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:

• discussions.apple.com/thread/250409744
• discussions.apple.com/thread/250385204
• discussions.apple.com/thread/7540901
• discussions.apple.com/thread/8614841
• discussions.apple.com/thread/7579973
• forums.macrumors.com/threads/10-14-5-mail-opens-by-itself.2182500/
• old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/7d81ak/solution_for_those_who_have_the_mail_app_randomly/
• apple.stackexchange.com/questions/361383/mail-app-opens-randomly-in-macos-10-14-5
• apple.stackexchange.com/questions/347399/mail-app-opens-spontaneously

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.

I don’t even know what to say anymore. Even ignoring how it says 179 GB available in the prefpane and 95,07 GB in the error message, why is it an error at either of those values? It says that the oldest backups are deleted when my disk becomes full. Why does this error message exist?

Reddit has always had UX that could only be described as intentionally inaccessible. I actually ignored the site for years just because I disliked it so much.¹ But sharing a link to a specific Reddit comment with the “new” layout really is something else. Earlier today I sent a direct link to the comment with the YouTube link, pictured in light blue above. This screenshot is what the recipient sees after opening my link. There are more than 4.2k comments in the thread to which I sent a deep link. But you can only see three and a half of them, because more than half of the screen is just other things put there to dRivE uP eNgAgEMeNt. We both work in tech, we both spend 90% of our time on the interwebs, and the recipient still reacted with “Wow, and the video in the comments is really crazy as well”. Because they didn’t see that I already specifically linked to that comment. And I can’t blame them at all.

Most of the time I just say (comment link!) right after sending a comment link, just to make sure. It’s always awkward and embarrassing to share such a link. Did they really get it? Or did they just read the post itself, not the specific super funny/important comment I linked to? Do I ask and make them feel bad/dumb? Do they now think I’m weird because they think I sent them the post instead of a comment, and the post doesn’t make sense for me to send? To some people I just would never even send any link to Reddit, because I’m so sure they would not be able to parse it. It’s almost as if they don’t even want me to share links. I’ll probably just use the new Apollo feature and send beautifully rendered “screenshots” of comments in the future. It is an insanely nice feature, and I hate that it is needed.

Bonus points for iMessage link previews, which have absolutely no visual difference whatsoever between a link to a comment in a thread and a link to the thread itself.

If you right click an item in the macOS Music.app where would you expect the contextual menu to show up?

1. Roughly in the area where you right clicked on
2. Not at all
3. Top left corner of the screen

Airmail has a fun new feature where you have to guess if any of the settings you’re trying to toggle is part of the premium subscription or not.

Thanks @herrherrmann for the post!

Some HTML tags are allowed. But not all! Don’t you just love it when a product has fun little games like that, where you can only find out relevant information by trial and error? No? Me neither.

That entire knowledge base entry has big “rest of the fucking owl” energy.