Category: Kbase of the Week

Apple Support:

Journaling is a feature that helps protect the file system against power outages or hardware component failures, reducing the need for directory repairs. This document explains some of the benefits of using this feature and how it works.

Journaling for the Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) file system enhances computer availability and fault resilience, which is especially noteworthy for servers. Journaling protects the integrity of the file system on Xserve and other computers using Mac OS X Server in the event of an unplanned shutdown or power failure. It also helps to maximize the uptime of servers and connected storage devices by expediting repairs to the affected volumes when the system restarts.

When you enable journaling on a disk, a continuous record of changes to files on the disk is maintained in the journal. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, the journal is used to restore the disk to a known-good state when the server restarts.

Although you may experience loss of user data that was buffered at the time of the failure, the file system is returned to a consistent state. In addition, restarting the computer is much faster. Always remember to back up your data as frequently as necessary.

I don’t often think about the rackable Mac Pro, but I can’t wait to own one in about 20 years.

Apple Support:

If your Mac has a Touch Bar and items in the Touch Bar are hard to see, you can turn on Touch Bar zoom, which displays a larger version of the Touch Bar on the screen.

This isn’t strictly a support document, but I wanted to post about it so I can find it again in the future. Here’s Marco Arment on Mastodon:

Got Thunderbolt Migration Assistant working!

Apple Support:

If your Mac has a Touch Bar, you can use familiar gestures—like tap, swipe, or slide—directly on the Touch Bar to adjust settings, use Siri, access function keys, and do tasks in different apps.

I want to write a lot more about the Touch Bar at some point. It was an interesting idea, but clearly one that users and developers mostly rejected. That doesn’t happen every day with Apple products.

Apple Support, describing the Gloom filter in Motion:

Creates a muted, dark glow. The image is darkened, and areas of detail are evened out into larger regions of color. It’s spooky.

I’ll let you be the judge of that:

Apple Support:

You can use the iPhoto Library Upgrader tool to prepare your library to work with the current version of iPhoto or Photos for OS X.

When you open a library created by an earlier version of iPhoto, you might see a message that says “Library version too old. Please upgrade your library ‘iPhoto Library’ using the free iPhoto Library Upgrader available from Apple.”

The iPhoto Library Upgrader prepares libraries from iPhoto ’08 (v7.x) or earlier so that you can use them with the current version of iPhoto or Photos for OS X. If your library was created by iPhoto ’09 (v8.x) or later, you don’t need to use this tool.

I remember having to run this on customer machines back in the day if they had neglected updating to new versions of iLife on a regular basis.

Last week on the Six Colors podcast, Dan Moren mentioned a very specific Apple support document that I was able to find via the Wayback Machine:

As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder in Mac OS X. Removing or modifying anything in it—or in subfolders within it—may cause unexpected issues. This folder is located in your Application Support folder, in your Library folder, in your Home folder.

Deleting or modifying things in the SyncServices folder may cause unexpected results such as:

• Duplicate contacts in Address Book or appointments in iCal.
• Data loss in Address Book or iCal.

Important: Any lost or duplicate data could propagate to other devices and computers via iSync and .Mac sync. This means data could be lost on other computers.

Amazingly, Apple still has documentation published about this subsystem of OS X, which sometimes had a space in its name and sometimes didn’t.

John Siracusa wrote about it in his OS X Tiger review:

Sync Services is a new framework for synchronizing data between applications, devices, and entire machines. Think of it as the publication of the functionality behind iSync to all third-party developers. The iSync application is now just an interface to the public Sync Services engine. In fact, it actually passes off all machine-to-machine syncing to a tab in the newly enhanced .Mac preference pane.

I expect a lot of third party developers to add sync support to their applications. Apple has already expanded the reach of Sync Services among its own applications, adding support for syncing Keychains and Mail accounts, rules, signatures, and mailboxes.

The interface for developers is very nice. They don’t have to worry about many of the ugly details of data syncing: conflict management, change notifications, duplicate data detection, or .Mac connectivity.

That leads to the one sore point. Applications that use Sync Services automatically support .Mac syncing, but there’s apparently no facility for syncing with networked services other than .Mac. It would be nice if the network storage part of Sync Services was also expandable by third parties. But I guess this is yet another way to make the $99-per-year .Mac subscription service more attractive.

Apple Support:

The status indicator light (SIL) on Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro has different patterns based on the state of your Mac. These patterns also occur on some earlier MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac models, though not all Macs have a SIL. If you have a Mac Pro, learn about the status indicator light behavior on Mac Pro (2023) or Mac Pro (2019).

I still wish Macs would show a pulsing LED when asleep. Even the machines listed in this document just show a solid LED when running and sleeping. I miss that little touch of useful whimsy.

Apple, in a new support document about the USB-C ports on the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro:

USB-C is a universally accepted standard that enables charging, syncing data, and playing audio and video. iPhone 15 models have a USB-C connector, which allows you to charge and connect to a variety of devices, including Mac, iPad, AirPods Pro (2nd generation), external storage devices, and displays.

Apple Support:

Some supervised iOS 6 devices may no longer be supervised after updating to iOS 7.

For devices that have not yet been updated to iOS 7, upgrade from iOS 6 to iOS 7.0.3 or later. The devices remain supervised using this upgrade path.