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As a macOS fan I keep being surprised that Apple still hasn’t implemented some obvious improvements, like a dual pane Finder or … an easier way to mount network shares. The latter is what ConnectMeNow tries to address, which is nothing new to those familiar with previous versions of ConnectMeNow (CMN).

We are more network connected than ever before – at home, in school and at work. We have network shares on our computers, want to access company network shares, or have a dedicated file server or NAS (Network Attached Storage) to store our information or make our backups. Unfortunately, it is still cumbersome under macOS X to connect to those “shares” (also known as mounted network “Volumes“).

For this reason I created ConnectMeNow – initially just for personal use.
Its sole purpose being to mount network shares quicker and easier, and have easier access to SSH connections.
ConnectMeNow supports protocols like SMB, CIFS, FTP, SSH, WebDAV, NFS and AFP.

Note: if “mounting” doesn’t mean anything to you, then know that mounting (in this case) refers to making network drives, for example from another computer or NAS, appear on your Mac so you can access them quicker and easier.

Besides this being a fully from scratch build version, this version now is available as 64bit application for Intel and Apple Silicon – signed an notarized.

While exploring a suggestion of a visitor here, I wanted to find a solid way to retrieve the IP Address of the Default Gateway in a given network.
The most common reason is probably so you can access the modem or router and do some verifications or configurations.

So in this article I’ll show you how to determine the IP address of the default gateway of your network, on several platforms (Window, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android).

Every now and then I find myself in need of converting an image to another format, especially when the application I’m working with does not support the file format I have at hand. Recently I find myself needing to convert several webp formatted files, a format developed by Google as a replacement for PNG, JPEG and GIF. Unfortunately quite a few applications still do not support this new(er) format.

There are a bunch of tools out there that can do this for us, like Pixillion from NCH Software (free version available), or online services like CloudConvert. MacOS however already comes equipped with a suitable tool that can help us with that – and can even handle a batch – called “macOS Preview“.

In this article:
How to convert images, to different file formats, with Preview that comes with macOS – one at a time, or in batch.

When using Terminal under a recent macOS version, you’ll most likely will be using Z-Shell (zsh) –  a quite common Shell found under Linux as well.
This used to be Bash, but Apple moved to Z-Shell early 2019 (some users may see a message when opening Terminal, requesting them to migrate to zsh).

I do tinker in Terminal quite often and always found the prompt kind-a boring.

In this article: how to customize the Z-Shell prompt.

Note: most of these tricks/settings may work the same way for different shells as well, like Bash and even Linux shell variants.

MovieScanner2, the successor of MovieScanner, is a small utility which analyzes your video file and stored the detected streams in a database.
The detected streams include all embedded video streams, audio streams, subtitle streams, and most common external subtitle files.

For each file details are being collected with ffProbe (from the ffMPEG project), like for example resolution, 3D, HDR, codec types, audio channels and layout, audio and subtitle languages, etc.

MovieScanner2 is completely free, and available for Windows, Linux (GTK and QT5) and MacOS X.

Sometimes we need a Certificate so we can encrypt and decrypt network communication, for example for all kinds of network devices (eg. NAS, IoT devices, local web server, etc).

Unfortunately, for some of these applications, we cannot obtain a legit certificate from a CA (Certificate Authority), due to certain limitations.
In this article I’ll show you how to create such a free Self-Signed (self-created) certificate yourself, for Windows, macOS and Linux.

I’ll also briefly point out limitations and potential problems that come with a Self-Signed certificate or CERT.

Flush DNS – Sometimes we do run into network issues, and sometimes this is caused by a corrupted DNS cache on your computer.

In this article a quick and easy overview on how to flush the DNS cache on your computer for several operating systems:

• Windows (Windows 95 up to Windows 10)
• macOS (10.6 Snow Leopard up to 11.0 Big Sur)
• Linux (several methods)

After having had an Oculus Rift, and now an Oculus Quest, I’ve collected a few tips and tricks for playing in VR, which I’d like to share with others.
These are the tips and tricks I use for myself, but also when introducing folks to VR, so hopefully these tricks are useful for you as well …

Note : Even though this article is mostly based on the Oculus Quest, most of these tips and tricks will also apply to VR headsets from other brands.

Note : To show friends and family all about VR, I have dragged my HMDs (VR headsets) all over the place, even to different continents.
Especially the Oculus Quest is very suitable for carrying it around, since the Quest is just so easy to get started. Just put the Quest on your face, switch it on, and you’re good to go.
(unlike some other HMDs where you need to setup base-stations first, which takes a bit of time and aggravation)

With the arrival of support for third party game controllers in macOS Catalina (10.15), we can now connect most certain game controllers to our Mac. In this article we look at Bluetooth enabled XBox One controller.

Once such a controller is paired with your Mac, you can use it with games that support controllers, like certain games on Steam, nVidia Geforce Now, Apple Arcade and potentially many more.

Note: Some of you may have read my older article on how to connect a XBox 350 controller to you Mac (2015). This method, and the XBox 360 controllers, are still working of course, but it is time for an update now that Catalina offers native support for certain controllers. Personally I like the newer XBox One controllers better anyway (especially the Elite models, even though these are not exactly cheap).

In this short article I’ll show how I implemented a cross platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) function for Lazarus Pascal to move files or directories to the TrashCan or Recycle Bin.

Since it took me some figuring out, I figured; why not write it down so others may benefit from this as well.
For your convenience: You can also download the Lazarus Pascal unit here, which holds the function for macOS, Linux and macOS.

macOS is great – I really like it a lot – but one thing it doesn’t handle all that great is … network shares.

In this day and age a little weird to still see this, especially from a company like Apple. We are more network connected than ever before – at home, in school and at work. We have network shares on our computers, want to access company network shares, or have a dedicated file server or NAS (Network Attached Storage) to store our information or make our backups.

Unfortunately, it is still cumbersome under macOS X to connect to those “shares” (also known as mounted network “Volumes“).

In Finder, a server doesn’t always appear right away, we need to go through a list of shares on a given “server”, get confused if we need SMB, CIFS, FTP, SSH, WebDAV, NFS or AFP, and I’m not even mentioning the need to enter a username and password on protected shares.

For this reason I created ConnectMeNow – initially just for personal use.
But the arrival of the 64 bit requirement, mandatory signed applications, and notarization requirements, and Catalina issues, my original old version was simply outdated.

So after months of work, I’d like to present ConnectMeNow v3, which hopefully makes working with shares easier for you as well.

In this article, I’ll show you the steps to create macOS install Media …

As most Mac users will know; each new macOS version comes with a few challenges. For some it’s nothing, for other it’s a disaster.

Catalina is one of the latter, a disaster for quite few amongst us, due to changed security rules and the lack of support of 32 bit applications.
Some of my favorite tools simply no longer work, and as a developer this makes me nervous when considering switching to the latest and greatest.

For this purpose I always create a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion, running the macOS version that I ran before the update.
This comes with challenges though, since Apple, in their infinite wisdom, does not simply provide macOS install media (eg. a DMG or ISO file) so you can install another version of macOS. We have to create our own.

Note: Here I describe how to create macOS install media, either as a bootable USB stick to do a fully clean macOS install for your Mac, or a DMG file, for example to setup a virtual machine.

As a hobby developer, when testing dark theme vs light theme under MacOS X, I have those moments where I have to switch back and forth between both themes quite often.
Going into the System Preferences to toggle theme, choosing the Appearance option, and then selecting the desired theme, does indeed work, but I wanted just a “one click” theme toggle.

To help myself with that, I created a small application that does exactly this: it toggles to “the other” theme, with just a simple click.
So when Dark Theme is active, it switches to the Light (Aqua) Theme. If however the Light Theme is active, it switches to Dark Theme.

The application is super simple, and has no interface. Just start the App and it changes theme and then closes itself.
Normally, this App would just sit in your Applications directory, with the optional shortcut in your Dock or even on the Touch Bar (if your Mac has one).

As some of you know, I created ApplePi-Baker a while ago, and with a new version I wanted to get away from using command-line tools like “dd” and “diskutil“. To do this the right way I needed to know how to use SMJobBless, in order to get root access, a.k.a. elevated privileges, privileged helper tool, etc.

Back in the day, we could do this pretty easy in our application, simply by using opening, reading and writing data from/to disks as “files”, with relatively simple code in our applications. These days seem to be gone …

With all kinds of malware trying to “hack” us, companies like Apple and Microsoft keep making it increasingly more difficult to actually get admin (root) access straight from our application (not to mention the seemingly cumbersome signing of applications). Which is all good, just too bad that the now majority of the time I spend on developing an application involves adapting to these limitations, instead of doing the creative thinking towards what the application really is for.

Apple has created a poorly documented mechanism for this, referred to as “SMJobBless” or “Privileged Helper“, and focusses heavily on Objective C and Swift – neither of these I like, let alone working with XCode (yuk!) – I really prefer working in Pascal, and specifically in an awesome IDE provided by Lazarus Pascal.

So in this article, I’m documenting my own findings to get this working with Lazarus Pascal – which took a lot of work and testing.

Keep in mind – I’m definitely not an expert on this topic, and I tried to include as much of what I found out as possible. It appears no-one has done this with Lazarus Pascal yet, so please bear with me, and definitely feel free to post improvements and/or suggestions. I’m sure there may be better ways and I’m always open to improving things, including myself.

Apple has done a pretty good job with the Dock in MacOS. There is just one thing that I do not like though; the way it stacks icons when you add a folder to your Dock.

A smart guy from Japan (2007 – Yasushi Chida) actually came with a neat idea for that, by introducing “buckets” (or better said: Stack Overlays) placed over the folders in your Dock. All that without the need to install any extra applications!
Unfortunately, his website at Yahoo!/Geocities has been gone for quite a while now.

The few steps you have to take can be a little bit challenging for MacOS beginners (even though it is pretty easy – as usual; once you know how it works). So in the article I’ll show you how to use buckets (a.k.a. Stack Overlays) in your MacOS Dock. This seems to work as of MacOS X Leopard and still works in Mojave (and I do expect this to work in future versions as well).