Tag: macOS

First Impressions of macOS 26

Yesterday I decided to stop waiting and install macOS 26 Tahoe. It’s a mixed bag.

Everything they added for apps other than the design updates, I like.

I’m a big fan of the Journal app. Having it on macOS is awesome. I’ve never been able to stick with Day One, but for some reason Journal clicks with me. The suggestions it gives are good at reminding me what I was doing, so even if I don’t visit the app for a few days, I can come back and fill in the details.

The updates to Spotlight aren’t huge for me, but what’s there is good. Being able to quickly switch to an app-only list is great for when the app I’m looking for isn’t the top result. I want to play with the actions list more. I’m wondering if having a good launcher for shortcuts will encourage me to use them more. For some reason the built-in clipboard manager only holds onto what you copy for eight hours, so I’m going to keep using Pastebot. If they remove that limitation, I’ll probably try it.

Relatedly, Launchpad has been totally redone and I guess is called “Apps” now. I never used or liked Launchpad to the degree it was hard for me to imagine that other people did. Instead of being a weird fake Springboard for macOS, it’s now a proper app launcher you can filter by category. I’m going to give it a keyboard shortcut and try using it in place of Spotlight.

Terminal is my favorite terminal app. Now that they added better color support and whatever you need for Powerline to run, I don’t see myself needing any others.

The new design language? It’s weird. Almost no third-party apps I use have adopted it, and I don’t know if I want them to. It’s really strange seeing the two styles next to each other, though. Probably they should eventually, but I think it’s going to make Electron apps and others that use custom UI seem even more out of place.

Liquid Glass is definitely better on iOS. At least there it feels a bit alive and I can see what they were going for. On macOS it’s just weird slightly-transparent bubbles everywhere. The new drive icons really bother me for some reason. The perspective is off. They aren’t flat, but they aren’t tilted back the right amount either. It feels like they’re going to tip forward out of the screen.

My review for the design changes is this — mostly not awful, but everything they changed is worse. Every change rests somewhere between neutral and a little bit degraded. Not hugely terrible, but just a little bit less pleasant than before. I guess that kind of adds up.

6/10

October 2, 2025

macOS
Freelance Availability for iOS/macOS Development

Looking at my schedule, I’m going to have at least a couple months of availability for freelance iOS/macOS/Ruby work starting immediately. I’m a former Apple engineer (2018-2021); experienced with all of the current app frameworks and technologies. Capable of working on any size project, new or existing.

If you’re working on getting your iOS/macOS 26 updates over the line, now is a great time to bring me on. Get in touch via my Hire Me page and I’ll get back to you right away.

August 4, 2025

iOS, macOS, swift
Hide Folders in MacOS Finder

A situation I’ve found myself in twice now is wanting to hide a folder in Finder without making it a dotfile, which would also hide it when using ls. Turns out there is a flag for this. To hide a file from the command line, use chflags hidden. To show it again, chflags nohidden.

I was even able to make a shortcut, so that I can right click and hide a folder from Finder itself — which is surprising, because I’ve never had Shortcuts do what I want with anything involving a shell script. The only wrinkle is that you must — I shit you not — go to Settings and give Finder full disk access.

You have to give Finder full disk access.

Finder is located at /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app, so once you go to Finder > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, hit the plus button, navigate to that folder, and select Finder.app. After that, the shortcut works as expected. You can download the it here.

July 18, 2025

Command Line, macOS, Shortcuts
Xcode’s predictive code completion is worse than nothing

Unlike some of my friends, I’m not the biggest fan of the kind of AI code completion that tries to write blocks of code for you as you type, but I was still kind of excited to see what Apple’s version of that in Xcode would look like and wanted to give it a try.

On paper, it could be great. Xcode indexes all your code and knows everything about your project. Apple controls the entire experience, so the integration between the editor and LLM could be deep and relevant to your project’s code. As soon as you try it, you realize that’s not true. Wherever it’s pulling suggestions from, it doesn’t appear to have any kind of meaningful understanding of your project. Bummer.

The suggestions not being that good isn’t why I had to turn it off — sometimes they’re all right. Not close to as good as Copilot, but okay sometimes. The reason I had to turn it off, and the thing that is absolutely mind-boggling about the feature, is that it makes basic syntactic mistakes all the time. Things like putting the end quote in the wrong place or leaving off parentheses. Every time it made a mistake like this, I had to spend one or two minutes staring at the line, trying to find the error.

That’s not just bad; that’s worse than nothing. The good news is that engineers inside Apple use Xcode too, so I’m certain the team knows how much love predictive code completion needs. Hopefully, they’re spending the time and energy so that this year or next it can go from what it is now to what I was hoping it could be.

May 2, 2025

Developer Tools, iOS, macOS, Programming, swift, Xcode

Emacs Style Keybindings on macOS

Listen — it’s not that I don’t want to use Vim keybindings. I’ve done it before. They’re fun. It’s kind of like giving your text editor a manual transmission. The reason I’m not using them now is because I don’t want one way of working with text on my computer which works with my editor, and another way that works everywhere else.

Something I’m always surprised more developer-type people don’t seem to know about is that macOS has pretty good support for Emacs-style keybindings built in, and they pretty much work with every text field in the system.

Three that I use a lot are Control-A to go to the beginning of a line, Control-E to go to the end, and Control-K to cut to the end of the current line. You can even use Control-Y once you’ve done that to paste what you just cut.

Apple has a whole documentation page listing these, along with a ton of others, but here are a few of the Emacs-style ones I could pick out. This document really highlights something I always notice when using any operating system other than macOS, which is how much less consistent and extensive keyboard support seems to be on every other system.

Shortcut	Function
`Control-A`	Move to the beginning of the line or paragraph.
`Control-E`	Move to the end of a line or paragraph.
`Control-F`	Move one character forward.
`Control-B`	Move one character backward.
`Control-P`	Move up one line.
`Control-N`	Move down one line.
`Control-K`	Delete the text between the insertion point and the end of the line or paragraph.
`Control-D`	Delete the character to the right of the insertion point. Or use `Fn-Delete`.
`Control-H`	Delete the character to the left of the insertion point. Or use `Delete`.
`Control-T`	Swap the character behind the insertion point with the character in front of the insertion point.
`Control-O`	Insert a new line after the insertion point.
`Control-L`	Center the cursor or selection in the visible area.
`Control-U`	Clear the entire line before the cursor (in Terminal and some text fields).
`Option-Delete`	Delete the word to the left of the insertion point.

March 7, 2025

macOS, Productivity

Keyboard Shortcut for Proofread on macOS

Of the Apple Intelligence writing tools that were released in beta recently, I’ve found the ones which try to rewrite your text in any way to be pretty bad, at least for me. The one feature I’ve been using many times a day, however, is “Proofread.” It’s sort of between macOS grammar/spellcheck and Grammarly. It’ll see where you missed a comma, fix capitalization, and that sort of thing without changing the tone of your text. It’s even smart enough to not mess up your formatting when writing in Markdown.

In fact, I like it so much I set up a keyboard shortcut for it. If you don’t know, you can set up keyboard shortcuts on your Macintosh for any menu item. I made mine control-command-p. If you’ve never done this before, Apple has a support page that will show you how it’s done.

November 20, 2024

Apple Intelligence, macOS
Why Can’t iOS Have Smart Folders?
On macOS, Apple has the concept of a “Smart Folder” that is found in all kinds of places. Sometimes they’re called something else, but it’s the same concept. Just off the top of my head, they exist in Mail, Contacts, Finder, Music, and Photos.

The only apps I know about that have added them for both macOS and iOS are Reminders and Notes, although I’ve found the implementation of them to be a bit weird. In both of those, you can’t add sub-conditions, so you can say all or any of a list of conditions, but you can’t say “all of these conditions and any of these conditions.” It might sound like a small thing, but it’s not.

Anyway, back to the topic. I want this, and I want Apple to add it. Part of me wonders if it’s just a matter of there not being an equivalent to NSRuleEditor in UIKit or SwiftUI, and so every app would have to implement the control on their own¹.

Apple Photos is the one where I really miss this because Photos libraries tend to be so big, and there are so many ways to slice them. For example, “I want to only see photos taken with this or that camera in the last six months.”

I know this whole thing probably sounds very specific and nerdy to anyone who doesn’t use this feature, but I do, and I think Apple should add it. It’s been fifteen years, Apple. I believe in you. You can do it.
1. Which is what Reminders and Notes did. ↩
November 19, 2024

iOS, macOS