“Apple should end their prohibition on shapes in MacOS app icons”

There's a lot you can say about macOS, but one thing Apple used to be incredibly good at were making beautifully crafted, detailed icons. As with almost every other aspect of macOS, this deteriorated sharply over the years, with the recent macOS releases with Liquid Glass being an absolute low point. Not o

https://www.osnews.com/story/145403/apple-should-end-their-prohibition-on-shapes-in-macos-app-icons/

#macOS

@ChuckMcManis Don't make me roll the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

#TLDW:
If #SysVinit wasn't slow dogshit and never designed with changing systems, configurability and speed in mind, it would've remained.
The inability or unwillingness to fix SysVinit was the reason #SystemD was concieved, which TBH is just @pid_eins "plagiarizing" [the concept of] #LaunchD from #macOS which #FreeBSD fans seem to love whilst hating SystemD.

@nixCraft

#NeXT / #Apple had the right idea.

* User homes are in /Users

* Each app is in /Applications and looks like a regular file but is actually a folder (i.e. you can cd into it and examine the contents)

* The operating system is in /System

* Files shared among apps (except files that come with the OS), including configuration files, are in /Library

* Static libraries, debug info, C headers, OS API reference docs, etc go in /Developer

#macOS #MacOSX #NeXTSTEP #Linux #Unix #BSD

One of the special functions we have in @Vivaldi is single key keyboard shortcuts. Off by default, this allows you to bind just about any key to a function. My personal favorites are Z and X for going back and forth in history and 9 and 0 to zoom.

Why we have it? It is all about speed of operation and accessibility.

We had this in Opera as well. I think I even implemented the first version myself.

We got great feedback from users that used this extensively, including users using this for accessibility.

#Windows #Macos #Linux #Computer #Technology

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/shortcuts/single-key-shortcuts/

My first company, Opera, was built on word of mouth. The same applies to my 2nd company, @Vivaldi. We have never had the means that Big Tech has. In the case of Vivaldi, we have even avoided investors, to not end up like Opera.

We have also made it harder for our selves. We likely could have generated more funds through adding stuff like Crypto, AI or just plain old data collection in the browser, but we choose not to. We are also not an Ad company like most of our larger competitors. Instead we have added a wealth of features and customization.

Now people are starting to understand that just going with Big Tech may be easy to start with, but ends up not being worth it. In fact we now have governments and companies thinking that they need to move away from Big Tech and quickly.

We welcome you all.

#Vivaldi #Browser #Technology #Windows #Macos #Linux #Android #Apple #Google #Microsoft

https://vivaldi.com/blog/how-can-a-dugnad-save-the-web/

I saw this and my first though was 'Come on! The #Almquist shell has never been ported to #macOS before 2026⁈ It must have been there since the #NeXTStep days, surely. Someone has simply not known about it because xe never thought to look up the name Almquist.'

https://github.com/dotike/fsh

So I went looking.

Mad as it may seem, from what I've found so far, an Almquist shell on macOS does not turn up before 2025.

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/dash-shell

Nary a mention of Almquist on Apple StackExchange.

It looks like macOS went straight from the C shell on NeXTStep to the Bourne Again shell.

But macOS has had a Korn shell for decades, right?

#UnixShells

A tale of two path separators

In macOS, you can apparently create files and directories in the Finder with names that include slashes. If you then go into the terminal and take a look with ls, you'll see that the slashes are actually colons.

I don’t understand all the nuances, but I know this is a side-effect of the fact that macOS has not one but two path separators: the slash (/) and the colon (:). The

https://www.osnews.com/story/145356/a-tale-of-two-path-separators/

#macOS

Just read that #MacOS #Tahoe is the last one that will support Intel-based #macs, and it only supports some 2019-2020 models.

So that means that #Apple is targeting six or maybe seven years of hardware support.

That's an e-waste empire, guys.

Alt...

A ginger tabby cat looking down at us, saying "Pathetic."

We are live!

I’m really happy to tell you that Billy is now available for download in the Mac App Store and directly from my website.

https://usebilly.app/download

https://apps.apple.com/app/billy-invoice-manager/id6752519012

#indiedev #macos #BuildInPublic

Alt...

An image introducing the app Billy showing its app icon with a sticker reading “Beautiful Bureaucracy” and confetti in the background.

My MBP M1 Tahoe is almost freezing daily. Unuseably slow. Can't figure out why.

If I run any of the stats monitoring tools I know, CPU and memory seem to be fine. Same with drive space.

Appears to be something to do with the filesystem. Open apps run fine, until they try to do something like spawn a terminal instance, or try to retrieve a list of files.

Too many files open? Failing drive?

Ideas?

#macOS

wow, `fd -x` (or -X) on #macOS is _bonkers_ faster than `find | xargs`

Great way to clean down your ~/Library cruft

#moderntooling

is there someone on here who uses #pkgsrc with #macos ?

i can download #alacritty with pkgsrc now, but the version it installs for macos doesn't seem to be the version i can download from github -- it isn't installed to /Applications and has to be bootstrapped via Terminal.app to run.

are there any clever/simple ways to rig this up? am i missing something obvious?

Quick update on @siracusa's Hyperspace for #macOS; it saved me nearly 4TB of drive space on one 20TB drive. It did take a while, but that's fine!

I have it grinding away on another to see what it can do there.

Alt...

Screenshot of Hyperspace, showing: Scanned Files 237,691 Scanned Folders 44,862 Scan Errors 1 View Scan Time 54:47:11 Potential Savings- Eligible Files 0 Reclaimed Files 55,940 Reclamation Errors- Reclaim Time 108:39:41 Reclaimed Space 3.94 TB Reclaimed 3.94 TB

MacOS 27 drops Intel support, will be last release with Rosetta 2

With the announcement of an upcoming new macOS release also come the usual changes in which Macs will still be supported. MacOS 27 Golden Gate is an important release in this regard, as it will be the first release of Apple's desktop operating system that will be entirely ARM-only, dropping support for all In

https://www.osnews.com/story/145279/macos-27-drops-intel-support-will-be-last-release-with-rosetta-2/

#macOS

Want strict guidelines on designing very Mac-assed apps so you don’t end up just shipping a stretched out iPad app?

Check out the Mario HIG for Macintosh apps. Make your apps Macintosh AF!!!

Get some strict guidelines on making sidebars, toolbars, layouts (especially those for Settings), and Inspectors!!!

All this is free too.

But if you feed my HIG into some LLM, don’t tell me about it. I don’t want or need to know.

Happy Coding!

#macos #macintosh #appkit #swiftui

https://marioaguzman.github.io/design/

@mjack

Sort of. Folk wisdom has #macOS derived from #FreeBSD. But actually XNU is a descendent of #NeXTSTEP. Both FreeBSD and NeXTSTEP were derived from from BSD, but not from *exactly* the same point in its evolution and neither from the other.

And of course they diverged from each other.

But you can, say, pull up an old iOS manual page and see it saying 'BSD' at the head, compare it with the same page from FreeBSD, and contrast it with #Debian and #Illumos:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/System/Conceptual/ManPages_iPhoneOS/man3/tzset.3.html

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tzset&sektion=3

https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=tzset&section=3

https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/manpages-dev/tzset.3.en.html

https://illumos.org/man/3C/tzset

In today's MacOS struggles: apparently you cannot change the default email handler without opening Mail.app and changing settings.

But there's a problem. When you open Mail.app you cannot access settings without first adding an email account. Which I stubbornly don't want to do because I don't want to use Mail.app _at all_. I don't use the big providers, and don't want to connect it to my iCloud.

Aggravating. I'm sure there's an arcane way (there always is).

#macos

Ran @siracusa's Hyperspace on one drive; it should save 3.9TB, running the reclaim now. Let's see what happens. <clicks Reclaim Space>
#macOS

Alt...

Screenshot from Hyperspace showing: Scanned Files 237,691. Scanned Folders 44,862. Scan Errors 1 View. Scan Time 54:47:11. Potential Savings 3.94 TB.

It's finally time to try #MacOS on my old 2012 Mac Mini.

Can somneone explain me this?

On #MacOS's Save File dialog, if a file with a `:` already exists, the colon is replaced by `/` in the file listing.

And if I want to write a filename with a `: `, the text input changes it to `-`!

Huh. I knew that Postscript support had been (foolishly) removed from macOS' Preview.app, but apparently at some point after that the pstopdf converter was removed as well. I used to use this to read manpages in a nicer format than a Terminal window.

Oddly, man -t ps (i.e., output Postscript) still works fine; there's just no built-in way to open the result.

#macos #postscript

Copying Remote Command Output to Your macOS Clipboard

A small trick to copy command output from a remote ssh session directly into the local macOS clipboard, using OSC 52 and a tiny shell script.

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/05/26/copying-remote-command-output-to-your-macos-clipboard/

#ITNotes #macOS #Mac #Apple #shell #ssh #Linux #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #illumos #Terminal #Clipboard

Ladies and germs, @bbedit 16.0 is out! I repeat: #BBEdit 16.0 has been released.

Update and/or purchase accordingly. This app has been a daily-driver for me since 1994 or ’95. #TextEditors #HTML #CSS #macOS https://www.barebones.com

Alt...

BBEdit’s macOS app icon — a large letter B set against a checked-diamond with a wrap-around checked bar

Webブラウザを使って日本語 #Mastodon をするうえで、 #Windows (ここには #macOS #Linux #NetBSD #FreeBSD などが入り得ると考える) が使いやすいという人が居る認識

#iOS, #macOS, and #iPadOS 26.5 updates arrive with encrypted #RCS messaging and more

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/ios-macos-and-ipados-26-5-updates-arrive-with-encrypted-rcs-messaging-and-more/

#cybersecurity #privacy #Apple #Mac #iPad #iPhone #iMessage #encryption #messaging

So the new #macOS update is to enable #Apple to make money by shoving ads in maps and to enable Apple to make money by hiking subscriptions in the App Store?

Let me just rush off and install that bad boy.

How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM’s display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Setting

https://www.osnews.com/story/144876/how-fast-is-a-macos-vm-and-how-small-could-it-be/

#macOS

Have a #ThinkPad running #OpenBSD and #Xfce look like #macOS: I stole someone else's font rendering trick and lost time doing this.

Alt...

An Xfce session screenshot. A Librewolf instance is visible side to side with a Thunar window and an Alacritty one. The terminal runs htop and fastfetch.

I'm considering bumping the macOS requirements for my binary package repository available at https://pkgsrc.smartos.org/install-on-macos/ again.

There's already a bunch of packages missing because they have newer C++ requirements than Xcode 15.4 supports.

What OS are folks running?

#pkgsrc #macos

32 years ago I started working on my first browser, Opera. I left Opera in 2011, but two years later I co-founded Vivaldi. Thus I have been making browsers now for 32 years, with a short break there between 2011 and 2013.

I have always felt that this work is important and no less today than before as more and more of you see the importance of alternatives to Big Tech.

Vivaldi is a European company with headquarters in Norway, servers in Iceland and team in Norway, Iceland, across Europe, Japan and a couple in the US.

We try our best to adapt to your needs. We build powerful browsers, with a lot of flexibility.

I welcome you to try us out and share with your friends!

#Windows #Macos #Linux #Android #iOS #TEchnology #EU #Europa #Norway #Iceland #Browser #Vivaldi #BigTech

https://vivaldi.com

Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?

You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be.

Perhaps I can explain.
↫ Marcin Wichary

It seems pretty obvious to me that's what it was for, but I guess man

https://www.osnews.com/story/144766/why-do-macs-ask-you-to-press-random-keys-when-connecting-a-new-keyboard/

#macOS