Apple’s OS X Mavericks (10.9) software came out recently — FOR FREE. I installed it today on our Macs young enough to hang ten with the big boys and discovered a couple quirks — and work-arounds.
App Nap
There’s a big emphasis on extending battery life with this latest version of the Macintosh operating system. One of the things it tries to do is save both long-term and short-term wear on your battery by putting applications down for a widdo beddy-bye when it thinks they are not getting your attention.
It’s not supposed to do this for applications in the background of your desktop that are actively downloading files or playing audio content. But it would appear that it doesn’t recognise Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Airfoil software’s network transmission of audio content to remote playback devices as worthy of staying up late, unsupervised. This has the consequence of your audio cutting out after the Airfoil app window has been obscured by some other app for a few seconds. Quite annoying!
I googled a bit and found this helpful tip: disable App Nap on a per-app basis through the Finder. Just
- open up the Finder,
- browse to your
/Applicationsfolder, - check the Prevent App Nap box
Note that it didn’t seem to take effect immediately; I had to log out and log back in again before that annoying behaviour was remedied. Since then, though — we’ve been humming along smoothly.
Disk Usage / Activity Monitor
When I ordered our MacBook Airs (doesn’t that sound weird, like putting on airs, or some kind of anachronistic usage akin to humours?) I cheaped out on the SSDs in favor of more RAM. As a consequence of that, we’re constantly keeping an eye on the remaining capacity on the primary hard disk. I liked the way the Activity Monitor did that (at least before Mavericks deep sixed it), and was dismayed to find that it had been removed in OS X Mavericks. Until I discovered a method that’s just about as good, that is. This is not something new to Mavericks — our aging Mac mini stuck at Lion 10.7.5 has this functionality, too. From the Apple menu bar thingie in the top left of the screen, click:
About This Mac → More Info → Storage
I’m not sure what Apple considers “Movies” and “Photos” — is it recognizing my camera’s raw images as Photos? Probably not. But for a niftier visualization, there’s an old, free program I found as well: Grand Perspective
I dig this little app a lot. It gives you output like this:
You roll your mouse over a box and the status bar of the window tells you the size of that directory. I had the mouse over the big red box in the top right corner — that’s my 8GB virtual machine file for running Ubuntu as a guest OS via Virtual Box. You can tell it to scan any folder on your machine and there’s a surprising number of display options and color schemes for the picky. I am sure this will be useful when this machine starts to run out of space, too.
Ah, updating “Macs” as in plural. I have 4, although the 2008 iMac has a dead hard drive. Opening it up to replace the drive will be a good father-and-son project.
Funny, for my new Mac Mini I also skimped on the drive and maxed out RAM and CPU. Since it’s of the old school stationary variety, I don’t have any battery problems. :-) The multiple-monitor features are nice, and I’ll have to adjust my Hazel workflows to use the new tags (I was using OpenMeta tags until now). And Mail.app plays differently with Gmail now (I don’t like it, I’m trying out Airmail). But all in all Mavericks has been a smooth update.
How so? The only thing I noticed is that I had to once again uncheck the box in my Gmail account settings to store drafts from Mail.app on the server. Anything else I should watch out for?
And what about Mailplane?
Tidbits has the details on Mail.app and Gmail: Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation.
Mailplane is still nice and still works as always, but as a pure browser it doesn’t store local copies of messages and attachments. Since our cash workflow basically consists of processing mailed PDFs I really like having a local cache.
Thanks. I am indeed having the mailbox synching problems with my Gmail account described in that article and elsewhere (can’t stand that my phone knows there’s a new message but Mail.app refuses to show it to me!).
I like Apple’s Mail.app. I like Gmail. I want them to be friends. But I’ll switch to Thunderbird until they get their bickering over and done with.
Tidbits has the details on Mail.app and Gmail: Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation at http://tidbits.com/article/14219
Mailplane is still nice and still works as always, but as a pure browser it doesn’t store local copies of messages and attachments. Since our cash workflow basically consists of processing mailed PDFs I really like having a local cache.
Good tip! I didn’t know you could disable app-nap on a per-app basis; that will come in handy. I love your OSX posts.
I waited until last night to upgrade my Macbook to Mavericks, so I haven’t really had time to shake out the possible issues. I do know that Little Snitch needs to be updated; my installed version wasn’t Mav-compatible. They have an update ready though, so this is really just a matter of me getting it done.
Hey, whaddayaknow, Apple released an update to Mail.app within the last few days. It seems to be working better with my Gmail account now: it actually appears to go out and check for mail when I tell it to.
It’s still not letting me keep that box for storing draft messages on the server unchecked though. I wonder what’s up with that (or if they fixed the glitch that was causing multiple drafts to appear on the server, such that when you read them in Gmail, it’s potentially quite confusing).
Scratch that!
Mail is still arriving significantly later in Mail.app than all the other ways I have of checking my Gmail.
Harumph.
Anyone still reading this thread? Mail.app on 10.9.1 seems to play MUCH better with my Gmail account now!
One weird thing still open: no matter how I try, I cannot get the “Store draft messages on the server” checkbox setting to stick, but at least the drafts I write on Apple Mail are no longer clogging up my Inbox when I view my Inbox via the Gmail app on Android.
After the update, I had to get a new application-specific password set up for sending through Gmail’s SMTP servers, but that was the only hiccup.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6065 has the details on the update.