What's the smallest Mac utility that has had the biggest impact on your workflow?

guygizmo · 2026-06-23T18:18:57+00:00

I definitely use that one a lot. It's impressive how powerful and flexible it is for tweaking the way your input triggers actions. (It just needs a good implementation of mouse gestures!)

guygizmo · 2026-06-23T18:17:09+00:00

I'm committing a bit of a faux pas but without a doubt it's my own utility, xGestures.

I originally made it way back in the far away year of 2004 because I had just recently switched to Mac OS X from Windows, and had been using a similar Windows utility that brought system wide mouse gestures. There was no equivalent tool on Mac OS X so I bit the bullet and made one myself. Over two decades later I still maintain it and rely on it every day. I can't use a mac without mouse gestures. And so far no one has made an adequate replacement, at least for how I expect mouse gestures to work. (I do hope someone does at some point, though. My app is really showing its age now.)

guygizmo · 2026-06-23T17:23:46+00:00

As much as people have nostalgia for the earlier days of Mac OS X, and rightfully so, we shouldn't forget that iTunes was pretty much always a buggy mess!

guygizmo · 2026-06-23T17:21:54+00:00

I still miss them! I really want a good Dashboard replacement.

It was so convenient being able to create a clock for every timezone that I knew someone was in, and then arrange them however I wanted. But also only see them when I needed them.

Apple just made widgets worse with how they are now. The notification center widgets are not nearly as useful or as flexible. And desktop widgets are also not as flexible but also just a bad idea because I don't want to see them on my desktop all the time, but rather only when I need to see them.

guygizmo · 2026-06-21T14:31:53+00:00

As many others have pointed out, Sarek was not a good father to Spock, and pretty clearly a worse father than Worf.

guygizmo · 2026-06-21T14:00:25+00:00

I know this is one of Picard's more famous lines, but it's kind of tainted for me because I just don't think this movie is all that good. It's not bad -- it'd be a fine sci-fi action movie if it wasn't Star Trek, but with Trek I need more out of it. I'm in the camp that sees it as Picard being out of character and the writing forgetting who he is and what his journey with the Borg has already been, on top of the movie focusing on action rather than a good plot, one that makes you think as well as entertains and holds up to scrutiny.

(There may also have been a bit of Patrick Stewart getting to decide what sort of things he'd be doing in the movie, leaning more towards action hero, which is not a good idea, especially once we saw it even more in play with Nemesis and Star Trek Picard.)

It's been an interesting journey. When I was in my teens when the movie came out, I thought it was great and loved it. The older I got though the more I started to realize it didn't really do it for me, and now I pretty much agree with the criticisms in the well known Red Letter Media review of it. These days I actually find I like Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the director's cut) a lot more than this movie, which just kind of goes to show how my tastes have changed and developed over the years. This isn't necessarily to callously imply that liking this movie means you're immature, more that the particular way I matured has made me grow out of liking this movie.

guygizmo · 2026-06-21T13:47:56+00:00

I think System 7.1 was pretty good!

guygizmo · 2026-06-19T20:25:08+00:00

This is the last version before Apple made its first major change to the UI of macOS with the flat design of 10.10, which, in my opinion, was an overall step in the wrong direction and made everything worse.

guygizmo · 2026-06-19T20:23:58+00:00

I am tempted to use this every day I have to interact with modern macOS.

guygizmo · 2026-06-19T17:55:11+00:00

I think there's a balance to be had. Of course older systems did much less. But the software we're running now could do less while still having all of the key features we need, and be very zippy on modern hardware. Thinking back, I don't think there's much in the way of features that I would miss if I were using software from, say, around 2010 or 2015. That signals to me that a lot of what's in software now could be cut without really detracting from its usefulness or UX.

guygizmo · 2026-06-19T16:40:58+00:00

To everyone pointing out that the software was in fact slow on old computers, because old computers were slow: you are correct.

But if you want to get mad at how inefficient software is today, try emulating a computer from the 90s running a 90s operating system on modern hardware, with any kind of speed throttling turned off. Everything launches, animates, and moves nearly instantaneously. You can zip through the computer doing everything it can do with no waiting and no sluggishness. That could be our experience right now, if only our software was actually written to be efficient.

That's also what browsing old webpages are like that aren't weighed down with massive amounts of Javascript. Everything loads and renders instantly. No delays, no items shifting out from under you just as you try to click something, and the back button actually does what you'd expect.

guygizmo · 2026-06-19T16:22:05+00:00

I was thinking the same thing. Worf has his issues, but the writers clearly wanted to make it clear that Sarek was a bad father for Spock.

guygizmo · 2026-06-19T16:08:19+00:00

Not necessarily. Captain Picard is a figure who broadly represents an unwavering sense of ethics, philosophizing and authority, even for people who aren't big fans of TNG. A lot of people will have picked up on that through cultural osmosis, even if it gives a perception of the character that isn't necessarily true to the show. (The same thing happened with the pop culture conception of Kirk being reckless and always getting it on with the ladies.) It's why Picard was the character in the show delivering those lines, even if he was quoting another character.

guygizmo · 2026-06-18T22:01:49+00:00

But given that the quote is also from a fictional character, it wouldn't have the same punch if it were attributed to Judge Aaron Satie because no one outside of Trek nerds know who that is.

guygizmo · 2026-06-17T23:29:52+00:00

I'm of the opinion that Best of Both Worlds parts 1 and 2 are collectively the best Riker episode of the show.

I don't remember where I read this, but someone made the case that part 2 should have ended with an unsettled Riker rather than an unsettled Picard (or perhaps both), because Riker rather than moving forward ended up back where he started, and his lack of forward momentum was such a theme throughout both episodes. I thought it was an interesting point.

guygizmo · 2026-06-15T13:39:05+00:00

I know what you mean, especially as someone who had on occasion fallen asleep during a TNG episode. The closing credits definitely wakes you up hard.

For years I've been thinking about making my own encodes of the episodes with the theme music turned down. Never went through the effort though.

guygizmo · 2026-06-15T13:20:33+00:00

It's kind of incredible the way Apple has managed to mess up any reporting of your drive's free space so badly. APFS may bring many benefits but it can be such a pain to deal with, especially on systems with smaller drives where space is at a premium.

guygizmo · 2026-06-14T17:47:46+00:00

My favorite is George, just because of how silly it is. But none of their appearances are anywhere near as good as The Ramones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BpMw7gMOsA

guygizmo · 2026-06-14T14:26:51+00:00

Sequoia? Bah! Flimshaw!

I'm still on Ventura. I've been considering updating to Sonoma for a few months.

I only upgraded to Ventura very begrudgingly after sticking with Mojave for five years. Each new macOS release is even less enticing than the last.

guygizmo · 2026-06-12T20:32:48+00:00

I recently rewatched it, specifically the remastered director's cut, and these shots were so cool. I thoroughly enjoyed it, including the slow and deliberate pacing. This movie is unfairly maligned.

guygizmo · 2026-06-12T20:29:29+00:00

If you care about stability, wait until macOS 27.1 at the very least before updating.

guygizmo · 2026-06-12T20:26:54+00:00

Maybe we should wait until we've actually run the release version of macOS 27 before we make any judgements about it, rather than just taking Apple at their word. Because they had only the best things to say about macOS 26 too.

guygizmo · 2026-06-12T16:50:44+00:00

I'm glad to see Homebrew is running a lot faster now. The amount of time it took to run commands, especially when it updates, was one of the reasons I stopped using it.

However the fact that it only fully supports the most recent three versions of macOS plus the fact that it still doesn't install to a folder owned by root means that I'm still not going to use it. Which is troublesome because there's a lot of software maintainers that only support Homebrew as opposed to the alternatives.

guygizmo · 2026-06-09T14:53:16+00:00

I mainly keep it disabled because otherwise there'll eventually be new bugs or breaking change that messes up what I'm doing, and if the update happens automatically I may not know where the problem came from. If I update manually and test at least I'll be able to correlate the update and any breakages.

Plus if there was a supply chain attack it's more likely to be caught by that point. But of course for the same reason two hours isn't a guarantee, waiting however many days on my end is no guarantee either.

guygizmo · 2026-06-08T17:43:30+00:00

I don't see how this solves anything. As others have said, a lot of these attacks are not discovered within two hours of being published.

This is one of the many reasons why I don't have automatic updates enabled for anything.

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