Tuesday, July 23, 2019 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Jason Snell:

After 24 hours of trying to use Catalina in earnest with all my data and apps intact, the new security features are incredibly annoying. Apps constantly asking for permission to see various folders, lots of relaunches and trips to System Preferences. It’s really unpleasant. At WWDC Apple’s presenters said they would not prevent you from running software you wanted to run on your Mac, but these interface choices are disaffecting. It feels like my Mac is fighting my choices every step of the way, and there’s not even a button to turn it all off.

Erik Schwiebert:

Apple is going to end up learning the lesson Microsoft did with Vista’s UAC prompts. Users end up getting conditioned to blindly click OK because the “security” just gets in their way. It’s a mess.

Mark Hougaard Jensen:

I, apparently as the only one, think it’s great. I found out for instance that Google’s “backup from this Mac” app wants to log all of my keystrokes. I’d never have known if Catalina didn’t tell me.

[Update (2019-07-26): I’m not sure what this is referring to, as apps such as TextExpander and Dash that need to monitor which keys you type have long needed to ask for accessibility access. There’s speculation that the warning is about registering a global hotkey, in which case it sounds like it’s misleading or was misinterpreted by Jensen.]

Kyle Howells:

They won’t actually prevent you from the running software. They’ll just limit how much they can do and make what they still can do impossibly annoying to use until you voluntarily give up and stop using them.

Bryan Jones:

Agreed. It also irritates me that GateKeeper is automatically re-enabled periodically. I constantly have to turn it off in Terminal just to open a bash script marked as executable in a text editor.

Brad Brown:

The worst so far for me is that all my QuickLook plugins are blocked, and while permission dialogs are annoying for other things, I can’t even find a way to whitelist those plugins anywhere.

John Gruber:

I sincerely think Apple should add a single “expert mode” preference to OK all of this at once. Maybe even make it something you have to type in Terminal, to discourage looky-loos, but something you only have to do once.

Peter N Lewis:

I think the security preferences needs to be flipped over, so applications are listed, and then permissions associated with them, with a big red switch at the top for “allow all”.

Daniel Kennett:

Modern Mac development! \o/

James Thomson:

Honestly, this is all part of my decision not to rewrite DragThing. The writing is on the wall for system level utilities, even if it’s tolerated currently...

Peter N Lewis:

[It] is clear Apple wants to stop all levels of unapproved workflow apps, despite it being essential both for business and even more so for accessibility assistance.

Panic:

Transmit 5.5.2, released today, will be the last version to support the current iteration of Transmit Disk. To prepare Transmit 5.6 for Catalina, we must support hardened runtime, which means dropping Transmit Disk and OS X El Capitan (10.11).

Wil Shipley:

App sandboxing has set app development back more than anything else. I love security but it was designed wrong from the beginning. Should have just replaced the system calls instead of trying to be invisible and magic. […] It wouldn’t have been trivial to create a new set of API calls that were secure and remove access to the old ones, but it would have been a billion times better for developers and users than the current hyperlink nightmare.

Daniel Jalkut (tweet):

The Catalina 10.15 public beta identifies software that has not been notarized as potentially risky because it “cannot be scanned for malware.”

Peter N Lewis:

And the (“cannot be scanned for malware.”) is such a lie, since Apple could clearly just check it at that point - why not just add a Scan button, and have it scan using the same process. Why? Because Notarisation is about controlling developers, not about security.

macOS doesn’t even tell you that there’s a way to bypass the check by using the Open command in the contextual menu.

Previously:

“Locking everything down that they can” is exactly what they are doing. And it’s killing the mac. If you lock everything down, you no longer have a powerful computer capable of anything I want to do, you have an iOS device with a different UI.

Dave Mark:

Disheartening. This is the first Mac beta I can remember that didn’t call to me. 🙁

Peter N Lewis:

This is the first OS X where I really really don’t want to upgrade for reasons other than concern about bugs. This drops support for 32-bit, breaking lots of old games and tools, and adds a whole bunch of security theatre road blocks.

Shawn King:

Same here. This is the first OS X version I won’t upgrade until I’m forced to.

See also: The Talk Show.

I think the first time I encountered it was opening an Xcode project from the desktop. Understandable if wanting to access the desktop directly without any user input, but seems a tad overkill for those cases where I explicitly tell an app “open something in ~/Desktop/Foo/”

Rosyna Keller:

Yes, that is supposed to be inferred access. Through the betas, inference is getting much, much better.

See also: Reddit.

Anyone seen that one yet? App doesn’t start anymore, no idea how to fix. Message from debugger: Error 1 The fix: sudo DevToolsSecurity -enable Finding that took me 3 hours. Yay.

This constant barrage of security permission dialogs on Catalina would be a lot less distasteful if a modicum of thought went into the user experience. Everything about the flow, including help that’s incorrect when you click on ?, is about accessibility, not the user’s goals.

Could you explain why @sip_app wants to record my entire screen? No where in your terms of service does it state you will record the users screen, this is illegal.

Paulo Andrade:

Sip is a color picker. The warning in Catalina makes its users feel insecure...

See also: The Talk Show.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, third-party System Preference panes on Catalina are loaded into a separate “legacyLoader” process. Can’t find any mention of this and had to find out through back channels. This is also responsible for all sorts of display bugs. Lovely.

I have not touched the Simulator in about 24 hours. I just got this alert while I was typing in MarsEdit and really in the flow. The modality of the alert interrupted me mid-sentence.

Speaking of Catalina and its dialogs, this daily popup drives me crazy. No indication what causes it, and if I don’t enter my password I can’t continue using the machine. Checking Activity Monitor suggests it’s Mail-related

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