The publishers of the DanMemo mobile game learned an important lesson Wednesday: never update your servers until you’re sure Apple has approved the new version of your app for download. The resulting lengthy “unscheduled outage” could be painful when your business model is based on convincing people to constantly buy imaginary coins to trade in to collect imaginary toys.

Up next, a Halloween Hogwarts event:

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Was looking at free disk space on my MacBook (which, since Mojave, has always been less than the sum of used+snapshots), and tripped across something new: DataVaults. TL/DR, unless you turn off System Integrity Protection in the firmware, Apple apps can create data stores that no other software can access. Not for backups, not for privacy scrubbing, not even for running a simple stat() call as root. I don’t even know why Mail.app has a secret vault, but it does, and it’s not the only one.

I do not like this.

I wiped the disks on an old Mac Mini running Yosemite 10.10.x and went to reinstall the OS from the recovery partition. It went online and verified that the system was eligible to install this OS, asked me to agree to the license, and then failed, because Yosemite was not available.

Following the misleading and at least partially incorrect instructions on the support site, I rebooted while holding down Option-R, and got the same behavior.

So I rebooted while holding down Command-Option-R (seriously, is a fucking boot menu too usable for your designclowns? has no one ever thought about replacing the ever-expanding suite of invisible magic keystrokes with a few lines of text? or even cryptic pictures?), and it downloaded and began installing Mountain Lion (10.8.5, possibly, although I won’t find out for 3.5 hours).

So, the OS that last shipped 2 years ago isn’t available for download, but the one that last shipped 4 years ago is? And I’ll have to upgrade through 6 major releases to get it current (hopefully without multiple intermediate installs…)?

Ironically, I only really wanted to get the updated firmware and recovery partition, because the spinning disks in this box are far too slow to run Mojave, and I’m going to crack it open next week, install SSDs, and reinstall the OS again.

If the upgrades finish by next week, that is.

(all with the goal of having a machine that stays at Mojave forever to run all the 32-bit software that Apple is screwing over next month…)

Update

Well, that didn’t work. Turns out that was a 2011 Mini, which won’t run Mojave and is stuck at High Sierra. Good thing I have a 2012 Mini that already has an SSD in it…

I know I’m a bit late to the game on this one, but after recently upgrading my iPhone from a 6 Plus (not supported in the upcoming iOS 13, so the trade-in price started to drop…), I discovered the on-by-default feature known as Live Photos.

It really, really sucks. Especially as a default. Glad I found out before it ruined any useful pictures. Just a bunch of quick reference pics like this from the Retreat:

Seriously, all it does is document how much your hand moves after you press the shutter button, while breaking any image-processing workflow you might have. What is the actual use case that justifies the development and (coughcouch) QA resources?

It’s been bugging me for a while with Mojave. I’ll be working along in a window, and suddenly there’s a flicker, and the current window is no longer current. Something grabbed focus and didn’t give it back. With all the crap that ends up running in the background on modern MacOS, it’s hard to figure out exactly what might be at fault, but I just had one pop up that can’t be blamed on anyone but Apple.

For my recent trip to Japan, I took along a Western Digital 1TB SSD as a Time Machine backup drive, and put it in my checked luggage for redundancy. I turned on Apple’s full-disk encryption (for the laptop as well), so when I plug it in, it pops up a password dialog box.

100% of the time, this dialog box steals focus, and then doesn’t give it back. The front-most application does not have an active window, and I either need to click on it or switch to another app and back again.

The drive is fantastic, by the way. I prefer it to the Samsung T3 and T5 models I’ve used, not the least because it comes with the only high-performance USB3(male)-to-USBC(female) adapter I’ve found, carefully designed to mate securely with the supplied short USBC cable. All the other small adapters I’ve tried significantly degrade performance despite claiming otherwise, but if I could buy a dozen of these (with or without the matched cable), I would. Sadly, WD doesn’t offer them separately.

Related, if you have multiple Time Machine backup sets for your machine, and you want to manually kick off a backup to a specific one (say, /Volumes/BackMe), the script looks like this (note that this requires the third-party jq tool in /usr/local/bin, because Apple plist format is garbage):

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

VOL=BackMe
if [ ! -d "/Volumes/$VOL" ]; then
        echo "TM backup '$VOL' not mounted!"
        exit 1
fi

ID=$(tmutil destinationinfo -X |
	plutil -convert json -o - - |
	jq -r '.Destinations[]|select(.Name == "'"$VOL"'").ID')
time tmutil startbackup -a -b -d "$ID"

It wasn’t cheap, but I finally have a fully-functional keyboard on my MacBook Pro:

Yes, that’s a one-key mechanical USB keyboard with an Escape key. I wish the case were a bit shorter (the USB port’s on the bottom side of the board, sadly), but even with the extra height, it’s so much easier to work now. I may try to CNC something that lets it “clip” onto the side with a very short USB cable; longer reach but better height, might be worthwhile.

I like to think that there’s someone out there to address this message to, but all signs point to “no”.

Let’s look at the intersection of several features:

1. Quick Look, activated by pressing spacebar.
2. “Display as Folder” view for the Downloads folder in the Dock.
3. Keyboard event passthrough to the active application.
4. Spacebar as “mark item completed” in Reminders.
5. Auto-select next item.

Now, let’s suppose that I have recently downloaded some items to which quicklook can be applied, perhaps pictures of scantily clad young ladies. While the Reminders app is active and an item is selected, I click on the Downloads icon, bringing up thumbnail images of these downloads, which I wish to view more closely.

I do this by pressing the spacebar, once to preview an image, once to make it go away again. I repeat these keystrokes several times, examining several images. When I click the Downloads folder again, I am returned to the Reminders app, which is now empty, because I’ve just marked every single item as completed.

This behavior is not consistent between applications. It never happens with Terminal, sometimes happens with Safari, where it’s a minor nuisance, and always happens with Reminders, where it is destructive.

Want to let users sign in to your iOS app using Google, Facebook, Github, or any other third-party service? Better put the new Apple login button first on the list, or you’re fucked.

Did I hear something recently about antitrust investigations in Silicon Valley? Will I hear more soon?