Apple Releases macOS 14.4, watchOS 10.4, tvOS 17.4, HomePod Software 17.4, and visionOS 1.1

SMB file sharing seems improved for me in 14.4. I used to have to do daily disable, restart, enable to get it to work. But right now it’s just working as intended.

So far all good here. No problems with hubs or printing. :crossed_fingers:

Can others confirm that watchOS 10.4 remembers where you are in the scrolling list of apps that appears when you press the Digital Crown?

Previously, I’d press the Digital Crown and then scroll and scroll and scroll because the three apps I found myself wanting to use all started with the letter S.

Now when I press the Digital Crown, I’m right where I left off with Strava and Stopwatch.

I mentioned it here:

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It looks like those people who lost access to printers when they installed Sonoma 14.4 have Microsoft Bitdefender installed and also are under Jamf Apple Device Management, probably through their employer. The solution I found on Reddit is to give Bitdefender (com.microsoft.dlp.daemon) full disk access: System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access.

watchOS 10.4 seems to remember one’s place in the scrolling list of apps, as did watchOS 9. Previous versions of watchOS 10 took you to the beginning of the list, which was very annoying.

One more thing I noticed on watchOS 10.4 that may be new. Before watchOS 10, double-clicking the crown while you were in an app let you switch back to the last app you were running. This was switched with watchOS 10 to bring you to the multitask screen - thumbnail views of your most recent apps, with the ability to scroll and tap to switch, or swipe and tap an “x” to force-quit an app.

I noticed today that if you double-click the crown and wait for a second or two it will, in fact, switch back to your last running app. I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t happening when watchOS 10 was first released.

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Did 14.4 change Mail’s toolbar for composing email or am I just imagining things? My send button has become very wide and now has a caret next to it for choosing send later options. Actually, it’s more like the single send area consists of two widgets: the actual send and the caret for send later. I checked toolbar config options, but unfortunately, there appears to be no simple just send button. And I can’t leave only send up there and toss the later caret. I’ve never used send later in my life. Now I have one wide button taking up about a third of the available toolbar space up there.

I still have a Mac on 14.3.1 and the send button is the same as on 14.4 - the send later caret is there.

When I look at the ‘Customize Tollbar’ menu item, it shows the carat as part of the Sent Icon. The resulting item uses more space than an icon alone, but no more than two icons would. How wide is your typical window for sending messages?

The image below captures that Toolbar with the Icon text added. Even then, there is plenty of extra space.

:laughing: I’m a student of Knuth. 72 characters per line — anything more is hard to follow. :wink: My compose window is way narrower than yours and I throw out all the non-essential widgets, but send is, well, fairly essential. :laughing: All I’d need is just a simple send button.

Apparently Oracle is warning about problems with Java after upgrading to masoc 14.4.

For months now, Reminders on the Mac wasn’t working. Not only did stuff not synch with the phone, the display of the Mac application was hosed. This got magically fixed in the latest Mac OS update.

But I still have to enter my password each time I plug the phone into the Mac to get the local backup to happen. I still classify that as a significant bug.

Agreed. I frequently print text files with the printer’s default font sizes, which tends to limit you to about 80 characters per line before text gets cut off or wrapped in ugly ways.

Composing content at 72 columns means you can e-mail it and people can quote it a few times without pushing it beyond 80 columns. (Yes, this is very old school and assumes e-mail clients quote text with prefix characters, which is not frequently done anymore).

But 72 also means you can block-quote it in the middle of a word processing document (at about 9 or 10pt fixed-width fonts) and the block will be comfortably sized for the main text to wrap around it.

Or I could just be making excuses for the fact that when I’m working, I open up many (5-10) console windows at 80 columns each and I want my work to look good in those windows.

2 posts were split to a new topic: macOS 14.4 bug deletes old versions of iCloud Drive files that are evicted locally

After some spelunking of settings I found that this is now in the settings. On the watch, Settings app; or on the phone, Watch app. Tap Accessibility. It’s a new setting under “App Switcher” - “Auto-Select Focused App” with the explanation text saying, “After 1 second of inactivity the App Switcher can automatically open the focused app”.

And now I know that the screen that opens when you double-click the crown is called the App Switcher.

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Cumulative summary of known issues and workarounds for macOS 14.4:

In case it hasn’t been mentioned already, my the two displays on my iMac no longer go to sleep after 15 minutes of no usage. This only started after updating to Sonoma 14.4.

Apparently another (obscure) bug has been discovered, this time in tvOS 17.4:

Looks now like Photoshop was what was waking up the computer. I use it so much I normally keep it running all the time. After I shut it down, the random wake-ups stopped. I do seem to recall a recent Photoshop update.