As a macOS engineer, what do you do when you’re told by Apple’s security team you have to turn it even more into Windows Vista and place even more useless alibi-security permission dialogs somewhere, but you’ve run out of new places to put them in?
Well, you get creative, and show multiple permission dialogs for the same permission. Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!
Why the heck is this a thing on macOS Sequoia? When you run the screencapture CLI from Terminal (or any other app) for the first time, you’re usually greeted with this dialog:
Fine. So you grant that permission, run screencapture again, but now you’re greeted with this stupid, infuriating, completely pointless dialog:
Huh!? Yes, I know Terminal can access this computer’s screen and audio. I just granted it that permission!
Seriously? Is this the way forward for macOS? Apple, I know you can do better. Because you used to.
We recently cancelled our cable/general TV subscription, which left us with a bit of an entertainment void. Not that TV was entertaining – we hardly watched anymore, hence the cancelling – but we do like to just “put something on” every now and then. So we decided to get Apple One (Premium, because we’re sharing with my mom). I was, at first, a bit hesitant to enable iCloud Photos – we have nearly 40.000 photos/videos, and obviously we don’t want to lose any of them. So I asked my cousin how he felt about it (he’s been using it for quite some time). He seemed happy with it, so I was confident in turning it on. A couple of backups on multiple drives later, I clicked the checkbox in Photos’ preferences on my Mac – and the waiting began.
Upload Observations
All in all, it took well over 36 hours to finish the upload. I began in the morning, let it run overnight in the hopes it would finish, but the next morning, it still kept going for more than half a day. I noticed that Photos didn’t continuously upload all photos. It uploads for a bit, then does some encoding for a bit, and then uploads again a bit. Now thankfully, my connection is pretty good with a consistent upload rate of ~7MB/s so I thought it would be done fairly quickly, but I didn’t consider that any encoding could be going on. Judging from Activity Monitor, at least videos are encoded before they go up into the cloud.
My Mac (which has all the photos) was the first where I turned it on, and after it had finished, I also enabled it on my iPhone and iPad. Those were done syncing in about two days. “Thanks” to what Apple probably considers a “feature”: the constant pausing of the syncing process on iOS devices, in order to conserve battery: “Paused syncing to save battery”, it said anytime I looked. No! Why!? Sync!, that’s what the battery’s there for. Just do it, I don’t care. And don’t let me enable it for “a day”, let me enable it forever. Seriously. Get it done.
Comparing to Photo Stream
Previously, I mostly collected photos on my Mac via Photo Stream. And I have to say, while I do enjoy the new syncing features iCloud Photos offers (syncing albums, photo-edits, etc), newly taken photos now take noticeably longer to appear on other devices than before. Not a deal breaker, but noticeable.
“Unable to Upload”
65 photos were unable to upload, according to Photos on my Mac. Why? I couldn’t honestly tell you. Photos didn’t tell me. It should have, if you ask me. I’d have liked to know. And there’s no way to retry to sync those photos with iCloud. They’re just in the “Unable to Upload” smart-album forever. Albeit, a bit of online research reveals an Apple support document with one of the weirdest and Apple-unlike solutions to a problem I’ve ever come across: Step 1: Export the photos in question “unmodified” to a folder on your disk. Step 2: Delete them from Photos (scary) Step 3: Import those photos you just exported into Photos again to retry their syncing. It worked (mostly), but still, why can’t I just do this in Photos itself?
Varying Photos count
An interesting tidbit: All my synced devices show a different photo count.
Device
Photo count
Video count
Mac
37.831
461
iPad
37.835
461
iPhone
37.834
461
The video-count is the same on all devices, but photo-counts vary.
Of course, with that amount of photos, there’s no way – ever – for me to find out which photos are missing on which device. Because interestingly, when I connect the iPhone or iPad to my Mac, it tells me that the connected device only contains items that are already on my Mac. Go figure.
General Impressions
I’m happy with iCloud Photos. Finally, all my videos sync, and so do all “fancy” photos (with blurry backgrounds or any sort of effects) and edits, and the syncing seems to so far be very reliable. No longer do I need to connect them once a month to make sure I have all photos collected on my main machine. Nice.
Face- and duplicates analyses appear to happen on each device individually, probably in the name of privacy (and iOS devices need to be – again, why? – connected to power for that to happen). I wouldn’t mind if that synced over (the found faces appear to, anyway). It’s kind of weird that they constantly turn off those features to conserve battery, and then have all my devices do the same work. Wouldn’t it save even more battery if just one device did it? Oh well…
Just a quick note that since the betas (!) of macOS Ventura 13.0, configuration of 3rd-party widgets is broken, which, of course, means that Yoink’s widget’s configuration does currently not work, and I cannot do anything about it. Let’s hope Apple fixes it soon, macOS 13.0.1 didn’t bring any improvement in this regard.
Here’s a quick video of what I mean:
Again, in my testing, this not only was the case for Yoink’s widget, but a widespread issue over all sorts of 3rd-party widgets, although I do believe that dynamically app-supplied values work. It might only be static values that are affected by this.
At some point in iPadOS 16’s beta, this same bug occurred, but that was fixed before release. I guess the fix didn’t make it into macOS. Maybe it’s time for another “Back to the Mac” event.
UPDATE (Dec 14th, 2022)
This is still an issue on macOS 13.1 (22C65). Quite embarrassing for Apple.
UPDATE (Jan 24th, 2023)
macOS 13.2 (22D49) seems to have finally fixed the issue – although it *did* take an initial
killall Notification\ Centre
to kickstart the widgets after adding and configuring them. But after that, it seems to work reliably.
Yoink for Mac, the drag-and-drop improving utility, is now available in version 3.6.8.
What’s New?
There’s now a preference for having Yoink dynamically provide JPEG and/or PNG data for TIFF, HEIF and/or WebP image files you drag out of it.
I’ve also fixed a couple of bug fixes and made some quality-of-life improvements, like having a dedicated “Pinned Copies” sub-menu in Yoink’s contextual menu’s Clipboard History.
As always, it’s a free update for existing customers of the app.
It requires macOS Sierra 10.12 or newer and runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Yoink is available in English, German, French, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.
