AVPlayer doesn’t provide a built-in way to fade in or out. I previously described how you achieve a video fade-in (or out) using general CoreAnimation layer animation, as part of making a macOS screen saver. Now let’s tackle the audio. I’m not certain what curve this implements, but to my ears it doesn’t sound quite… Read more
This is pretty rudimentary, but apparently our robot overlords need me to write this post because many of them suggested some truly bizarre approaches, some of which don’t work at all. If you’re using AVQueuePlayer, then just use AVPlayerLooper. Easy. But if for some reason you want to use AVPlayer specifically (e.g. you need to… Read more
First, make sure you really want to. macOS’s screen saver system is absurdly buggy and broken. It’s frustrating to work with and very difficult to make work right. If you’re determined, read on. Screen savers are basically just applications. Same bundle format and structure, just with a “saver” extension instead of “app”. Setting up the… Read more
Apple does provide these instructions, although they were annoyingly hard to find (in no small part because the page title is only incidentally related to the task). In short: My projects are already covered by Time Machine and other backup mechanisms, and I tried to tolerate Final Cut Pros built-in backup system, but the damn… Read more
I don’t know why, but it’s apparently impossible to directly import a Lightroom catalog from one computer into the catalog of another. It always fails at the end of the import with the same infuriatingly useless error message. However, I seem to have found a fairly reliable workaround: In my experience you must perform the… Read more
Five years ago installing Swift on a Raspberry Pi – or really any non-Apple platform – was fairly involved. Compared to getting a Raspberry Pi working to begin with it was easy, but still a far cry from apt install swift. Sadly it’s still not quite that easy (and some Python package is squatting on… Read more
APFS (like many modern file systems but unlike its predecessor HFS+) supports copy-on-write. This means you can logically copy a file – it looks and behaves like a distinct file – but it doesn’t immediately copy the file’s contents on disk – it merely shares them with the original. Only if and as you modify… Read more