Monitor what’s filling your mac hard drives with WhatSize or DaisyDisk

As an editor at some point you are going to fill your hard drives, and before they get too full you are going to want to clear up some space and to do that you need to see exactly what is filling them up. To do that I have 2 really good paid utilities that you can use to see exactly what is taking up so much space on your mac. These are WhatSize and DaisyDisk.

Now I have been using and continue to use WhatSize as my primary, mainly because I prefer it’s interface. It is more expensive at $14.99, but it has a 30 day trial and works on Big Sur just fine.

Why do iOS mobile sync’s take up so much damn space?

And it also includes a graph form interface if that is your thing, though I prefer the lists view which I find makes much more sense.

DaisyDisk on the other hand is all built along it’s graph view, which is very pretty, but I do find it much harder to use than the column view of WhatSize.

It is very pretty, but column view just makes more sense to my mind.

As an added bonus it also works on M1 Macs already.

Both programs take a bit of time to scan a disk and then give you the results. As I have said I prefer WhatSize, but that is entirely your decision and you can try them both out before you buy, so…

Either way being able to delve into your files and find out what is taking up so much space on your hard drives in a quick and easy way is tool every editor and graphics artist should have in their tool belt.

AppleInsider on how to batch rename files in the Apple Finder

You learn something new every day, I didn’t actually realize that this was now built into the Mac OS, as I have always used A Better Finder Rename (and awesome app with more power than this, but it costs $22.95 unlike this tip but if you do check it out also check out A Better Finder Attribute it’s companion app).

So check out this article by Macolm Owen at AppleInsider.

Every editor will need to batch rename files at some point, and the fact that it is so easy to do in the finder now is an amazing thing.

In Apple Mail if I sort by Newest at bottom, why does it have to scroll to the top every time I open the app?

I know this is a weird little thing, but it always bothers me. I sort my mail so that the newest is at the bottom (this was the default for Eudora which I used for many many years as my default mail program). Now Apple Mail if I sort so that the oldest is at the top, every time I open it it scrolls so that the I am seeing the oldest first. Just because I want my newest mail at the bottom of the list doesn’t mean I want to see my oldest e-mail in my inbox every time I open the app!

I know I should switch to newest at the top then, but I hate being told how to do things, and should be able to chose. Honestly it is a lot of why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X, it is a program that forces you to do everything one way, as chosen by an engineer and not an editor. I like when there are many ways to do something as in Premier Pro and AVID. Don’t tell me that the way I do something is wrong, put in many ways to do something and let me chose which way works for me, but especially don’t leave a way in but handicap it!

End of rant.

Using Onyx to verify system file structure and run various maintenance tasks on a mac

Sometimes your Mac is running badly and needs some maintenance, now there are a couple of paid utilities I fall back to (mainly TechTool and Diskwarrior, but I will post more about those later) but the first I run is always the free OnyX. Onyx is a GUI or graphical user interface for various terminal utilities. It is from Titanium Software and has different versions for each version of the OS.

I always go to Maintenance and usually run everything except disk positions on desktop. It will quit all open apps and run. And the run will take a while, maybe even an hour depending on hard drive size, then will restart your machine.

I run this when Premiere is being sketchy, lots of crashes, and the system just seems to be running wrong. It isn’t a utility for Premiere, but for your system overall.

9to5Mac is reporting on the possibility of a an upgraded Intel Mac Pro before the move to M1

Change Miller at 9TO5 Mac is reporting that the Xcode 13 Beta has a reference to scalable Intel Ice Lake Xeon processors, which would be a big upgrade from what is in the current Intel MacPro.

It would be nice to see new video cards offered by Apple too since they are supporting more current video cards in the latest versions of Big Sur.

The Mac Pro is supposed to be this upgrade-able machine, so it would be great to see Apple actually make some upgrades available before the completely EOL it. Otherwise all the upgrade ability talk was just bullshit, because they knew that Apple Silicon was coming.

This would be a good boon to editors though to have one last MacPro with the best processor available.

MacRumors reporting several macOS Monterey features unavailable on Intel-Based Macs, doesn’t bode well for continued Intel Support

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors has a report on several features that are only available to M1 macs.

None seem like deal breakers, and the Portrait Mode blurred background could be something with the cameras, which would mean not supported on M1 Mac Mini.

Apple has said they will continue to support Intel Macs for some time, but slowly removing features from Intel doesn’t really seem like full support, and gives doubt to rumors of a final Mac Pro with newer Intel Processor.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on how to get 67% more performance on an external drive on an M1 Mac

OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.

Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).

EDIT:

Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.

2 Applications to keep your Mac apps up to date

 

or

So I have been a longtime user of MacUpdate, a web site that keeps a library of more than 32,000 Mac Apps in an easy to find interface, where you can search by Free, paid, on sale, or top rated, or recently updated. So it will update your existing applications as well as help you find new apps.

The problem is the use the MacUpdate Desktop app, it is a $20 subscription for 6 months, and I have had a subscription for a long time, but it is not without it’s issues.

First off I have a long standing re-occuring issue with my login, where the app freezes and stops getting updates, and you have to log out, but when you try to log back in your login does not work. And the only solution I have found is to contact support and have them reset my password to a generic, and then you can change the password and it works for a little while before the problem occurs once again.

Another issue with MacUpdate Desktop is Mac OS Big Sur, because MacUpdate Desktop does not run at all on Big Sur, which is on version 10.16.3 already, so a new version seems a long time coming, especially for a subscription app.

An alternative to MacUpdate is MacUpdater 2 from CoreCode. Unlike MacUpdate it is a one time purchase (at least for version 2, as there is an upgrade from versions 1), and can be had for $14.99 to $35.00 depending on the version.

It also has a Priveleged Install Helper tool so you can install apps that require a password with a single click, and you can have it make app backups of recently installed apps in case one doesn’t work.

It is also Big Sur and Apple Silicon native, which is a big plus. And it has as dark mode unlike MacUpdate. As is the price, which is certainly better.

So I would recommedn MacUpdater from CoreCode and it is what I will be using from now on.

Engadget is reporting that Apple’s M2 Processor has entered production and could arrive by July

Engadget has the news, and that it will again be SOC or system on chip, so integrated CPU, GPU and AI processor.

I am still hoping for eventual external gpu and memory for system and gpu, but that could be unlikely, but hopefully this will at least have support for more than 16GB of Combined RAM and a better GPU.

I hate having Mac’s future so up in the air again. At least with Intel we had a roadmap. Now we will will never know what is coming. And the pro machines won’t cone until the end of the 2 years and I will likely be disappointed with the results, at least at first.

AppleInsider reports that Mac OS 11.4 has added support for AMD Big Navi 6800, 6800XT and 6900XT

 Wesley Hillard at AppleInsider is reporting that MacOS 11.4 adds support for AMD Big Navi graphics cards 6800, 6800XT and 6900XT.

This is great news, Big Navi are what are in the new Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, are more powerful than anything in the current MacPro. It would be awesome if these cards were to be released for the MacPro and even better if they were to be added to an Pro variant of the M1 with PCI card and hopefully thunderbolt eGPU support.

There is the possibility that the M1 cards will never support PCI based graphics cards, and that would really be a shame, but this keeps the possibility alive.

Big Navi should be great for both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. I would still prefer the addition of NVIDIA, but that is unlikely to ever happen.