Daily Archives: April 1, 2019

Cool MacOSX feature

I’ve found it increasingly hard to approve of Apple for the last while (like seven or eight years) so I wanted to point out something I like. I don’t know when it appeared, but I only just noticed it myself.

You may have noticed that MacOSX apps are good at tracking changes to the filesystem. You can be editing a document in one app, and you change it’s name in the Finder (or the Terminal) and the first app notices that and doesn’t try to save it under the original name. Good job, Apple. All the OSes should do that.

But here’s the feature I just noticed. I’m downloading a file (using a non-Safari browser) and I notice that it looks like this in the Finder:

Notice the grey progress meter next to the file? Pretty slick. I don’t know what the API requires on the part of the web browser, but it’s nice that the rest of the OS can be aware the file is open (easy enough) and it’s 85% done (pretty impressive).

MacOSX Security Updates

I hate them, because I know they probably should be installed, but they take about an hour to install. I see a lot of this:

For whatever reason, it tends to camp out around 40 minutes. I’ll come back and it will say 42 minutes, or 41, or 43, but rarely anything below 40 or over 45.

So this week, Apple gave me a security update:

Note the size of this file. Some of have bandwidth caps, Apple.

Then, a couple of days later, they gave me another. Only it wasn’t a new security update. It was an update of the first update.