I’d love to know what this problem is. I don’t just say that in the “if you tell me there is a problem, tell me at least something about the problem” way, but I’m very curious about the technical details of it.

It can’t be that bad, because force-closing and reopening Mail.app fixes it. Usually it seems to occur when you have a spotty connection and Mail.app isn’t able to download the actual body of the email. If they can detect the problem – as demonstrated by the error message – and clearing some cache (or whatever other voodoo force-closing achieves) can resolve it, why can’t it be fixed in a non-shitty way?

So recently I’ve been forced to reboot my iPhone more often than usual. One thing I noticed is that Spotlight (is it called Spotlight over there?) is basically useless for a solid two or three minutes after each reboot. The above screenshot (left: shortly after reboot, right: normal) isn’t some crazy trick where I tried to capture a split second that doesn’t make sense, that’s after several retries of the same search term over the course of several minutes after a reboot.

Opening 1Password after an iPhone reboot is always the first thing I do, because 1Password requires one unlocking via Master Password after a reboot before you can use Face ID to unlock it. For some annoying reason, this Master Password unlocking can’t be done from within the Safari extension. So when you open a website after rebooting, and want to log in using the Safari extension – you can do that just fine. Instead of unlocking 1Password via Face ID, you use the Master Password in Safari. But that does not unlock Face ID for subsequent usages, you’d have to keep inputting your Master Password like some kind of neanderthal. Allowing Face ID unlocks in Safari can only be achieved by actually opening the app itself and unlocking that via Master Password. Afterwards, you can use Face ID from within Safari.

That’s why instantly opening 1Password via Spotlight after a reboot is something I have a lot of experience with. I’m not quite sure when it started being so unreliable after a reboot, but it seems to rebuild the search index every time. No progress indication, no information that searching currently is completely useless, nothing.

It says “Your subscription will automatically renew on %1%”. I guess owning a PS5 now makes you belong to the one percent?

Wouldn’t the kind of users that rely on a utility like that also read a deprecation notice outside of the OS itself? This way it has big “Do you know what time it is? – Yes.” energy.

Thanks Michoel for the screenshot!

I’ve been experiencing this bug since the Messages.app rewrite in Big Sur. I have so far not been able to find out what exactly causes it: Often, but not always when I want to respond to a thread, the colors of the interface will freak out when it brings the thread to the forefront. The colors are always different, see also this video:

Only after it happened the tenth time did it occur to me to check if causing a “redraw” by dragging another window over it might fix the rendering. As you can see above, it certainly does… something.¹

Why am I filming and photographing my screen? Well as it turns out, this does not show up in screenshots or screen recordings at all. They look perfectly fine, so it must be a bug fairly “late” in the graphics pipeline, I suppose? Pinky promise, video and photo have not been modified in any way except for the blurring of personal details.

Leaving threaded mode or closing the app fixes it, also there is no high CPU load or anything like that when it’s happening, and the app is still perfectly usable (well, as usable as it is without weird graphics glitches).

I know I could search for “Maps” but one would think that even the most rudimentary search algorithm could figure out that “Apple Maps” could be related the Maps.app installed on this Apple computer.

This even continued to behave that way after a reboot. Only way to solve it was to use Activity Monitor to kill the process for the widgets of the app.

Maybe the app is doing something wrong, but even if so – who handed them the gun to shoot themselves in the foot with? Luckily this is happening in the golden era of the App Store, otherwise I’d repeatedly get physical boxes by mail, I guess.

Clicking on the warning sign next to my iCloud account in Mail shows me this informative error message. Yes I want to try “Online Status” of undefined mail account again.

I’m not sure what all other messenger apps out there do differently than Apple’s Messages.app but the syncronization between devices is always consistently the worst. Apple of all companies should be the one to nail cross device sync in their own ecosystem.

After waking up the computer, messages from hours ago stay unread until I click on each conversation to make the badge go away. Restarting Messages.app doesn’t fix that. Clicking on a conversation sometimes replays the messages with a “new message arrived” notification sound for each message. If this is hundreds of messages this results in a few seconds of notification sounds being played in quick succession and sometimes overlapping.

I don’t know if this is one of these universal childhood experiences everyone around the world can relate to, but probably during my first year of school for a while it was the most hilarious thing to write “Please turn over” on both sides of a piece of paper and hand it to someone.

It looks like “artificial intelligence” has now arrived at that level of maturity. (It’s a search without results – curious enough after searching for an autocomplete suggestion from that search function – and repeating useless “Did you mean?” suggestions.)

Thanks Karoline for the video!