512 Pixels

This week on Mac Power Users, we hosted our annual holiday gift guide for nerds like us.

I spent some money on the air.

My thanks to our sponsors for helping with that:

• 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
• Woven: The calendar with the most powerful scheduling tools. Try it free for 21 days.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
• Sync Up, a OneDrive podcast: Takes you behind the scenes of OneDrive.

On More Power Users, I shared a story about a recent tech favor I did for a friend that went terribly, terribly wrong.

Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

• A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
• A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
• An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
• A Google Meet app that works efficiently without using Chrome
• A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification, mic, and cam support
• A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
• A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.

512 Pixels readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/unite512 or when you use the promo code ‘512Pixels’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

Apple’s Developer website:

You can now enable Family Sharing for auto-renewable subscriptions and non-consumable in-app purchases, allowing users to share their purchases with up to five family members.

Apple has a secondary page explaining how this change affects developers and users:

Once a developer turns Family Sharing on for their app, it cannot be turned off.

This is the first Twitch stream I’ve put on my YouTube channel. I’m not sure how often I will double-post things, but this video felt like a good one to share:

This week on Connected, Apple is handing out awards, Federico has a new iPhone charger on the way, Myke meant to try an app and Stephen tried reinstalling macOS. Oh, and Salesforce bought Slack.

On a very special Connected Pro, Federico talks about a big change in his household.

My thanks to our sponsors this week:

• Pingdom: Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code CONNECTED to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2021, and can be used only once.
• StoryWorth: Record your family stories. Get $10 off your first purchase.

I assume this means we’ll never see updated emoji or a native Mac app.

This time on Liftoff:

The world is mourning the uncontrolled collapse of the Arecibo observatory, even as China’s Chang’e-5 mission is underway to return lunar samples to Earth, which would be a first since the final Apollo mission. Also: an update on the SLS and Orion and a look at what’s going on at Roscosmos.

Lots of ups and downs this week.

My thanks to our sponsor for this episode:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code LIFTOFF at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

Jeff Barr, on the AWS News Blog:

Powered by Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System, you can use Amazon EC2 Mac instances to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for the Apple platform including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari. The instances feature an 8th generation, 6-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor running at 3.2 GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 4.6 GHz. There’s 32 GiB of memory and access to other AWS services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Systems Manager, and so forth.

Mac instances run macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and 10.15 (Catalina) and can be accessed via command line (SSH) or remote desktop (VNC). The AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) for EC2 Mac instances are EC2-optimized and include the AWS goodies that you would find on other AWS AMIs: An ENA driver, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), the CloudWatch Agent, CloudFormation Helper Scripts, support for AWS Systems Manager, and the ec2-user account. You can use these AMIs as-is, or you can install your own packages and create custom AMIs (the homebrew-aws repo contains the additional packages and documentation on how to do this).

The plan on rolling out M1 Mac minis early next year, and while this is neat, I still think what MacStadium offers is a lot more compelling if you need a Mac in the cloud all the time.

This week on Ungeniused, we talk about the worst day of the year.

Apple Support:

I want to mount Apple SCSI hard disks without restarting the system. Is there any way to do this from the System software or any of the included utilities? If not, can you suggest any other utilities that would enable mounting Apple SCSI drives without restarting?

Yes, there are several shareware utilities that allow mounting of SCSI volumes without a restart. They are: SCSI Probe by Robert Polic, SCSI Info by Bob Easterday, and SCSI Tool by Paul Mercer. SCSI Probe is available online.

Love it or hate it, it seems that the Touch Bar is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. As such, it seems wise to me to make it more useful.

A little backstory first, though… earlier this year, David Sparks finally talked me into buying a Stream Deck to use at my desk. As with most things, he was right about how much I would come to love it.

The Stream Deck is incredibly flexible, but one of my most common use cases is to tap a single button on it to open a bunch of related Safari tabs when it comes time to prepare for a show.

For example, if I press the button with the MPU logo, it opens these pages:

• MPU episode schedule
• Folder of MPU Outlines
• The MPU page in Relay’s ad-tracking system
• The MPU page in the Relay FM CMS

I’m doing this via with Keyboard Maestro, another incredibly flexible tool. Here’s what that looks like, with my secret URLs redacted:

As you can see, on my Mac Pro, this is triggered by a specific button my Stream Deck, as pictured above.¹

To re-use these macros on my MacBook Pro, I made a copy of them in Keyboard Maestro, which I have sync its data over Dropbox.

I then fired up BetterTouchTool, which among many other things, allows you to create custom UI elements on your notebook’s Touchbar, tying them to a wide range of actions. Turns out, you can even have BetterTouchTool become a trigger for Keyboard Maestro.

First, create a button in the Touch Bar section of BetterTouchTool, or a group that you can place buttons in, like I have:

The action you need to use is named “Execute Terminal Command (Async, non-blocking),” which makes the button fire off a script. Here’s the script itself:

osascript -e 'tell application "Keyboard Maestro Engine" to do script "PLACEHOLDER"'

Where I have that placeholder text, you’ll need to paste in the UUID of the Keyboard Maestro macro you want to execute. To get that, you will need to select “Copy as UUID” in Keyboard Maestro:

… and then paste it into BetterTouchTool.

(While in Keyboard Maestro, be sure to set the trigger for the macro to be a script.)

When this is all done, you can tap a button on the Touch Bar and fire any Keyboard Maestro macro you desire.

Happy automating!

It’s the end of the road for the once ubiquitous Mac app, as its creator Christopher Forsythe writes:

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

It’s been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career. However at WWDC in 2012 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before I renamed it to Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There’s even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it.