I pretty much said it all in the title, but if I have my mac set to not restart apps when it restarts, why when it crashes does it restart all the previously open apps? In all likelyhood it is one of the apps that crashed, so why not honor the setting that I have been using and not open apps if it crashed?
Credit: AppleAppleInsider has an article on the possibility that Apple Silicon will only support their own GPU's and not 3rd Party GPU's. This graphics shows that Apple Silicon Mac doesn't support NVIDIA or the currently supported AMD GPU.This is really scary. The Apple Silicon GPU will certainly be OK for laptops or low end machines, but for high end computers this would literally be a death knell.Let's hope this just means for the current development system, because otherwise it means the new MacPro was a huge bait and switch. Oh look at this we can make the highest and most powerful machine, but you know at the same time they were already working on End of Life-ing that machine with Apple Silicon.I don't want to move to Wintel, but if their is no 3rd party GPU support, WINTEL will be the only solution.
OK so I have found a new annoyance with Catalina and it is in the save dialogue box.Often when I am rendering something in After Effects I overwrite an old render with a new one. But when I make the file, it adds a _1 to the filename, so I open the save dialogue and hit the right arrow to go the rightmost character and delete the two characters. Before Catalina that is how it worked, but now it goes to the end of the .mov so if you delete, you delete the .mov instead of the last 2 characters.This is a new behavior, and completely changes how I have worked for years. It is a huge annoyance!
I swear the problems with Apple Music, Apple's iTunes replacement for Catalina never cease and they don't get better.I am stilling dealing with the items in folders showing up out of order in folder iOS sync, but here is another issue that is driving me nuts.I know that basically they just want you to use Apple Music and not own your own music anymore, but I still own a lot of music, and when I create a new playlist in Music and drag the music I want in it to the playlist the tracks show up for a little while and then disappear. Now the music has been added to the library and I can go find it and then re-add it to the playlist, but why the hell if I add it to a playlist does it then leave the playlist. Honestly Apple What The FUCK!!!!
OK so I was always worried about them getting rid of iTunes. I have been using it for too many years. Making it 3 apps does not make it any more efficient than one app, in fact I would say it makes it less efficient.And they have already been changing features, trying to replace Star ratings with heart or no heart after I have been rating songs for years with stars does not work for me.Catalina though broke up iTunes and moved iOS sync to the finder. Now it still has the same features as the old iTunes sync everyone said, but there is one big one that no one has mentioned that is really messed up!Now first off I have already said that the new Sync does not give a text description of what is syncing, and while it does eventually show you a progress wheel, it does not show one at first (I can only assume this is the backup stage which always took forever with no indication of how long it takes).Here my iPad and iPhone are both in that nefarious stage when you have no idea how long the sync will take.Here you can see my iphone is at least int he progress bar stage, though still less info than old iTunes which told you what it was doing.Anyway now here is the major problem with having the finder do the sync. If you are syncing an iOS device you cannot restart the computer because it will tell you that that the finder is not done completing the sync! Now with previous versions of Mac OS this still occurred, but you could just force quit iTunes and your computer would restart. You can't do this with the finder! You can relaunch the finder with a right click in the dock, but the sync continues through this, and I even tried with Activity Monitor and the sync just continues not allowing you to restart. Now maybe there is a process that I don't know what it is called that I could quit to allow this. Or if I turn off WIFI sync and disconnect the device, maybe it will stop and I can restart, but this is a problem! I am a video editor and there are just times I need to restart, so at the very least their should be a cancel button on iOS sync in the FINDER!!!I have posted about this at Apple's Discussions and MacRumors.
So I did make the move to Catalina after SoftRaid upgraded to 4.8 with Catalina support, and overall I am OK with the split Music, Podcasts and TV apps that replace iTunes. In fact the TV app is superior because it now will play back 4K movies on my iMac Pro.My biggest complaint so far is with the Finder Sync for iOS. It seems mostly the same, save for a few things I don't like. First off your apply and Sync Buttons are greyed out while the phone is syncing. So if I connect the iPhone or iPad it starts syncing, then I can make any changes I want, but can't apply them until the current sync is finished. In iTunes I could apply as soon as I made the changes I want to.And the problem with having to wait is not knowing when it will end. At least iTunes had text based feedback of what was going, and would tell me that it was in the backup portion which always took forever. Now all you get is a little spinning ball next to the device in the finder which gives no indication of how long the sync is going to take!And then after that it does give a little indicator to give you some idea of how long it will take, but not text information of what is syncing at that point. You can see the white filling up means how much time it is going to take.So what did the first spinning thing mean? I am going to have to assume that is the backup. If so it went much faster at least the first time.And I always sync playlists, and every time you open the program it reverts to Albums. How hard would it be to remember where you were? Really?
Apple has released Mac Os 10.15 Catalina, and it is the first to make the jump completely to 64 bit, abandoning the ability to run any 32 bit code. It is always recommended to wait a while to upgrade you system, or even better wait for 10.15.1 to work out some of the bugs. I am very interested in it though as I want to try out SideCar with my iPad Pro and Pencil.Since there is no more 32 bit code many programs will not run, and you can tell which ones that will be in Mojave. Just to to your apple menu and About This Mac.Then Select System Report:Then go to Applications:Then check the column that reads 64 bit and the applications that say no will certainly not work.I have a lot of applications that will not work, but most are from old versions of Adobe that I still have installed.Now I am certain to need some 32 bit application at some point in the future, and if you make the move to Catalina before taking some steps to ensure you can still run the applications you will never be able to.My first step was to make a clone of my hard drive at Mojave for that I head over to Bombich and get the latest paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner. This is an amazing program I have used for years that will clone a hard drive and make a bootable copy. Now I have an iMac pro, so there are additional steps to be able to boot from an external drive thanks to the T2 security chip (you need to restart while holding down command and r and then change the startup security utility to allow external boot with at least Medium security instead of Full Security).And to keep running 32 bit apps, since I own Parallels to be able to run Windows Applications on my Mac. Tidbits actually has a great article on how to do this using your Mojave Recovery Partition to create a clean install. Sure you will have to re-install the 32 bit apps to get them to run, but a nice clean install won't take up the space that a full backup of my system would.And finally it turns out I can't upgrade to Catalina right now, as I run an external RAID using Softraid for my OWC Thunderbay. Now it will mount in Catalina, but will run slower and have no ability to recover hard drive that die or basically do anything with it in version 5.7.5. Now Softraid and OWC are an amazing company so they are working on it, but since Catalina is much more restrictive on running system extensions this one is going to be hard. It will first be available in 5.8, then in the new version 6 they are developing. I do hope it comes out soon.••••UPDATE!Wow, so I got an e-mail from SoftRaid and OWC and they said that they should be releasing 5.8 within…
So news reports have been popping up that 2013 MacPro’s running AVID Media Composer have been not restarting just going black. And the only fix was to re-install the Mac OS to get the system running again. Reports seemed to mostly focus on 2013 MacPro’s but from many rental houses, but also sone other macs were affected. It seemed to be that the user folder was having it’s permissions changed from admin to a normal user.Well it seems that issue was not caused by Media Composer per se. In fact, according to ProVideoCoalition and Engadget it is a Chrome update that is screwing up the user folder. And it is only on macs that have System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled. This means that in fact AVID is partially responsible, since AVID requires SIP to be turned off so it can get direct access to a Mac’s Graphic Systems. Of course neither Final Cut or Premiere or DaVinci require this, but AVID does.AVID needs to fix this or work with Apple, because such an expensive and important software shouldn’t require you to lower your Macs defenses. And of course a Company as big as Google should know better as well, but why would they test with SIP disabled? I mean now they need to, but it is not something you would normally test for.
Now I use Firefox as my primary browser, and I have for years. I have enough if my life in google because I use a gmail account, and google search is too much of my life so I don't want to use Chrome, even if it is marginally faster. And Safari I don't really use on my mac, because I use Firefox, but I have to use it on my iPad and my iPhone.My problem is, as it has been for years since they introduced iCloud syncing of bookmarks, is that it constantly fucks up and my bookmarks get destroyed. I end up with empty folders and bookmarks moved all over with all these new random folders. And this happens all the damn time!Now when it existed I used Xmarks to sync my bookmarks between firefox and safari on my mac, but it never worked well and I tended to get messed up bookmarks both ways, but now that Xmarks is officially gone I realize that the issue is much deeper within iCloud.In fact I don't save any bookmarks in any version of Safari. I only add them to Firefox to keep them and I back them up when I add them so that I can restore and don't have to fix my bookmarks ever. I even e-mail myself the links from my iPad so that I can add them to Firefox on my desktop. It is a pain but it means keeping my bookmarks safe.And it means that I am constantly fixing my Safari bookmarks. And I know how to do that. You turn off iCloud syncing of Safari on all your devices, and let it sit for a bit, and tell the iOS devices to delete your bookmarks when you do this. Then I export my clean bookmarks from Firefox and import them into safari, then re-organize them so they are correct (bookmarks toolbar into favorites and move the rest of the bookmarks out of the folder they get stuck in). Then you turn back on iCloud Safari on all your devices and hope everything was cleared up. If it was, you will get your clean bookmarks back until iCloud messes them up again.The stupid part is this is an easy problem to fix for Apple. Instead of always merging your bookmarks add a damn option to upload and overwrite bookmarks. This way I could easily clean them up in a single step! Xmarks had this. And so do other bookmarks sync programs. Apple just acts like it never fucks up, but it fucks up all the time!Do people just live with their fucked up bookmarks? I don't understand! WTF! Fix this shit Apple!
Quentin Carnicelli recently posed a great article on the sad state of upgrades across the whole line of the Macintosh Computers. Basically it comes down to the fact that other than the iMac Pro which came out in December (half a year ago) there isn't a single mac that has been updated in a year.This is really a sad state. And the Mac Mini has been almost 4 years without an update or a price drop for old as hell hardware. Macs used to at least get processor upgrades once in a while with the form staying the same, but it seems we are not even getting that anymore.Apple really has become a phone company that occasionally releases some new computer hardware.And this makes me worry even more for the supposed new MacPro which we will learn about in 2019! Honestly no computer should take 3 years to design and ship. Especially when what Pros really want is the old cheese-grater with updated hardware. All the hints at a modular design really scares me. I don't want modular, I want upgradeable with off the shelf PC components. Not some proprietary monstrosity that is upgradeable with over-expensive modules that only follow Apple's upgrade schedule, which is slow at best. And most of us want some choice, mostly the choice to use NVIDIA graphics cards and not have to run it externally via thunderbolt which is not and never will be as fast as a 16x PCI bus.