports dragging the window to an edge for various snap effects.
I remember using it a lot on Windows, but since I've switched to macOS I think I've migrated entirely to their Mission Control way of handling windows. I'm not sure why but I very rarely need to have 2 windows side by side anymore, maybe because I can just three-finger swipe to compare windows.
I still think Rectangle should be integrated as a native feature, but I think I understand why it's not.
1. When opening 'mission control' in gnome, all the windows have the application icon at the bottom, it's easier to find what I am searching for. In macos I have to scan every window for the content I am looking.
2. If I don't find an app in 'mission control' in gnome I can just type and open it very quickly. In macos you need to close mission control and then open spotlight.
3. In gnome it's possible to close applications from 'mission control'. In macos if I want to clean up the space I have to go window by window.
4. Mission control arrangement sucks, sometimes windows overlap, position changes randomly.
5. In gnome, when moving a maximized window it resizes to a smaller size so you can easily interact with the windows behind (drag a file or whatever).
Those are the ones on the top of my head. It really kills my productivity and make me wonder if macos is worth the pain. Yes, it comes with lot of very polished applications but most of the time I am just using the basics.
[1] https://rectangleapp.com
macOS has had built-in “window snapping” since 2015. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
And if/when you need more advanced window management, there’s a plethora of free and paid options.
I assume because that type of advanced window management is a poor default for a mainstream audience.
Happily, there are great options for this. My preference right now is Raycast's Window Management extension. https://www.raycast.com/extensions/window-management
after spending the last 2 months on desktop linux full time - I'd rather pay $12 and use macos than pay nothing and have a worse open source experience.
> Web apps let you use any website like an app, complete with an icon in the Dock for faster access and a simplified toolbar for easier browsing.
Windows/Chrome has that feature. For example accessing https://github.com shows an install button, which creates icon for direct access and allows GitHub to have a dedicated window and notifications.
https://i.imgur.com/IjxsMpA.png
I can close Chrome and any PWA application independently.
None of them have to be kept open. Even for notifications, if I allow.
And I just found out I can even cast the entire window to my TV, which is cool https://i.imgur.com/efF1moy.png
I just want the new changes to Safari and Notes while I don't care about the other changes, why not have Safari be a normal application downloaded from the App Store, like the rest of us pleebs have to do when publishing apps?
Not needing to bundle dependencies that you know are provided by your OS environment?
Easy to investigate and fix bugs (You don't need a VM of every MacOS version on your machine)?
They might also see it as an incentive - perhaps new app features act as driver for OS adoption.
From a security perspective decoupling from OS updates seems advantageous.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-mk/guide/deployment/dep93ff7ea7...
Plus of course everything is tested together (which is what Linux distros also do. They update their apps for minor releases and bugfixes but not major releases for the same distro).
> Plus of course everything is tested together
That makes sense, Apple's QA department seems to be held together with tape for the last decade or so, as every new update seems to break something, so maybe they're trying to make it as easy as possible now in order to recover.
i.e. they may have started out that way, but almost nothing is gained thinking about this history today, despite it being factually correct.
- Darwin is developed "as" a BSD — a vertically-integrated base-system monorepo that contains the kernel, the system libraries, and the low-level userland services and software. Rather than teams working on one component that has a contractual ABI with other components, there are no real "team-shear-layer" ABIs, except at the public API level that gets presented to users; and instead, anywhere below the userland public API level, is free to be modified as part of the project of modifying system software. (Think, by analogy, the introduction of pledge(3) in OpenBSD. Apple can insert new "technologies" like that throughout every layer of the system very easily—and they often do!)
- Darwin is installed and tested like a BSD: it's a whole base-system release, containing an inseparable kernel + base system. There is no way to test individual components in isolation (without a complete mock of the rest of the base system), as the components may all have circular dependencies — the kernel can depend on the base system just as the base system can depend on the kernel, because it's all one "layer." There's no package manager; no packaging; no components with separate build artifacts that get "integrated." You just build an entire base system, and have to wholesale swap your old base-system for the new one. (In the "old days" on minicomputers, the rootfs wasn't BSD per se, but was specific to booting that machine; while /usr was a BSD on tape, direct from Berkeley. An "OS upgrade" of a BSD was a new /usr tape for you to mount on next reboot. These days, macOS uses APFS system volumes to achieve almost exactly the same thing.)
AFAIK, there's no real good name for these properties besides "a BSD" — despite these properties not really being BSD-specific. Maybe let's call this "BSD-style OS architecture"?
macOS before OSX already had BSD-style OS architecture — though it was something closer to embedded OS architecture at first, shipping OS-on-ROM in early Macs, and only evolving toward updateable on-disk kernels with System 7-or-so. But the Apple development team's BSD-style "thinking", is what made the choice of merging macOS with the Jobs' NeXT Darwin BSD base-system, an "intuitive" operation, rather than something fraught with paradigm-conflict. It's the same reason that Apple ran NetBSD on the servers they ran to back WebObjects for iTMS, back when: "BSD-style" is how Apple engineers think.
it really isn't
I’ve used SMS for 2FA even though it’s vulnerable to hijacking because AutoFill from SMS makes it so easy. AutoFill from Mail will be a welcome alternative.
Edit: Updated now and it seems like nothing changed :(. External monitor still becomes dim for SDR content if I flick on HDR, and no slider in sight to boost the intensity. There is a projector setting as a color profile, but that only changes the contrast and colors, but not the brightness.
This sounds interesting!
I really wish there was a native FUSE alternative on macOS; just recently I found myself in a pickle due to not being able to mount an ext4 boot volume on an SD card on my Mac at all. (Passing through to a VM works only via USB.)
I'm not really willing to install a third-party kernel extension just for a custom file system I need once every few months anymore, especially given that Apple's native exFAT drivers now apparently run in the userspace.
They should just make that capability available to the actual-userspace!
You mean turning off system integrity protection? No. I have both ext4 and NTFS from Paragon, and didn't have to do that.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/inst...
Apple's secure boot process differs significantly between Intel and Apple CPU.
Instead we get widgets on the desktop like it’s 2005 again.
Ultimately, it's what makes software updates as hard as they are there: Just being able to do an "apt-get update" with applications open without anything exploding was a true revelation the first time I used a Unix.
I can't even begin to imagine. If I'm deleting 200 files on my M1 MBA, that's still going to take 30-45 seconds.
It's doing something. What is it doing? Does it have something to do with Time Machine or file versioning or secure erase or what?
Everything else is blazingly fast as it should be.
Isn’t that what DriverKit can be used for?
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secd0a47c14c:
“DriverKit is the framework that allows developers to create device drivers that the user installs on their Mac. Drivers built with DriverKit run in user space, rather than as kernel extensions, for improved system security and stability. This makes for easier installation and increases the stability and security of macOS“
There needs to be some OS-side FUSE-like kernel interface for userspace drivers like this to be able to actually mount them in the VFS.
They're more geared towards Dropbox-like synchronizing use cases. Some developers have made it work for SSHFS too, but even that's already a bit of a stretch; for more custom solutions it definitely falls short: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/681325
The only option currently seems to be to implement a network file server such as SMB (which is what Google Drive used to do before File Providers existed!) or NFS, for which there even is a FUSE bridge available: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t
I was hopeful that Ganesha NFS [1] would suffice as a bridge for the various FUSE filesystems I need to use with macOS, but alas, they have abandoned the FUSE interface and moved to FSAL/FSAL_VFS [2].
It would be really nice to have a clear path to building a copy of Ganesha NFS that supported a whole host of the great FUSE filesystems out there built to this API.
[1] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha [2] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/issues/759
If you've ever had a suspicion about files on an SMB share going missing, occasionally, when there's been a Mac client using the share, this does indeed happen.
https://www.apple.com/macos/sonoma/pdf/macOS_All_New_Feature...
This is ducking great.
Yes, not in Outlook, please.
Is there another set of notes that has all the underlying API changes supported that 3rd parties can use?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
Meanwhile there's still no support for AV1.
Hardware-only is the right move IMO. Literally earlier today I was dealing with stuttering video that turned out to be caused by Chrome putting me on a software implementation of a “better” codec. These new codecs are only better on devices that can run them without stuttering, heating up, and chewing through battery.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0...
Wow, that's actually great news. It's the first I have seen of Apple actually supporting it in any way (despite being a member of the consortium that created it).
I don't disagree wrt. phones and tablets, but my MBP laughs at decoding AV1 videos; it's really not that taxing for an M2. Anyway, the more important story here is that A17 (based on this) appears to have AV1 hardware. That's an important first step.
Widgets? I didn’t care for them on Leopard or iOS, why would I clutter my desktop with them now?
Notifications have gotten worse and worse to handle. System Preferences is awful to use now. All the cutesy apps you can’t uninstall…
I’d be happy to pay again for macOS if the list of ‘features’ included fixing long-standing bugs and annoyances, making things more stable, and bringing back features and UI that were both simple and effective.
Bah.
> Explicit language handling. The keyboard will add explicit language that you use to your personal vocabulary list and will learn this usage for each different app. Explicit language that is learned is used for autocorrect and suggestions
* Screen Sharing: A new high performance mode in the Screen Sharing app delivers incredibly responsive remote access over high-bandwidth connections — enabling creative professionals to accomplish their work remotely.*
I suspect it's the underlying tech that streams macOS into the Vision Pro. The "High Performance" mode lets you select 1 or 2 virtual displays, and always blacks out the host machine completely.
One screen is a 32 inch UHD 60Hz monitor and the other one is a 24 inch 2560x1440 90Hz screen which is rotated by 90 degrees.
OSX refuses to support it because it eats into their monitor sales that use an alternative TB-based multiplexing protocol (which is only available on Apple devices, which are, well, not the world's best monitors, yet somehow the most expensive per square inch in a lot of cases).
All the various incarnations as far back as Ivy Bridge's TB2 should have working support in Windows and Linux. I have physically tested it on my MBPR from that era, and it worked, and I know of other people's newer OS-swapped Macs also working.
Lack of MST support in OSX has historically blocked 4k early adopters: 4k screens exported themselves as two logical displays due to 4k monitors coming out ahead of HBR2-capable controllers.
As for ARM-era Macs, as far as I know, they licensed a common ASIC block for their DisplayPort transceiver, which is also what AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have done. So, their hardware should still support it fine, but I have no clue if Asahi's work on the GPU driver has gotten MST to work.
It's ridiculous that they refuse to support this. Iit's actually backfiring. Peoppe at work laugh when they see me attaching two cables to my Macbook ehile everyone else with different operating systems use their docking stations or daisy chaining. Even old Chromebooks support it.
My records indicate it is this: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-u...
I drive two 34UM88 with it.
I have a repo for my dotfiles and install scripts so i can set up my system in like an hour
Maybe time to upgrade to Ventura now.
I'm mostly a backend dev so I just install Docker and be done with my stack. The script installs the usual tools that I use for daily work, Slack/Discord, editors, browsers.