Yesterday, I was working on Transloader v3.0. In particular, on its push notifications and making sure everything syncs properly. Today, I wanted to continue working on this, but found myself unable to. My Mac suddenly didn’t receive CloudKit push notifications anymore. Even worse, neither of the delegate methods
weren’t called anymore – without any code changes. Something was wrong.
But here we are, a couple of hours later, and everything’s working again. Finally. So, to save you some time should this happen to you, here’s what I did:
Restart
I restarted my Mac – the obvious solution. You might think. Only that it didn’t work, the problem persisted. But it’s still the first thing I’ll try if this returns.
Delete Containers, Group Containers, and CloudKit Caches
In Finder, delete
/Users/yourname/Library/Containers/yourAppContainerFolder/ /Users/yourname/Library/Group Containers/yourGroupID.yourAppGroupContainerFolder/ /Users/yourname/Library/Caches/CloudKit/yourAppID /Users/yourname/Library/Caches/CloudKit/CloudKitMetadata* (*all files that begin with that filename) /Users/yourname/Library/Caches/CloudKit/CloudKitOperationInfo* (*all files that begin with that filename)
Now launch Activity Monitor.app and force quit the following processes:
cfprefsd apsd notifyd remoted
Now, I’m not sure you need to force-quit each and every one of those, but I wanted to relaunch any process that remotely looked like it had to do with remote/push notifications.
At this point, I restarted Transloader through Xcode, and lo and behold, it worked again. On my MacBook Pro, where the same problem occurred simultaneously, I took the same steps. And it *didn’t* work. A restart was required, so your mileage – like mine – may vary.
When creating a custom Quick Action for macOS Mojave’s Finder, you have the option to supply a custom icon:
But this is what happens when you supply an ordinary image in Dark Mode:
or Light Mode:
(in Light Mode, it’s obviously better, but still not as subdued as it should be, which is more grey than pitch-black, or whatever color your original icon file might have).
Tip #1 – Getting the icon’s color right
The trick is to have the file end in ‘Template’, like ‘MyWorkflowIconTemplate.tiff’. But that’s not all there is to it. When you add a custom icon through Automator, it automatically gets renamed into ‘workflowCustomImage.png’. So no matter what you name your file, it won’t matter.
To fix this, add a custom icon to your Quick Action in Automator, save, switch to Finder and navigate to /Users/yourname/Library/Services/, where your newly saved Quick Action will end up.
There, right-click your Quick Action, select ‘Show Package Contents’, and navigate into Resources, where your icon file will be. Rename it to ‘workflowCustomImageTemplate.png’.
Now, navigate into Contents and open Info.plist. Look for <key>NSIconName</key> and change ‘workflowCustomImage’ to ‘workflowCustomImageTemplate’. Save.
Now the icon will look like this:
That’s much better. But there’s another issue we need to take care of:
The icon’s a bit too large, even though in Finder and the “More…” menu, it looks well-sized.
Tip #2 – Getting the Touch Bar icon to play nice
I thought I’d be smart about it, since the “append ‘Template’ “ trick worked, I’d have three differently sized images and append @2x and @3x. But it didn’t work.
The trick is to have a TIFF file with 2 (or 3, to be on the safe side) representations – one at 1x, one at 2x and one at 3x.
And voila, it worked:
To create the TIFF, I wrote a small app that takes my icon file, creates three NSBitmapImageRep objects from it and adds them to an NSImage instance. Then it writes the NSImage object’s TIFFRepresentation to disk.
Open that file in Preview.app and you’ll notice all three icons inside that one TIFF (you might have to select View – Thumbnails in the menu to show them)
Select the first and select Tools -> Adjust Size… in the menu bar.
Resize the image to 16×16 (which I found to be working nicely) and set its resolution to 72, if it isn’t already.
Select the next thumbnail and resize it to 32×32 at 144 DPI, and the third thumbnail to 48×48 at 216 DPI. Save.
Now repeat Tip #1 with this new file and you’re all set.
I hope this will save you some time, as it cost me plenty 😉
In the latest Xcode beta (currently, 7.1 beta 2), I noticed this in its Release Notes (login required) :
(…)Developers running on Yosemite will not be able to pair the Apple TV Remote with the tvOS Simulator Runtime. (…)
That implies that it’s somehow possible to pair the Apple TV Remote with a Mac running OS X 10.11 El Capitan – but how? There’s no explanation anywhere to be found.
Un-pair the Apple TV Remote
If you’ve already paired your Apple TV Remote with your Apple TV Developer Kit, you won’t be able to pair it with your Mac – you’ll have to un-pair it first.
Original Image Credit: Apple Inc., markup mine.
A response to this forum threadon the Apple Developer Forums lead me to how to do it: Hold down the Menu and Volume-Up keys on your Apple TV Remote for about 5 seconds, perhaps a little longer, and the Remote’s pairing will be reset.
Pair it with your Mac
Launch System Preferences and click on Bluetooth. In there, you’ll see something like this:
The Apple TV Remote in System Preferences / Bluetooth.
Click on Pair to pair the Apple TV Remote with your Mac. There should be a spinning wheel for a couple of seconds after which it should be paired.
Ready to Rock
Now the Xcode tvOS Simulator automatically recognizes the paired Apple TV Remote and should respond to anything you do on it. Enjoy 🙂
Update (October 6th, 2015) – Media Control?
Oliver Drobnik (@Cocoanetics on twitter) was interested in what kind of Bluetooth profiles the Apple Developer Kit Remote supports – for example, the Media Control profile to be able to adjust volume, play/pause, etc) – or if it can only be used in Xcode’s Simulator. He suggested I use the free Bluetooth Scanner App LightBlue to see what profiles it supports. According to the app and this Apple website that lists the service names, the profiles supported are Battery Service, Bond Management, Device Info and a custom Apple service – so no media control for now. But thanks to Oliver, now we know.
Original Image Credit: Apple Inc., markup mine.
The Apple TV Remote in System Preferences / Bluetooth.