Last Week on My Mac: How Time Machine backups waste space
Let’s play unintended consequences, in this case with macOS security and privacy protection, the file system and Time Machine backups. Although this is quite a complex and technical game, I promise you...
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How Preview mangles annotations
A few years ago, Apple decided to completely rewrite its support for PDFs in PDFKit and Quartz2D. The new version broke a lot of existing code, and developers were forced to work around those bugs....
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File Integrity 7 : Which other file formats are resilient?
The advice I’ve always given about saving archive copies of important documents is to keep at least two copies, one in the normal finished format, and another in a common exchange format such as PDF....
View ArticlePodofyllin 1.0 is now a Universal App
Podofyllin version 1.0 is the first full release as a Universal App, superceding all previous beta releases. This should run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, on all versions of macOS from...
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How effective and safe is Preview’s redaction tool?
I hadn’t noticed it before Big Sur, but Apple’s bundled Preview app can now redact PDF documents. This article looks at how thorough that is, and whether you can rely on it removing all access to...
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Forming unusual characters using Unicode and typography
Last week, I was asked the apparently simple question as to how to form the mathematical symbol commonly used to express the mean or average of x, x̄ (that should display as the letter x with a bar...
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How to compare two PDF documents
There are some fundamental tasks we need to do with most if not all documents. One of them is to compare two versions of what are essentially the same document. These might be legal agreements, or...
View ArticlePodofyllin version 1.1 introduces lightweight bookmarks
I seem to spend a lot of time reading PDF documents, some of them several thousand pages long. Naturally, I use my own lightweight PDF viewer Podofyllin for this, as it can’t change or overwrite those...
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Ruby text in Pages
Sometimes powerful features get hidden quietly away in apps. One I’ve recently come across is Pages’ support for what’s more commonly known as Ruby text. That’s where you attach supplementary text to...
View ArticleEfficient resilient storage
Most of what we do in computing reduces to processing, storage and output. Storage is central to everything we do, and its goals are to be reliable, efficient and resilient. Unfortunately, as this...
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How should you save web pages in Safari?
The Internet is frighteningly ephemeral. The site you found so useful today may have vanished next week, and the chances of it still being there in a couple of years may be slim. This article looks at...
View ArticleHow to store data and files securely using macOS
While it’s popular among third-party password managers to offer support for secure storage of files and other data beyond standard secrets like passwords, keys and certificates, macOS keychains are...
View ArticlePostScript’s sudden death in Sonoma
If there’s one language that’s been at the heart of the Macintosh for the last 39 years it’s PostScript, the page description language developed by the founders of Adobe, the late John Warnock and...
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Get more from your metadata: reversing Spotlight
Spotlight, particularly when enhanced by a powerful search app like HoudahSpot, is powerful when you know what you’re looking for, and that search term is already indexed. What it doesn’t reveal,...
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Reversing Spotlight search with a second beta of Spotcord
At the start of this month, I released the first beta of a new app that reverses Spotlight search to build a vocabulary of keywords found in your images and other documents. I’m delighted today to...
View ArticleWhere is my file’s metadata?
Most of us have little difficulty in understanding where a file’s data is: each file’s records identify where that’s stored. But where is the information about that data, its metadata, stored? The best...
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Are your text secrets safe in a PDF or image?
Sometimes, one person’s favourite feature is another’s threat. Live Text is a good example of this, and at the centre of this article. The text that you’re happy to extract from a photo using Live Text...
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PDF, Live Text and Spotlight: troubled relationships
Given its original purpose, age, and erratic development, we have unrealistic expectations of our PDF documents. Just because they have become something of a de facto standard for archiving important...
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SwiftUI on macOS: PDF Help book
This article has a source code supplement. To read that in parallel, open this link in a separate window or tab so you can follow this account with its full source code. Substantial apps for macOS need...
View ArticleSwiftUI on macOS: PDF Help book source code
This is the Swift source code to accompany the article SwiftUI on macOS: PDF Help book. LittleHelperApp.swift import SwiftUI @main struct LittleHelperApp: App { var body: some Scene { WindowGroup {...
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