macOS

DevMate has announced a merger with Paddle, bringing macOS developers a way to manage in-app payments and subscriptions, and more.

You want to migrate data to a new Mac but are also interested in using a clean install instead of restoring from a backup to remove any of that unnecessary crud that gathers, especially when you someone like me who constantly installs and uninstalls applications and tools. I have been trialing a handful of tools and processes recently building towards helping with this and now I have a shiny new M1 Pro laptop it seemed a perfect time to see how useful they were. Here’s what I wanted to test and how the process went.

I have been using Parallels for a couple of years now, primarily for running Windows virtual machines (VMs), but occasionally Linux VMs too. I mostly use it for playing games, testing, and the occasional Windows-only application. There are some other long-standing options such as VirtualBox, QEMU, and VMWare. I am intentionally ignoring anything that also runs containers, such as Docker, as that’s a different use case, and a whole other gamut of options.

Installing and updating applications and other dependencies on a computer really should be a solved problem by now. Yet almost every major desktop operating system provides multiple options, with no real clear answer to “which is best.”

Surrounded by digital devices, it's all too easy to use any number of them to access a world of distractions, rather than focus on doing what you need to get done. In a strange, ironic twist, many of the devices and operating systems now offer tools to help block and filter these distractions. When I split myself between macOS and Android, I had focus modes set on both (conveniently, both OSs call them the same thing), but I never found them to be that effective, as I'd have to keep remembering to keep the equivalent modes the same on both devices. Then I bought an iPhone and discovered that the focus modes mostly sync between devices. With the arrival of the "Reduce Interruptions" focus mode in the 2024 operating systems, I went all in on optimising focus modes to work as efficiently as possible, not only blocking and filtering as many distractions as possible, but also automating them as much as possible.