Macos

I installed Android Studio via homebrew “brew cask install android-studio” as a part of my automated Mac OS setup. Recently, Android Studio prompted me that an update is available. When I accepted to update, it failed with an error “Studio does not have write access to /private/var/folders/wt/rjv6_wcn4f97_2nth7fqftqh0000gn/T/AppTranslocation/19A80F28-865B-41FC-AA87-B8E43C826FCB/d/Android Studio.app/Contents. Please run it by a privileged user to update.” This error was confusing; I was running Android Studio as myself, a nonprivileged user and the same user owned this directory. Googling it a bit for AppTranslocation took me here. ...

Occasionally, my mac applications end up in a corrupt state where they won’t open. I recently encountered this with Deluge. The first step to diagnose is to open Terminal and open them in the terminal via Sh 1 2 $ open -a deluge # This name is same as the name of the app (minus the ".app" portion). LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed for the application /usr/local/Caskroom/deluge/1.3.12/Deluge.app with error -10810. Now, the error is more diagnosable but still cryptic. Deluge.app above is a directory and we can navigate to the binary located at Deluge.app/Contents/MacOS/Deluge and execute the actual binary to see a more actionable error ...

Default window management scheme in Mac OS X is not well-polished. For example, till Mac OS 14.6, there is no way to make an application occupy left half of the screen or to make an application always stay on top. To improve on that, my personal setup includes following applications. Better Touch Tool - At the most basic level, it provides “Window snapping” feature, drag the window to top-left and it expands to full screen. It allows full control of gestures and keyboard shortcuts. My personal setup includes “cmd + option + Tab” to switch between active windows of the same application. It is available via homebrew cask. ...

Booting process The bootloader loads the kernel stored in /mach_kernel. Tip: Use rEFIt as a bootloader for dual booting into GNU/Linux. Kernel launches the launchd process which is equivalent of init in GNU/Linux. launchd loads startup processes from several directories (/System/Library/LaunchAgents, /System/Library/LaunchDeamons, /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchAgents and corresponding files in ~/Library directory)

This blog post contains a collection of small tips for engineers migrating from GNU/Linux to Mac OS X for software development. Note: In another post, I wrote about why there is a dearth of a good GNU/Linux laptop.