Month: February 2024

Compact macOS menubar icons

~ Rylon

When Apple released macOS 11.0 “Big Sur” back in 2020, one of the changes they made was to increase the gap between icons on the menubar. During development the gap was enormous, but it was eventually toned down for release, based on the negative feedback during testing.

People with a lot of menubar apps found the icons took up too much space, so tools like Bartender became popular to help keep things under control. Later when Apple released the first MacBooks with a notch, people even found their icons disappearing underneath it!

So what can we do about that?

The first thing to do is look to see if any icons can be removed, for example with things like battery life and volume being accessible in Control Centre, maybe you don’t want discrete icons for those? You can quickly remove them by holding Command (⌘) and then dragging the icons off the menubar.

Mind the gap

Once you’ve removed any unnecessary icons, you can modify some hidden macOS settings to reduce the gap between each icon, so they don’t take up as much space. Simply open a Terminal window, and run the following commands:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int <integer>
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int <integer>

You’ll then need to log out and back in for the changes to take effect.

I found values of 8 and 6 looked best to my eye, but you can experiment with different integer values to find your favourite.

Before and after, it’s subtle but with a busy menubar it can make all the difference. Shout out to iStat Menus for the performance monitoring widgets you see here.

Undo

You can easily restore the default setting at any time with the following commands:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding

Don’t forget to log out and back in again for the changes to take effect.

Enjoy!

OrbStack

~ Rylon

Last year I wrote how I’d switched from Docker Desktop to Colima, but later that same year I stumbled across a brand new solution that was in development, called OrbStack. The author was pretty communicative on Mastodon and so I downloaded it during the beta to take it for a spin, and was immediately blown away.

Containers should be a joy to use, not something you have to put up with. Let’s build the future of dev envs.

https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1750965469518176438

So what makes it so special? Well let’s start with the performance. OrbStack is fast. How fast is it? Well I’ll let one of my Mastodon posts answer that question:

https://mastodon.social/@rylon/110509034462228406

That’s right, after rebooting my Mac, the OrbStack user interface was up and running before the macOS Dock had even finished sliding up from the bottom of the screen. Everything about OrbStack is so fast you never feel like you’re waiting for it, it just gets out of the way and let’s you get on with things.

Another thing I really appreciate is the entire user interface is native SwiftUI. There’s no slow clunky Electron code to be found here. This means not only does the app perform faster, it also feels right at home on macOS. Controls behave how you’d expect, and it follow the system conventions properly.

Like Colima, OrbStack is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop. This means you can install it over the top of your existing Docker Desktop setup, and it will Just Work™. In fact it will offer to automatically import your existing container images and stotage volumes when you first run it, which is a nice touch.

Value added

There are a ton of features in OrbStack that really demonstrate the attention to detail and care, which shines throughout the product. They’re so numerous in fact I could spend a week talking about them, but instead I’m going to list a few of them here:

  • Automatic HTTPS certificates and DNS for your containers
  • Rosetta support for transparent x86 emulation
  • Start/stop containers from the macOS menubar (including Compose projects)
  • Explore Docker images directly using Finder (they can even show up as disk mounts)
  • Two-way file sync between containers and your local filesystem
  • Easily search through logs with a native log viewer (supports clickable links in the output)
  • Automatic cleanup of unused build-caches to save disk space
  • Much lower energy usage

The list goes on! Check out the feature comparison between OrbStack and Docker Desktop to see a more complete list.

Kubernetes and Linux

OrbStack also provides the best local Kubernetes story out there.

You get a single-node Kubernetes cluster which has been optimised for development, and because it uses the same container engine as the rest of OrbStack, all your Docker images are immediately available for use in pods, without needing to push to a registry. You also benefit from the other OrbStack features, for example automatic DNS names for your pods and services, no need to mess around with port forwarding. Ingress resources will Just Work™. It’s super slick.

As if all that weren’t enough, OrbStack even allows you to spin up Linux virtual machines, again with a level of polish that really sets it apart from other solutions.

Summary

I’ve been using OrbStack since the early beta, and immediately subscribed when v1.0 was launched back in September last year. In that time, it’s gone from strength to strength, continually adding great new features that really sets it apart from the competition. I love the proper native macOS application, the sheer speed, and all the nice “quality of life” features that make it a joy to use, and recommend you give it a try today.

OrbStack by Orbital Labs https://orbstack.dev

OrbStack is the fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux. Develop at lightspeed with our Docker Desktop alternative.

💰 Free for personal use, $8 per month for business/commercial use.

Not so smart assistants?

~ Rylon

I really like using Siri to get things done when I’m not able to use my phone normally. For example, when cooking I can quickly add things to my shopping list as I’m using them, so I’ll remember to buy more the next time I’m at the supermarket. Or if I’m driving somewhere, I can easily control my music, or reply to a friend to let them know if I’m running late.

When Siri works, it’s brilliant, but there are times it can be incredibly frustrating to use.

On it… still on it…

Every year at WWDC we hear from Apple that Siri can do more and more things entirely on-device without needing the Internet, but in practice it still seems to suffer from connection issues (even when all my other devices are fine). This usually manifests as Siri responding with the phrase:

On it….. still on it….. something went wrong!

As soon as Siri answers any request with “on it…” I know with 100% certainty that the request is going to fail. Even worse, if you immediately ask Siri to do the same thing again, it will then typically succeed! I really wish Siri would just retry the request itself silently, and save me from hearing that dreaded phrase again.

Split personality

I have a couple of HomePod minis (or is it HomePods mini?), one in the living room and one in the kitchen. When cooking it’s handy to set various timers, so obviously I ask Siri to do that, but if I go into the living room, and ask Siri to check on the status of the timer, it acts like it has no idea what I’m talking about.

Me: “Siri, how long’s left on the timer?”
Siri: “There are no timers on HomePod.”
Me: *sigh* “Siri, how long’s left on the kitchen timer?”
Siri: “There are no timers on HomePod.”
Me: *SIGH* *walks to Kitchen* “Siri, how long’s left on the timer?”
Siri: “There’s a timer with 4 minutes left.”
Me: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I found something on the web

I’ve also had interactions where Siri gives me an example of some phrases I can use, only for it to turn around and say it has no idea what I’m talking about when I try to use them. Or it just abandons any attempt at understanding you and does a web search for what you asked. This usually isn’t very helpful, and it’s completely pointless on HomePod, given it lacks a display. Siri will chastise you in that case, and tell you to “ask again from your iPhone”.

When it comes to memory, sometimes it will forget what you were talking about mere seconds earlier, forcing you to repeat your request in full, trying to get the syntax correct. It’s like typing into a command line, rather than having a conversation.

By comparison, when this does work it feels so much more natural. Asking about the weather, then following that up with “and what about tomorrow?” flows quite nicely. It can also be quite clever, for example, if you’re asking about “tomorrow”, but the time is after midnight, it will check if you actually meant today, which is probably what most people would mean in that case.

SiriGPT?

Can an LLM like ChatGPT help here? I’ve seen a few articles this week claiming that’s exactly what Apple is working on for iOS 18, and I think it would make a big difference. ChatGPT is already so far ahead of Siri simply in terms of how natural sounding the conversations with it can be. They can be quite convincingly real.

I think it would substantially improve the experience if Apple could integrate those conversational features into Siri, but they will need to be very careful to handle the fact that LLMs hallucinate a lot, which is to say they can generate output that sounds plausible, but is either factually incorrect or totally unrelated.

Although Apple hasn’t jumped on the current AI bandwagon yet, they’ve actually been using machine learning (ML) technology in their products for a while now. They tend to use ML in more subtle ways, such as separating a subject from the background allowing portrait mode to be applied to your photographs, or in real-time during video calls. It also powers the Visual Look Up feature that helps you identify people, animals, plants, and more. There are tons of little features like that throughout Apple’s operating systems that rely on ML behind the scenes.

The good news is Apple’s privacy focus, and the presence of the Neural Engine in all their CPUs, means they are able to run a lot of the ML models entirely on-device. I’d expect no less from a next-generation Siri, and for a smart assistant with so much access to your personal data, this can only be a good thing.