Image workflow for WordPress

Screenshot of the Image Tool+ main window, showing a bunch of image format conversions in progress

These are the main tools and procedures I use for publishing images through WordPress. In case it’s helpful to others. My input images generally fall into three categories: Some of these formats can be published directly into WordPress – mainly PNG and JPEG – but not all, and neither PNG nor JPEG are the best… Read more

Secret Sonoma design lead: Barbie

macOS Sonoma is in so many ways a dumpster fire. It’s the worst Apple OS update I can remember (although admittedly there’s been some real stinkers over the years, so maybe I’m overlooking some repressed memories). There was of course the bug whereby encrypted external drives no longer mounted automatically. That was pretty special, because… Read more

Option-dragging while defining the bounds of a screenshot

I’ve been taking screenshots on Macs for more than thirty years. I thought I was pretty much a power user. I’ve known forever that you can do not just the whole screen (⇧⌘3) but a specific target area (⇧⌘4), and of course the space trick for capturing a window (including menus!). But what I didn’t know is… Read more

Preventing system sleep in Ventura

Ventura’s new System Settings app, replacing System Preferences, removes the ability to control quite a few important things. One of those is whether or not the system goes to sleep automatically. Well, it does let you control this setting but only for when the system is on mains power: By default the system will sleep… Read more

Performing a delayed and/or repeating operation in a Swift Actor

Say you want to perform some operation after a delay, and/or at regular intervals, inside a Swift actor – maybe your actor represents a weather station and you want to periodically fetch the latest weather information, automatically. How do you do that? You could punt the problem to some other code, outside the actor –… Read more

Reverting to an older version of Safari Technology Preview

Apple try to make it impossible to revert to a prior version of Safari Technology Preview (STP) – and they also try to force updates to the latest version immediately, without user consent. This is bafflingly hostile behaviour for what is supposed to be a beta version of the browser that users voluntarily, out of… Read more