I used to search for a video file using spotlight and it would return several results and when it was a file I accessed more than a couple of times it'd be the top result. I'd see an icon of the application used to play the media type and the name of the file.

Nowadays, with the same keyword, I frequently can't find the file I successfully found before but also, even when it does find it, it doesn't display it anywhere near the top results, it's down in a section called 'photos from apps' which presents a grid of options, rather than a list, all of which represented by the VLC icon as it's my default media player but with NO filename. I have found it before because usually it's the one preselected, although not always. It's super frustrating not being able to actually see what's found. I think this is probably supposed to display photos as photographs or maybe videos using thumbnails, to make it easier finding an image compared to filenames given the name of the section 'photos from apps', but I'm not even looking for an image anyway and besides if I was and the thumbnails actually worked, I'd have to have typed the exact or at least similar filename to the image I'm looking for anyway making a visual search pretty useless.

To be clear, I'm not looking to get rid of the ability for spotlight to be able to search media such as videos or images, I just want the results of that search presented in the sane way they used to be back on High Sierra. (Probably persisted beyond that but I jumped from HS to Sonoma and now Sequoia).

This used to be an option, now it isn't. I found command line solutions which would be fine, but they're all for scheduling sleep for set times, I want set durations.

When this feature first came out I immediately disabled it because I noticed you couldn't stretch windows across two screens. I thought I might try putting up with it, but at the time I found it made it damn near impossible to use Avid Media Composer effectively.

It's been disabled in all the years since and I've never thought about it since until just recently where now twice in one month I've come across situations where something only works if it's enabled. One is for disabling the behaviour where fullscreening a video makes a second monitor turn black and now with Sequoia, the ability to use the native window tiling they just introduced.

I've always used magnet and then later rectangle to achieve the same and will probably just revert but I thought I'd try and give the native option a shot. I checked to see if that stupid shit with not being able to span windows has been fixed in the intervening period but it hasn't. Does anyone know if you can make it work with separate spaces enabled or at least why it works this way?

These are handy tools for bypassing soft paywalls, especially when Bypass Paywalls Clean fails you.

• Apple Support: Hide distractions when browsing webpages in Safari on Mac
• uBlock Wiki: Element Zapper

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19003650 >> vt-enc is a bash script that simplifies the process of encoding videos with FFmpeg using Apple's VideoToolbox framework on macOS. It provides an easy-to-use command-line interface for encoding videos with various options, including codec selection, quality settings, and scaling.

I've got a pretty old macbook pro, I would assume it's intel. I'd installed refind and debian on it then just left it for a while. No damage that I know of, but I did move houses. Now, I plug it in and the power cord shows green, and the battery indicator shows blinking fully bars. I have tried all the keyboard things to reset, but no luck. Is this thing fucked, or are there any possible solutions? Thanks for the help guys!

Roc VAD implements a virtual device for macOS that acts as network sender or receiver.

It works on top of Roc Toolkit[1] and can be used with any compatible senders and receivers, including PipeWire and PulseAudio modules, CLI tools (which also support bare ALSA), Android app, etc.

Roc Toolkit itself is a library for realtime streaming with fixed latency and loss recovery, designed to work well over unreliable networks like WiFi.

[1] https://github.com/roc-streaming/roc-toolkit

> re:AMP is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity music player for macOS X, fully written in Swift.

https://re-amp.ru

> This concept envisioned a computer that would expand with the needs of the user, through the use of modular components

https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept/

I've noticed in recent years that more and more apps only offer "small, medium, large" font size settings. My problem is simple. I am visually impaired and need VERY large fonts.

I need my font size set like this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/08bSDwyyJZm2X4g1f9iZ6mreA

But instead, with more and more apps like Ivory for example, the biggest I can get is this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/00eUunqHWyZkEWCuFpHlPmVEA

I suspect that the culprit may be Swift UI, but I have no evidence for this.

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

Thanks!

I ran Mac for years but never actually considered using Page or Numbers. A long time ago I gave up on MS Office and switched to Libre Office which was... fine-ish. I also use Google Docs but wouldn't want to give up a local desktop office suite altogether.

Having just bought a new MBP I opened one of my old MS Word documents forgetting I'd not installed LibreOffice yet and of course it opened in Pages. I figured maybe I should give it a go instead of knee-jerk rejecting it. My first issue is that almost anything I ever work on will be something that was almost certainly made with Microsoft Word and it's very annoying to me that in Pages, I can't just cmd+s save a Word document as I edit it, having instead to save a .pages version for safety and periodically 'exporting' a .docx and overwriting the previous export to update it in order to maintain the document's compatibility with anyone else using it in Word.

I also tried recreating my invoice document that I first made many years ago in Word. Editing the original was a non-starter, just impossible to get it looking right but that's okay it wasn't designed for Pages and I was trying to keep an open mind. So I remade it from scratch figuring it was a good test bed as it has some just basic writing of words on a page but also more complicated formatting and tables to recreate in a specific way to make it indistinguishable from my original document. I got there in the end but it was horrendously painful. I haven't given up on it yet because I figure Word is actually probably one of the very first computer programs of any type that I ever used so to say it's just what I'm more used to is an understatement. Because of that, learning anything significantly departing from Word will naturally be hard, and unlike Google Docs and Libre Office Write, it doesn't try to emulate Word. The thing is though, maybe I could get used to it, but I'm kind of wondering, if it's worth the bother. My main reasoning for trying is that it's there already, so why install something else and I may as well get my money's worth and while over-hyped, often Apple software is really nicely polished and a joy to use so I feel like I want to like it and to use it. But with the learning curve plus the compatibility issues with Office, I think the bar for it being worth it raises to the point where it really has to actually be better than word in a meaningful way to justify it, not just as good. Is Pages better than Word? Certainly right now it doesn't look that way, but I'm still adjusting of course.

Does anyone else use it and do they like it? Is it something that once you get used to you'd never want to use anything else? My other problem is that for some reason most of the Apple Support articles and forum posts answering questions I have all seem to be from around Circa 2012 at the latest and very rarely any more recently than that. Often they refer to menu items that are slightly out of date and subtly different now, which is weird. What happened in 2012 that seemed to stop people using this software?

I upgraded to Ventura recently after using High Sierra for a very long time. I'm noticing a few things here and there I don't like so much and want to change. Text edit seems to have been messed with in a mostly unwelcome way. I was able to fix the thing where instead of opening a document when you open the app, it instead opens a file prompt, however now I also want to close a document without saving (or even by saving for that matter), and avoid using the mouse. I definitely used to be able to quit without saving using keyboard only, can't remember about saving although that would also be good.

At the moment, in text edit, if you cmd+Q or cmd+w to quit the app or close a document, you're prompted to save it or delete it, which is good, but pressing tab to go through available options on the save prompt to select the 'delete' option is seemingly no longer possible. For some reason, the newly integrated combo box for choosing a tag for the save file seems to stop the tab selection process in its tracks as you can now only either shift focus between the filename text field, or this drop down list of tags and can't get past them without reaching for the mouse. I guess if I was happy with the default save location I could press return at this point and save the document, but if I don't want to save or I want to change any other parameters in the save prompt, I have to use the mouse. Seems like a minor complaint I know, but it just didn't use to be a problem and I tend to resent new problems that didn't exist before but have been introduced.

This was more difficult to find and more confusing than I anticipated. I have a new MBP M2 Max. I want to replace my current desktop PC with it.

I use 3 monitors, 2xHD monitors that only have HDMI ports on them, and 1 old 2560x1600 DVI monitor. I want to buy a dock so I can easily plug the laptop in to as few things as possible, ideally even only plugging it in to one thing if possible. I have found USB-C to to DVI-dual link connectors online and I know one can buy USB-C to HDMI adaptors (I'm unclear if I can get TB4 to HDMI adaptors). I also use one of the old apple USB keyboards that had a USB 1.0 hub on it for connecting a mouse which I would definitely want connected via a dock in conjunction with the monitors and also speakers connected via 3.5mm jack. I want a dock specifically so that as soon as I plug the laptop in, it functions just like using a desktop and I'm not needing to hook each of these things up individually every time I'd be operating the laptop in a closed configuration most if not all of the time when at home at my desk.

Ideally then I could find a dock that will connect to a TB4 port and will have either HDMI or Displayport ports on it that I can connect the monitors to, or additional TB4 ports that I can hook the monitors up to via adaptors. I'd also ideally then be able to hook up some fast storage to such a dock but that's where I get a bit confused about how the bandwidth situation works and how resources are divided up and how that influences what dock to buy. This is a slightly less important requirement because I probably won't be hooking up storage all the time and when I do, I don't mind using up one of the remaining TB4 ports on the MBP for that, but for convenience sake it sure would be nice if I could hook a USB-C gen 2 drive or TB4 drive to the dock while it's connected to the 3 monitors, just don't know how possible that is.

Something else that's confusing me is, I was looking at the Sonnet Echo 11 and it was mentioned somewhere in a tech specs document that you could plug monitors in to it's TB4 ports with active adaptors. I remember having to make such a distinction a long time ago back when DVI was still a thing, that in order to use the full resolution of a DVI device one needed an active vs passive adaptor to actively convert the signal and that the active variant was much more expensive and contained powered circuitry. This irks me, because if that's what they're talking about here with HDMI to USB-C connectors plugging in to those TB4 ports on the dock it'd be very disappointing because I thought if one shells out a bunch of cash for a fairly chonky dock that it would take care of any such conversions and the idea of having to spend a whole bunch more money to get the "active" adaptors for each monitor in order to connect to the dock that I was hoping would be my adaptor is a bit galling.

Has anyone been trying out GPTK for gaming on their Mac? I have a M2 Max and have been considering setting it up to game while traveling. Would love to hear your experiences

I recently got back into the Apple ecosystem and am curious on everyone’s favorite applications they use!

Direct links:

• https://sindresorhus.com/day-progress
• https://apps.apple.com/app/id6450280202

PS: I'm not the author just found it cool.

• What's your use cases for the computer?
• Do you have any interesting peripherals?
• What are some of your favorite Mac apps?
• Are there currently any gripes with your setup? If you could change one thing about your Mac, what would it be?

>Otherwise, this release of OpenCore Legacy Patcher contains some noteworthy improvements:

• Reworked logging system
  • Per-run logs in ~/Library/Logs/Dortania
• Restoration of Live Text on certain Metal 1 GPUs
  • ie. Intel Ivy Bridge and Haswell, Nvidia Kepler
• Extra guard rails for unreleased OSes

And many more improvements and fixes listed in the changelog below.

> The xhyve hypervisor is a port of bhyve to macOS. It is built on top of Hypervisor.framework in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and higher, runs entirely in userspace, and has no other dependencies. It can run FreeBSD, some Linux distributions, and Windows 10 and may gain support for other guest operating systems in the future.

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/disclosure2.html

Design and build websites that work and look great on any device you can imagine (For a limited time the first 100 people to download Rewurk will get it free.): https://www.rewurk.app/

https://parrotgeek.com/bigsur/