We’ve been in squircle jail before

Screenshot from macOS 26 Tahoe showing various application icons, many of them stuck in squircle jail

I’m not using macOS 26 Tahoe yet – hopefully I’ll never have to; 🤞 the next version of macOS is less of a dumpster fire, and I’ll just skip Tahoe entirely. But, looking over other people’s shoulders, and listening to the groans and cries, I’m struck by something. We’ve been here before. Icon jail, I… Read more

Recording audio to an iPhone via a Tascam Portacapture X8

Photo of the Tascam Portacapture X8 error dialog - "USB FS Mismatch"

It is possible to use the Tascam Portacapture X8 as an ADC, input converter, and mixing board for an iPhone, but there’s a few things you’ll need to know. Thankfully, any USB-C or USB-C-to-Lightning cable will do You just connect one end of the USB-C cable to the Portacapture X8 (to its built-in USB port)… Read more

Extracting embedded images from a PDF

Surprisingly, the best way (that I’ve found) to do this is to use The Unarchiver, a free app from MacPaw (the folks behind SetApp and many other things). It seems to faithfully extract the images as-is, including ICC profiles (which might technically be separate from the image within the PDF, but nonetheless are crucial to… Read more

Fading audio with AVPlayer

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