One of the core principles of macOS is that an app can have multiple windows. This makes it easy to read something in a browser window, while at the same time writing something in another one. Unless you are using GitLab and someone decides they have to artificially dim one window so you can’t read anything there any more. Safari and they decide that two pinned tabs shouldn’t be used at the same time.
Why?
Update 2020-07-15: Attributed error to Safari not Gitlab. Thanks @Cisneiros
Apple doesn’t like creepy tracking pixels in emails, just like most people. Blocking “Remote content” as a feature is pretty common in many email applications. What plenty of email applications additionally have is a way to overwrite this behaviour in some way. Fastmail for example let’s users choose from three options:
This is not possible in Apple’s Mail.app which only supports “On” or “Off”.
People came up with all kinds of — mostly AppleScript based — workarounds but this seems like something that should actually be configurable. Not being able to control this with finer-grained settings will just encourage people to disable the feature entirely and expose themselves to all kinds of tracking.
Cool.
Needless to say, statuspage.io is not blocked by anything on my end. Both statuspage.io and DigitalOcean’s instance of it, status.digitalocean.com, are perfectly usable in another tab. The latter proudly claiming “All Systems Operational”.
Even if it was blocked – what a horrible way to handle that. Is this the experience users get in case statuspage.io has an actual downtime? Do websites get paid per solved hCaptcha?
Very helpful details, thanks Microsoft! You know, if you want to punish people for not using Gmail, just say so outright instead of barfing up Java errors into your frontend and making people go through your bugtracker for support, because they can’t contact customer support without an account.
Two more fun details about this insanity: 1) I already have an account with the same domain name. I’ve had that account for years. 2) After sifting through the linked Jira issue, I’ve tried some of my other domains, and of course people who discriminate based on domain names also build shit like this:
And as if all that was not bad enough already – the NO “button” doesn’t do anything when clicked.
For some reason I now have two Time Machines on my Desktop. If I click on the one that not actually contains my Time Machine backup it’s just an empty directory without an icon. It’s also not possible to delete it or eject it.
Restart fixed it.
Aight, just gonna dismiss the cookie banner real quick so I can see the screenshot better. Or so I thought.
Running out of space on macOS is not a pleasant experience. When you do hit the limit it’s best to just shut down the computer and hope the sleepimage is getting purged. Hopefully then you have sufficient space to reboot and clean up.
PS: I know how to take a screenshot, but that doesn’t work any more once your disk is full so I had to resort to a screen photo. Additionally rm -rf via the iTerm.app didn’t work any more either.
Apple gave everyone some new and free fonts. This is great!
Not so great: You can’t download all of them at once.
“Why not just select multiple families while holding the Command key?” you might ask. This question is easily answered by giving it a try and observing how the CPU load is going up to 100% while the system grinds to a halt and the interface starts lagging after selecting more than 6 fonts.
The Google Stackdriver interface is already user hostile to a certain degree (Dropdown with 100 services, no search, typing letters doesn’t do anything) but some defaults never cease to annoy me.
Them: “Filter by label or text”
Me: Inserts text from log line
Them: “Thanks, we’ll filter for these 7 tokens independently”
Me: clicks 7 times to remove each one of them and pastes again with quotation marks
Since macOS 10.12 there’s a bug in Apple Mail that causes it to randomly become the frontmost application. If you are in full screen mode — like when you are giving a talk or watching a movie — it opens itself up in split view mode where it takes up half the screen while your other main window is being resized.
I saw this happening first hand when coworkers showed me something on their computers but never experienced it myself. This has been happening since at least macOS 10.12.
After some research it became clear that it’s related to Gmail and I’m not exactly the only one:
The proposed solutions are to disable Power Nap (I don’t see how that could be related) or to remove Gmail. I wouldn’t call any of these a viable solution.
Unfortunately now I’m also in the select group of people experiencing this bug.
I tried to confirm the theory of Gmail causing it and could partially reproduce it. The bug only seems to happen with Gmail accounts that are part of a G Suite account and not with my personal Gmail account. It happens 1-2 times per day.
Funnily enough the bug only started to show up when I got my new Mac Mini with a clean install of Catalina. This makes it pretty clear that this is not some third party app causing havoc but just yet another critical bug that hasn’t been resolved in an increasingly longer list of macOS releases. It’s not as critical as Mail.app deleting emails but it’s still not something you want to have happening every few hours.