Changelog: one fix, twenty-one apps

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash

If you use more than one or two of these apps, your Mac has spent the week quietly updating them. That is a lot of update prompts and very little explanation, so here is what actually changed.

Most of it is one fix, made once in the shared code and rolled out everywhere.

Settings windows now fit what is in them

Every Jorvik app draws its settings from the same shared pane. That pane sized its window by measuring its own content — except the content had been given a fixed size, so the measurement could only ever return the same answer. The two halves disagreed about which of them decided the size, and the fixed one won. Every settings window in the suite opened at the same small pane with a scroll bar, however large your display.

They now size themselves to their form, up to 80% of the screen they open on.

The second half matters more than it sounds. A window sized for a large external display is taller than a laptop screen, and macOS pins a title bar below the menu bar — so once its bottom edge is off screen you cannot scroll the form to the end and you cannot drag the window up to reach it. Your own settings, unreachable. Windows now re-check themselves when the displays change, or when they are reopened on a different screen.

Twenty-one apps: ActiveSpace, ASCII Saver, Ballast, BrowserCommander, BrowserNotes, Calendar Upcoming, ClipMan, CopyLens, HawkEye, HyperCaps, Jorvik Daily News, Lookout, MenuTidy, MirrorGuard, QuitProtect, Rainbow Apple, Rainy Day, ScreenLock, ShortcutHUD, SpaceMan and WindowPin.

Permission rows stopped lying

Apps that need a macOS permission show a row telling you whether you have granted it. Grant it in System Settings while that window is open, come back, and the row carried on insisting you had not. You are then being told to do a thing you have just done, by the app you did it for.

Fixed in ActiveSpace, ASCII Saver, CopyLens, HawkEye, QuitProtect and Rainy Day.

It took longer to get right than it should have, for a reason worth knowing if you ever write one of these: the check macOS gives you is cached inside your own process, and the announcement that the permission changed arrives before the system has finished recording it. Read it the instant you are told and you get the old answer, pinned there until the next change. Which looks exactly like your logic being backwards, and is not.

Earlier in the week, three that gained features

Lookout 1.1.0 now watches for pull requests on repositories you own, not just issues. It had sat silent for three days while three of them waited, because the search behind that check asked for is:issue — and in GitHub’s search language that excludes pull requests. The same release removed an age filter that had been quietly discarding any issue on its first birthday. The full story.

QuitProtect had three. The menu bar stopped claiming protection it was not actually providing; the whole interface now speaks Simplified Chinese if that is your Mac’s language; and there is an optional quit guidance overlay that appears on the first commandQ to tell you what to do next. The full story.

ASCII Saver 2.0.1 now stops the camera when your displays go to sleep. Previously the screens went dark and the capture session stayed live — the camera indicator lit on a machine that looked switched off. The full story.

MenuTidy and the band beside the notch

MenuTidy 2.1.1, on the 10th.

Its Reveal Hidden Icons feature has one job on a notched Mac: show you the status icons the notch has eaten. It was missing the ones nearest the notch — which is to say, the ones it exists for.

macOS will tell you where the notch ends. There is an API, it returns a number, and the number is correct. It simply does not start drawing status icons there. In between lies a band of roughly twenty points where an icon is laid out, reports an entirely ordinary position when asked, and is never drawn. Not clipped, not faded. Nowhere on screen, while insisting it is at x=862 like everything else. So MenuTidy checked an icon against the reported edge, saw it sitting comfortably clear, and left it out of the panel.

Whether you ever hit this was luck. Adding or removing a single icon shifts the whole row and could hide the problem or expose it — a fine description of the sort of bug reported as “sometimes it misses one” that then refuses to reproduce.

Nothing in AppKit documents that band. So the clearance is a measured constant rather than a calculated one, and rather than bury it:

defaults write cc.jorviksoftware.MenuTidy notchDrawInset -float 24

The default is 22. Err low if you change it — too small merely returns you to occasionally missing an icon, while too large starts hiding icons that are plainly on screen, which is much the worse failure.

Two more, this morning

Ballast 1.1.6: the two sliders in the Loudness section are now the same length. Comfort level was the only one flanked by its Quieter and Louder labels, so they took their width out of the track and it ran visibly short of the slider directly beneath it. The labels now sit under the ends of the track they describe. Before that, 1.1.5 brought its Permissions section into line with every other app in the suite.

Calendar Upcoming 2.1.5: when nothing is coming up, the popover shows the current month with today marked, rather than telling you there is nothing to show. The week starts on whichever day your region starts on.

The ones with nothing in them

A few apps bumped a version this week with nothing you can see. That was a README sweep — install instructions someone who has never used a Mac terminal can follow, and Homebrew mentioned where it belongs. Real work, but not work that changes the app on your Mac. Sorry for the prompt.

Everything above is out now, through the built-in updater, the download pages, or Homebrew.