My M1 Mac mini Desktop — January 2022

This is how the desktop on my M1 Mac mini looks like, as of January 2022.

m1 Mac mini Wallpaper Desktop

[Click to view the full-size PNG]

The wallpaper is called “Campfire” and is created by my colleague Denys. He once designed two versions — one for daylight and one for nighttime. I quickly turned it into a Dynamic macOS wallpaper that automatically changes based on the time of the day. I think I’ve had this for over 8 months now, I love it!

I have long been using Safari as my default browser, but recently had to switch to Microsoft Edge (and for some parts, Brave) because of the memory leak issue in Safari on macOS Monterey. Both Edge and Brave are good browsers, so much better than Google Chrome, but still have some minor annoyances & miss features that I’ve been so used to in Safari. So this week, I figured I’ll use Safari Technology Preview till Apple releases a fix for the memory-leak issue. Thankfully, STP hasn’t been suffering from that issue yet.

The other apps that always have a place in my Dock are Spark, Calendars, Things, Slack, Tweetbot, Telegram, iA Writer, Pixelmator Pro, FCP X, Discord, Overcast, Raindrop.io, Gowalla Street Team, and Spotify.

In the menu bar, I have Bartender 4 organising all the variety of icons I have there. From right to left, I have:

Always Visible: Cleanshot X & Wireguard
Hidden: iStat Menus, Dropzone, Pika, Hazel, Day One, Pause, Pandan, and NextDNS.
Always Hidden: Rocket, Backblaze, Creative Cloud, Magnet, and 1Password.

Apple has officially announced WWDC 2018, which will take place at San Jose, California from June 4th to June 8th, 2018. The much-awaited keynote announcing the next versions of iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS will be held on Monday, June 4th at 10:30PM IST.

If you’re a developer and are looking to attend the conference, head over to Register for the ticket lottery.

Another password-related bug has been discovered in macOS High Sierra, this time in the App Store Preferences in the Settings.app.

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors, says:

The security vulnerability means that anyone with administrator-level access to your Mac could unlock the App Store preferences and enable or disable settings to automatically install macOS updates, app updates, system data files, and, ironically, even security updates that would fix a bug like this one.

This sounds really embarrassing for Apple, but this is far from being a major bug. First, the App Store preferences are unlocked by default for admin users — and it doesn’t work for/affects the non-admin users. Additionally, if anyone with malicious intent has admin access to your Mac, there’s a lot worse that is possible. That’s not to say that this bug shouldn’t be taken seriously. Apple has already fixed this bug in the beta of its upcoming High Sierra release.

I’d love to join Apple’s QA team. Seriously!

Some Thoughts on Apple’s WWDC 2017 Announcements

Apple WWDC 2017

At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 this week, Apple delivered a jam-packed keynote address on Monday. As has been tradition over the last few years, a bunch of us Apple enthusiasts gathered at the iXyr Media HQ to watch the keynote together. Unlike the last few keynotes, the WWDC 2017 keynote address lasted almost 2.5 hours, and the company had so much to talk about. They even completely skipped talking about their sales and growth, and their tvOS platform barely got 2 minutes on stage, only so that Tim Cook could mention that the Amazon Prime Video app is finally coming to Apple TV later this year.

Over the next 140 minutes or so, Tim Cook and other Apple executives took the audience through an incredible journey, in what is touted at one of the best Keynotes that Apple has ever delivered, largely for the sheet number of announcements that the company had to make.

Here is a list of everything major Apple announced at WWDC 2017 and some thoughts on the announcements:

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