Erica Sadun

Where technology meets something or other

Archive for the ‘OS X’ Category

Controlling Screen Sharing from the command line

My world often narrows to Xcode and Terminal. There are times I just want to check in on another computer quickly and I don’t want the hassle of creating a new Finder window, going to the network, waiting for the items to load, and clicking Screen Sharing.

Let me share a quick osascript solution I use instead (and there’s an even better solution for launching just using open, thanks Chris). This example connects to Esopus Spitzenburg, my Mojave computer (aka the one that still runs everything including Photoshop and Microsoft Office).

#! /bin/sh

/usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "Screen Sharing" to GetURL "vnc://Esopus-Spitzenburg.local"'

If closed, the Screen Sharing application launches in the foreground. If already running, it stays at its relative hierarchy. You can add a command to activate to bring it to the front on each invocation, even if the connection is already active.

If you’d like to let the utility toggle visibility on call instead, add a request to Finder and append it to the script:

/usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to set visible of process "Screen Sharing" to not visible of process "Screen Sharing"'

I have written similar utilities to open Broxwood Foxwhelp and Glockenapfel, depending on the computer I’m using. As much as I’ve intended to write a single utility instead of two or three dedicated scripts, I’ve can’t convince myself it’s worth the effort.

(Bonus points: Why are my computers named this way?)

Crafting a custom word count service

I just happened to need to do a lot of word counts today so I put together a service to make my life easier. While, I performed my initial work on Mojave but the same approach works all the way to Big Sur and, presumably, the upcoming macOS Malibu Barbie.

Open Automator

To get started, launch automator and create a new document.

Select Quick Action, Choose from the new document dialog:

Add Scripting

Drop in a Run Shell Script and then an Apple Script. You can search from them in the top-left corner. Drag them in order into the right panel.

I used /bin/bash for my shell script, shocking, I know, as I am well known for my love of all things csh. Feel free to use whatever shell suits you. The first non-argument shell variable ($1 here) corresponds to highlighted text, which can be used by the system contextual menu:

echo `echo $1 | wc -w` words. `echo $1 | wc -c` characters.

Switch the pop-up for piping output (“passing input”) from “to stdin” to “as arguments”. This allows the AppleScript to read the selected data and present a dialog. If you forget, you’ll get empty input and something like “1 words, 0 characters” all the time.

on run {input, parameters}
    display dialog input as string buttons {"OK"}
end run

Save and Run

Save the action. I called mine “Word Count”.

The action automatically saves to ~/Library/Services, in case you want to find or delete it in the future.

% ls
Word Count.workflow/

Your new quick action automatically adds a custom service to your contextual pop-ups. Just highlight anything you want to count, from text on a web page to your work in a document and open the contextual menu:

Make sure the output looks reasonable. For easiest testing, copy the text to your clipboard and then use wc directly in terminal.

And, then boom, you are done.

Let me know if this was helpful.

The surprising joys of Preview

For years, I’ve been saying how surprising macOS’s Preview app is. Just about everyone knows it is _there_ and lots of people use it to look at pictures and crop and occasionally to annotate. But there’s so much more that Preview can do.

Did you know that you can use Preview to scan and fill out forms using nearby Phones so you can get paper work done and submitted? That’s just one underused feature. It syncs with the phone’s document scanner, to find the outlines of the paper, then performs geometry correction so you can fill out paperwork, whether it’s for your next group hike or your kid’s camp outing. Fill, sign, send, and you’re done.

Preview can also be your new lightweight drawing program, whether you want to work with shapes and text or with freeform lines:

Preview can also adjust photo levels for basic color corrections. The right-hand side is the original. The left shows the picture after I applied auto levels, upped the contrast, and warmed the picture slightly. (Yes, that’s me on the left, and my son on the right in the Powerade reflection.)

I’m not sure who gave the Preview team the go-ahead to add lots of silly and delightful features or whether this is just a dogfood target that somehow got shared with the public, but there’s just so much you can do with it. The other evening, my daughter had begged for a watchkit app and I used Preview to populate my XCAssets for the watch app icon.

If I can get enough people to sign up, I’ll be giving a workshop this week on Preview through Try Swift World, although it’s a bit of a hard sell given how weird a topic it is for an audience of developers.

What’s your favorite hidden app feature that few people know about?

Catalina GIFfing: Quick workflow from screen to animated GIFs

All the leaves are green.

And the sky is blue.

I’ve been at my desk.

With screenshot play…

(To be fully truthful, it’s currently raining cats, dogs, kittens, and puppies. But it’s lovely here in the high desert.)

With my newly updated workflow creating the following GIF took about a minute maybe from start to post. The secret? QuickTime Screen Recording (bless you ⌘-Shift-5) and “gifify” courtesy of Homebrew. Set record, demo, stop, convert, drop into WordPress:

I love how easy it is to invoke screen recording these days with macOS’s updated capture interface. It’s especially nice how the optional delay time allows me to get into the zone before recording actually starts.

Back to installation, the blocker was getting homebrew to get itself into position to fully support Catalina. I had to apply homebrew update and homebrew upgrade and homebrew doctor a number of times. Not only did I get gifify installed, but ffmpeg is finally back to working and I once again have emacs for all my git needs.

I’ll spare you how bad the emacs transition was other than to say if you have to disable system integrity and mount read-write by hand, you’re probably doing it the wrong way.

With ffmpeg, it was the dependent libraries including the ones already installed into macOS (like openssl ). Homebrew refused to link:

Warning: Refusing to link macOS provided/shadowed software: openssl@1.1

I wish I had known early about the update/upgrade/doctor approach applied multiple times by the way, not just once, until everything stops complaining and the doctor says “Your system is ready to brew”. Because at that point, installs are a breeze. Installing before then, when the configuration seemed irreparably broken was probably a bad choice.

I spent a bit of time after removing my current bandaid symbolic links. It seems to have helped that I ended up granting separate privileges to ruby in Security & Privacy a while ago. I don’t remember why I did but it’s in there and I vaguely remember going through the process while cursing Cat.

June’s almost here and I wonder if Catalina.successor() will be better or more of the same. It hasn’t been a good Cat year for me.

Broken App Store downloads on Mojave: We could not complete your purchase

This has been happening to a lot of people recently. You open App Store and try to update apps or download new ones. Instead:

And if you have 48 apps to update, you have to click OK 48 times. Argh.

I spent nearly two hours with Apple yesterday trying to resolve.

Instead, I should have just tweeted because when I did Bas Broek had the answer almost immediately:

I had already rebooted, reset NVRAM/PRAM, cleaned out my Application Support for the App Store, and, get this, at the advice of Apple itself, reinstalled freaking Mojave to try to resolve it.

What a waste of time.

I hope this may come up in someone’s Google search to save them time.

  1. Quit App Store
  2. At the terminal: open $TMPDIR/../C/com.apple.appstore/
  3. In Finder: trash everything in that folder including any pending updates / stuck items.
  4. Relaunch App Store
  5. Done

Update: Gwynne Raskind adds: “$TMPDIR/../C is confstr(_CS_DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR)”.

Catalina permissions: Chrome, Zoom, etc

Ran into trouble this weekend where I was unable to add permissions for a number of apps to allow access to my microphone and camera.  (And yes, I’m aware of the security horrors of Zoom but I had work to do.)

They wouldn’t give the normal permissions request:

Instead, I got a message directing me to System Preferences:

Once there, the prefs did not list the app for normal check-to-enable:

I couldn’t unlock and drag on an app.

With some help from Bas Broek and this article, which specifically addressed the inability to grant access in Catalina, I discovered that rebooting with a NVRAM/PRAM reset might help. It sounded like sacrificing chicken entrails but it worked. While a regular reboot didn’t help, the Cmd+Option+PR reboot did.

Apple Support Article: How to reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac.

I hope this helps someone else to avoid the time I wasted.

How to fix: Ooops, I lost track of those beta upgrades

What happens when you put off beta upgrades and put them off and off and off and suddenly the release version has outpaced the beta? This happens:

And this happens:

So there you are, stuck in beta and complaining to your friends about what is, ultimate, my your fault. If you don’t update on a timely basis, you can waste a few hours (as I just did) getting your system back on track so you can mess with (for example, just to pull something out of thin air) Swift Playgrounds for iOS for Mac (which requires the 10.15.4 beta10.15.3).

Just so you don’t waste time, don’t try installing the 10.15.3 combo updater. (Image above) You need to:

  • Unenroll from the beta program,
  • Install the latest macos from the App Store,
  • Re-enroll into the beta program, and
  • Upgrade to the latest beta.

Prepare to waste your entire morning on this, hopefully less the time I spent figuring it out courtesy of friends. Once you get the App Store blessed macos install going, remember that once it reboots, there’s another hour of wait time just on the standard install:

Those 13 minutes are a lie.

Expect at least another hour once you get to the beta access installer:

Hopefully this post will help anyone doing a websearch to get out of exactly this issue at some point in the future.

A final note: Once you’re up to date, swear to yourself that your rule of “never be the first to install a new beta” doesn’t mean “never be the last to install the new beta“. Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson.

Adjusting HDMI volume on Catalina

Normally when you output audio through HDMI, you cannot control its volume from your Mac. You adjust it on the output device instead, whether it is a monitor or TV.

I’m working on my Catalina laptop while my mini is in the shop and using my newish DELL monitor without my normal speakers, which plug into the headphone jacks. With this setup, my music is loud, even when I have the monitor settings fairly low.

As it is a pain to adjust volume through the monitor menu, I decided to give Soundflower/SoundflowerBed a try. I was quite sure that Catalina would have killed it by now.

I was wrong.

In SoundflowerBed, I chose HDMI for the 2-channel output.

In System Preferences, I selected Soundflower (2ch) as my sound output device.

Boom. My volume control came back to life and my ears are recovering from the onslaught.

Seeing an old friend keep plugging along and doing what I need is remarkably satisfying. Thank you to everyone who has worked on Soundflower through the years, from Alexander Hudek and RogueAmoeba to MattIngalls and Maciej Wilczyński.

Flipping the switch and the 32-bitpocalypse

I think I’m ready to upgrade my Mac mini to Catalina. I know, I know: “But the 32-bitpocalypse! Are you ready to lose all that investment?” I think I’ve worked through that. Haven’t I?

The last few weeks I’ve been busy. I bought a smallish (0.5 TB) external SSD drive and backed up a good chunk of my Mac mini to it. Today I’ve been running tests on how it works booting on my MBP, not my mini. That’s because my underpowered mini just isn’t strong enough either in boot speed or  running off the external drive to make this a reasonable approach.

On the MacBook, however, the SSD responsiveness is pretty fine. Once booted, I’ve tested Office, Photoshop, and a bunch of other 32-bit apps and while they’re not going to win awards for speed, they run and appear to be stable.

That leaves me with the dilemma. Do I flip the switch? Do I go full Cat on my main work machine? It’s been a reasonably time since release, so what mine fields should I expect to encounter? I honestly don’t want to upgrade and then have to start restoring from Carbon Copy Cloner backups from regret. (My backups are run nightly so they’re there if I need them.)

What do you think? Pull the switch or walk away? I hate being out of step with the latest OS, even if I do have Cat installed on my MBP and am happily using it there. Give me your advice. I’m not ready to walk away from so many apps that I still use many times a week but I don’t want to freeze my mini in the past. Thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions.