The reason I dug into the translation settings in the first place was this popup – it keeps coming up after dismissing it. Not every time, but frequently enough to be really annoying.

There appears to be no way to disable it.

I never again want to hear a single word about the Windows settings mixing different generations’ UI styles.

(This is in the as-of-writing latest macOS version 27.0.1, which is still an inexcusable crime against taste. [The weird artifacts in the video are courtesy of macOS’ screen recording functionality – it’s not in the actual UI.])

A story in three screenshots:

1. What a weird requirement. Of course the two “different” languages were “English (US)” and “English (UK)”, despite me never having explicitly configured the latter – I assume that Apple just presumes this based on geo-location when you set Siri to English while in Europe?
2. Five minutes later, first hurdle overcome: how big is this download? How long will it take? How fast is it downloading?
3. Five and a half hours later, absolutely zero indication if anything is actually happening or not.

The download had finished the next morning. I don’t even have interest in ever using this app, I just can’t help myself from following through with crap like this when I encounter it.

Got it, thanks.

I couldn’t use the app, so I followed their instructions and clicked “Update WhatsApp.” But no! I got that horrible pop-up, urging me to “try again later”! So which is right? I quit the app in frustration and lo, when I tried again later, I found it had updated. At least it was free (what a bizarre disclaimer)!

I also really like the capitalization on the “native” dialog. “Check For Updates process is already running”, beautiful.

Thanks to long-time reader Benji for the submission!

I signed in to the App Store but not iCloud on my iPad. When I opened the Settings app and tapped iCloud in the sidebar, I was greeted with the blank screen shown in the attached screenshot.

OS version: 27.0.1 (latest as of now). I reentered this page / reopened the Settings app / restarted the device many times and it always behaved the same.

Thanks Fuchen for the submission!

I guess iPadOS didn’t get the memo about menu icons yet.

Thanks Fuchen!

Why?! At least it shows an actual error message instead of just hiding the toggle, or flipping itself back on. But just saying that it’s not possible is such a terrible user experience. Explain to me why this dependency exists. Is it somehow using the contacts to verify who manages the Screen Time settings? Surely that must just be using the iCloud Family data and not something as unreliable and user-changable as the address book?

Of course I’m the only person on this iCloud account, family, device, and whatnot – so whatever governance reasoning is behind this limitation logically makes no sense to apply. I guess we’ll have to wait for the A21 Pro chip before the computing power is sufficient to cover that scenario.

Now that I already wrote about Backblaze for another reason, I’ll also finally take a moment for a different rant related to their software. This screenshot is almost a year old, because I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this post – it can’t really be visualized. (In the time I procrastinated on this post, there’s been a different shitstorm that I luckily don’t need to care about personally.)

As already indicated in my last post, Backblaze very much has a “hide the details” approach to their software. No version number, updates somehow magically happen over time by themselves – even finding the installer to do it manually is a challenge. Despite being a highly technical product and exposing some pretty complicated settings.

One of the things they hide extremely well is any sort of progress or detailed logging/debug information. All you get is basically the window shown above. “We backed up this much, and it’s all good. Trust me, bro.”

Unfortunately this frequently is simply not true. From time to time I deal with files that are so important to me that I verify they have been backed up to feel safe. (Yes, I do back those up to more places than just Backblaze.) When a new file like that comes into being, I go into Backblaze’s restore mode to make sure the file is showing up there. Too often it isn’t. Despite the “trust me bro” reassurance.

In that scenario, you just can’t do jack shit. I dug into whatever logs can be found, every UI option, crawled through old forum threads and Reddit posts with certain incantations. I rebooted the computer. I reconnected all the disks. touch’d the file, renamed the file, moved the file away and back. Reinstalled the software. Still, no matter how often I clicked Backup Now, it would always just buzz away for a moment and then happily report back that it’s all done. You are backed up as of now! But unfortunately I still wasn’t. That’s a pretty significant problem for a backup service.

So after a couple of days of this not resolving itself with enough time, I finally gave in and reached out to support. To be fair, that wasn’t as useless as I expected it to be. But the solution they presented is wild enough that I’ll just quote it here entirely:

follow these steps:

• Connect all disconnected drives.
• Ensure Backblaze is set to “Continuously” (Backblaze Preferences/Control Panel -> Settings -> Schedule)
• Make sure all drives you want backed up are checked (Backblaze Preferences/Control Panel -> Settings; bottom box “Hard Drives to back up”)
• Create a single, small file on the drive in question - just a simple text file is fine.

Then follow these steps to update your application:

• Restart your computer.
• Download the latest installer from this link: https://secure.backblaze.com/update.htm
• Do not uninstall Backblaze. Simply run the installer over your current version.
• Restart your computer once again.
• Then, go to Backblaze Preferences/Control Panel and hold Alt or Option and click “Restore Options.” Let it run for at least 4 hours, then see if the small files you created backed up, and if the date of the drive’s last update also updated.

Please note that both reboots are necessary; do not skip these steps.

Of course by the time I had received those instructions, the problem had solved itself already after all – so I can’t say if I could have saved myself a couple of days of hassle and waiting if I had known to reboot my computer twice around reinstalling the software before holding Alt or Option while clicking Restore Options and then waiting for four hours.

Can’t believe I didn’t just think of trying this myself!

Speaking of Backblaze and System Settings, though: this beauty is fresh of the presses in 27.0.1 – probably more Backblaze’s “fault” than Apple’s, given how extremely non-native their Java app is, but still. What a mess.

The Backblaze preferences themselves also had this highlight:

You might not even see it at first, but this window has tabs on top. Six of them, actually, each with a full word as title. When you click into this black hole of UI elements, they unfold and show up normally (until you reopen the window).

However, all this is – again – not even what I initially wanted to investigate. But the state of software quality on macOS is so in the gutter now that you can barely click twice without encountering some bug. Granted, not necessarily terrible bugs, but bugs nonetheless. Must be all that amazing productivity that “AI” is unlocking, hooray.

The reason I went into these preferences in the first place is that I no longer saw the Backblaze menubar item after upgrading my personal laptop to Golden Gate.¹ As you see above, the menu bar item checkbox is unchecked. I didn’t uncheck it. I also don’t really remember checking it, but it’s probably been ten years since I initially configured this. You can already guess what happens when I do check the box and press OK, right? Exactly, nothing happens – and the box is unchecked again if you go back.

Backblaze doesn’t show a version number anywhere, the “About Backblaze” item in the menu bar can be clicked but doesn’t open anything, and it doesn’t have a manual update check. Just to be sure I wasn’t writing about a problem they already fixed, I went to download the installer manually – fun little game, by the way: go to their website and see how long it takes you to find those downloads.

After the installation of the newest version was finished, the following dialog was shown. Of course this didn’t fix the problem, so I’d say that’s pretty solid comedic timing.

(Yes, I’m aware that there is a menubar item permissions list in macOS now – there’s no Backblaze entry there at all. Maybe that’s actually the problem, but unlike some other permissions you can’t manually add entries to this list.)