newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
How a missing quote mark may have caused my Mac to act up
In seemingly miraculous fashion, basic functions that I thought were lost to my Mac have returned. Spotlight is now able to find stock Apple apps, and Mail is now able to send emails.
So what happened?
I can only guess, but I do know what I was doing just before the miracle — fixing an error in Terminal, along with cleaning up brew installations.
The error was a missing quote mark in a file, something that has plagued me for years. Before AI, I would copy and paste errors into Google and hope for an answer. Typically I would wind up going down rabbit holes, becoming increasingly frustrated until I finally gave up.
What saved me was Le Chat from Mistral. It showed me how to find the offending file and how to fix it. Out of curiosity, I asked if the the missing quote mark would cause any problems. To my chagrin, it had the potential to create a long list of problems, many of which seemed embarrassingly significant.
But this was a long-standing error, so how would fixing it solve problems that just cropped recently? Again, I can only guess that it was a cumulative thing over the years that finally reared its ugly head.
While I was at it, I upgraded all the stuff that I’ve installed with brew. In some cases, I decided to uninstall — things that take up a lot of space and that I no longer have use for. These included Node, Ruby and Hugo.
Why were these installed in the first place? Because I was curious about static site generators. Fussing around with Terminal is not my idea of a good time, so I eventually moved on. Good old Textpattern can never be replaced.
Recently I learned that Font Awesome has acquired static site generator called Eleventy. They’re rebranding it as Build Awesome.
This is surprising given that Font Awesome’s icons are meant to make life easier for developers. The same goes for Web Awesome, a collection of code components.
I’ll be curious to see how or if they can make a static site generator easy for the average person who has never hear of Terminal, and would be scared to touch it if they had.
More posts in the Mac category
Sunday, March 15, 2026
Spotlight can no longer find the stock Apple apps on my iMac
I’ve had my iMac for almost a decade now, and aside from slowing down a bit over the years, it’s worked just fine.
Until now.
It started with Spotlight no longer being able to find any apps or files. After a lot of back and for with Claude that resulted in more time in Terminal than I normally like, along with a trying number of reboots, I was able to force Spotlight to re-index.
Spotlight is now back to normal except for one weird thing — it can’t find the stock Apple apps, including, just to make things more irritating, Terminal. These apps are kept in a separate part of the system, and Spotlight — for reasons unknown — is no longer able to index this part.
Claude suggests re-installing macOS, insisting that it’s not that hard and only takes 30 minutes. I’m skeptical, and besides there are other solutions. For one thing, Terminal is now in the dock.
And Spotlight has been demoted from Command-Space. I’ve turned that combo over to Launchbar, which has no trouble finding stock apps. I’m tempted to go on a rant about why on earth a third-party app would be better at indexing than the one built in. But I'll spare you.
I tried other launchers. Raycast found the stock apps, but slowed down the computer to the point of making it juddery. Alfred, surprisingly, could not find the stock apps. Quicksilver found them, but has an interface that only a mother could love.
Launchbar is free if you don’t mind the occasional nag. I haven’t been nagged yet, so we’ll see how that goes. If it gets bad, I might be tempted to see if I can bear Quicksilver. Or, you know, actually pay for Launchbar.
Update: Now Mail won't send email. I switched to Spark, which has a free version that seems fine. But this really is annoying. My expectation is that it would be the opposite — Apple's apps should be the gold standard for basic reliability. Third-party apps should only be there for optional functionality.
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Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Is the friendly interface no longer “inter”?
1995
2025
The Mac’s Finder icon has, for me, always been an artistic depiction of the phrase “friendly interface.” It’s been like that since 1995, but with its latest iteration in Tahoe, the face has lost its inter.
Let me explain.
I see the icon as a play on the word “interface” — Susan Kare’s idea of what a face would look like if it was “inter”. The icon, I believe, is meant to show two faces brought together as one, just as humans and computers are brought together in a real-life interface.
The earliest version showed an obvious split between the two halves of the face, with the lines extending outward on the top and bottom. Gradually, the line disappeared and the only way to differentiate was the colours.
The Tahoe version breaks with that tradition. It looks like a blue face with a partial white mask placed on part of the right side. It retains the friendly smile, but it’s no longer inter.
Given that many people don't like the changes to the interface introduced by Tahoe, an interface that in some ways makes the interface more difficult, this version of the Finder icon stands as a reminder that a friendly interface may no longer be the goal at Apple.
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Friday, December 26, 2025
Why doesn't the newest Safari work on older Macs?
There’s a cool new thing you can do in HTML that is supported by all the major web browsers, including Safari. But I can’t use it because, well, Safari.
You see, if you want the latest version of Safari, which has this cool new thing, you also need the latest or near-latest version of macOS. It’s been like this for several years now. Safari and macOS are joined at the hip.
Firefox, Chrome and Edge don’t have this problem. I can easily install the latest and greatest on my aging iMac. In fact, I switched to Firefox a few months ago because the old Safari on my old Mac was painfully slow.
Why can’t Apple make its latest version of Safari work with older versions of macOS? It seems insane that Mozilla — a small non-profit — can do this, but the behemoth that is Apple can’t or won’t. They should be embarrassed.
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Saturday, December 20, 2025
Liquid glass grinds my gears
Everyone else has had their say about the Liquid Glass design adopted by Apple, so why shouldn’t I? Actually, I’m mostly fine with it, but some of those icons just don’t make sense.
The one that jumps out at me is Settings. The icon is a set of gears — glass gears apparently. I can’t help thinking about the teeth breaking off as they mesh together. Ouch.
The same goes for the Passwords icon — a set of three glass keys. Try putting one of those in a lock and see how well it holds up. Hint: it won’t.
Both of those should be metal, but that would put them out of step with the rest of the icons. It’s almost like we should go back to the original skeuomorphic design where the icons looked the way they would in real life.
Another example is the Books icon. Can you imagine a book made out of glass? Those pages won’t turn. The same goes for Contacts, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to represent a book of sorts. Both of these icons should be paper.
The old Mail icon looks like a paper envelope, just as you would expect. The new one looks like a glass envelope, which, of course, would break if you tried to read the contents.
One more that makes me cringe is the Games icon represented by a glass rocket propelled with glass fire. That thing would never get off the ground. We need metal and fire.
The only one that kind of makes sense is the Camera icon, with its glass lens. But the ring around the lens and the body of the camera are presumably also made of glass, so it only half-way makes sense.
I do manage to suffer these indignities, though, by thinking of the icons as baubles. For example, don't think of it as a real book. It’s more like a decoration that you might hang from a Christmas tree. What about the rest of the year? Some people have whole shelves devoted to knickknacks and doodads, so you could think of your glass keys sitting on one of those.
More posts in the Mac category
Friday, October 24, 2025
Hello, Firefox, my old friend
I’ve been using Safari for the past couple of years, assuming that it would run best on my aging iMac, now so old it’s stuck on Ventura.
I mean, surely a browser built by Apple would be optimized for computers built by Apple.
But in the past couple of weeks, Safari has become painful — spinning beachballs, long start-up times. Looks like Apple has left this old-timey 2017 Mac behind.
Even when Safari seems finally ready, I still can’t type in the address bar.
So it’s back to good, old Firefox. Even with AI built-in, and I’m not sure if I’m too crazy about that, it still runs circles around Safari.
Really, all I want to do is click on an icon and type where I want to go on the Internet. Firefox does that.
More posts in the Mac category
Monday, June 9, 2025
Apple goes through the looking glass
As I watched Apple’s presentation of its new Liquid Glass design, my first thought was one of practicality — if you can see through it, won’t the background be a distraction?
Then I remembered I had this same concern while developing my Ciders web app. At the time, glass morphism was riding a surge of popularity, and I figured it would be perfect for the app. Cider often comes in glass bottles, so it would be fun if each item could look like it was on a pane of glass.
There are a number of things you have to think about if you want a glassy look. The edges need to look like they are raised, have a thicker density, and catch the light in their own way. The main part of the glass should have some frosting and blur so it isn’t completely see-through. A bit of sheen makes it look like it’s reflecting light. Rounded corners are also a nice touch.
The detail I sweated over most, though, was the opacity. It has to be just the right amount so that you can see through without the text becoming hard to read.
I had the advantage of working with a single-colour background that never changes — my idea of what might be the colour of cider. But what if you were designing this for, say, the notifications that come up on your Mac?
You would have no idea what the background might be. It could be dark or light. It could be an image where dark and light are both present. Or it could be a gradient from dark to light.
I’m interested to see how these variables are handled. My inclination would be to program the notifications so they sense the background and adjust accordingly, but I don’t know enough about programming to know whether this is possible.
Apples’s presentation, as you would expect, demonstrated Liquid Glass under ideal conditions. But as we all know, the real world is often less than ideal.
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Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Your Mac's Shortcuts app can create workspaces for you
So you need to do some work on your Mac that involves opening a few apps. One of them is a browser with a couple of tabs open. You want the windows for the apps placed just the way you like them.
And you want this workspace to appear with a single click.
You could buy an app to do this for you — there are a few good ones out there. Or you could use the Shortcuts app that comes with your Mac. Here’s how.
Before we get started, though, if you’re not familiar with the basics of Shortcuts, I suggest you watch the free sample videos in the course from the incomparable MacMost.
You build a shortcut by dragging in actions from the right sidebar, which can be found by typing in the search area.
Start off by pulling in one “Open App” action for each app you want to open. Click on the word “app” and change it to the name of the app you want to open.
If one of those apps is Safari, you can get it to open tabs with the “Open URLs” action. Other browsers are trickier, and you might have to resort to using an AppleScript snippet.
Now drag in one “Find Windows” action for each app. Click on “Add Filter”. Change “App Name is anything” so it reflects the name of the app you’re working on. The name of the app might not always be clear — for example, is it VS Code, Visual Studio Code, or just Code? A good guide is to use the name in the app’s menu bar. In this case, it is just Code.
Finally, you need to attach a “Resize Window” action to each “Find Window” action. Set this action so it puts the window for each app where you want it — for example, “Resize Windows to Left Half”.
If you’re not happy with the pre-sets for window sizing, you can use Dimension, and give an exact size in pixels. If you do this, you will also need to drag in an action called “Move Window”. This is so you can tell Shortcuts where to put the window after it’s been resized.
Test your shortcut by clicking on the arrow on its title bar. It should open the open the apps and URLs, then move their windows to areas you specified.
To save this shortcut, click on the tab in the right sidebar with an “i” inside a circle. You can pin it in the menu bar, make it a quick action, create a keyboard shortcut — and more. Under the File menu, you can add it to the dock.
Here's how it could be done with Safari, VS Code and Transmit:
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Sunday, May 19, 2024
Why do we put wallpaper on our desktops?
Have a look at the top of your real-life desk. You might see some papers scattered or in piles. There might be a folder. There might be a portable hard drive.
The equivalent on your Mac is the desktop. Most people have at least a few icons representing files and folders on it, and maybe one for a hard drive. Macs even allow you to put your files in the equivalent of stacks.
Let’s get back to your real-life desk. Supposing you were tired of how it looks. Maybe it’s just your basic brown wood.
So you go down to the wallpaper store, find something you like, and glue it down on the desk. Right?
I don’t think so. So why do we ruin the computer desktop metaphor by using the term “wallpaper”?
There was a time when wallpaper on a Mac was known as a “desktop picture.” That made more sense. You were putting a picture on top of your desk. It would be rare to do something like that in real life, but at least it jived with some kind of reality.
Wallpaper goes on walls. Your desktop is not a wall.
But it looks like Apple, which did so much to popularize the graphical interface, has given up.
If you go to Settings in macOS 13 Ventura, and type in “desktop picture,” you’re taken to a section called Wallpaper.
One of the top results of a search in Ecosia for “desktop picture” is “Customize the wallpaper on your Mac”.
If you want to download a Lord of the Rings desktop picture for your Mac, you’ll have to browse one of the many wallpaper websites.
It’s a case where Windows won. Despite using the desktop metaphor like macOS, they have always insisted on using the term “wallpaper”.
I can see why Apple caved. They were probably tired of wasting time supporting new users who couldn’t figure out that desktop picture was the same as wallpaper.
How about we compromise and call it “tablecloth”?
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Sunday, December 11, 2022
Three-finger dragging is awesome
It was sore fingers that finally convinced me to try Apple's Magic Trackpad. Now I wish I hadn't waited so long.
With a few deft swipes and taps, the trackpad can do anything a mouse can do — what a revelation! You don't have to grip it, move it around or click it. I can't believe how easy it is.
The thing that really blows me away is three-finger dragging. I sometimes have to highlight, copy and paste a lot of text, and didn't relish the though of clicking and holding while pulling down. Three-finger dragging comes to the rescue.
With this enabled, you just move your cursor to where you want to start, then drag with three fingers until you have everything you want highlighted. Some instructions say you need to click at the start, but you don't even have to do that.
Depending on your system, there are two ways of enabling three-finger dragging.
System Settings > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options. Enable dragging and select three-finger drag.
System Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options. Enable "Use trackpad for dragging". Choose "Three Finger Drag" from the list of options.
Enjoy.
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