I connect to my Mac many USB devices that communicate over a serial (UART) bus to send debug information to the host or to receive data and code. You know, Raspberry Pi Picos, Adafruit Feathers, FTDI cables — that kind of thing. Often I have more than one connected. Is there an easy way to see what’s connected without listing /dev every time and to remember connected devices’ paths?
It’s June once more, and time for Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC). This is a chance to learn about new functionality and, yes, discover initiatives announced at previous WWDCs that you completely missed the first time around. A case in point: Apple’s revamp of how apps are notarised at the command line, which was revealed at WWDC 21 but I only encountered this week.
Over the last few years I’ve released a number of command line utilities for macOS. I’ve always included online help within them, triggered with the --help switch, but I recently wondered how I might provide Unix Manual pages too. It would allow users to call up help with the CLI command man as well as a command switch. Belts and braces, perhaps, but I’m a completist and, more to the point, didn’t know how it was done and wanted to learn.
All three of my PreviewApps — PreviewMarkdown, PreviewCode and PreviewYaml — got big updates this week. Headline features: significantly improved font, style and colour selection, across-the-range stability improvements, and faster PreviewCode theme preview presentation.
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.
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.
smittytone messes with micros 