Get Info: #macos

Transparent compression with Folder Actions in macOS

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:44:00 +0000

I just wired this up for my own build folder—where my current project is quietly piling up data—and figured it was worth writing down. The same trick works on any big codebase, a pile of assets, or a crowded /Applications folder. I generally use it on folders that don’t have frequent churn, but do have large or compressible things added to them often enough.

It relies on transparent file system compression (sometimes called AFSC), which has been built into macOS for years. It’s nothing like a zip archive: files aren’t bundled up or locked away—they keep their names, stay right where they are, and every app opens them as normal. macOS simply stores them compressed on disk and unpacks them on the fly as they’re read. The only thing that changes is the size on disk—often dramatically. Apps can even launch more quickly, which is why all Mac App Store downloads already have this sort of filesystem compression applied.

The classic tool for this is afsctool, but these days I reach for applesauce, a modern Rust rewrite. It compresses much faster by working on blocks in parallel, uses less memory, and writes safely via atomic temp-file renames so you can’t corrupt a file.

Rather than run it by hand in the Terminal or from a context menu every time, we can wire it into a Folder Action so files get compressed the moment they land in a folder.

Install applesauce

Two easy options:

# Homebrew (lives in a custom tap, not the core repo)
brew install Dr-Emann/homebrew-tap/applesauce

# or the standalone installer, if you'd rather skip brew
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/Dr-Emann/applesauce/releases/latest/download/applesauce-cli-installer.sh | sh

Then find where it landed:

which applesauce

On Apple silicon brew installs to /opt/homebrew/bin/; older Intel Macs use /usr/local/bin/. We’ll need that path in a moment.

Create the Folder Action

Folder Actions is a built-in macOS directory watcher. We’ll build one with Automator:

Open Automator, choose New Document, pick Folder Action.
At the top, set receives files and folders added to: to your target folder.
If Automator drops in a Get Selected Finder Items action, delete it—Folder Actions already pass incoming files along, so keeping it breaks the pipeline.
Search the sidebar for Run AppleScript and drag it into the workflow.
Paste this, swapping the path if yours differs:

on run {input, parameters}
	repeat with theItem in input
		try
			do shell script "/opt/homebrew/bin/applesauce compress " & quoted form of (POSIX path of theItem)
		end try
	end repeat
	return input
end run

Save (Cmd + S) as something descriptive like “Compress”, drop a few files into the folder, and macOS shrinks them behind the scenes. Pretty easy!

Just for you, here’s one I made earlier: Compress.workflow.zip (93 KB)

No sudo required

Changing a file’s compression sounds like root territory, but applesauce only writes to your own user-owned folders, so it isn’t. That means no Touch ID or password prompts breaking your flow, and nothing running with privileges it doesn’t need.

What triggers it

Worth knowing before you lean on this: a Folder Action only fires when items are added to the folder (or removed from it), never when a file already sitting inside it changes. It isn’t recursive either—only the top level of the folder is watched, not the contents of any subfolders. That’s straight from Apple’s docs.

For /Applications that comes with a catch. When an app updates itself it usually swaps in a whole new .app bundle, which is technically a new item—but Folder Actions have always been flaky at noticing changes made by anything other than Finder, and updaters move files into place programmatically. So don’t count on self-updating apps getting re-compressed for you. When you want to be sure, drag the app out and back in, or just re-run applesauce compress on it by hand.

Choosing the algorithm

By default applesauce compress uses LZFSE, Apple’s fast and well-balanced algorithm—a good pick for almost everything. Two others are available:

LZVN — tuned for 64-bit, very fast to decompress.
ZLIB — slower to compress, but often the best ratio.

Force one with -c:

do shell script "/opt/homebrew/bin/applesauce compress -c LZVN " & quoted form of (POSIX path of theItem)

And applesauce info <path> will report the ratio and algorithm any file ended up with. You beauty!

Managing setup

Saving from Automator attaches the action to the folder you chose, but you can wire the same “Compress” action to more folders—or check it’s switched on if nothing’s happening—from the Folder Actions Setup dialog. Right-click any folder in Finder and choose Services → Folder Actions Setup…

Tick Enable Folder Actions (bottom-left).
Add the folder you want watched to the left column.
Pick “Compress” from the actions on the right.

Now anything you drop into that folder gets squeezed automatically, no matter how it got there.

Results

We can confirm the savings with Finder’s Get Info (wouldn’t that be a great name for a blog?). The Size line still reports the full, uncompressed size—that’s what apps see—while the smaller figure in brackets is what the folder now actually takes up on disk. The gap between the two is the saving.

For finer detail, applesauce info <path> prints the exact ratio and algorithm file by file.

Today I shipped 20 apps and a screensaver

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Shipping software is hard. My secret to doing it successfully is a combination of careful scoping, with strict avoidance of feature creep. But even then, it’s still insanely difficult to ship something.

Shipping multiple pieces of software one after the other in quick succession would be an even more gruelling task. Nobody in their right mind would choose to do such a thing…right?

Right?

I must have missed the memo because I’m shipping 20 apps and a screensaver…today!

14 × macOS apps (Mac App Store)
3 × macOS apps (TestFlight)
2 × iOS apps (App Store)
1 × macOS app (GitHub download)
1 × macOS screensaver (Web download)

Get them at gingerbeardman.com/apps/

Twenty!?

Yup. So I think it’s a bit of a myth that software takes huge teams to make. Some of the most successful software of all time was created by individuals: MacPaint, HyperCard, Minecraft, RollerCoaster Tycoon, BitTorrent, Stardew Valley, WinAmp, Flappy Bird, Vim, the World Wide Web, HTML, URLs, and HTTP (those last four by the same person, Tim Berners-Lee). Or perhaps it was made by power duos: Photoshop, Doom, Quake, Google, WhatsApp, Figma, Sensible Soccer. It’s still quite common today, especially in the indie scene, but perhaps it’s not talked about as much?

I started making software in 1990 on the Atari ST, moved to Windows and the web in 1995, then to Macintosh in 2000, and iPhone in 2007. My apps and games have been featured in publications around the world, been downloaded millions of times, and one of my games—which happens to be only 39 KB—received a “best game of the year” accolade alongside Mario and Zelda. The only time I wasn’t actively making and releasing software was during my time working for Apple as a Technology Evangelist, because they don’t allow it.

So I had a bunch of apps that I’d built for myself over the years, and friends kept encouraging me to release them. Making an app for yourself is one thing, but shipping an app to the public is much more difficult. If I was to release one app every month it would take me almost two years to release them all! Doing the App Store Dance to that kind of beat is my idea of hell. So I decided to do it “once” for all my apps. It still took a couple of months to get them ready, and a further month to get them all approved. I do not advise anybody else do this, because it was painful. But I did it, and here we are!

WTH!?

To ship this many apps at once I had to optimise my workflow to an unprecedented level: Xcode projects set up as similarly as possible to reduce cognitive load, shell scripts to automate common build and test tasks, a script to generate changelogs ready for submission, another to automate incremental website builds based on changed files, and one more to generate screenshots of my screenshots, followed by asc to automate uploading data to App Store Connect.

Code hygiene got the same treatment. I ran Periphery across every project to find and remove dead/unused code, which shrinks the binary. Then jscpd to spot copy-paste duplication or similar code sections and refactor them into shared helpers, which can sometimes increases binary size slightly, but it’s a price worth paying for maintainability across so many codebases. There are several Xcode/compiler optimisations that can help strip unused data from the final binary, if you’re careful. I also “cheat” by adding only the largest icon size to macOS apps to avoid over 100 KB of additional icon size variations.

For the website I created a static site generator that uses a simple templating system to generate a static site for 20 apps, the whole thing is spat out in only 36ms. Each app has its own markdown content file with YAML front matter, markdown description for the press kit, privacy policy, RSS feed XML (managed by my app Feedit), maybe some FAQs, an SVG icon, and a bunch of screenshots in both light and dark mode. The press kit is zipped up on a full build and the static site is uploaded to my server over WebDAV. I even managed to hide a fun little mini game in there! The time and effort spent on this system over the last couple of months was roughly equivalent to building another app. But it was worth it.

Most of my apps cost a small amount up front. That’s a way to show your appreciation for the time I spent making them. It also means I never need to use ads, tracking, or subscriptions to make it worth me doing this. After all making software is my job, not a hobby. All apps are actively maintained—if an app hasn’t been updated in a while, it means it has reached a stable state, rather than it being abandoned. Supporting older versions of macOS comes for free when you’re not tied to dependencies that have their own requirements and release schedule.

Pricing is kept dead simple: $5, $10, or $15. Three tiers, no tricks, no “Pro” upsells, no subscriptions. Small utilities are $5, mid-size apps are $10, and the most capable or niche apps are $15. A couple are free, and there are some bundles to save money.

Fits On A Floppy

Many of these apps are small enough to fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Not as a gimmick but as a discipline. I use only native frameworks, avoid dependency bloat, and keep features focused. Writing small software is harder than writing big software because every line of code has to earn its place. But the result is apps that download in a blink, launch instantly, and respect your system resources. I don’t miss floppy disks, but I miss the mindset they demanded: that every byte matters, that constraints breed creativity, and that software should be light on its footprint.

Read the full manifesto at fitsonafloppy.com and spread the word! ✨💾✨

The App List

These apps were all built to fill personal needs, but friends have encouraged me to release them for others to use. This is the bit where I was set to claim oldest app was about 8 years old, while the newest apps was about 8 days old. But sadly App Store Review got in the way, by rejecting my oldest app that I’ve had installed on my own phone since 2019 for being “too derivative” (I’ll revisit that and launch it another time), and they took longer to review the newest app than it did for me to develop it. Other fun rejections along the way: inappropriate use of the word “Safari” in an app for managing Safari browser tabs and bookmarks, and use of web server entitlements in a web server app, sending a video of me ejecting a physical CD-ROM drive, the list goes on. But you get the idea: these apps have taken a while to arrive.

Anyway, here they are, have fun with them:

Barfly macOS

Analytics for your itch.io games, right in the menu bar. Track views, downloads, and purchases with delta tracking across configurable time periods from one hour to one week. Refresh on a schedule and keep historic data.

Brutify macOS TestFlight

Lossless image optimisation using 14 engines running in parallel. Drop in images or folders and get perfectly optimised JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP assets without any quality loss. Fast, Slow, or Lossy modes to suit any workflow. A modern ImageOptim.

Ditto macOS

Translate text without switching apps. Copy text twice with CMD+C and your clipboard is translated using Apple Translate or DeepL. Includes a floating window for real-time translation as you type. A DeepL alternative.

Dottie macOS TestFlight

A native Mac pixel art editor built from scratch. Drawing tools, layers with onion skinning, frame-based animation, custom palettes with Lospec import, and export to PNG, GIF, SVG, and sprite sheets. A native macOS alternative to Aseprite, Piskel, Pixen, etc.

Driveaway macOS

Removes macOS metadata junk from external drives before you eject them. No more .DS_Store files, Spotlight indexes, and AppleDouble resource forks cluttering up your USB drives and SD cards.

EQer macOS

A system-wide 10-band equaliser that processes every app on your Mac in real time. Pick a preset, drag the curve, or paste your Audiogram and let it calculate the right listening curve for your hearing. Includes per-app control and dynamic range compression.

Feedit macOS

An editor for creating, managing, and publishing RSS 2.0 feeds. Import existing feeds, edit every field, validate against the spec, and publish to a local folder or WebDAV server. Drafts, iCloud sync, and Find & Replace built in. An alternative to Feeder.

Hubble macOS

Interactive USB topology viewer for macOS. See your complete device tree as a zoomable canvas with speed-coded cables, throttle warnings, power diagnostics, and hot-plug animations—all updating in real time.

Last Dance macOS download

Solves a persistent macOS bug where SMB file sharing becomes unresponsive after restart. It automatically disables file sharing before shutdown and re-enables it at login. No worries.

Localmost macOS

Spin up a local HTTP server by dragging a folder onto your menu bar. Multiple servers, automatic port assignment, access logs, and directory listings—all managed from a clean native interface.

Mojibaker iOS free

Create profile pictures with your choice of colours, gradients, images, then overlay emoji, genomji, memoji or stickers. Type a mood to get colour suggestions, compose your design, save presets, and export at high resolution.

Octoping macOS

GitHub notifications in your Mac menu bar. See what needs attention, grouped by repository with colour-coded icons matching github.com. Mark items as read or open them in your browser.

PaperTrail iOS

Full TaskPaper editing on iOS. Projects, tasks, notes, and tags with a powerful search query language, collapsible projects, widgets, and more. Syncs via iCloud and works with TaskPaper on Mac.

Seeports macOS

Shows every TCP port listening on your Mac from the menu bar. Ports are automatically grouped by service—Docker, OrbStack, Kubernetes, and more. Copy a localhost URL, open in browser, search for info on unknown ports, or terminate a rogue process.

Spindle macOS TestFlight

Raw device access for byte-accurate CD and DVD extraction, with support for hybrid ISO 9660/HFS discs and triple hashing for verification. Rip from multiple drives simultaneously.

Stapler macOS free

Bundle related files into logical projects without moving anything. Opening a single .stapled document opens your artwork, code, todo list, and your reference docs—all at once.

Tabulator macOS

A bird’s-eye view of every Safari tab across local windows, tab groups, cloud tabs, and bookmarks. Search, sort, tag, export, and manage tabs from one place. Includes a vertical tabs mode, Safari extension to show open tab count, and automatic daily backup with easy restore.

Tsundoku macOS

Quick access bookmarking for self-hosted services. A global hotkey captures the URL and title from your browser, suggests tags, and posts to Linkding, Raindrop, Shaarli, LinkAce, Karakeep, or Wallabag.

Vanishing Point macOS

Perspective correction for photos and images. Four correction tools with Apple Vision auto-detection, 256+ aspect ratio presets, background removal via Vision framework, colour sampling, plus image adjustments. Export as PNG, JPG, or TIFF. QuickLook and Finder Thumbnails are supported.

Wavelet macOS

Sound effect generator powered by synthesis, based on classic sfxr. One-click presets for laser zaps, coin pickups, explosions, and more. Layer multiple sounds with the built-in mixer and export as WAV, or as code in Lua, or Swift.

“Fits on a Floppy” Screensaver macOS download free

And finally, technically, the 21st release: a macOS screen saver inspired by After Dark and its classic Flying Toasters. It features flying disks that do barrel rolls and spins as they drift across your screen. Thanks to my friend Jason Morley for the idea, which I built while waiting for App Store Review to finish processing the rest. To make this easier, I upgraded the old test harness I built for my Today screensaver back in 2009.

Dottie: a native macOS pixel art editor (WIP)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0000

For the past several months I’ve been working on a pixel art app for macOS, with the goal of making it as much of a first class citizen and great Mac-like experience as possible. To that end it is fully native and built using Swift and SwiftUI, with a tiny bit of AppKit.

As with all the macOS apps I build, they start with a personal need. This one was to replace the aging and unsupported Piskel electron/web app. I like it and I loathe it, so I wondered if I could do better. My friend Jason Morley was the additional momentum I needed to actually get moving and try some things out—so thanks Jason!

A little bit of history repeating

I’ve been into pixel art since Deluxe Paint ST (yes, on Atari ST not Commodore Amiga!), and of course on the classic Macintosh. I also collect information about the multitude of Japanese “dot art” pixel art apps, which are quite different to the apps that I grew up with. All this to say that I already had a list of features I missed, pined for, or otherwise thought should make a return. Naturally, dithering should be a tent pole feature affecting all tools.

A dither smudge like the one shown below was last seen by me in 1992’s Multi Paint System (PC-98).

Look, Ma—no dependencies!

And as an additional constraint—which you may know I love to set for myself—I decided that I would use no packages or external dependencies, just system frameworks. Yes, that means I had to write my own colour picker (but, that’s my idea of a good time!) and some things took longer than just adding a package, but I can say that there is precious little wasted code inside this app. In fact, at the time of writing a single-architecture build of the app that has been readied for distribution still fits on a 3.5” 2HD floppy disk!

Pre-mortem

A full post-mortem will come after release.

The trickiest parts of development so far:

drawing pixelated circles of any width and height (all the classic graphics programming text books require the circle to have odd dimensions so that the coordinate of the centre pixel is an integer)
figuring out the intricacies of the document-based application model
trying to get the “New Document” button to appear on the file selector that appears at app launch (in fact this one still evades me for reasons I can’t figure out, get in touch if you can help!)
automating help book compilation (thanks Mario!)
performance bottlenecks with some aspects of SwiftUI (thanks WWDC Lab!)
surprise performance gains from using AppKit for better gestures
selections and marching ants
dealing with some bad early decisions (tech debt)

The most fun aspects so far:

designing and iterating on the UI
coming up with a name and brand
implementing palette management and trying new ideas
implementing a custom colour picker, twice
drawing the various tool and app icons
getting to a point where it feels done and every new feature is icing on the cake

One interesting thing about the app:

there is no settings window

Launching late-2025

I hope to launch the app this autumn, but until then: if you’re a pixel artist feel free to get in touch with your email address and I’ll send you a TestFlight invite!

The menu bar items I use on macOS

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:08:00 +0000

This is an expanded version of a post I made to the MPU Talk forum.

Visible

Those I often need to interact with:

Bartender (menu bar item manager; old version)
Dato (alt clock and calendar with timezones; old version)
iStat Menus (network speed; old version)
xBar (custom menu items powered by my own shell scripts)
- Proxy Status
- Software Sales Stats
- GitHub Issues
- Eject Volumes
Caffeine (used to set Mac not to sleep)

Hidden

Those I infrequently need to interact with:

Bookmark manager hotkey app (my own, unreleased; supports linkding)
OTP Auth (2FA codes)
ToothFairy (Bluetooth/AirPods helper)
Fluor (specify function key behaviour per-app)

Always Hidden

Those I rarely need to interact with:

Bluesnooze (turns off Bluetooth when Mac sleeps)
NepTunes (audio scrobbler and track notifications)
SoundSource (custom audio equaliser with my hearing profile audiogram)
DeepL (instant translation of copied text when doing Cmd+C twice)
Alfred (multi-tool with clipboard history and custom workflows)
Default Browser (open links in your most recently used/active browser)
Tiles (window manager)
Hammerspoon (my own window and workspace manager functions written in Lua)

🤓

Automating the cleaning of macOS-specific files on Eject

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:45:00 +0000

I’ve released a native macOS app that does all this script can do and much more!
Read all about it: gingerbeardman.com/apps/driveaway/

Dot underscore ._ and .DS_Store files are macOS-specific metadata cruft generated for foreign filesystems (like FAT32 or exFAT) that are not usually needed for disks that are mainly used on other platforms. Digital cameras, music players, e-book readers, and handheld gaming devices can get confused when they encounter these odd files during file system parsing and directory listing. The problem is compounded if the devices naïvely process files by looking only at the file extension as they will then see the dot underscore version of a file as a duplicate and try to preview/play/open it.

For years I’ve used an app called CleanMyDrive to remove such files, but it was discontinued in October 2023. I continued to use it until it recently stopped working completely …so I needed to find an alternative solution. There are some apps on the Mac App Store that look like they’ll do the trick, but I don’t really want to spend the time buying and trialling multiple apps to find one that fits my usage habits. I can make one!

I already use an app called xbar for keeping track of my GitHub issues, itch.io sales, network/server status, and more. So I decided to flex my shell script muscles and put together an xbar script to do it.

The script adds a menu bar item that allows you to:

Eject (click)
Unmount (option-click)
Eject All (without cleaning, useful when you want to disconnect all drives from your computer)
All with a handy notification

That’s it! Straight to the point, no frills, functional software.

Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 21:00:00 +0000

The latest version of this app is now available as a free download on the Mac App Store.
More info on my apps website at: gingerbeardman.com/apps/stapler/

A couple of days ago I was reading on Hacker News about a feature in some Linux window managers where they allow collections of tabs from different apps.

This reminded me of BeOS, but at the same time it reminded me of an app from 1992 for classic Macintosh called Stapler, and how I’d talked about that and it’s one-time spiritual successor, LaunchList, in the past. These were both similar apps that allowed you to collect and launch all the apps, files, folders, documents, related to a specific task, thus saving time. Or as Ali Rantakari so succinctly put it in 2009: “Opening a Bunch of Stuff at Once on Your Mac”.

So over the past day or so I built my own take on this concept for modern macOS!

Whilst my app is inspired by both Stapler (right down to the name) and LaunchList, my app adds improvements and features of its own and is more of a hybrid of both. For example, Stapler didn’t have drag and drop and LaunchList didn’t have zero-click auto-launch. My goal was to keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler. To that end, there are no preferences or settings in the app.

Tell me more

The idea is you set up a Stapler Document per project containing related apps, files, folders, etc. Then you can open them all at once by launching the single document. Each document contains a list of aliases that can be managed, inspected, launched using the app. The key time-saver is that if you launch a Stapler Document directly, all the items in its list will automatically be launched. Cool!

Work: text editor, run current game, pixel art editor, bitmap font app, todo list
Play: Music app, Hacker News app, Twitter app, script to position windows
Movie: run Caffeine to keep your computer on, shortcut to put displays to sleep

It’s an odd way of thinking about working on a computer—it’s task-based rather than app-based or document-based. Indeed, some might say it’s an outdated way of approaching things. But I’m always banging the drum about there being so much good stuff that was prematurely left behind along with the memories of System 7 (though I still use that), BeOS, OS/2, Amiga Workbench, GEM and the many alternative desktops of Atari ST, etc. So I thought I’d see if I could walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

Details

It’s written in Swift and SwiftUI and weighs in at 640KB, about one third of which is a multitude of icon files at many different sizes and resolutions. By creating a Document-Based App you get a ton of functionality for free, such as document/tab/window management, undo/redo (though I still needed to watch for it and refresh the app window), and much more.

The editor is a native macOS window that’s kind of like list view in a file manager, or a spreadsheet, or a little folder…depending on your point of view. Plus some menu commands and keyboard equivalents. You can have multiple windows open at once, for example one window each for all your common tasks, giving you the ability to launch full tasks or parts of them with minimal effort.

The items in each list are macOS bookmarks (sometimes: security scoped bookmarks) which are a type of authorised/verified/secure alias (in fact, they’re still called aliases in the code) that have been around for about 10–15 years. They contain the path plus a bunch more info. As macOS becomes more locked-down the recommended way of accessing files is to retrieve these bookmarks through the normal layers of system permissions and security. Without the bookmarks, for example just using plain text paths, I would not be able to show the full images in Quick Look or easily launch the list items. A key benefit is that the bookmark will still resolve if the file is moved somewhere else on the same disk, or even to a different volume!

I store the items as JSON in the saved file, simply because I prefer it to XML (which is the main/default option). I wanted the files to still be human readable and editable to a degree.

The files are launched using the default app specified by that file, so it can be changed on a per-file basis. Individual images might open in an image editor, image viewer, app to run OCR, script to run OCR on it, etc.

Dealing with files was both cool and annoying, cool that you can get the bookmarks to files so easily, but annoying that you have to jump through so many hoops to work around the security and sandbox protections and end up having to do file requests in a long-winded way, and then there’s having to tweak plist entries to give the app just the right permissions. I’m using some features of SwiftUI that mean the app can’t run on anything before macOS 14 Sonoma. All-in-all I’d say modern macOS development is a bit of a mixed bag. Take it or leave it.

Bonus tip

Make sure to uncheck: System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Windows > Close windows when quitting an application

Then leave the windows of an app open as you quit it. When you next launch the app its windows will restore to their previous size and position. If you close the windows first, then the app will restore to having no windows open.

Thanks

My good friend Dave Roberts (Serendipity App Company) for brainstorming why it was so damned difficult to get the app to react differently when a document was opened from Finder. Rip it up and start again! To Dustin Mierau for kickstarting this trend of remaking forgotten old apps for modern macOS. And eternal thanks to Chris Patterson and Ali Rantakari for their apps.

Since launch

support added for macOS 12 and newer (was originally macOS 14 and newer)
new features added
omissions addressed
bug fixes
new icon on the way

Elsewhere

Search Moby Games using Alfred app

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 12:57:00 +0000

Earlier this year I made a workflow for Alfred app to allow easy searching of Moby Games. Earlier this week it was released on Alfred Gallery.

Download

alfred.app/workflows/gingerbeardman/moby-games/

The workflow requires an API key that you can get instantly via your Moby Games profile page.

If you’d like access to the free API (not-for-profit use), create a MobyGames account and then visit your profile page. Click the ‘API’ link under your user name to sign up for an API key. If you wish to use the API key with an existing game launcher or plugin please specify which launcher and plugin you will be using.

Enter “Alfred app Moby Games workflow”. Then paste your API into the Workflow configuration.

Open Source

Suggestions and PRs are welcome at: github.com/gingerbeardman/alfred-moby-games/

Taking command of the Context Menu in macOS

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:14:00 +0000

Yesterday on Twitter the inimitable Morten Just posted a preview of a tool he’s created that wrap ffmpeg to allow movies, such screen recordings but pretty much anything, to be re-encoded to a smaller filesize.

I responded with a trick I use to do the same on “right-click” context menu using a macOS app called ContextMenu, and others said it was possible to do it using Automator (with some caveats). In this blog post I’ll compare the two.

But first… let’s talk about how we will make this work.

Processing files through shell scripts

We’ll be making use of command line tools to do the heavy lifting, but don’t worry I’ll show that this can be as simple as a single-line command to process a single file, or a shell scripts of a few lines to process multiple files.

Single files

The one-line command to convert a video or audio file can be as simple as the following:

/opt/homebrew/bin/ffmpeg -i "$@" "${@%.*}.mp4"

There are some assumptions here:

ffmpeg has been installed using brew
my Mac is Apple silicon, so brew installs commands to /opt/homebrew/bin/
(older Intel Macs will have them installed to /usr/local/bin/)
the script is called with parameters passed by argv so the file is $@
the new file will have the same name as the original, but with a new .mp4 file extension
it only works on single files (read on)

We could add an extra parameter to the command line to use hardware encoding (hevc_videotoolbox) -c:v hevc_videotoolbox, which would be something like twice as fast, but this will not reduce the file size. So we stick with ffmpeg default settings.

You can take the exact same approach with any destination format as it is decided by the file extension. Cool. You could convert any of ffmpeg’s supported file types to any other, such as WAV, OGG, MKV, etc.

And as we’ll see later we can take this simple command and change it to use other command line tools to compress GIFs, with or without upscaling, and many other timesaving tasks. Powerful stuff!

Multiple files

To extend this approach for multiple files you can use the following for loop:

for f in "$@"
do
    /opt/homebrew/bin/ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.*}.mp4"
done

Multiple files in parallel

And to process those multiple files in parallel (be careful not to overwhelm your computer!) we can background each execution using the & symbol.

for f in "$@"
do
    /opt/homebrew/bin/ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.*}.mp4" &
done

Automator

This has been a built-in macOS app since 2005. Setup is relatively straightforward:

Create a new Quick Action workflow
Workflow receives current: movie files
in: Finder
Add a new action of type action Run Shell Script (search for it in the sidebar)
Pass input: as arguments (this will give us a template command)
Replace the echo line with your command
Save, name it “Duplicate as MP4”

The menu item is now available on the context menu, inside the Quick Actions submenu. After repeated use I find this submenu too annoying, but you may fare better.

So, pretty easy! But, there are some caveats or limitations that may, or may not, annoy you. Perhaps we don’t want the menu item to appear for such a broad range of files (all “movie files”), or maybe we want it to appear for multiple types of files (both “audio files” and “movie files”). Sadly this is not so easy with Automator.

Automator stores these files at ~/Library/Services/ and they will migrate to a new Mac.

ContextMenu

Many years ago I found ContextMenu ($4.99) which solves all of the issues I have with the Automator approach. There’s also a free version, ContextMenu Lite, that supports up to 3 actions to give you a taste of the good stuff.

Submenu is optional
Apply to multiple types (files or directories; can be as granular as file extension)
Show output (sometimes you want to see the results of the command)
Confirmation before running (if it’s a potentially dangerous operation)

The menu item displays in Finder as follows:

ContextMenu stores these files in its own group folder, right click an action and choose Show in Finder, but you can specify your own folder in a location of your choice. Both will migrate to a new Mac, but the later might give you more control.

Edit: we can limit actions to running on files with specific extensions or, since update 1.4.4 specific UTI types.

Compressing a GIF

We can use the gifsicle command line tool to optimise (compress) an Animated GIF. The a parameters I use here are explained in the gifsicle man page, and I arrived at them with years of experimentation.

/opt/homebrew/bin/gifsicle -O1 -Okeep-empty --careful "$@" > "${@%.gif}.o.gif"

We can also do the same thing whilst scaling it up by a factor of 2:

/opt/homebrew/bin/gifsicle -O1 -Okeep-empty --careful --scale 2 "$@" > "${@%.gif}.o.gif"

Repository of ContextMenu Actions

Here’s my repo of shared actions. Inside each .cmaction file is a main.sh file which contains the command that you can use in Automator if you’d like.

github.com/gingerbeardman/contextmenu-actions

These include many useful commands such as:

Convert BIN+CUE to ISO
Change sample rate of audio
Convert image to 1-bit
Convert image format
Create Clean ZIP
Duplicate audio as alternative format
Duplicate image as alternative format
Duplicate movie as alternative format
File information
Generate images for web
Make script executable
Move file (includes helper app)
New file with clipboard
Open file with specific apps
Optimize GIF
Set GIF to loop infinitely
Show GIF info
Playdate Colorize IMG
Replace Existing App (warning)
Scale image to certain percentage
Set as MacJapanese encoding
Show hashes (includes helper app)
Stub out file (warning)
Touch file

Running modern macOS on non-retina displays

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 16:25:00 +0000

It’s 2024 and for some years now Apple have stopped supporting non-retina displays. From their perspective it makes sense given that all of their devices run retina displays, but from the user’s perspective it’s annoying given that so many of us are still using non-retina displays as either an external main display or as a secondary display. Not all of us are capable or comfortable buying multi-thousand dollar 5K displays.

My personal situation is that I run a portrait display so that I can display a long page of code. Hey, if portrait was good enough for the Xerox Alto and is good enough for the iPhone then it’s good enough for me. I have shortcut keys to arrange windows into halves, thirds or quarters and I’m super productive with it. I’ve been using this setup for a handful of years now, with my current setup consisting of a 1920×1200 display rotated 90-degrees giving me a desktop of 1200×1920.

You might be thinking, “why not use a rotated 1080p display?” and the answer to that question is that a lot of software won’t display correctly or even fit on a desktop of width 1080px, but is fine at 1200px. You might also be thinking “why not buy a 4K display?” and that’s because none of them are wide enough in portrait. Finally, if you’re asking “why not buy a 5K display?” then, yes, that’s a very good point. But until I do that, there’s a problem waiting to be solved.

Problem

There are a number of issues running modern macOS on non-retina displays that Apple seems to not want to fix, and in fact they are introducing new problems with every new version of macOS. Apple’s stance is that they don’t make resolution-specific adjustments, but I find that to not be quite true. Of course, abandoning non-retina elements or not paying attention to how they display on non-retina displays has the affect of being a resolution-specific adjustment. Plus, one of the most recent issues proves that there was a specific change made for non-retina displays.

Text cursor

Since macOS 14, Sonoma, there’s a new redesign text cursor. It changes colour and flashes in a different way than the normal cursor, but more importantly it is 50% wider (1.5x) on non-retina displays! On retina displays the cursor is equivalent to 2px wide and on non-retina displays it is equivalent to 3px side. You might think that a single pixel might not make much of a difference, but when there’s only 2px between characters it means the neighbouring text is obscured. So it’s difficult, perhaps even impossible, to tell whether a c character to the left of the cursor is a c, d, o, q, etc. In some situations, depending on your choice of font or text size the new wider cursor will completely obscure the letters i, I, l, 1 that are next to the cursor. Reported to Apple as FB13536508.

Abandoned icons

Across macOS from Finder to Safari icons are stretched and badly positioned on non-retina displays, which may or may not be limited to icons made from SF Symbols. As recent as Monterey, System Preferences app would transition using retina icons and then after the transition they would be replaced with non-retina icons.

Workaround

The most useful workaround to these problems is to trick macOS into thinking that your non-retina display is retina. This is done by changing the scale value of your display.

An alternative way of doing this is to use BetterDisplay where you can simply click the High Resolution (HiDPI) toggle for your non-retina display.

If you want to do it by hand you can open up the com.apple.windowserver.displays...plist at ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/, in something like PlistEdit Pro, and search for “Scale” to change each instance of a value 1 into 2. Thanks to Vladimir Kochkovski for sharing this solution!

Pros

improves cursor width issue (it’s less wide so neighbouring text is not obscured quite as much)
fixes many other user interface elements that are bad on non-retina displays

Cons

screenshots are @2x, which might be unexpected or undesirable
websites that do not provide retina-ready images may appear slightly blurry
(in other words: the same things as a real retina display)

Japanese language support on Classic Macintosh

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 12:50:00 +0000

Collecting Japanese Macintosh Magazine Media was not without its challenges. After buying those discs, and figuring out a way to index the content, I wanted to run some of that software! So I needed a way to work with Japanese files and display them correctly in a real Classic Macintosh environment. For the reasons outlined below I decided to use only System J7.5.3 and Mac OS 9.

System 6

You’d install a third party solution like SweetJAM or GomTalk. This method only for the truly hardcore!

KanjiTalk

You could install KanjiTalk 7 on top of US System 7. It includes all the features of System 7, plus utilities for entering and displaying Japanese.

Native Japanese System 7

Later you could get official Japanese installers for System 7. I’ve found that it’s easiest to install System J7.5.3 and dual boot to it using System Picker. This allows full display of Japanese text, opening of Japanese documents and you can still type in English when you need to, by using the language input method icon in the menu bar.

Language Kits

For later versions of the system you can install Language Kits provided by Apple. For System 7 and 8 the Language Kits had to be bought. For OS 9 they came for free.

Example: Mac OS 9

After installation the process requires some additional steps: set your system to a specific font, and register specific apps to display in Japanese (if they don’t automatically).

Install “Language Kits” Result:
- You’ll gain the language input menu
- You’ll be able to see Japanese in Text control panel
Set “Control Panels -> Appearance -> Fonts -> Views Font” to Osaka Result:
- You’ll be able to see Japanese in Finder
Use “Language Register” to set Japanese on a per-app basis Result:
- You’ll be able to see Japanese in the app menus and windows

Further details at Japanese-ization of OS (Mac OS 9 edition).

Resurrecting an ASMedia USB hard drive enclosure

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I bought a 2.5” Crucial SSD and a UGREEN USB 3.1 Gen 2 Hard Drive Enclosure (SKU: 70499) on which to keep some working files whilst connected to a Mac mini. I used that on macOS 10.13 High Sierra, 10.14 Mojave, and 11 Big Sur (I skipped 10.15 Catalina). Over the years the setup served me well.

After I upgraded to an M1 MacBook Pro I didn’t need to use that sort of setup, so I just kept the external drive in my travel bag to be used as a backup drive.

The problem

The first time I plugged it in on macOS 12 Monterey it didn’t show up, but I didn’t have time to troubleshoot so I put it away again. Today I had some free time so I plugged it in and, unsurprisingly, it did not mount. Time to do some research!

First, I tried it in my Windows VM. No joy. Then I tried it on a real Windows PC: it mounted briefly and then disappeared. Interesting! Thankfully Windows gave me a little more information to go on than macOS, it showed the chipset model number: ASMT2235

The diagnosis

A quick web search found some references to a firmware update that “resolves intermittent mounting issues in Windows” which sounded like just the ticket!

The plan

I found a great YouTube video that showed the process and explained what you should and should not do. The video was created in late 2022 and advised installing the firmware that started with the same number as the one on your drive, but my drive already had that installed (version 171120_D1_1E_80). Then, whilst I was looking at all the other available firmware, I noticed that the first part of the filename looked more like a date to me, one that roughly matched when the firmware was released.

The solution

So I decided to try flashing the firmware with the most recent date (version 220906_D1_45_01). The flashing tool, MPTools, needs to have its interface unlocked using the password “asmedia” and then you should select the line in the window that corresponds to your drive. It shouldn’t let you flash the wrong drive, but please be careful!

After displaying a green progress bar, the tool declared the process was a “PASS”, and everything looked great. I unmounted the disk from Windows and it appeared in macOS — it had worked!

Lights out?

The only change after all of this is that the drive enclosure no longer shows a LED when powered on, which is a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

The LED can be enabled by flashing a slightly less than newest firmware (version 200416_D1_43_00).

At this point, given that it’s proven these firmware updates do contain fixes, the choice is yours whether to have the light or not.

One-click restore most recent backup of a file from Time Machine

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Often I want to restore the latest version of a file from Time Machine, but using the Time Machine interface to do so is awkward and slow. So I came up with my own solution that can be triggered from the Finder context menu of any file.

Usage

right-click on a file
select “Restore from Time Machine”
file is trashed (recoverable using Trash’s Put Back feature)
most recent backup of that file is restored from Time Machine

This takes a seconds or two, depending on the size of the file in question. Most importantly this saves interrupting my workflow by having to opening the Time Machine interface and zooming through all those windows looking for the file.

Requirements

ContextMenu (paid)
- or FiScript (free)
- or Service Station (limited trial, paid)

These apps let you add items to Finder’s right-click context menu, from where you can run your own scripts that do something with the full path of the file/s selected.

trash, a shell script to delete files with support for Put Back
tmutil, built-in macOS utility for interacting with Time Machine

ContextMenu.app

Create a “New Action with Shell Script…” as follows:

Scripts

There are a couple of scripts because backups are stored differently on USB and Network. Of course, you’ll also need to change the path names to suit your setup.

Other uses

You could also install the script to enable it to be used from the command line.

File hash calculator app for macOS

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I often need to calculate the hash of a file for verification purposes, to confirm that a download has completed successfully or that an ISO I have dumped from a CD is a correct match with known good dumps.

I couldn’t find a nice easy to use app for this so I put together my own app. Download it here: Hash.app.zip (version 1.3).

Features:

Auto clear text field on each operation
Finder “Open with…”
Select file on first launch
Drag and drop after window is open
Single or multiple files
Accepts many binary file types
Resizable window
Hold alt/option to only calculate quickest hashes (CRC32, XHH, MD5)
Default is to calculate all hash types, including slower hashes (SHA1, SHA256)

Look Up

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite little touches in macOS: Look Up

And don’t forget that you can add look up support for Emoji symbols using my Emojipedia Dictionary.

Detecting Data

On iOS (since version 10) and macOS (since 10.5 Leopard) there’s a feature called Data Detectors that helps recognise various forms of data in text, such as phone numbers, street addresses, contacts, and so on.

A simple version of this is the use of capitalised words as markers to detect phrases during Look Up. It’s not foolproof, as we can see in my video, but it works well more often than not.

Emoji Dictionary 🤓 📖

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favourite features of Mac OS X is the ability to point the mouse cursor at a word and press Command+Control+D to quickly see a popup definition courtesy of Dictionary.app:

It annoys me when I use this feature on an Emoji and it doesn’t work. 😠

D.I.Y.

During my job as a Technology Evangelist at Apple, I took great pride in learning as much as possible about the frameworks and tools that are provided to developers. One such toolkit allowed the creation of custom dictionaries for Mac OS X.

So I thought it would be fun to use the Dictionary Development Kit to create a simple dictionary of Emoji and their meanings. It was! You can grab the finished dictionary here: github.com/gingerbeardman/Emojipedia

How it works

I grabbed a comprehensive list of Emoji Data from the Unicode website, and then set about converting it. The process was as follows:

Convert Emoji Data table to plain text (select all & copy in Chrome).
Write some simple PHP to parse the text file and write out the XML.
Setup build process.
Test and repeat many times.

For each Emoji I store the name and emoji itself, along with a list of keywords and aliases. That way you can search by word or theme and more easily find the emoji you’re looking for. I also list the keywords in the definition, which Dictionary.app automatically converts into hyperlinks allowing you to browse the Emojipedia dictionary just like a website.

Emojipedia

There’s only one place to go to find out information on any Emoji and that’s Emojipedia, a fantastic resource created by Jeremy Burge. I put a link to Emojipedia in every definition, so you can easily click through to find out more and continue learning about Emoji. I plan to work even closer with Emojipedia to include even more information in the dictionary file.

For Hire

I offer a consultancy service that helps companies make better use of technology; from low level tools through to user interface and experience. Get in touch with me if you’d like to work together.

It only remains for me to wish you a Happy #WorldEmojiDay! 🌍

Today screensaver

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Today is a Mac OS X screensaver inspired by On Kawara’s Today Series—nearly 3,000 date paintings made over five decades, each a monochrome background with the current date inscribed on it in the language and calendrical conventions of wherever Kawara happened to be that day.

The screensaver displays today’s date in the same spirit. It can show the date, time, or day of the week, on a background colour of your choosing—or a random one.

Download

gingerbeardman.com/today/