I’ve just released version 6.0.0 of imageprep, my macOS command line tool for processing batches of images. Born a shell script, imageprep has now not only finished school and graduated from college, but also has gained employment as a fully compiled application. It’s written in Swift so it’s quicker these days.
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.
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…
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.
Continue readingDownload and release notes for this handy macOS menu bar utility here.
Anyone who uses Terminal will run the ls command to get a listing of files and directories. It’s built in to macOS’ BSD Unix foundation layer. It has one key limitation for me: it has no option to list directories before listing files. Read on to learn how to deal with this issue.
smittytone messes with micros 