I guess Messages.app on iOS heard I was talking shit about its big (or little?) brother and felt left out. Let’s ignore the preview-less PNG image above, because it is almost 4 megabytes big and how could we ever expect iOS to handle such an amount of pixels. Instead, focus on not just one but two mysterious wireframe iMessage apps. Apparently they were both left over after I deleted the app which installed… one of them. iOS seems to hold them more dearly than me, because it freaks out when I try deleting them.

In Preview.app you have to really resize that Inspector window to see more of your data instead of more whitespace to the left. That way, when it finally reveals what you actually want to see, you get to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Thanks @nickheer for the video!

A few days ago we joked about Bavaria in iMessage, as seen in the screenshot to the left. Yet when I search for “bavaria” on my MacBook, as seen in the on macOS screenshot in the top right corner, I only get one result from last year. Of course, when I manually scroll back a few days (which itself is an experience so laughably bad that I’m honestly at a loss for words) the message is obviously also available on my Mac – as seen in the lower right corner.

iMessage is eight years old. Never once in its entire existence has search on macOS (it’s such a long time that it wasn’t even called macOS back then!) worked properly. It is so ridiculously bad, there’s actually a third-party app that provides a functioning search. This total embarassment of a sitution is so old that said third-party app has been around long enough that I was still a student and too broke to buy the app back when I first heard of it. Instead, I built a poor man’s version myself – it’s just a simple SQLite database after all, nothing a few shell aliases couldn’t query quickly and efficiently. But apparently it’s still a problem too hard to solve for the almighty Apple.

Don’t even get me started on how utterly horrible the UX (it should not be called that, it’s just… pain) is for actually navigating between multiple search results on macOS. When I need to find something in my iMessages I just grab my iPhone. And let’s not forget that this option has only become viable since iOS13, before which it was just as bad on there as well.

Just like everyone else these days I’m registered for a minimum of 27 Slack workspaces. Every time I have to sign up for a new one Slack treats me like I’ve never even heard of them before.

I really hope that at some point they’ll just have a unified account with workspace identities. The way that Discord does it where you have one account across all “workspaces” is also not an ideal solution.

Yes, I am ignoring the bigger problem which is the fact that open source software projects shouldn’t even use a closed-source, history-paywalling silo like Slack.

Trying to sign up for Prime again after seeing the delivery fees. I guess that’s what happens if your links are not real links but spans with a JavaScript click event.

Neither of those folders contains any unread items. When I enter one of them, both unread counts vanish. It then reappears (with different counts) every few days.

Setting the scene: Imagine you are moving a playlist or deleting a track from a playlist. A second later you realize your mistake and want to revert that action.

What’s the shortcut you’d reach for first? For me it would be Cmd + Z, the universal shortcut for “Undo that last change”.

Small Apple Music.app pop-quiz: What happens if you decide to use that shortcut?

Answer: The playlist folder name is deleted and renamed to “untitled folder”, if you hit Cmd + Z a few more times it creates additional playlist folders called “untitled folder”. Obviously.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s anyone actually using Apple Music at the fruit company for more than a few minutes while doing a demo. While I really like the curated playlists there are some serious usability problems with them:

• You can’t put them in folders like regular, locally created playlists
• You can’t see which one is a local one you can put in folders and which one is an Apple Music Playlist that can’t be moved without just trying it.
• You can’t select multiple playlists to remove or move them (Like it would work in any native Mac app)
• To rename the playlist you can’t right-click / rename as you would expect it to work. You have to open the playlist and then figure out that you can click the name in there. But just in the right way, otherwise it starts playback of the playlist. Or in the case of an empty playlist a random song from your library…for reasons. This is so discoverable that people had to call the Apple Support to learn that.

If you’ve used Apple Music for more than a couple of days you’ll end up with an endless list of alphabetically sorted playlists in the side bar with no way of organizing them or deleting them without right-clicking every single one of them.

I guess that’s what they mean by “Lose yourself in 60 million songs.” on the Apple Music marketing landing page.

For months I have been wondering why on a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro the fans would always spin up like crazy when a simple Time Machine backup was running. It also seemed really odd to me that almost always when I checked, it would show several GB of data being backed up – I rarely change that much data. Then I read about Catalina fucking up yet another thing and figured that must probably be the reason.

Still, it was so insanly annoying that I could not let it rest. I figured there must be some way to find out what data exactly changed inbetween two TM snapshots. There is. I let that script run (for almost an entire day) and in the resulting output I was quickly able to find the directory that was responsible for almost the entire size of the changes: ~/Library/Arq/.

So I went into that directory, finding a Cache.noindex directory in it that was several dozen gigabytes large. After the recent debacle with Arq 6 (I’m still on version 5) my initial reaction was to blame the developer for putting that cache directory in the wrong place, causing it not to be ignored by Time Machine. But alas, there was the .noindex¹ ending in the name, so should that not also mean that Time Machine ignores it? Yes. Yes, it should. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t. So for months, my two primary backup strategies have negatively affected each other by slowing down to a grinding halt and consuming ungodly amounts of CPU power and fan spinnage.

I have now manually added that specific directory to my Time Machine exclusion list and haven’t heard the fans since. It just works!

While clicking around in the Shortcuts.app I peeked at some of the offered ready-made Shortcuts. I’m not sure how this value is generated but at least for my understanding of languages this one doesn’t quite roll off the tongue easily.