The package manager I use on macOS is Homebrew, Brew for short. This is a great open source tool for installing command-line apps and utilities, and keeping them up to date. It’s essentially the Mac version of the Raspberry Pi’s apt. So much of the software I use on a regular basis — the nano text editor, Node.js, Python 3, the shellcheck shell script linter, the hugo website builder, the sass CSS wrangler and a whole load more — were added and are maintained using Brew.
Another day, another update. This time it’s PreviewMarkdown, my macOS utility for providing QuickLook file previews and icon thumbnails in Finder. It runs under Catalina and above, and this version makes some adjustments to support Big Sur.
You can read more about using PreviewMarkdown — just run it once to register its app extensions, and that’s it — it the product page here. You can download PreviewMarkdown from the Mac App Store.
The latest version of MNU, 1.4.0, can be downloaded from my software site. The focus of this update is to support the changes brought in by Big Sur’s updated, iOS-esque UI: in this case, no more roll-down sheets, and iOS-style dialogs and square icons.
I’ve been messing around with the I²C Mini from Excamera Labs for a week or so. It’s a tiny, 19x19mm I²C breakout designed to to let you connect a wide array of components — displays, sensors, controls and such — to your computer.
My Mac port of a 1980s era “interactive adventure” game needed a little love, so I finally got round to applying some this afternoon. You can download it here, and read more about the history of this fondly remembered 8-bit classic from a time when we had to type these things into a Commodore PET, line by line…
I have just released version 1.3.0 of MNU, my macOS menu bar utility. Usually I’d just post a very brief notification of the the update, but this release requires a little more explanation.
The Nano command line text editor has reached a new milestone: version 5.0.
There are the usual array of bug fixes and tweaks, but what caught my eye among the release notes was the introduction of a scroll indicator. This tells you where you are within a long file and is particularly good for mouse users so you can see where you’ve got to as you mouse-wheel through a document.
A few posts back, I talked about the script I use to package macOS apps that I distribute outside of the Mac App Store. That script is designed to simplify the complex process of signing and notarizing not only the app itself but also the installer package its ships within. This is all made necessary by the ever more rigorous, annoying but necessary security provisions Apple is applying to macOS.
Download the utility and read the release notes for this handy macOS image-to-pdf converter here.
I don’t know if this is a glitch in my system — I see it in a couple of machines, though both have the same config — but under macOS Catalina, Finder has an annoying habit of ignoring the size of windows. Pop up a new Finder window and it’s just a small quarter-of-screen panel at the top left of the desktop, not the much larger panel that the most recently closed window was.
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smittytone messes with micros 