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What’s the future for your Intel Mac?

From its first announcement of Apple silicon Macs on 22 June 2020, there has been speculation as to when support of Intel models will cease. Now Apple has given exceptionally clear details of its future intentions, and we have a clearer idea of what’s coming in macOS Tahoe, we can make plans at last. This article looks at the years ahead. In each case, major events are scheduled to occur with the annual transition of macOS to the next major version, normally in September-October.

2025

Final security update for macOS 13 Ventura, ending support for:

  • iMac 18,1-3
  • MacBook 10,1
  • MacBook Pro 14,1-3.

If you’re still running Ventura on a Mac capable of Sonoma or later, now is the time to plan the upgrade.

2026

Final security update for macOS 14 Sonoma, ending support for:

  • MacBook Air 8,1-2.

First release of an Arm-only version of macOS, 27. However, that and all its updates will continue to include full support for running Intel binaries using Rosetta 2 translation. macOS 27 will be the last major version that supports Rosetta 2 fully in Virtual Machines.

2027

Final security update for macOS 15 Sequoia, ending support for:

  • iMac 19,1-2
  • iMac Pro
  • Mac mini 8,1
  • MacBook Air 9,1
  • MacBook Pro 15,1-4 16,3.

First release of macOS 28, with full Rosetta 2 support removed. Limited Intel binary support will continue for “older unmaintained gaming titles” only. As a result, virtual machines running macOS 28 will no longer be able to run most Intel binaries.

2028

Final security update for macOS 26 Tahoe, ending support for all remaining Intel models:

  • iMac 20,1-2
  • Mac Pro 7,1
  • MacBook Pro 16,1-2 16,4.

T2 firmware updates are almost certain to cease with the end of support for macOS 26. Major third-party vendors are likely to stop providing Universal binaries, as they too drop support for macOS 26 and Intel models. Apple may decide to remove x86 support from Xcode 29, but hasn’t yet made any statement either way.

Benefits of upgrading macOS in Intel models

Although macOS Sequoia and Tahoe have brought some new features for Intel Macs, much of Apple’s emphasis now requires Arm systems. Major reasons for upgrading your Intel Mac to the most recent version of macOS it can run include:

  • Third-party support. Major software vendors like Microsoft normally only support their products on versions of macOS still supported by Apple.
  • Safari is only updated in supported versions of macOS.
  • Bug fixes. Although new versions bring their own bugs, the chances of an existing bug being fixed in the current release of macOS are far greater than it being fixed in an older version.
  • Security vulnerabilities. Only the current version of macOS gets a full set of fixes in each round of security updates, and the older two supported versions often lag the current one.
  • Enhancements. Some new features are still provided for both platforms.
  • Compatibility. If you already use Apple silicon Macs, or intend doing so, they are more compatible when running the same version of macOS. One topical example is Tahoe’s new ASIF disk image format.
  • Quantum-secure encryption. Apple has already started to transition to cryptographic techniques designed to remain secure as and when quantum computers are used in the future to break older methods. This started with iMessage last year, and Apple has announced that macOS 26 Tahoe will support quantum-secure encryption in TLS. This is unlikely to be added retrospectively to older versions of macOS.

I hope you find that helpful in your planning, and wish you success in whatever you choose.

Changing Paintings: Summary and contents parts 37-54

This is the third of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 37-54, from the fall of Icarus to King Midas.

gowyicarus
Jacob Peter Gowy (c 1615-1661), The Fall of Icarus (1635-7), oil on canvas, 195 x 180 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons.

Daedalus and his son Icarus try to escape Crete using wings of feathers and wax. Icarus flies too near the sun, his wings melt and he falls to his death. Daedalus’ nephew is transformed into a partridge.

37 The fall of Icarus

rubenshuntofmeleageratlantavienna
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta (c 1616-20), oil on canvas, 257 × 416 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

Calydon troubled by a wild boar. Many heroes hunt the animal, and Meleager is successful. He shares the glory of his prize with Atalanta, but his uncles take the prize, so Meleager kills them both.

38 The Calydonian Boar Hunt

Meleager’s mother Althaea avenges the deaths of her brothers by throwing a log on the fire, causing her son’s death. His sisters are turned into birds. Theseus travels home from the boar hunt and is entertained by Achelous, who explains how nymphs were transformed into the islands of the Echinades.

39 The feast of Achelous

rembrandtphilemonbaucis
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Baucis and Philemon (1658), oil on panel mounted on panel, 54.5 × 68.5 cm, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lelex tells of Jupiter and Mercury seeking hospitality when visiting Phrygia. Only the humble and poor couple Philemon and Baucis entertain them. The gods save them from a flood that drowns everyone else. They’re later transformed into intertwining oak and lime trees.

40 Hospitality to strangers and virtue rewarded

Achelous tells those at his banquet of three shape-shifters: Proteus the old man of the sea, Erysichthon who sold his daughter to assuage his hunger until he consumed his own body, and Achelous himself.

41 Shape-shifters and the Old Man of the Sea

bentonacheloushercules
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Achelous and Hercules (1947), tempera and oil on canvas mounted on plywood, 159.7 × 671 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Achelous and Hercules wrestle for the hand of Deianira. Achelous turns himself into a bull, and Hercules wrenches off one of his horns, which becomes cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty.

42 Wrestling for the Horn of Plenty

rubenscentaur
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) (workshop of), The Abduction of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus (c 1640), oil on panel, 70.5 x 110 cm, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, Hanover, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Hercules marries Deianira, but the centaur Nessus tries to abduct her, so Hercules kills him. Nessus gives Deianira some of his blood, and tricks her later into impregnating one of Hercules’ shirts with it, causing him to incinerate himself on a pyre. He is then turned into a god.

43 The death of Hercules

The birth of Hercules made difficult by Juno and Lucina. Other myths of Hercules as an infant.

44 The birth of Hercules

Dryope picks lotus flowers, and is punished by transformation into a Lotus Tree. Byblis dissolves into a spring after falling in love with her twin brother. A daughter raised as Iphis, a boy, who was transformed into a man immediately before marrying the woman Ianthe.

45 Dryope, Byblis and Iphis

schefferorpheusmourningeurydice
Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice (c 1814), oil on canvas, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Orpheus marries Eurydice, who is bitten by a snake and dies. He travels to the underworld and pleads for her to be allowed to return with him. That’s approved, provided he doesn’t look back. Near the end of their return journey, he does look back, and she fades away back into the underworld. He then shuns women for three years in his grief.

46 Orpheus and Eurydice

Cyparissus befriends a stag, then accidentally kills it, and in his grief is transformed into a cypress tree, now grown near cemeteries. Orpheus tells of the young Ganymede, who was abducted by Jupiter and taken to Mount Olympus to be cupbearer to the gods.

47 The cypress tree, and the abduction of Ganymede

tiepolodeathhyacinth
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), The Death of Hyacinthus (c 1752-53), oil on canvas, 287 × 232 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

Hyacinthus, lover of Apollo, is killed by the god’s discus, and transformed into the purple hyacinth flower.

48 Killed by Apollo’s discus

geromepygmaliongalatea
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890), oil on canvas, 88.9 x 68.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Pygmalion rejects libidinous behaviour in women, and remains celibate. He carves a statue of a woman in ivory, and asks Venus for a bride like her. His statue is transformed into a woman, they marry, and have a daughter Paphos.

49 Galatea transformed from a statue

Myrrha is made pregnant by her father following a deception. He tries to kill her, but she flees and calls on the gods, who transform her into a myrrh tree. Nevertheless, her baby is born, and becomes Adonis.

50 The making of myrrh and birth of Adonis

renihippomenesatalanta
Guido Reni (1575–1642), Hippomenes and Atalanta (1618—19), oil on canvas, 206 x 297 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

Venus tells Adonis of the story of Atalanta, who had been told not to marry, and became a fast runner. Hippomenes challenges her to a race for her hand in marriage. He tricks her during that by dropping three golden apples provided by Venus, and beats her to the finish as a result. He didn’t thank Venus for her help, so the couple make love in a shrine to Cybele. As punishment they are transformed into lions to draw Cybele’s chariot.

51 The race between Hippomenes and Atalanta

goltziusdyingadonis
Hendrik Goltzius (1558–1617), Dying Adonis (1609), oil on canvas, 76.5 × 76.5 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the warnings of his lover Venus, Adonis goes hunting, is gored in the groin by a wild boar, and dies. His blood is turned into the red anemone.

52 Death of Adonis

levydeathorpheus
Émile Lévy (1826–1890), Death of Orpheus (1866), oil on canvas, 189 x 118 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Orpheus is attacked by a mob of Bacchantes, torn limb from limb, and dies. His remains are dispersed into rivers, and his soul reunited with Eurydice. The Bacchantes are transformed into an oak wood.

53 The death of Orpheus

Bacchus grants the wish of King Midas, and everything he touches is transformed into gold. This proves a disaster, so Bacchus removes that gift. Midas loses a music contest with Apollo, for which he is given ass’s ears.

54 How Midas got his touch and his ears

More updates for Tahoe: Aliases (Alifix), special files (Sparsity), file types (UTIutility) and language (Nalaprop)

This week I have another group of four little utilities whose windows have been overhauled, and have new app icons to meet the requirements of macOS Tahoe. Each of these new versions requires macOS Big Sur or later.

Finder aliases

If you have old Finder aliases that need to be checked and repaired, Alifix will do that job with you. Use it to scan a folder containing those aliases, and it will warn you which can’t be resolved any longer, and can rewrite those that need to be updated.

Alifix version 1.4 is now available from here: alifix14
and from its Product Page. As it seldom needs updating, it doesn’t use the auto-update mechanism.

APFS sparse and clone files

As you can tell by its name, Sparsity started off as a means of creating APFS sparse files for test purposes. In addition to that, it has a valuable scanning feature that will detect and report details of all sparse, clone and purgeable files in a selected volume or folder. Information reported includes both the nominal and actual size of each file, so you can see which sparse files are saving the most space on disk.

Sparsity version 1.4 is now available from here: sparsity14
and from its Product Page. It too doesn’t use auto-update.

UTI file types

Give UTIutility a filename extension and it will tell you its Uniform Type Indicator (UTI, also UTType), traditional Mac OSType, MIME type, Pasteboard type, and a list of UTIs it conforms to. You can also find the same information from those other properties. This too has a crawler that will search through a volume or folder and compile a list of all the UTIs it encounters there. Its Help book contains an extensive reference to UTIs to help you get the most out of them.

UTIutility version 1.4 is now available from here: utiutil14
and from its Product Page. It doesn’t use auto-update.

Natural language

For many years, macOS has had built-in features to handle and parse natural languages including French, Spanish and German. Nalaprop uses these features to analyse text files, or text pasted into the left view in its main window. That text can then be parsed by downloadable linguistics modules supplied by Apple, and each word displayed in colour according to that word’s part of speech or grammatical type. From that it can automatically construct dictionaries or concordances of words used in that text, arranged by part of speech, and giving word frequency for each.

Nalaprop comes with a multilingual demonstration file to show how well it copes with language transitions.

Here it has parsed and coloured the text in the middle according to part of speech, for two languages, English and French. To the right of those is the dictionary it has compiled, ending verbs and starting the list of nouns. At the far right is a colour key for parts of speech.

In this demonstration, Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield has been parsed, a total of nearly 360,000 words. Currently such large documents are analysed in the main thread, so you’re likely to see a spinning beachball during parsing, but can still switch freely to other apps when that’s taking place. Those with Apple silicon Macs will see that analysis is performed in a single thread running on one P core, so all the other P cores remain free to run other tasks. I was hoping to use different threads for this, but it proved too complicated to incorporate in this particular version.

Nalaprop version 1.4 is now available from here: nalaprop14
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Enjoy!

Here are the 21 icons for those of my apps so far ported to be compatible with Tahoe.

You don’t have to collect all in the series, though.

Interiors by Design: Gallery

Compared to the number who have painted themselves in their studio, painting galleries have been an unusual theme for interiors. My examples start with a couple of fanciful images, but soon transfer to some of the more famous, as they went public during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

paniniancientrome
Giovanni Paolo Panini (1692–1765), Ancient Rome (1757), oil on canvas, 172.1 x 229.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Giovanni Paolo Panini’s paintings of Ancient Rome (1757, above) and Gallery of Views of Modern Rome (1759, below) are almost certainly wholly imaginary, although some of their figures look to have been identifiable as leading collectors of the time. These may have been an ingenious device for the artist to show a dazzling array of his own views, of course.

paninimodernrome
Giovanni Paolo Panini (1692–1765), Gallery of Views of Modern Rome (1759), oil on canvas, 231 × 303 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
zoffanytribunauffizi
Johann Zoffany (1733–1810), Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-77), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, England. Wikimedia Commons.

A more accurate reflection of the excesses attained by some is in Johann Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-77). This shows a section of one room in the palace that had belonged to the Medici family in Florence. It had only recently (1765) been opened to the public when Zoffany painted this for Queen Charlotte, who never visited Italy let alone the Uffizi, although she was the wife of King George III. Several of the paintings included are familiar, including some by Raphael, and it might repay careful study to determine whether the collection is accurate.

huskissonlordnorthwickpicturegallery
Robert Huskisson (1820-1861), Lord Northwick’s Picture Gallery at Thirlestaine House (1846-47), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 108.6 , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

As the middle classes were gaining better access to pictures in the nineteenth century, the hoarding of paintings by the upper classes was becoming extreme. Robert Huskisson’s painting of Lord Northwick’s Picture Gallery at Thirlestaine House (1846-47) not only shows one quite modest collection of the time, but reinforces how few people were able to enjoy the paintings secreted in the mansions of the rich.

John Rushout, the second Baron of Northwick (1770-1859), moved his collection from Northwick Park to Thirlestaine House when it grew too large for his own residence. When he died in 1859, he had no children, and this collection was sold off and dispersed around the world.

frithprivateview
William Powell Frith (1819–1909), A Private View at the Royal Academy (1883), oil on canvas, 60 × 114 cm, Royal Academy of Arts, London. Wikimedia Commons.

William Powell Frith’s last great human panorama shows A Private View at the Royal Academy, completed in 1883. Although he was a Fellow from 1853 until his retirement in 1890, his can’t have been an easy relationship with the British art establishment. This work gives some insight into the frictions within the Academy, as Oscar Wilde is seen at the right holding forth about art, to the dismay of Frith’s friends nearby. Frith had opposed the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, and, like Frederic, Lord Leighton (also shown in this painting), was a great traditionalist.

gervexsessionpaintingjury
Henri Gervex (1852–1929), A Session of the Painting Jury (before 1885), oil on canvas, 300 x 419 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

For Henri Gervex, depicting A Session of the Painting Jury of the Paris Salon was subtle revenge for their refusal of his most famous work Rolla in 1878. The painting the jury are voting on here is a ‘classical’ nude, thus acceptable, compared with Gervex’s of a naked prostitute, thus deemed immoral.

At the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, Louis Béroud emerged as the uncontested specialist in painting the interiors of galleries, specifically the Louvre in Paris. From then until the First World War, he seems to have painted little else.

beroudatthelouvre
Louis Béroud (1852-1930), At the Louvre (1899), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

At the Louvre (1899) is the earliest work of his that I can find showing the interior of the Louvre, although the pretty young lady posing beneath a painting of the deposition of Christ is merely sitting, holding her umbrella, and looking decorative. Nearer the nonchalant, even disinterested, guard is Correggio’s Venus and Cupid with a Satyr (also known as Jupiter and Antiope) from 1528, one of the gallery’s great treasures, and something of a favourite of Béroud.

beroudrubensroom
Louis Béroud (1852-1930), The Rubens Room in the Louvre (1904), media and dimensions not known, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

If you have visited the Louvre, you will be familiar with the many copyists who work there. Some are students who are improving their skills by copying the Masters, but many are painters who sell those copies on. Béroud shows a copyist chatting to a man in The Rubens Room in the Louvre (1904).

beroudartistlouvrecorreggio
Louis Béroud (1852–1930), An Artist in the Louvre with Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope (1908), oil on canvas, 91.4 x 73.0 cm, Private collection. The Atheneum.

He then seems to have become obsessed with painting copyists, and in An Artist in the Louvre with Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope (1908) returns to the Correggio. Note the use of a sheet of scrap paper under the copyist’s easel, to ensure that no drips of paint ended up on the floor. All but one of Béroud’s copyists seem to be women, although today you’re almost as likely to come across a man. I suspect that reflects the more limited opportunities for women to train as painters at that time.

beroudcopyistslouvre
Louis Béroud (1852–1930), Copyists in the Louvre (1909), oil on canvas, 72.4 × 91.4 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

He started catching his models during their more social moments, as with the discussion taking place in his Copyists in the Louvre (1909). The large painting shown here is Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717); to the left is Greuze’s The Milkmaid (1780), and to the right his Broken Pitcher (1785).

beroudjoysofflood
Louis Béroud (1852-1930), The Joys of the Flood (in the Medici Gallery) (1910), oil on canvas, 254 x 197.8 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

The Joys of the Flood (in the Medici Gallery) (1910) is probably the best of all Béroud’s gallery interiors. This time the copyist is the artist himself, the only man to appear in that role in these works. Rubens’ huge The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles (1621-25) bursts into life, as its water starts to flood the Louvre and its three nudes step out onto the floor.

Béroud had a close call with the police on 21 August 1911, when he had been painting a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and the original went missing. This was first noticed by Béroud, who reported the theft, and so became embroiled in the crime.

beroudpaintercopyingmurillo
Louis Béroud (1852-1930), Painter Copying a Murillo in the Louvre (1913), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

After his moment of fame, Béroud returned to painting his copyists. In his Painter Copying a Murillo in the Louvre from 1913, the only easel occupied is in front of Murillo’s The Young Beggar (c 1645).

The Stafford Gallery 1912 by Douglas Fox Pitt 1864-1922
Douglas Fox Pitt (1864–1922), The Stafford Gallery (1912), graphite, charcoal and watercolour on paper, 40 x 32 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by Sarah Fox-Pitt and Anthony Pitt-Rivers 2008, accessioned 2009), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fox-pitt-the-stafford-gallery-t12995

Douglas Fox Pitt’s The Stafford Gallery from 1912 is an unusual watercolour with its elevated view recalling Spencer Gore’s Gauguins and Connoisseurs painted the previous year. While Gore’s painting (no image of which is in the public domain) shows a landmark exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings in the same gallery, Fox Pitt shows an early exhibition of the Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson held from 9 March 1912. The painting shown most prominently is Fergusson’s La Dame aux Oranges (c 1908–09), whose location is now unknown. To the left is The Red Shawl (1908), and on the right is Le Manteau Chinois (1909).

The Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery, 26 June 1926 exhibited 1929 by Sir John Lavery 1856-1941
Sir John Lavery (1856–1941), The Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery, 26 June 1926 (1929), oil on canvas, 85.7 x 116.8 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by Lord Duveen 1930), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lavery-the-opening-of-the-modern-foreign-and-sargent-galleries-at-the-tate-gallery-26-june-n04553

Finally, this painting by Sir John Lavery (1856–1941) of The Opening of the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate Gallery, 26 June 1926 (1929) was commissioned by the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen to mark the opening of these new galleries by King George V. The King and Queen are seen on the dais, beneath a few of the Tate’s collection of paintings by JMW Turner. Duveen’s name is recorded in the inscription above the doorway.

Should you try the public beta-release of Tahoe?

Some time in the next week or two, Apple is expected to release its first public beta of macOS 26 Tahoe. This article is intended to help you decide whether to risk or resist that tempting offer.

As with Sequoia last year, to install the public beta-release you no longer have to download a special enabler from a closed website. This is now done through an extra option in Software Update. All you need to do is sign up here, and once the public beta is released you should see it offered in Software Update, when your Mac is signed in using the Apple ID you signed up with. There’s also an option there that caters for those who wish to use a different Apple ID for betas.

Can your Mac run Tahoe?

Tahoe is officially supported on just four models of Intel Macs with T2 chips, and all Apple silicon Macs. It’s expected that at least some older Macs will be able to run Tahoe using OCLP, but won’t do so until that has been updated later this year.

The full list of supported models is:

  • MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019, and 13-inch 2020 with four Thunderbolt ports,
  • iMac 2020,
  • Mac Pro 2019,
  • all Apple silicon Macs.

As in Sequoia, Apple Intelligence is only available on Apple silicon models.

What do you get in the beta?

Apple’s official account of new features is fairly detailed. I have drawn attention to a new disk image format in this article.

Changes are dominated by Liquid Glass and other features in its new interface, which is still evolving. This brings changes in app icons, and may require further work to adjust interface elements to accommodate its changes.

Other significant new features include:

  • Magnifier app using a connected camera;
  • Journal app now available in macOS;
  • Phone app available in macOS;
  • Metal version 4.

Apple provides extensive release notes for betas.

Although Tahoe is thoroughly macOS version 26, you will discover that it can also pose as version 16, as explained here.

Can you lose that Mac?

The next question you should ask is whether you could afford to completely lose your Mac for a while, as a result of a problem with the beta. Although that’s most unlikely to happen, it’s a risk you’ve got to be prepared for when you install any pre-release version of macOS.

Never, under any circumstances, install a beta of macOS on any Mac you rely on for production. Betas invariably involve firmware updates, so even if you install the beta on an external disk, it will change your Mac’s firmware. Undoing that is hard enough for an Apple silicon model, and it’s not possible on Intel Macs. All you can then do is wait for another beta, or maybe the final release in the autumn/fall, which should update the firmware to something more compatible.

Betas also normally come with updated versions of key components such as iCloud, the APFS file system and Time Machine. Consider carefully what havoc they could produce if there’s a bug affecting other storage used by that Mac, and its backups.

If the worst comes to the worst, you could end up having to restore that Mac to an older version of macOS. Apple explains how to do that, and you should read that account carefully before making any decision. If you’re thinking of installing betas on an Apple silicon model, beware that process requires another Mac running Apple Configurator 2, or macOS Sonoma or later, and restoring it in DFU mode.

Internal or external SSD?

One way to reduce the risk posed by beta versions of macOS is to install them on external storage. While that can enforce some degree of separation and protection, it still means that firmware is updated, and still brings significant risk of disaster. Don’t try this with a production Mac, even from an external disk.

If you’re going to install the beta on an external disk, you’ll need to be comfortable with the procedure for Apple silicon Macs. Although it does become straightforward with practice, some seem unable to get it to work at all. Intel Macs are far simpler, of course, although one important catch with T2 models is that you have to downgrade their security using Startup Security Utility in Recovery mode, if you haven’t already done so, or they can’t boot from an external disk. This article steps through the procedure.

Multiple systems on the same disk

You can also install multiple boot volume groups on the same disk, letting you choose which version of macOS to start up from. This provides even less separation or protection than installing them on separate disks, so should never be attempted on any production Mac.

Apple recommends that you do this into separate boot volume groups within the same APFS container, which has the great advantage that they share the same free space within that container. However, there are times when that can work against you, and you may prefer to opt for separate containers instead. The choice is yours.

Virtual machine

Some consider the best way of keeping out of trouble when running beta versions of macOS is to install them into a Virtual Machine (VM). This can’t alter the firmware of the Mac hosting the VM, and that alone makes it far safer. This is simplest on Apple silicon Macs, with their extensive built-in support for running virtualised macOS. Use any of the virtualisers, including Parallels, UTM, and my own Viable. Full instructions for Viable are given here, with additional information for Tahoe here.

iCloud

Some betas bring substantial changes to iCloud, and in the past that has caused lasting havoc to accounts and on iCloud storage. I’m not aware of any particular issues that have been reported in this respect with Tahoe betas, but many testers prefer to use a different iCloud account for Macs when running beta-releases of macOS.

Kernel panics

If you do decide to install the Tahoe beta, or have already done so, I have a big favour to ask on behalf of tens of millions of users, and most of Apple’s engineers. By all means take a good look at its new features, and give Apple plenty of feedback on what you think of them. But please pay careful attention to the basics, exercising your Mac with peripherals such as external displays and hubs. Should you discover problems, please work with Apple to ensure that it knows what they are. If you can, test out features such as Time Machine (being careful not to put your existing backups at risk), which seldom get much attention from beta-testers.

In particular, send Feedback reports on any kernel panic your Mac encounters when running a beta. The normal system report, sent after your Mac has restarted, is helpful, but further details are much better still. Even betas should never suffer kernel panics; if yours does, please help Apple’s engineers fix that problem before Tahoe is released.

For those who do beta-test Tahoe, I wish us success, and hope you enjoy testing, and helping Apple make Tahoe even better for all of us.

Apple has released an update to XProtect for all macOS

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all supported versions of macOS, bringing it to version 5303. As usual, Apple doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change.

This version adds two new rules, for MACOS_SOMA_JUEN and MACOS_SOMA_LLJU, continuing to extend its coverage of the Amos/Soma family of malware.

You can check whether this update has been installed by opening System Information via About This Mac, and selecting the Installations item under Software.

A full listing of security data file versions is given by SilentKnight and SystHist for El Capitan to Tahoe available from their product page. If your Mac hasn’t yet installed this update, you can force it using SilentKnight or at the command line.

If you want to install this as a named update in SilentKnight, its label is XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5303

Sequoia systems only

This update has just now been released for Sequoia via iCloud. If you want to check it manually, use the Terminal command
sudo xprotect check
then enter your admin password. If that returns version 5303 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you may be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

Update:

The update was released via iCloud at 2010 GMT.

In memoriam Robert Bevan, British landscape painter: to 1914

On 8 July 1925, almost exactly a century ago, the British painter Robert Polhill Bevan died in London following surgery for stomach cancer. Although his paintings have been largely forgotten since, he was one of the active members of groups centred on Walter Sickert, including the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups. He was perhaps the leading artist who recorded London’s final years of working horses. In this article and its sequel next week I summarise his career and show a selection of his paintings.

Robert Polhill Bevan was born in Hove, on the south coast of England near Brighton, and in 1888 started a short period as a student at the Westminster School of Art in London before he moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. Although it’s claimed that his fellow students there included Pierre Bonnard and several of those who were later to become Nabis, some of them were already at the École des Beaux-Arts, and it’s not clear whether Bevan ever came into contact with those artists in Paris. He did, though, visit the artists colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1890 and more briefly in 1891.

In the autumn of 1891, Bevan travelled first to Madrid, where he studied the work of Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, before going to Tangier. He returned to Brittany in 1893, where he was encouraged by Paul Gauguin and Auguste Renoir. He arrived back in Britain the following year, and moved to Exmoor, where he apparently painted and hunted, a pursuit that had occupied much of his time when he was in North Africa. He married the Polish artist Stanisława de Karłowska in late 1897, and in subsequent years often visited her family estates in central Poland.

Morning over the Ploughed Fields c.1904 by Robert Bevan 1865-1925
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), Morning over the Ploughed Fields (c 1904), oil on canvas mounted on hardboard, 21.9 x 26.4 cm, The Tate Gallery (Purchased 1969), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bevan-morning-over-the-ploughed-fields-t01121

During this early part of his career, he often sketched in oils en plein air. Morning over the Ploughed Fields is an example of these paintings from about 1904, and was almost certainly made during one of his visits to Poland. It’s small, with fluid brushstrokes of vivid colour. He divides the almost featureless plain into bands, with blue trees in the distance, and the far splash of a barn. Pinholes at its corners suggest that Bevan painted this on canvas when it was pinned to a board.

In 1905, Bevan had his first solo exhibition, which failed to attract critical attention. He then apparently experimented with a more Divisionist approach.

bevanturnriceplough
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex (c 1909), oil on canvas, 66.4 x 90.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is enigmatic: rice wasn’t grown there, and might be a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough needing to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here.

Bevan exhibited five paintings in the first exhibition of the Allied Artists’ Association in London in 1908. His work was noticed by Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, resulting in his being invited to join the Fitzroy Street Group. When Walter Sickert and his close circle were forming the Camden Town Group in 1911, Bevan was invited to be one of its sixteen members, and accepted.

The Cab Horse c.1910 by Robert Bevan 1865-1925
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), The Cab Horse (c 1910), oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by the Trustees of the Duveen Paintings Fund 1949), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bevan-the-cab-horse-n05911

He painted The Cab Horse in about 1910 using ‘anti-realist’ colours, and showed this at the first exhibition of the Camden Town Group. By this time, Bevan had a particular interest in the remaining working horses in London, including that shown here being harnessed to a hansom cab. The figure on the left is removing a blanket from the animal’s hindquarters, although their dress doesn’t suggest this is a cold day.

Horse Sale at the Barbican 1912 by Robert Bevan 1865-1925
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), Horse Sale at the Barbican (1912), oil on canvas, 78.7 x 121.9 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1934), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bevan-horse-sale-at-the-barbican-n04750

Bevan’s Horse Sale at the Barbican from 1912 follows Sickert’s advice to paint everyday scenes from life in London, and is a reminder that the city, here in Aldersgate, used to have bloodstock auctions.

bevanquiethorse
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), “Quiet with all Road Nuisances” (c 1912), oil on canvas, 48.6 x 61.6 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

The title of Bevan’s painting “Quiet with all Road Nuisances” from about 1912 quotes from the auctioneer’s description of this horse at another sale, and should have made this animal a good purchase for working in town.

After 1910, Bevan stopped visiting Poland in the summer. Instead he spent much of the season among the Blackdown Hills, on the border between Devon and Somerset, where he painted in the Bolham Valley and around the village of Luppitt, to the north of Honiton, Devon.

bevanswisscottage
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), Swiss Cottage, Hampstead (1912-13), coloured chalks, graphite, and black chalk, squared for transfer on medium, slightly textured, beige wove paper mounted to board, 47 x 37.3 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

Like other members of the Camden Town Group, Bevan was a careful draftsman, and his oil paintings often started as sketches before being squared up and transferred to canvas. He drew this view of Swiss Cottage, Hampstead in 1912-13. The Swiss Cottage of the title refers to a part of Hampstead, now in the London Borough of Camden, named after a pub called the Swiss Tavern, now Ye Olde Swiss Cottage. This view shows a parade of shops rather than the pub, and has been carefully projected to a vanishing point off the paper to the far right.

Haze over the Valley c.1913 by Robert Bevan 1865-1925
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), Haze over the Valley (c 1913), oil on canvas, 43.2 x 53.3 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1959), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bevan-haze-over-the-valley-t00282

Bevan painted Haze over the Valley in about 1913, when he was spending the summer at Applehayes, a farm in the Blackdown Hills owned by Harold Bertram Harrison (1855–1924), an amateur artist who had studied at the Slade School in London from 1896.

In 1913, Bevan had a further solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in London, which had hosted those of the Camden Town Group. When that group transformed into the London Group in 1913, Bevan was elected its treasurer.

During 1914-15, he rented a first-floor studio in Cumberland Market, Camden Town, which was then London’s specialist hay and straw market. Bevan’s studio was the centre for a small group consisting of himself, Gilman, Charles Ginner and John Nash, who became known as the Cumberland Market Group. They exhibited together at the Goupil Gallery in 1915.

bevanweighhouse
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), The Weigh House, Cumberland Market (c 1914), oil on canvas, 51.1 x 61.3 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.

The Weigh House, Cumberland Market from about 1914 shows this market in its last years, before it closed in the late 1920s. It was situated between Regent’s Park and Euston railway station, but was demolished during and after the Second World War to form a large housing estate.

References

Wikipedia.
Robert Upstone (ed) (2008), Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 85437 781 4.

How to stop Safari quitting unintentionally

I don’t always hit the right keyboard shortcuts. Of those that I commonly get wrong, by far the most serious are Command-W and Command-Q in Safari. While the former just closes the frontmost window, the latter quits the whole app, and can lose the contents of online forms. Why can’t Safari show a confirmation alert before quitting, so I can cancel those unintentional quits?

No alert is going to stop you from using the wrong keyboard shortcut. All it will do is annoy you every time you want to quit Safari and press the correct keys. At worst, when you press Command-Q but intended Command-W, you’ll accidentally click on the wrong button in the alert and go ahead with quitting Safari. The error isn’t quitting the app, it’s pressing the wrong keys, and you’ll continue to do that unless you train yourself out of it, or change your practice to make it more robust.

Historically, keyboard shortcuts for quitting apps and closing windows have long been set as Command-Q and Command-W, as Q stands for Quit and W for Window. It’s unfortunate that the two keys are immediately adjacent, so making it easy to press the wrong one, particularly if you hunt and peck for keys rather than being a touch typist.

If you’re having this problem in Safari, then you’re most likely doing the same in other apps, although its impact there may not be as apparent. That’s because most other apps track changes made in open documents for this purpose, but that’s not something that Safari can do with web pages, as entering your own text within them is tracked by the remote web server, not the browser. This should be mitigated by any website that you’re entering text into: the server should either record those entries as you make them, or at least give you the option of saving them. That’s a basic expectation of accessible website design.

Solution

You may find it helpful to enable Ask to keep changes when closing documents in Desktop & Dock settings. Coupled with disabling the control below, to Close windows when quitting an application, that should bring more protective app behaviour.

It might seem tempting to try changing the shortcut for Quit, but as far as I can see, you can’t do that for all apps. Changing it for just one or a few introduces a major inconsistency, and only increases the risk of error.

The best way you’re going to address this is to remove its root cause, by not pressing Command-Q when you don’t want to quit Safari, and that requires you to close windows a different way. Readily available in macOS is the choice of:

  • closing windows by clicking on their red Close button at the top left;
  • using the Close command in the File menu;
  • assigning a different key combination, and using that to close windows in all apps.

Although you don’t appear able to change the shortcut for Quit in all apps, you can for Close. Open Keyboard settings, click on Keyboard Shortcuts…, then on App Shortcuts at the left. Click on the + tool to add a new shortcut, and set that for All Applications, with a Menu title of Close, and a shortcut of something like Command-Shift-M. You may find Apple’s list of keyboard shortcuts helpful to ensure there are no conflicts. Whichever you choose, you should apply it consistently across all your apps. This keeps it standard and simple and makes it automatic.

Of those three options, my preference is invariably for the first, using the window’s Close button. That’s because it works independently of whichever window is at the front and ‘in focus’. With a little care checking which window you apply it to, it should be completely free of error. The disadvantage of both the Close menu command and its shortcut Command-W is that you might have a different window in focus, so sometimes you will end up closing the wrong one by mistake.

Training

Once you have chosen which to use, train yourself rigorously to use that, and that alone. When working with single-window apps you have the choice of using either, and you should consciously go through the process of thinking that through before deciding which control to use, to remind yourself of what you are doing and why.

The goal is to make closing windows and quitting apps, including Safari, thoroughly reliable processes, so you never make a mistake. That makes any warning alert superfluous, and you’ll then agree that it would only serve to irritate. That’s why better interface guidelines caution against displaying an alert unless there’s a compelling reason to do so, and not routinely whenever quitting an app.

Modern Stories of Lovis Corinth: 1915-19

When the First World War broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and his family had only just come to terms with his stroke in 1911, then found themselves living in a country at war. He and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism.

corinthindefenceofweapons
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Im Schutze der Waffen (In Defence of Weapons) (1915), oil on canvas, 200 × 120 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

This patriotism was expressed openly in paintings like Corinth’s In Defence of Weapons from 1915. The same suit of armour in which he had posed proudly for his self-portrait prior to his stroke now saw service in the cause of his country.

corinthcharlottecorinth1915
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1915), oil on canvas, 54.5 × 40.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

But both Corinth and his wife were growing older and more tired. Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1915) shows a very different woman from the younger mother of a few years earlier. Her brow is now knitted, and her joyous smile gone.

corinthlakemuritz
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Lake Müritz (1915), oil on canvas, 59 × 74 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The answer, for Corinth and his family, was to get out of Berlin and enjoy the countryside. In the summer they travelled to Lake Müritz (1915) in Mecklenburg, and Corinth started painting more landscapes again.

corinthstilllifepagoda
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Still Life with Pagoda (1916), oil on canvas, 55 × 88 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

He also continued to paint still lifes, such as this wonderful Still Life with Pagoda (1916), with its curious combination of Asian and crustacean objects.

Every year from 1916 to 1918, Corinth returned to his home village Tapiau and the nearby city of Königsberg where he had started his professional career, to see the terrible effects of the war on the people. In 1917, he was honoured by their citizens in recognition of his achievements. A substantial one-man exhibition of his paintings was also held in Mannheim and Hanover that year.

corinthcain
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Cain (1917), oil on canvas, 140.3 x 115.2 cm, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf. Wikimedia Commons.

Cain (1917) is probably Corinth’s most significant work from the war years, and continued his series of stories from the Old Testament. He shows Cain finishing off his brother Abel, burying his dying body. Cain looks up to the heavens as he places another large rock on his brother, and threatening black birds fly around.

This stark and powerful painting may also reflect Corinth’s own feelings of his battle following his stroke, and those invoked when the US first entered the war that year, as its remorseless slaughter continued.

corinthgotzvonberlichingen
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Götz von Berlichingen (1917), oil on canvas, 85 × 100 cm, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund. Wikimedia Commons.

Götz von Berlichingen (1917) shows the historical character of Gottfried ‘Götz’ von Berlichingen (1480-1562), a colourful Imperial Knight and mercenary. After he lost his right arm in 1504, he had metal prosthetic hands made for him, that were capable of holding objects as fine as a quill. His swashbuckling autobiography was turned into a play by Goethe in 1773, and a notorious quotation from that led to his name becoming a euphemism for the phrase ‘he can lick my arse/ass’.

Corinth celebrated his sixtieth birthday in 1918, and was made a professor in the Academy of Arts of Berlin. However, with the end of the war and its unprecedented carnage, disaster for Germany, and the revolution, Corinth slid into depression.

corintharmourpartsinstudio
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Armour Parts in the Studio (1918), oil on canvas, 97 × 82 cm, Staatliche Museen Berlin, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons.

Armour Parts in the Studio (1918) is his summary of the situation. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

corinthgirlinfrontofmirror
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Girl in Front of a Mirror (1918), oil on canvas, 88.5 × 60 cm, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach. Wikimedia Commons.

He still managed some fleshly paintings, such as this Girl in Front of a Mirror (1918).

corinthselfportraitwhitecoat
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-Portrait in a White Coat (1918), oil on canvas, 105 × 80 cm, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne. Wikimedia Commons.

His self-portraits show clearly the effects of war and age. In Self-Portrait in a White Coat (1918) he’s visibly more gaunt. He is shown painting with his left hand, and has used the open sleeve to stow some brushes for ready use.

corinthselfportraitateasel
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-Portrait at the Easel (1919), oil on canvas, 126 × 105.8 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons.

Just a year later, his Self-Portrait at the Easel (1919) reveals a still older man, looking directly at the viewer, grappling with the changing times.

Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair 1919 by Lovis Corinth 1858-1925
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair (1919), oil on canvas, 71.5 × 47.6 cm, The Tate Gallery (Purchased 1991), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2016), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/corinth-magdalen-with-pearls-in-her-hair-t05866

Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair (1919), one of Corinth’s few works now in the UK (in the Tate Gallery), is one of several he made of Mary Magdalen, a popular subject for religious paintings. This follows the established tradition of showing her as a composite, based mainly on Mary of Magdala who was cleansed by Christ, witnessed the Crucifixion, and was the first to see him resurrected. Apocryphal traditions held that she was a reformed prostitute, and most depictions of Mary tread a fine line between the fleshly and spiritual.

This is Corinth’s most intense and dramatic depiction of Mary, her age getting the better of her body, and her eyes puffy from weeping. She’s shown with a skull to symbolise mortality, and with pearls in her hair to suggest the contradiction of her infamous past and as a halo for her later devotion to Christ.

corinthroses
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Roses (1919), oil on canvas, 75 × 59 cm, Städtisches Museum, Braunschweig. Wikimedia Commons.

Corinth also kept up his floral paintings, here with Roses (1919).

In the summer of 1918, Corinth and his family had first visited Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. They fell in love with the countryside there, and the following year bought some land on which Charlotte arranged for a simple chalet to be built. In the coming years, the Walchensee was to prove Corinth’s salvation, and the motif for at least sixty landscape paintings.

corinthwalchenseebluelandscape
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Walchensee, Blue Landscape (1919), oil on canvas, 60 × 75 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In September of 1919, their new chalet was ready, and the Corinths moved in to watch the onset of autumn. Walchensee, Blue Landscape (1919) appears to have been painted quite early, before the first substantial fall of snow.

corinthoctobersnowalchensee
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), October Snow at Walchensee (1919), oil on panel, 45 × 56 cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe. Wikimedia Commons.

October Snow at Walchensee (1919) shows an initial gentle touch of snow as autumn becomes fully established.

corinthwalchenseesnowscape
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Walchensee, Snowscape (1919), oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Later in the season, when the ground was well-covered with snow, Corinth painted it in Walchensee, Snowscape (1919).

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 314

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 314. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Expedition for a panther now in visionOS too.

Click for a solution

Safari

Expedition (a safari) for a panther (it was first bundled with Mac OS X Panther in 2003) now in visionOS too (it’s now bundled in visionOS).

2: Polished plate is now 1’s most serious competitor.

Click for a solution

Chrome

Polished plate (chrome) is now 1’s most serious competitor (on Apple’s platforms, it is Safari’s main competitor).

3: Web pet only lasted a year before the exploder.

Click for a solution

Cyberdog

Web (cyber) pet (dog) only lasted a year before the exploder (released in 1996, it was dropped the following year, for Microsoft Internet Explorer to become the bundled web browser in Mac OS X).

The common factor

Click for a solution

They’ve each been web browsers for Mac OS.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Updates to Apfelstrudel (Unicode), AppexIndexer (Appexes), Ulbow (logs) and Versatility (versions)

In this last batch of updates to my apps for the next few weeks, there are four more popular tools, covering Unicode normalisation, appexes, logs, and document versions.

Unicode normalisation

Perhaps the earliest problem with APFS was its lack of Unicode normalisation for file and folder names. This has been a standard way to address accented and other characters that appear identical but have different codes. Apple addressed that, first in providing a normalisation layer on top, then by incorporating it into APFS. However, it can still prove a problem, both within apps and when working with other file systems. Apfelstrudel is a simple app that reveals any potential problems with normalisation, and helps you use the form most appropriate. Version 1.6 has an overhauled interface, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Big Sur onwards.

Apfelstrudel 1.6 is now available from here: apfelstrudel16
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Appexes

App extensions, or appexes, are numerous in recent versions of macOS, and widely used by apps. This simple utility shows all those managed by PlugInKit, complete with their UUIDs, to help you manage them. Version 1.1 has an overhauled interface, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Sonoma 14.6 onwards.

AppexIndexer 1.1 is now available from here: appexindexer11
and from its Product Page. It doesn’t yet support auto-update.

Logs

Until I started development of LogUI, Ulbow was my preferred app for browsing the Unified log. It has extensive features, with full support for the use of predicates, a chart showing the most frequent sources of log entries, and support for creating and using logarchives, including those from iOS and iPadOS. Unlike LogUI, it uses the log command to obtain log extracts, enabling it to show entry times in nanoseconds. It also displays extracts in Rich Text rather than as a list. Version 1.11 fixes a crashing bug when handling some logarchives, has an overhauled interface, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Big Sur onwards, and is recommended for all users.

Ulbow 1.11 is now available from here: ulbow111
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Document versions

While Revisionist (also recently updated) provides a suite of tools to work with macOS document versions, Versatility handles one of those tasks with greater ease, creating version archives, and reconstituting them into documents. Simply drop a file onto its window and it will be converted into a folder containing each saved version as a separate document. Drop one of those archive folders onto its window and it will be reconstituted into a document with all those previous versions. This makes it simple to preserve versions when moving documents between volumes or computers, and for archival purposes. Version 1.1 has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe, and supports macOS from Big Sur onwards.

Versatility 1.1 is now available from here: versatility11
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Next updates

Most of my other apps that haven’t yet been updated for Tahoe should still run perfectly well, although their app icons won’t appear the same as before. I’m now turning my attention to the successor to SilentKnight and Skint, and my virtualisers Viable, ViableS, Vimy and Liviable. Once I’m done with those, I’ll return and complete my other apps.

Enjoy!

Yellows cruel and Impressionist

Many yellow pigments in use, even into the twentieth century, have shown a pronounced tendency to fade. So when someone comes along offering you a ball of compressed powder that is an intense yellow, and appears more lightfast than alternatives, you’ll believe anything they say. It comes from the urine of cows? No worries, just tell me how much, and when can you deliver?

This seems to have been the story behind the introduction of Indian Yellow into European painting. It had a long track-record of use in and around the Indian sub-continent, where it had featured in watercolours and gouache, and buyers in Europe were only too happy to pay high prices for it when it became available.

anonmongolchieftain
Artist Unknown, Mongol Chieftain and Attendants, folio from the Gulshan Album (Rose Garden album) (Mughal, c 1600), opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 42.3 x 26.5 cm, The Freer & Sackler Galleries (https://www.freersackler.si.edu/object/mongol-chieftain-and-attendants-folio-from-the-gulshan-album-rose-garden-album/), The Smithsonian, Washington, DC. Courtesy of and © 2018 The Freer & Sackler Galleries, The Smithsonian.

This exquisite watercolour miniature showing a Mongol Chieftain and Attendants from the Gulshan Album now in the Freer and Sackler Galleries is a good example, from around 1600. Its yellows and greens have lasted those four centuries very well, and careful testing by Elisabeth FitzHugh has shown the unmistakable presence of the chemicals known to be diagnostic of real Indian Yellow.

The snag with European paintings is that so few works have been tested, and records are so scant, that we don’t even know when Indian Yellow was first used as far west as Europe.

willersgroveariccia
Ernst Willers (1802–1880), Grove Near Ariccia in the Evening Light (1873), oil, dimensions not known, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Ernst Willers’ Grove Near Ariccia in the Evening Light (1873) is one of the few European paintings known fairly unequivocally to contain Indian Yellow, probably used to form its rich greens.

We know with rather greater certainty when Indian Yellow came off the market, as by the end of the nineteenth century supplies had essentially dried up. The claim is that, between the late 1500s and then, some Indian herdsmen fed their cows with mango leaves, collected the cows’ urine, and dried it to generate the pigment in balls of compressed powder, some of which still exist. In the nineteenth century, this was increasingly viewed as being cruel to the cows, and the practice was progressively eliminated.

Whether this story is accurate, or indeed the pigment ever saw much use, remains open to doubt. Certain claims, for example of a ban on the production of the pigment from 1908, can’t be verified and appear legendary. But there is evidence that some artists in both India and Europe used the pigment in their paintings.

Its successor Chrome Yellow is part of a family of pigments ranging from pale lemon to deep orange-red, and based on lead chromate, which had been ‘discovered’ as a mineral in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its use as a pigment wasn’t recognised until the early nineteenth century, when it became increasingly popular and versatile.

Initially, supplies were limited and it was expensive. As general commercial demand for the mineral increased, new sources of supply were found, and its price fell accordingly. During the latter half of the nineteenth century it was probably the mainstay yellow and orange in the palette of most painters.

overbeckitaliagermania
Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869), Italia and Germania (Sulamith and Maria) (1828), oil on canvas, 94 × 104 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons.

The first evidence of the use of chrome yellow as a pigment in painting dates from just before 1810. Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s painting of Italia and Germania (or possibly Sulamith and Maria) was made in 1828, and is thus from the early adoption phase, when the pigment was expensive and encountered infrequently. Although Overbeck was restrained in his use of colours from orange through to yellow and green, he has achieved a subtle chromatic effect in the green fabric.

blechenviewassisi
Carl Blechen (1798–1840), View of Assisi (1832-35), oil on canvas, 97 x 147 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Carl Blechen seems to have used Chrome Yellow more extensively in his imposing View of Assisi, painted a few years later in 1832-35. By this time the mixture of Chrome Yellow with Prussian Blue had become known as Green Cinnabar or Chrome Green, although the chromium salt used was not itself green, of course.

bocklinvillaonsea1
Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), Villa by the Sea, version I (1864), resin and wax on canvas, 124.5 × 174.5 cm, Sammlung Schack, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

By the time that Arnold Böcklin painted this, his first version of Villa by the Sea in 1864, Chrome Yellow had established itself as the standard. However, this is one of a relatively small number of works using the pigment in an almost encaustic mixture of resin and wax.

cezannerailwaycutting
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), The Railway Cutting (c 1870), oil on canvas, 80 × 129 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Chrome Yellow was widely used by the Impressionists and shown at the Salon, and is demonstrated well in Paul Cézanne’s famous painting of The Railway Cutting (c 1870). I believe that most if not all of the greens seen here rely on Chrome Yellow mixed with blue.

As some of the Impressionists, like Claude Monet, generated more income, they could afford to start using the newer and far more expensive cadmium-based pigments that were coming onto the market. Cadmium Yellow is also considerably more lightfast and durable than Chrome Yellow, so during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many painters switched away from Chrome Yellow.

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Walter Crane (1845–1915), Neptune’s Horses (1892), oil on canvas, 33.9 × 84.8 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Walter Crane’s Neptune’s Horses (1892) is one of the later works that apparently still relied on Chrome Yellow.

During the twentieth century, Cadmium continued to displace Chrome in pigments for paints ranging from lemon to orange-red. However, both are potentially environmentally damaging, and in this century more modern, less toxic synthetic organic pigments have been introduced as substitutes. Thankfully, as both Cadmium and Chrome pigments trap their toxic salts in insoluble particles, neither presents any danger to the careful painter when used in paint. For the pastellist, though, inhalation of pigment in dust is a more significant risk.

Chrome Yellow was one of the key colours of Impressionism, and features in many nineteenth century landscapes. No cows ever suffered in its manufacture.

References

NS Baer, A Joel, RL Feller & N Indictor (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, ed Robert L Feller, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6. (Indian Yellow)
Hermann Kühn, Mary Curran (1986) Artists’ Pigments, vol 1, ed Robert L Feller, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 74 6. (Chrome Yellow)

Last Week on My Mac: Plan ahead with this summer’s mallyshag

Summer is an unpredictable time of year. With the Atlantic hurricane season already upon us, we could see searing heat or devastating storms. So it is with the announcements made at WWDC earlier this month: do we have time to try out some of the new features coming in three months, or must we get on with wrangling deprecations and changes looming in macOS Tahoe?

A glance through Apple’s beta release notes might suggest it should prove innocuous, and the great majority of code that’s already happy in Sequoia should have no problems in Tahoe, and so far that’s my experience. That should leave us plenty of time to adjust our app icons so they display properly in the Dock and elsewhere, but it’s there it gets more subtly complicated.

Fix app icons

I don’t think I can over-stress the importance of using Icon Composer for creating replacement app icons. If you don’t, then Tahoe seems determined to deface many traditional icons so they become almost illegible and unusable. The only exemptions are those already conforming to the fixed outline of a square with rounded corners. Any irregularity such as putting a pixel outside that, and they’re relegated to the sin bin.

Here are two icons for the same app viewed in Tahoe. The left one uses a traditional AppIcon.icns icon image, while that on the right is the same circular PNG that has been applied using Icon Composer and added as a .icon file. So far my attempts to get this to work using Xcode 16.4 have been unsuccessful, and the only solution has been to use a beta-release of Xcode 26.

Overhaul controls

That brings with it another problem, as it automatically converts AppKit and SwiftUI layouts so they use Tahoe’s new interface style, and that can generate further work. If you look closely at Apple’s demos of Tahoe at WWDC, you may notice that its controls have changed in size and shape. Not only do most have more rounded corners, but they also have different dimensions.

Interface conversion for apps that use AppKit or SwiftUI is clever, as it preserves the original for use in previous versions of macOS, and only adopts the new style when in Tahoe. Build your app with its smart new Tahoe-compatible icon and run it in Sequoia, and it looks just the same as it did.

This demo, Mallyshag, looks the same in Sequoia, but has become a mess in Tahoe because of those changed control dimensions.

Those three buttons are significantly wider, so now overlap one another and are wider than the text box below. They need a careful overhaul before they’re ready for Tahoe. Conversion can also have unexpected side-effects: for example, I’ve had some selectable text fields changed to be editable as well. You can see an example that I missed in the left view in XProCheck’s window. I now check carefully through every detail in windows that have been migrated by Xcode to support Tahoe.

This doesn’t just apply to AppKit windows in Interface Builder. Although SwiftUI dynamically positions controls, I’ve found it necessary to increase the minimum width of some views to ensure they remain fully usable.

Aside from any code changes needed, migrating an app to Tahoe thus requires:

  • creation of a new app icon using Icon Composer;
  • adding the .icon file to the Xcode project and setting it as the app icon;
  • careful checking and rectification of all windows and their contents.

NSLog

There’s one last thing that may have escaped your attention in Apple’s release notes: NSLog. When Apple introduced the Unified log in macOS Sierra, it preserved the longstanding use of NSLog as a means of making entries with a minimum of fuss. More formal methods are more cumbersome, although they’re also more powerful, so NSLog still remains popular with developers, at least until Tahoe’s change.

A long way down the release notes, and oddly announced under the subheading of New Features, Apple states that NSLog will no longer record anything of use in its entries in the Unified log, although they’ll still be reported in full in Xcode and to stdout. One of the other purposes of my test app Mallyshag was to verify just what is now recorded by NSLog.

This is the entry obtained using LogUI when running either version of the app in macOS 15.5:

And this is the extent of entries seen in macOS 26:

So what in earlier macOS might have been a useful
Error number 1467296 in Mallyshag
is redacted to the contentless stub <private>.

If you still use NSLog, you’ll almost certainly want to move on to a better alternative, again being careful to avoid ending up with its contents redacted.

Outcomes

Come the release of macOS 26 Tahoe, there’ll be three groups of apps:

  • those that haven’t been ported at all, whose icons will be almost unrecognisable;
  • those whose icons display correctly, but with flaws in interface controls;
  • those that work as expected, with conformant icons and controls.

Some will also write dysfunctional messages in the log, because they’re still using NSLog, although few users are likely to notice that.

That doesn’t take into account those apps relying on alternatives to AppKit and SwiftUI for their interface, as those have a great deal of ground to cover in just a few months if they’re going to be ready in time for Tahoe’s release.

That’s why I’ve started unusually early in getting my apps ready for the autumn/fall. I’m sure that summer still has some surprises in store.

Mallyshag?

This is a local Isle of Wight name for a caterpillar, usually a large and hairy one. It just seemed appropriate.

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Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), Metamorphosis of the Lappet (after 1679), watercolour, 19.3 x 15.9 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

The lost yellow of the masters

As one of the primary colours, yellow is a vital paint for artists. For many centuries there weren’t any particularly good greens that were also enduring, so many oil and watercolour paintings have relied on the mixture of blue and yellow to generate most of their greens. This weekend I show and tell the stories of three of the yellow pigments that have featured in well-known paintings. Today’s is about one pigment that went missing from the palette for two hundred years, and tomorrow I’ll consider two other yellows with unusual histories.

For much of that period many of the pigments used in artists’ paints were closely guarded secrets. Their precise manner of preparation, even the source of their ingredients, were considered part of the craft of paint-making, whether performed by a supplier or in the artist’s workshop. On at least one occasion, this led to the loss of a pigment from the palette: Lead-Tin Yellow, widely used in many of the greatest works of art prior to 1750, vanished until its rediscovery in 1940.

Like several other pigments, Lead-Tin Yellow seems to have originated in glassmaking, and there’s some evidence of its use as a pigment in glass made as early as about 400 CE. Its earliest use in paintings probably dates back to Giotto in about 1300, following which it became extremely popular.

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Jacopo di Cione (fl c 1365-1398/1400) (probably), Noli me tangere (1368-70), egg tempera on wood, 56 x 38.2 cm, The National Gallery (Presented by Henry Wagner, 1924), London. Courtesy of and © The National Gallery, London.

My earliest example is this painting in egg tempera attributed to Jacopo di Cione: Noli me tangere from around 1368-70. Examination of the brilliant yellow lining to Christ’s robe has shown that its pigment is Lead-Tin Yellow of type II. That is a variant consisting of a lead-tin oxide with free tin and silicon that’s more strongly associated with glass-making, and prepared slightly differently from the ‘purer’ type I.

Both types of Lead-Tin Yellow have proved robust and stable pigments in a range of different binders, including egg tempera and oils.

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Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400–1464), Adoration of the Magi, from St Columba Altarpiece (detail) (c 1455), oil on oak panel, 138 x 153 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Maxvorstadt, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

The centre panel of Rogier van der Weyden’s St Columba Altarpiece, showing the Adoration of the Magi, from about 1455, has been found to contain Lead-Tin Yellow in the rich yellow sleeve of the king in the centre. This is shown better in the detail below.

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Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400–1464), Adoration of the Magi (detail), from St Columba Altarpiece (detail) (c 1455), oil on oak panel, 138 x 153 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Maxvorstadt, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.
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Ambrogio Bergognone (fl c 1481-1523), The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena (c 1490), oil on poplar, 187.5 x 129.5 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, 1857), London. Courtesy of and © The National Gallery, London.

By about 1450, Lead-Tin Yellow type I was increasingly being used in paint. For example, the infant Christ’s lemon yellow dress in Ambrogio Bergognone’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Catherine of Siena (c 1490) has been found to contain this ‘purer’ type.

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Ambrogio Bergognone (fl c 1481-1523), The Virgin and Child (1488-90), oil on poplar, 55.2 x 35.6 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, 1894), London. Wikimedia Commons.

Another very similar painting by Bergognone, his The Virgin and Child from 1488-90, has not, as far as I can tell, been examined to test for the use of Lead-Tin Yellow, but I strongly suspect the infant Christ’s dress here contains the pigment too. This is shown particularly well in the detail below.

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Ambrogio Bergognone (fl c 1481-1523), The Virgin and Child (detail) (1488-90), oil on poplar, 55.2 x 35.6 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, 1894), London. Wikimedia Commons.
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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel (‘The Virgin of the Rocks’) (Panel from the S. Francesco Altarpiece, Milan) (c 1491-1508), oil on poplar, thinned and cradled, 189.5 x 120 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, 1880), London. Courtesy of and © The National Gallery, London.

Although believed to be a stable colour, one of the more surprising examples of the use of Lead-Tin Yellow is in one version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel, better-known as The Virgin of the Rocks. The panel from the S. Francesco Altarpiece of Milan, painted between 1491-1508 and now in the National Gallery in London, is shown here.

The light brown lining of the Virgin’s blue cloak, shown in the detail below, contains Lead-Tin Yellow type I. The version in the Louvre, in which that lining is a bright yellow, doesn’t appear to have been reported on.

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), The Virgin with the Infant Saint John the Baptist adoring the Christ Child accompanied by an Angel (‘The Virgin of the Rocks’) (Panel from the S. Francesco Altarpiece, Milan) (detail) (c 1491-1508), oil on poplar, thinned and cradled, 189.5 x 120 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, 1880), London. Wikimedia Commons.
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Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), The Allegory of Love III, Respect (c 1575), oil on canvas, 186.1 x 194.3 cm, The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.

Yellow is a prominent colour in the paintings in Paolo Veronese’s series The Allegory of Love. In this the third, Respect from about 1575, Lead-Tin Yellow type II has been found in the primrose yellow impasto on the man’s tunic.

Veronese used type I in the first of the series, and type II in the third and fourth, suggesting that he used different sources of supply for his pigments over this period. The two types appear visually indistinguishable, and don’t seem to handle differently in oil paint.

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c 1615), oil on canvas, 248 × 321 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Maxvorstadt, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Several of Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings, including his Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt from about 1615, have been found to contain Lead-Tin Yellow, although I don’t know which type he used.

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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669), Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-1638), oil on canvas, 167.6 x 209.2 cm, The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.

Another fine example of the extensive use of Lead-Tin Yellow, here of type I, is in Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c 1635-38). Many of Rembrandt’s paintings have been found to contain the pigment, but here it has been applied in thick impasto to model the highlights on Belshazzar’s cloak.

Rembrandt here used a double ground, over which he applied earth pigments before applying the uppermost layers of lighter colours, including Lead-Tin Yellow, to model the detail. These are shown in the detail below.

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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669), Belshazzar’s Feast (detail) (c 1635-1638), oil on canvas, 167.6 x 209.2 cm, The National Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.
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Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Milkmaid (c 1660), oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

Jan Vermeer is another of the Old Masters whose paintings often contain Lead-Tin Yellow. In The Milkmaid (c 1660), for example, it accounts for much of the pale yellow of the woman’s bodice.

What happened next is rather strange. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Lead-Tin Yellow declined markedly in popularity, and by 1750 it appears to have been replaced by other, sometimes less stable, pigments, including Naples Yellow (highly toxic lead antimonate). Once replaced, the recipes for its manufacture appear to have been lost, and its use was forgotten.

During the eighteenth century, there were also changes in the supply of pigments and paints to artists, and by the nineteenth century most were sourced from specialist colourmen, who appear not to have known about Lead-Tin Yellow as a pigment. By the time that commercial manufacture of oil and other paints became widespread in the late nineteenth century, the pigment had been long forgotten. This was aided by uncertainty over its traditional name, which led to confusion with the pigment Massicot (lead oxide or Lead Yellow).

It was Richard Jacobi, working at the Doerner Institute in Munich in 1940, who stumbled across the pigment when analysing yellow paints in Old Master paintings. He reported his radical findings in 1941, and from the late 1940s and 1950s onwards paint analyses looking for it have been performed quite widely, and have found its extensive use in works between 1300 and 1750. Since then it has even been re-introduced in some commercial paint ranges.

Reference

Hermann Kühn (1993) Artists’ Pigments, vol 2, ed Ashok Roy, Archetype. ISBN 978 1 904982 75 3.

Saturday Mac riddles 314

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Expedition for a panther now in visionOS too.

2: Polished plate is now 1’s most serious competitor.

3: Web pet only lasted a year before the exploder.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

A brief history of web browsers

Although taken for granted now, Apple didn’t release the first version of Safari until January 2003. Before that was a succession of interesting experiments to try. Those started with Netscape Navigator in 1994, which lasted until 2007, although by then it was little used on Macs.

Netscape is seen here in 2000, following my successful purchase of downloadable versions of Conflict Catcher and Suitcase from Casady & Greene’s online store.

Two years later, and I’m browsing Amazon’s listing of my never-published book that was slated for 31 March the following year. I’m so glad I never pre-ordered it.

Netscape had been at the front of browser development, leading with on-the-fly page display, cookies and JavaScript. But in 1996, it was challenged by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and Apple’s more innovative Cyberdog. The latter was sadly abandoned the following year, leaving the way clear for Apple to replace the bundled Netscape with Internet Exploder, as it quickly became nicknamed.

This is Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2001, providing the front end to Mac OS X Server through Webmin.

Cookie settings in Explorer were highly detailed in 2005.

Many of us abandoned Internet Explorer for alternatives such as Camino. That had originated within Netscape as Chimera in 2002, based on its Gecko layout engine, with a native Mac OS X front end. The following year it was rebranded as Camino, and amazingly lasted until 2012.

There were other competitors, such as Omni Group’s OmniWeb, which had been developed for NeXTSTEP since 1995, then moved to Mac OS X until 2012.

This is OmniWeb in 2007, showing the different browsers it could identify itself as, including a single version of Safari 1.0.

In January 2003, Apple launched the first beta-release of its own browser, Safari, and bundled it in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther when it was released that October. Since then Safari has been a regular fixture in successive versions of Mac OS X, OS X, and macOS. For several years, it was the only browser on iOS and iPadOS.

This is Safari 1 showing the front page for Apple’s developer site in 2004, complete with the offer to download Xcode version 1.5 with dead code stripping as a new feature. That year, Mozilla Firefox was released as an alternative, and has continued to support Macs ever since.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came with Safari as the only bundled browser when it was released in April 2005, although it took Safari 2.0.4 in early 2006 before it was stable.

Page loading was slow in 2005, when Apple’s front page took a total of over 16 seconds to load fully, but that only used 6.8 MB of memory. By contrast, today Apple’s front page only takes a couple of seconds but requires over 200 MB.

There were times when the only way ahead with these early versions of Safari was to completely reset it, emptying its cache, and even removing all passwords and AutoFill text. This is Safari 2 in 2006.

Prominent among the plugins in 2006 was the dreaded Shockwave Flash, which had only recently been taken over by Adobe when it acquired Macromedia the previous year. Details of plugins are here being displayed on an internal web page within Safari 2.

Safari 3, bundled in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in October 2007, brought the claim that it was then the fastest browser, but it was troubled by bugs and security problems at first.

Safari 3 had already grown extensive preferences, covering the use of plugins, Java, JavaScript and cookies, seen here in 2007.

Its successor, Safari 4, followed in the summer of 2009, ready for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, with further performance improvements, particularly in its JavaScript engine.

By 2009, Safari 4 was able to warn the user if it was about to visit a site blacklisted by the Google Safe Browsing Service. At least when that service was available. That year also saw Preview and Beta releases of Google Chrome, now Safari’s most serious competitor on Apple’s hardware.

Safari 5 was released a year later, in 2010, and was bundled in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011. This brought Reader mode and opened the door to third-party extensions.

Safari’s hidden Debug menu provided a collection of tools for web developers, and more recently has become the even more extensive Develop menu.

By the release of macOS 10.12 Sierra in 2016, Safari had reached version 10.

By 2016, close control over Adobe Flash Player had become critical, as a result of its frequent exploits, although it remained highly popular with content developers before Adobe finally killed it at the end of 2020.

Since 2021, with the release of macOS 12 Monterey, Safari 15 and its successors have been able to perform on-the-fly translation, as demonstrated here.

Safari is now the bundled browser in macOS, iOS, iPadOS and visionOS, and this year is set to leap in version number from 18 to 26 with the arrival of Tahoe and its sister OSes. It has been a long and sometimes troubled journey over those 22 years, and despite strong competition from Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, it remains the browser of first choice for a great many using Apple’s hardware products. I hope my screenshots have brought back more happy memories than traumatic moments.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Modern Stories of Lovis Corinth: 1913-14

By the beginning of 1913, Lovis Corinth had essentially overcome the consequences of his stroke in late 1911. His painting style had moved on, although not because of any residual physical limitations, and he and his family were starting to build a new lifestyle that would hopefully preserve his health better. Key to that was getting away more from Berlin.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-portrait with Tyrolean Hat (1913), oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Wikimedia Commons.

By 1913, in his Self-portrait with Tyrolean Hat, he appears to be on holiday in the South Tyrol, marked by his headgear and the inscription at the right. However, his face has become more gaunt and worried. Although he appears to be holding his brush in his right hand, it’s actually clasping several brushes and his palette, indicating that he was painting with his left hand. If painted from a mirror image, of course, the handedness could be reversed. There doesn’t appear to have been any significant change in his brushwork.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-portrait in Armour (1914), oil on canvas, 120 × 90 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Wikimedia Commons.

Corinth dons his suit of armour again for his 1914 Self-portrait in Armour, holding a pole in his left hand, assuming the image isn’t mirrored. This is an excellent comparator against his 1911 portrait: there has been little if any change in facture, but his face has changed, and there is still worry in his expression. His chin is no longer raised in pride, but he stares straight ahead with determination.

Painted at the start of the First World War, his armour here is probably a response to that, and to the universal call to arms. Corinth had a great admiration for Otto von Bismarck.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-portrait in the Studio (1914), oil on panel, 73 × 58 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons.

Self-portrait in the Studio (1914) is the last in this series of self-portraits, and shows him painting with the brush held in his left hand, although this would be reversed if the image was mirrored. He appears older, more anxious, perhaps even stressed, as he looks directly at the viewer. Again, there’s little apparent change in his brushwork from 1911.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Menton (France) (1913), oil on canvas, 43 × 62 cm, Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

At some stage, perhaps during the winter of 1912-13, Corinth and his wife stayed in the French resort of Menton (1913), where he painted this excellent and detailed view. Although clearly dated, his verticals are once again leaning towards the left, as they had been soon after his stroke.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Skittle Alley (1913), oil on canvas, 83.2 × 60.5 cm, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, Hanover. Wikimedia Commons.

His flattening of perspective is well illustrated in Skittle Alley (1913). This shows an outdoor skittle alley close to a building that is presumably behind the viewer. In the foreground is a table laid up for a meal, to the left of which is a chair. A man, his back to the viewer, is just about to bowl at the skittles shown at the far end of a level alley, cut through the wood.

With its high vanishing point, the alley seems shallow and much higher at its far end, and could easily be seen as rising at an angle of over 45 degrees. The distant landscape seen through the gap at the end of the alley has no aerial perspective, providing no clues as to its distance. Corinth has depicted this as if everything from the alley beyond is on a flat plane, like a theatrical scenery painting, parallel to the picture plane, and only slightly deeper than the table and chair.

This is believed to have been painted when Corinth had been invited to the property of Carl von Glantz, a friend of one of his students, at Mecklembourg. It’s reminiscent of Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century showing similar games taking place outdoors.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Cat’s Breakfast (1913), oil on cardboard, 52 × 69 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

He continued to paint still lifes, such as this Cat’s Breakfast (1913); some of these became so loose as to show only the most basic forms of the objects.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Bacchante (1913), tempera on canvas, 227 × 110 cm, Private Collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Contrary to claims that this change in style was driven by the results of his stroke, Corinth still painted more detailed figurative works, such as this Bacchante (1913), using tempera rather than oils. Its brushwork and finish is surprisingly close to his earlier figurative paintings from Berlin, although once again the strokes in the background are slanted as if made using his right hand.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Odysseus in the Battle with the Suitors (Wall decoration for the villa Katzenbogen) (1913), media and dimensions not known, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. Image by anagoria, via Wikimedia Commons.

Corinth was also quick to return to major mythical paintings, some of which were undertaken as wall decoration for the Villa Katzenbogen, including his grand Odysseus in the Battle with the Suitors (1913). This shows the conclusion of the Odyssey, in which its hero slaughters all his wife Penelope’s suitors, on his return home to Ithaca.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) Ariadne on Naxos (1913), oil on canvas, 116 × 147 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Ariadne on Naxos is one of Corinth’s most sophisticated mythical paintings, and was inspired by the first version of Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos. This was first performed in Stuttgart in October 1912, and Corinth probably attended its Munich premiere on 30 January 1913. Wikipedia’s masterly single-sentence summary of the opera reads: “The opera’s unusual combination of elements of low commedia dell’arte with those of high opera seria points up one of the work’s principal themes: the competition between high and low art for the public’s attention.”

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) Ariadne on Naxos (detail) (1913), oil on canvas, 116 × 147 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in erotic langour on Theseus’ left thigh. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) Ariadne on Naxos (detail) (1913), oil on canvas, 116 × 147 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The group in the middle and right is centred on Dionysus, who clutches his characteristic staff in his left hand, and with his right hand holds the reins to the leopard and tiger drawing his chariot. Leading those animals is a small boy, and to the left of the chariot is a young bacchante. Behind them is an older couple of rather worn-out bacchantes. Crossing the sky in an arc are many putti, their hands linked together.

Corinth has combined two separate events in the story into a single image: Ariadne’s eventually broken relationship with Theseus, and her subsequently successful affair with Dionysus. This is multiplex narrative, more typical of narrative paintings of the early Renaissance, and exceptionally unusual for the early twentieth century.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Christmas Decorations (1913), oil on canvas, 120 × 80.5 cm, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Linz, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.

On Christmas Eve at the end of 1913, he painted this delightful scene of their two young children enjoying their Christmas Decorations. Charlotte, the artist’s wife, is seen at the left edge disguised as Father Christmas. Their son Thomas stands with his back to the viewer in front of a nativity scene close to his mother. Daughter Wilhelmine is at the right edge, inspecting one of the presents. Corinth uses high chroma traditionally associated with Christmas to enrich the scene.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Sea at La Spezia (1914), oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

The following year, Corinth returned to the Mediterranean coast, this time to Liguria in northern Italy, where he painted the Sea at La Spezia (1914). Not as dramatic as his earlier painting at Bordighera, his waves are still rough strokes, and the sea rich in its colours.

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), New Buildings in Monte Carlo (1914), oil, dimensions not known, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt. Wikimedia Commons.

Resorts along the French and Italian Rivieras were enjoying a wave of popularity and rapid growth captured in New Buildings in Monte Carlo (1914).

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Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (2) (1914), oil on canvas, 77 × 62 cm, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum, Krefeld, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

One of his few religious paintings of this time is his second version of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, from 1914. Its story is drawn from the book of Genesis, during the period in which Joseph was in Egypt after he had been sold into slavery by his brothers. Rising to become the head of Potiphar’s household, Potiphar’s wife takes a fancy to him, but Joseph resists her attempts at seduction. She then falsely accuses him of attempting to rape her, resulting in Joseph being thrown into prison.

Corinth shows the most popular scene depicted in paintings, in which Potiphar’s wife is trying to seduce Joseph.

Having survived his stroke and moved his style on, Corinth was now moving into the next phase of his career when, on 28 July 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Germany invaded Belgium and Luxembourg, and the First World War had begun.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Updates to Cirrus (iCloud), Revisionist (versions), Spundle (sparse bundles) and T2M2 (Time Machine)

This next batch of updates to my apps includes more popular tools, covering iCloud, document versions, sparse bundles, and Time Machine backups.

iCloud

Cirrus gives you detailed insight into what’s stored in iCloud Drive, provides a ready-made log browser for checking what’s going on, and a simple test for syncing. Version 1.16 has an overhauled interface, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Big Sur onwards.

Cirrus 1.16 is now available from here: cirrus116
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Document versions

Revisionist gives you direct access to versions of documents saved automatically by macOS, and a powerful suite of tools to work with them. You can run checks to discover which documents have saved versions, then browse those, previewing them with Quick Look. It can save individual versions as new files, and create archive folders containing all versions, that can be reconstituted into the original with those versions preserved. Version 1.10 has an overhauled interface, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Big Sur onwards.

Revisionist 1.10 is now available from here: revisionist110
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Sparse bundle disk images

Spundle creates and maintains sparse bundle disk images, offering a range of supported file systems, and features such as compaction to maintain their efficiency. Version 1.9 has an overhauled window, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Big Sur onwards.

Spundle 1.9 is now available from here: spundle19
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Time Machine backups

The Time Machine Mechanic, T2M2, is the standard utility for checking your Mac’s Time Machine backups. It checks and reports on their performance, free space on backup storage, how much has been transferred in each backup, and much more. Version 2.03 has an overhauled interface, and has been rebuilt with a new app icon ready for macOS 26 Tahoe. This version supports macOS from Big Sur onwards, backing up to APFS.

Depending on any changes finalised in the full public release of Tahoe later this year, I may need to make further adjustments to its code.

T2M2 2.03 is now available from here: t2m2203
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Enjoy!

Changing Paintings: Summary and contents parts 19-36

This is the second of four articles providing brief summaries and contents for this series of paintings telling myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and covers parts 19-36, from Perseus’ rescue of Andromeda to Theseus killing the Minotaur.

burnejonesperseus8b
Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), The Perseus Series: The Doom Fulfilled (1888), oil on canvas, 155 × 140.5 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart. Wikimedia Commons.

Perseus in mid-flight over North Africa with the head of Medusa. Atlas refuses his request for lodging and transformed into a mountain. Perseus finds Andromeda chained to a rock, frees her and kills the sea-monster. Blood from Medusa’s head transformed into coral.

19 Perseus rescues Andromeda

burnejonesperseus4
Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), The Perseus Series: The Death of Medusa I (1882), bodycolour, 124.5 × 116.9 cm, Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton, England. Wikimedia Commons.

Perseus marries Andromeda. In his wedding speech, Perseus gives his account of killing Medusa. Medusa had been raped by Neptune and punished by Minerva in the transformation of her hair into snakes.

20 Perseus kills Medusa

nattierperseusunderminerva
Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), Perseus, Under the Protection of Minerva, Turns Phineus to Stone by Brandishing the Head of Medusa (date not known), oil on canvas, 113.5 × 146 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours, Tours, France. Wikimedia Commons.

The wedding feast disrupted by Phineus, who claims Andromeda was stolen from him. They fight, Perseus turning them into statues using Medusa’s face. The couple return to Argos, and Minerva to Helicon, where the Muses tell her of a spring created by the hoof-print of Pegasus. The Pierides challenge the Muses to a story contest.

21 The fate of Phineus, and the Muses on Helicon

cranefatepersephone
Walter Crane (1845–1915), The Fate of Persephone (1878), oil and tempera on canvas, 122.5 × 267 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The story of Proserpine sung by Calliope the Muse. Venus uses Cupid to make Pluto fall for the young Proserpine. He abducts her to Hades. The nymph Cyan fails to stop them and melts away into a pool of tears. Ceres, Proserpine’s mother, told by Arethusa of her abduction, and appeals to Jupiter. As the girl had nibbled a pomegranate while in Hades, she can’t be freed, so spends winter with Pluto in Hades, and summer with Ceres.

22 Proserpine’s fate

Calliope tells of Arethusa’s attempted rape by Alpheus, and her transformation into a stream joined by Alpheus’ river to Diana’s island of Ortygia. Ceres visits Triptolemus to give him seed for unproductive land. Lyncus tries to kill him when he’s asleep, and transformed into a lynx.

23 Arethusa, Lyncus and the magpies

tintorettoathenaarachne
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1519-1594) (attr. workshop), Athena and Arachne (1543-44), oil on canvas, 145 x 272 cm, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, Florence, Italy. Olga’s Gallery, http://www.abcgallery.com.

Arachne boasts that she’s a better weaver than Minerva, so they compete. Arachne shows images critical of the gods, so Minerva tears up her work and strikes her. Arachne tries to hang herself, and Minerva transforms her into a spider.

24 Arachne’s fate

davidapollodianaattacking
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe (1772), oil on canvas, 120.7 cm x 153.7 cm, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Wikimedia Commons.

Niobe boasts she’s more worthy than Latona, who tells her children Apollo and Diana to punish the mortal. The pair slaughter Niobe’s seven sons and seven daughters. Niobe transformed into marble on a mountain peak, forming the River Achelous.

25 The slaughter of Niobe’s children

brueghellatonalycian
Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610), oil on panel, 37 × 56 cm, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons.

Pregnant with Apollo and Diana, Latona goes to Lycia to give birth. Afterwards she seeks water, but locals prevent her, so are turned into frogs as punishment.

26 Latona and the Lycian peasants

The satyr Marsyas challenges Apollo to a music contest judged by the Muses. The god wins, and exacts the penalty of flaying the satyr alive. Tears of satyrs and fauns create a new river.

27 The music contest

rubenstereusconfronted
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys (1636-38), oil on panel, 195 × 267 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons.

King Tereus of Thrace rapes his sister-in-law Philomela, cuts out her tongue and abandons her in a forest cabin. She tells her story in her weaving, is rescued, and with Tereus’ wife they kill and cook the king’s son, and trick Tereus into eating his own son. The sisters transformed into swallows, and Tereus into a hoopoe.

28 Philomela’s revenge

mitchellflightofboreasoreithyia
Charles William Mitchell (1854–1903), The Flight of Boreas with Oreithyia (1893), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

The north wind Boreas abducts his betrothed Orithyia.

29 Boreas and Orithyia

Draper, Herbert James, 1864-1920; The Golden Fleece
Herbert James Draper (1863–1920), The Golden Fleece (1904), oil on canvas, 155 x 272.5 cm, Bradford Museums, Bradford, England. Wikimedia Commons.

Medea falls in love with Jason and helps him in the three tasks he must perform to win the Golden Fleece. They sail home with their prize.

30 Jason, Medea and the Golden Fleece

Jason asks Medea to rejuvenate his ageing father Aeson, which she does successfully.

31 Rejuvenating Aeson

Vision of Medea 1828 by Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Vision of Medea (1828), oil on canvas, 173.7 x 248.9 cm, The Tate Gallery (Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856), London. Image © and courtesy of The Tate Gallery, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-vision-of-medea-n00513

Medea tricks the daughters of Pelias into rejuvenating their father, but instead they boil him alive. Medea flees, is abandoned by Jason, murders her two sons, and marries King Aegeus of Athens.

32 Medea’s murder by proxy

flandrintheseusrecognized
Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864), Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832), oil on canvas, 114.9 × 146.1 cm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

King Aegeus makes Aethra pregnant and returns to Athens. His son Theseus grows up and travels to Athens to prove his paternity. Medea tries to trick the king into poisoning his son. When that fails, she flees, leaving Theseus to become a hero.

33 The origins of Theseus

War between King Aegeus of Athens and King Minos of Crete. Juno’s reprisal against the nymph Aegina in a plague, killing the people of Aegina, then repopulated from ants transformed into warriors, the Myrmidons, who later fight in the Trojan War.

34 Minos and the Myrmidons

Cephalus, envoy from Athens, tells how he accidentally killed his wife Procris with his javelin. She had suspected him of infidelity with an imaginary zephyr, so was following him when he was hunting. He mistook her for a wild beast that had been eating the livestock of Thebes.

35 The tragedy of Cephalus and Procris

King Minos attacks the city of King Nisus, whose daughter Scylla betrays Nisus leading to his defeat. She fails to win the love of Minos. Nisus changed into an osprey, Scylla into a seabird. Minos returns to Crete where he can’t escape the shame of his wife’s bestiality with a bull and birth of the Minotaur. Minos gets Daedalus to build a maze to contain the Minotaur, then feeds it every nine years with young Athenians. Minos’ daughter Ariadne helps Theseus kill the Minotaur. Theseus abducts her to Naxos, where he abandons her. She meets Bacchus and marries.

36 Theseus and the Minotaur

Read PDF better with a new version of Podophyllin

A quick check of just one of my working volumes revealed that it contains over 20,000 PDFs, the earliest dating from 1994, just a year after its introduction. Six years ago, I had become fed up with trying to use other PDF readers and set out to write my own, that soon became Podofyllin. It has some unique features, of which the most important to me is that it can’t and won’t change a PDF. Podofyllin is the latest app I have rebuilt, tweaked and given a new icon to, primarily for compatibility with macOS 26 Tahoe.

What I hadn’t realised was that, at some time during Sequoia, one of Podofyllin’s key features had quietly stopped working, apparently as a result of a silent change in macOS. This update fixes that, and restores (almost) full functionality, with just one feature still absent.

Perhaps its most important feature after preserving original PDFs unchanged, is its support for opening multiple views of the same document. Shown above are three different windows, each showing the same document, and at the lower left Writing Tools is just about to produce a summary from one of them.

The main window has thumbnails on the left, a conventional rendered page view in the middle, and the whole text content to the right. You can also open an unlimited number of accessory windows, each displaying different pages from the same document.

Another unique feature (the recently troublesome one) is a window to display the contents of the PDF file in raw format, so you can inspect its structure, metadata, and more.

This source code window shows two versions of the code, one as written in the file, the other ‘flattened’ as used in Quartz 2D to render it, together with a summary. Quite a few PDFs contain hidden content, usually left over from an earlier edit. Some save contents in versions, and for those Podofyllin can recreate and save those as separate PDF documents.

The one feature that used to work in the past that I still can’t revive is exporting page contents in Rich Text format, something I suspect isn’t working in macOS.

I have also taken the opportunity to overhaul the Help file thoroughly, to make it more accessible and navigable.

Podofyllin 1.4 is now available from here: podofyllin14
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Like other recent updates, this new version requires Big Sur or later. If you’re still running Catalina or earlier, please check Podofyllin’s Help document, as that explains how you can disable its auto-update mechanism.

I’m delighted to welcome the prodigal Podofyllin back at last.

Interiors by Design: Bars, pubs and cafés

Prior to the nineteenth century most beer, wines and other popular drinks were served to paying customers by staff in inns or taverns that didn’t have a bar or counter as such. From the middle of the century there was a transition to bars, also known as pubs (from public house) in Britain, and varieties of cafés in France and mainland Europe. This article shows some of the interiors of these successors to the inn or tavern.

degasabsinthe
Edgar Degas (1834–1917), In a Café, or L’Absinthe (1873), oil on canvas, 92 × 68.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

These two sorry-looking drinkers in Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 are sat on a long bench fitted to the wall behind them, at tables that appear to be fixed. Behind them is a large mirror.

manetcornercafeconcert
Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Corner of a Café-Concert (1878-80), oil on canvas, 97.1 x 77.5 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, Courtauld Fund, 1924), London. Courtesy of and © The National Gallery, London.

The waitress in Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert from 1878-80 has brought these beers from the bar, so customers can drink while they enjoy the musical and stage entertainment. Behind her is a small orchestra in its pit in front of a stage where an actress is performing.

manetcafe
Édouard Manet (1832–1883), In a Café (1880), oil and pastel on canvas, 32.5 x 45.5 cm, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons.

Manet’s In a Café, from 1880, is thought to have been painted using a combination of oil paint and pastels, and may have been an early study leading to his famous painting below.

Édouard Manet (1832–1883), A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), oil on canvas, 96 x 130 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, London. Wikimedia Commons.

His Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) engages in enigmatic and optically impossible mirror-play. This forlorn young woman is serving at the bar in front of her, with a large mirror behind showing a reflection that doesn’t match its original. Arranged on the bar are assorted bottles of beers and spirits, that on the far left bearing the artist’s signature. According to the reflection, the audience at the Folies-Bergère are watching the show under the light of a huge chandelier.

meuniercafeseville
Constantin Meunier (1831–1905), Café del Buzero, Seville (date not known), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Meunier Museum, Brussels, Belgium. Image by Szilas, via Wikimedia Commons.

Constantin Meunier’s Café del Buzero, Seville probably from around 1882 shows the interior of one of the city’s bars, with a dancer on its small stage.

uryflemishtavern
Lesser Ury (1861–1931), Flemish Tavern (1884), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

During his travels in Belgium in 1884, Lesser Ury painted this view of the inside of a Flemish Tavern, as the barmaid drew beer for what seem to be two barefoot young girls.

carpentierforeigners
Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922), The Foreigners (1887), oil on canvas, 145 x 212 cm, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons.

Évariste Carpentier’s The Foreigners shows the interior of another inn in Belgium. At the right, sat at a table under the window, a mother and daughter dressed in the black of recent bereavement are the foreigners looking for hospitality. Instead, everyone in the room, and many of those in the crowded bar behind, stares at them as if they have just arrived from Mars. Even the dog has come up to see whether they smell right. The artist painted this in the small town of Kuurne in West-Flanders in 1887.

beraudabsinthedrinkers
Jean Béraud (1849–1935), The Absinthe Drinkers (1908), oil on panel, 45.7 × 36.8 cm , Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. As a bonus, at the top edge he lines up a parade of coloured glass bottles containing liqueurs and other spirits that became popular and functional decoration in bars.

beraudlalettre
Jean Béraud (1849–1935), The Letter (1908), oil on canvas, 45.7 × 37.2 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives another glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. Polished metal coat-hooks adorn the walls, and there are more liqueur bottles reflected in the mirror.

sumanovicbarparis
Sava Šumanović (1896–1942), Bar in Paris (1929), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Sava Šumanović’s Bar in Paris from 1929 shows a sailor chatting up two well-dressed women at a more modern bar, with a bottle of champagne poised for opening, in an ice bucket at the left. One of the women is sat on a high bar stool.

drummondprincesswales
Malcolm Drummond (1880–1945), The Princess of Wales Pub, Trafalgar Square: Mrs. Francis behind the Bar (c 1931), oil on canvas, 66 x 43.3 cm, Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Fund), New Haven, CT. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art.

Malcolm Drummond depicts a traditional English public bar in The Princess of Wales Pub, Trafalgar Square: Mrs. Francis behind the Bar, from about 1931. This pub is still open, and is at 27 Villiers Street, just off Trafalgar Square, and not far from the National Gallery. It’s named after the first wife of George IV, who married in secret, thus never became his queen. A row of three pumps for drawing beer dominate the top of the bar, while underneath it is a small sink with taps where used glasses are washed. Above is an array of spirits, together with the red-coated figure promoting Johnnie Walker whisky. This remains the model for the great majority of modern English pubs.

How keys are used in FileVault and encryption

We rely on FileVault and APFS to protect our secrets by encrypting the volumes containing our documents and data. How they do that is a mystery to many, and raises important questions such as the role our passwords play, and how recovery keys work. This article attempts to demystify them.

Naïve encryption

A simple scheme to encrypt a disk or volume might be to take the user password, somehow turn it into a key suitable for the encryption method to be used, and employ that to encrypt and decrypt the data as it’s transferred between disk storage and memory.

There are lots of weaknesses and difficulties with that. Even using a ‘robust’ user password, it’s not going to be memorable, sufficiently long or hard to crack, and there’s no scope for recovery if that password is lost or forgotten.

FileVault base encryption

In Macs with T2 or Apple silicon chips when FileVault is disabled, everything in the Data volume stored on their internal SSD is still encrypted, but without any user password. This is performed in the Secure Enclave, which both handles the keys and performs the encryption/decryption. That ensures the keys used never leave the Secure Enclave, so are as well-protected as possible.

Generating the key used to encrypt the volume, the Volume Encryption Key or VEK, requires two huge numbers, a hardware key unique to that Mac, and the xART key generated by the Secure Enclave as a random number. The former ties the encryption to that Mac, and the latter ensures that an intruder can’t repeat generation of the same VEK even if it does know the hardware key. When you use Erase All Content and Settings (EACAS), the VEK is securely erased, rendering the encrypted data inaccessible, and there’s no means to either recover or recreate it.

This scheme lets the Mac automatically unlock decryption, but doesn’t put that in the control of the user, who therefore needs to enable FileVault to get full protection.

FileVault full encryption

Rather than trying to incorporate a user password or other key into the VEK, like many other encryption systems FileVault does this by encrypting the VEK using a Key Encryption Key or KEK, a process known as wrapping.

filevaultpasswords1

When you enter your FileVault password, that’s passed to the Secure Enclave, where it’s combined with the hardware key to generate the KEK, and that’s then used together with hardware and xART keys to decrypt or unwrap the VEK used for decryption/encryption.

This has several important benefits. As the KEK can be changed without producing a new VEK, the user password can be changed without the contents of the protected volume having to be fully decrypted and encrypted again. It’s also possible to generate multiple KEKs to support the use of recovery keys that can be used to unlock the VEK when the user’s password is lost or forgotten. Institutional keys can be created to unlock multiple KEKs and VEKs where an organisation might need access to protected storage in multiple Macs.

APFS encryption

True FileVault requires all keys to be stored in the Secure Enclave, and never released outside it. Intel Macs without T2 chips, and other protected volumes such as those on external storage can’t use that, and in the case of removable storage need an alternative that stays on the disk. For that, APFS uses the AES Key Wrap Specification in RFC 3394, using a secret such as a password to maintain confidentiality of every key.

APFS also uses separate VEKs and KEKs, so enabling the use of multiple KEKs for a single VEK, and the potential to change a KEK without having to decrypt and re-encrypt the whole volume, as in FileVault. In APFS, VEKs and KEKs are stored in and accessed from Keybags associated with both containers and volumes. The Container Keybag contains wrapped VEKs for each encrypted volume within that container, together with the location of each encrypted volume’s keybag. The Volume Keybag contains one or more wrapped KEKs for that volume, and an optional passphrase hint. These are shown in the diagram below.

apfsencryption1

Apple’s documentation refers to several secrets that can be used to wrap a KEK, including a user password, an individual recovery key, an institutional recovery key, and an unspecified mechanism implemented through iCloud. Currently, for normal software encryption in APFS, only two of those appear accessible: a user password is supported in both Disk Utility and diskutil‘s apfs verb, while diskutil also supports use of an institutional recovery key through its -recoverykeychain options. Individual and iCloud recovery keys only appear available when using FileVault, in this case implemented in software, either on Intel Macs without a T2 chip, or on all Macs when encrypting an external volume.

Because keybags are stored on the disk containing the encrypted volume, if the disk is connected to another Mac, when macOS tries to mount that volume, the user will be prompted to enter its password, and can then gain access to its contents. When FileVault is used to protect a Data volume on the internal SSD of a T2 or Apple silicon Mac, that volume can only be unlocked through the Secure Enclave of that Mac, and it isn’t possible to unlock it from another Mac (that’s also true when FileVault hasn’t been enabled on that volume).

Apple has released an update to XProtect for all macOS

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all supported versions of macOS, bringing it to version 5302. As usual, Apple doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change.

This version adds a new rule for MACOS_SOMA_FA_LE, again extending coverage of the Amos/Soma family of malware.

You can check whether this update has been installed by opening System Information via About This Mac, and selecting the Installations item under Software.

A full listing of security data file versions is given by SilentKnight and SystHist for El Capitan to Tahoe available from their product page. If your Mac hasn’t yet installed this update, you can force it using SilentKnight or at the command line.

If you want to install this as a named update in SilentKnight, its label is XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5302

Sequoia systems only

This update has already been released for Sequoia via iCloud. If you want to check it manually, use the Terminal command
sudo xprotect check
then enter your admin password. If that returns version 5302 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you may be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

Reading Visual Art: 218 Umbrellas and parasols in the sun

Historically the most sustained purpose for umbrellas has been to shelter from sun rather than the rain, when they act as parasols. In contrast to the story of the umbrella in rain, its use in the fair weather of Europe has become a matter of fashion, as an accessory almost exclusively to shade women. That excludes specialist use by painters and anglers.

dailibriumbrellamadonna
Girolamo dai Libri (1474–1555), Umbrella Madonna (Enthroned with Jesus between St. Joseph – St. Raphael the Archangel and Tobias-Tobia) (1530), media and dimensions not known, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.

Girolamo dai Libri’s Umbrella Madonna, more prosaically titled Madonna Enthroned with Jesus between St. Joseph, St. Raphael the Archangel and Tobias from 1530, shows an intermediate step between the ecclesiastical umbraculum and an ornate parasol. The winged putto supporting the umbrella seems to be skewering it into the top of the Virgin’s throne, and Raphael the Archangel wears an ancient precursor of the modern printed T-shirt.

vandyckelenagrimaldi
Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of Elena Grimaldi (c 1623), oil on canvas, 246 × 173 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Umbrellas and parasols became used by women of the nobility, as shown in Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo from about 1623. The Marchesa was a Genoese aristocrat, whose appearance and deportment reinforce her status, from her matching scarlet cuffs to the gold braid around the lower edge of her underskirt.

boudinbeach
Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), The Beach (1864), oil on panel, 42 x 59 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Wikimedia Commons.

When people started gathering on the beaches of Europe, it was only natural that ladies should take their parasols with them. Eugène Boudin’s marvellous paintings of these incongruous soirées show participants seated on upright chairs, wearing heavy outdoor clothing, their parasols superfluous under the overcast sky at dusk, here in The Beach from 1864.

monetbeachtrouville
Claude Monet (1840-1926), The Beach at Trouville (1870), oil on canvas, 38 x 46.5 cm, The National Gallery (Bought, Courtauld Fund, 1924), London. Image courtesy of and © The National Gallery.

When Claude Monet’s family and friends took to The Beach at Trouville in 1870, they too brought their parasols. The woman on the left is thought to be Monet’s first wife Camille, and that at the right is probably Eugène Boudin’s wife. This was painted during the Monets’ honeymoon. This also marks an interesting period of transition: Madame Boudin wears black and holds a black parasol, similar to those seen in her husband’s earlier beach scenes. Camille Monet wears white and holds a white parasol, attributes of the younger generation.

bretonwomanwithumbrella
Jules Breton (1827–1906), Élodie with a Sunshade, Baie de Douarnenez (1871), oil on canvas, 65 × 90.8 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The following year, Jules Breton and his family spent much of the summer and autumn in their customary haunts in Brittany. Breton painted his wife Élodie with a Sunshade, Baie de Douarnenez (1871), with its magnificent view over that bay to the low hill of Ménez-Hom in the far distance. Although Breton was closer to Boudin’s generation than that of Monet, his wife opted for a more modern look than that of Madame Boudin.

monetpromenade
Claude Monet (1840–1926), La Promenade (Woman with a Parasol, Madame Monet and Her Son) (1875), oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Wikimedia Commons.

Camille Monet appears again in fashionable white, with a white parasol, in Monet’s La Promenade, or Woman with a Parasol, from 1875.

manetjeannespring
Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Spring (Jeanne Demarsy) (1881), oil on canvas, 74 x 51.5 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Édouard Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Demarsy in his Spring from 1881 shows this actress who lived from 1865-1937, and modelled for both Manet and Renoir. At the age of just sixteen, and here still aspiring to the stage, she wouldn’t have been seen dead with an old black parasol.

John Singer Sargent, Morning Walk (1888), oil on canvas, 67.3 x 50.2 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Morning Walk (1888), oil on canvas, 67.3 x 50.2 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.

John Singer Sargent’s model for his painting of her Morning Walk (1888) also opted for fashionable white.

So far, these parasols and umbrellas have declared their roots in the umbraculum, complete with lacy trimmings and plain fabrics. In the 1880s, the new fashion for Japonisme took Paris and the rest of Europe by storm.

boznanskawomanredumbrella
Olga Boznańska (1865–1940), Portrait of a Young Woman with a Red Umbrella (Portrait of the Artist’s Sister with a Red Umbrella) (1888), oil on canvas, 88 × 60 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1888, Olga Boznańska painted her sister in this Portrait of a Young Woman with a Red Umbrella, holding a brightly decorated east Asian parasol complete with its bamboo ribs.

boznanskaselfportrait1892
Olga Boznańska (1865–1940), Self-portrait (1892), oil on cardboard, 65 × 52 cm, Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu, Wrocław, Poland. Wikimedia Commons.

A few years later, in 1892, Olga Boznańska painted this ingenious Self-portrait with a Japanese umbrella.

gilbertliebevolleblumenpflege
Victor Gabriel Gilbert (1847-1933), Loving Flower Care (date not known), oil on canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Victor Gabriel Gilbert’s undated Loving Flower Care was most probably painted at around this time, and features another Japanese parasol with more subtle colours than those of Boznańska. His model is hardly dressed for the task of gardening, though.

helleummehelleuumbrella
Paul César Helleu (1859–1927), Portrait of Mrs Helleu with an Umbrella (1899), oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Paul Helleu’s wife Alice was his favourite model, and features in his loose oil sketch in blue and white of Portrait of Mrs Helleu with an Umbrella (1899).

John Singer Sargent, Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (c 1905), oil on canvas, 55.2 x 70.8 cm, Private collection (sold in 2004 for $23.5 million). WikiArt.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (c 1905), oil on canvas, 55.2 x 70.8 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.

Several of the many sketches made by John Singer Sargent of his friends during their travels in the Alps and elsewhere include their white parasols, as in this Group with Parasols (A Siesta) from about 1905.

helleuonbeach
Paul César Helleu (1859–1927), On the Beach (1908), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

In Helleu’s panoramic view On the Beach from 1908, his model’s parasol reclines on its own, apparently deployed as a compositional device.

sorollastrollingseashore
Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), Strolling along the Seashore (1909), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Museo Sorolla, Madrid, Spain. Wikimedia Commons.

Joaquín Sorolla, another of the virtuoso painters alongside Sargent at the turn of the twentieth century, shows the white parasol as part of full dress for a formal promenade of the beach at Valencia, Spain, in his Strolling along the Seashore (1909).

orpenmiddaybeach
William Orpen (1878–1931), Midday on the Beach (1910), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Private collection. Image by Rlbberlin, via Wikimedia Commons.

William Orpen’s Midday on the Beach (1910) shows a British day out before the First World War, with lighter dress, parasols, and a large wicker hamper containing a packed lunch.

John Singer Sargent, Simplon Pass. The Tease (1911), watercolour on paper, 40 x 52.4 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. WikiArt.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Simplon Pass. The Tease (1911), watercolour on paper, 40 x 52.4 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. WikiArt.

When crossing the Simplon Pass through the Alps, in The Tease (1911), Sargent’s friends still travelled in their voluminous dresses, hats, and a white parasol.

brumbackgoodharborbeach
Louise Upton Brumback (1867-1929), Good Harbor Beach (1915), oil on canvas, 59.7 x 70 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Meanwhile, down at the coast on Good Harbor Beach (1915) in Gloucester, MA, large brightly-coloured beach umbrellas had become a feature of a more modern beach scene, as painted by Louise Upton Brumback in her bold and crisp style.

Anna Ancher, Young Woman in the Garden with an Orange Parasol (after 1915), oil on canvas, 31.8 x 20 cm, BRANDTS Museum for Art & Visual Culture, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Anna Ancher (1859-1935), Young Woman in the Garden with an Orange Parasol (after 1915), oil on canvas, 31.8 x 20 cm, BRANDTS Museum for Art & Visual Culture, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.

Japonisme wasn’t dead yet, though. Painted after 1915, Anna Ancher’s Young Woman in the Garden with an Orange Parasol shows an umbrella at least inspired by east Asian style, and once again bright in its colours.

coopersummer
Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937), Summer (1918), oil on canvas, 127 x 153 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

My final example was painted in 1918, at the end of the First World War, far from the mud and blood of Europe’s battlefields. Colin Campbell Cooper’s Summer (1918) is inspired by Japonisme, fortified here by the east Asian influence of California, and by Monet’s paintings of his garden at Giverny.

More updates: xattred, Precize and DelightEd. From xattrs to Rich Text

Here are three more updates to some of my most popular apps, primarily for improved compatibility with macOS 26 Tahoe, but with improvements in their interface for other versions of macOS from Big Sur onwards.

xattred 1.6

This toolset for working with extended attributes (xattrs) has several improved window layouts, a couple of fixes in its code to cope with deprecations, and a new icon that should work far better with Tahoe, without compromising its appearance in older macOS.

xattred 1.6 is now available from here: xattred16
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism. If you’re still using it in Catalina or earlier, please disable its auto-update as detailed in its Help book, so you can remain with version 1.5 or earlier.

Precize 1.16

This provides a great deal of useful information about files, from their inode number, detailed size including that of extended attributes, and access to bookmarks and their analysis. I have tweaked its main window to improve its interface, rebuilt it, and provided it with a new app icon that should be an improvement on all versions of macOS from Big Sur onwards.

Precize 1.16 is now available from here: precize116
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism. If you’re still using it in Catalina or earlier, please disable its auto-update as detailed in its Help book to remain using your earlier version.

DelightEd 2.4

This text-only Rich Text editor was originally developed to work better with Dark mode, when it was introduced in Mojave. Since then I have used it to produce all the Rich Text I use in apps, ensuring it continues to work properly across both Light and Dark modes. It also has unusual features to support interlinear text. This version has had a few tweaks in its window layout, and has been rebuilt to make it fully compatible with Tahoe and features like Writing Tools, as well as gaining an updated app icon.

DelightEd 2.4 is now available from here: DelightEd24
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism. If you’re still using it in Catalina or earlier, please disable its auto-update as detailed in its Help book so you can remain with an earlier version.

In the works

I’m currently in the throes of producing a new version of my PDF reader Podofyllin, which I use daily. Unfortunately, this will remove its ability to view the code inside PDFs, as Apple appears to have disabled all the features it relied on to perform that, and they no longer work in Sequoia. However, it still has some unusual features, such as opening multiple views of the same PDF, and can’t edit or save any changes to the original file.

I have spent some time inside Viable, my macOS virtualiser, trying to get it to use the new ASIF disk image, but so far have been unable to get it to work. I will be pursuing that when I get the time.

Enjoy!

Modern Stories of Lovis Corinth: 1912

In December 1911, when he was 53 and at the peak of his career, Lovis Corinth suffered a major stroke. When he regained consciousness, he couldn’t even recognise his wife Charlotte, and his left arm and leg were paralysed. As he had painted his entire professional career with his left hand, it looked as if that career might have come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

(There is some uncertainty over which hand Corinth had painted with prior to this catastrophe, and which side was paralysed as a result. Although the consensus appears to be that he had painted with his left hand, and that was his paralysed side, some sources claim the opposite.)

Thankfully he made a rapid recovery over the following weeks. His left arm remained weak for some time, and he needed a stick when walking, but by February 1912 he had completed his first self-portrait since his stroke, and was painting actively again.

Corinth’s paintings changed visibly after his stroke. There is controversy among commentators as to how much of this change was the result of its effects, and how much his launch into Expressionist style was intentional on his part. Another question is whether any residual weakness or impaired hand-eye co-ordination might have brought other changes to his technique. Did he, for example, have to learn to paint using his right hand as compensation? Visual evidence can be gained from comparison of self-portraits shortly before and after his stroke.

corinthselfportrait1911
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-portrait as a Flag-Bearer (1911), oil on canvas, 146 × 130 cm, Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu, Poznań, Poland. Wikimedia Commons.

One of his last completed prior to his stroke, Self-portrait as a Flag-Bearer (1911), shows a proud artist, posing in a suit of armour, a standard borne behind him. His pose is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1636, and reflects his perception of his role in the Secession, and the Secession’s importance in the history of art. His brushwork is rough and painterly throughout, even over his face, and the background is sketched in gesturally.

corinthselfportraitpanamahat1912
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Self-portrait with a Panama Hat (1912), oil on canvas, 66 × 52 cm, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland. Wikimedia Commons.

Self-portrait with a Panama Hat was painted in 1912, during his recovery, and differs little in its facture. His facial expression and bearing have changed totally, though, his eyes staring through his struggle, in concerned contemplation.

Once Corinth was fit enough after his stroke, he and Charlotte travelled for three months of convalescence on the French Riviera at Bordighera.

corinthbordighera
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Balcony Scene in Bordighera (1912), oil on canvas, 83.5 × 105 cm, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Balcony Scene in Bordighera (1912) shows Charlotte with a miniature parasol to shelter her from the dazzling sun, on the balcony of their accommodation there. His rough facture has extended more generally from his nudes and sketches, marking his move to Expressionism.

There are also some interesting traits in his brushwork that (at least partly) reflect his recovering condition. Verticals, indeed the whole painting, tend to lean to the left, in opposition to the diagonal strokes used to form the sky, which are more typical of someone painting with their right hand. His previously quite rigorous perspective projection has been largely lost, although he maintains an approximate vanishing point at the right of the base of Charlotte’s neck. He has employed aerial perspective, but the painting lacks the effect of depth seen in his earlier work.

corinthitalianwoman
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) Italian Woman with Yellow Chair (1912), oil on canvas, 90.5 x 70.5 cm, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, Hanover. Wikimedia Commons.

Indoors, he painted an Italian Woman in a Yellow Chair (1912). There has been speculation as to whether this wasn’t a local Italian model, but Charlotte. The hat does seem to have been his wife’s, and appears in a sketch of her that he made at about the same time.

corinthstormcapampeglio
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Storm off Cape Ampelio (1912), oil on canvas, 49 × 61 cm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden. Wikimedia Commons.

Storm off Cape Ampelio (1912) shows rough seas at the cape close to Bordighera. Its brushwork has great vigour, and captures the violent surges that occur when incident and reflected waves meet. Again its verticals are leaning to the left.

corinthblindsamson
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), The Blinded Samson (1912), oil on canvas, 105 x 130 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Wikimedia Commons.

His first major painting following his stroke returned to the theme of Samson. This autobiographical portrait of The Blinded Samson (1912) expressed his feelings about his own battle against the sequelae of his stroke.

In the Samson story, it shows the once-mighty man reduced to a feeble prisoner, forced to grope his way around. No doubt Corinth didn’t intend referring to the conclusion of Samson’s story: with the aid of God, he pulled down the two central columns of the Philistines’ temple to Dagon, and brought the whole building down on top of its occupants.

Although rough in its facture, Corinth has now restored his verticals and clearly got the better of any residual mechanical problems in painting.

corinthnikolausfriedrich
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Portrait of the Sculptor Nikolaus Friedrich (1912), oil on canvas, 101.7 × 81 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

This wonderful Portrait of the Sculptor Nikolaus Friedrich (1912) at work wasn’t the first Corinth had painted, as he had made one previously in 1904, when the sculptor was young and muscular. Eight years later he’s seen in the midst of a broad and representative range of his work. Friedrich died two years later, when he was only 48.

corinthatthemirror
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), At the Mirror (1912), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. Wikimedia Commons.

At the Mirror (1912) is an ingenious painting using the woman’s reflection to make clear the struggle that Corinth, seen only in the reflection, had gone through to paint his images. Instead of providing the viewer with a faithful and detailed reflection, that image is even more loosely painted, rendering their faces barely recognisable.

corinthhamburg
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), View of the Jetties in Hamburg (1912), oil, dimensions not known, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Bavaria. Image by Tilman2007, via Wikimedia Commons.

View of the Jetties in Hamburg (1912) shows the continuing looseness of his facture. Its verticals are more consistent and vertical than in his paintings in Bordighera, and his brushstrokes are varied in orientation.

In the first year since his stroke, Corinth’s painting had come a long way. What he must have feared would be career-ending was not. The event may have accelerated his move to Expressionist style, but it doesn’t seem to have driven or determined it.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 313

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 313. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Light and lenses control a car inside Macs until 2013.

Click for a solution

Optical drive

Light and lenses (optical) control a car (to drive) inside Macs until 2013 (they were fitted internally in Macs until 2013 models, with the last being in the MacBook Pro 13-inch mid-2012 that wasn’t discontinued until 2016).

2: Splendid campaign originally for airs until last August.

Click for a solution

SuperDrive

Splendid (super) campaign (drive) originally for airs (this external optical drive was first intended for MacBook Airs) until last August (they were discontinued in August 2024).

3: Cupertino’s Roman 400 in South Carolina was the first in 1988.

Click for a solution

AppleCD SC

Cupertino’s (Apple) Roman 400 (in Roman numerals, CD) in South Carolina (abbreviated to SC) was the first in 1988 (it was Apple’s first tray-loading CD-ROM reader, available between 1988-91).

The common factor

Click for a solution

They’re all optical drives that have been sold by Apple.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Starting up: early kernel boot in macOS 15, iPadOS 18 and iOS 18

Starting up a Mac, iPad or iPhone begins a series of processes progressing from their small boot ROMs to user login, starting up the services required for the operating system and booting the array of hardware in the chip. Early phases, before the kernel is booted, leave little in the way of records, just a few ‘breadcrumbs’ in NVRAM, but the kernel and processes it starts write a great many entries in the log. This article describes a few of those, concentrating on macOS 15.5, with additional information on iPadOS and iOS 18.5.

Logs

These were obtained from logarchives made soon after normal startup on:

  • Mac mini M4 Pro, booting macOS 15.5 in Full Security mode from the internal SSD;
  • iPad Pro 11-inch (4th generation)(Wi-Fi), with an M2 booting iPadOS 18.5 normally;
  • iPhone 15 Pro, booting iOS 18.5 normally.

Logarchives were opened in LogUI and all log entries (excluding Signposts) were extracted for the first 5 seconds following the start of kernel boot and saved to a LogUI JSON file. Following correction for time adjustments (see below), those contained:

  • for macOS, 20,000 entries in a total of 5.7 seconds;
  • for iPadOS, 10,000 entries in a total of 5.7 seconds;
  • for iOS, 10,000 entries in a total of 5.6 seconds.

Each set of entries opens with an entry recording the first moment of the boot process, for example
08:23:33.343017 === system boot: CCB8E0AC-5B94-4789-B951-BF0B893FF45F
following which there is a gap of over 5 seconds during which preboot is completed. The next entry then records the start of kernel boot, for example in macOS with
08:23:38.536777 kprintf initialized

Periods between those two entries were 5.2 seconds for macOS, 5.3 seconds for iPadOS, and 5.1 seconds for iOS.

Times and their correction

One potential source of major error in using log entries during startup results from clock time corrections. When started up, Macs and Apple’s devices appear invariably to have clock times about 6 seconds in advance of UTC. This is corrected about 4 seconds into kernel boot, and marked in two log entries such as
00.827884 === system wallclock time adjusted
00.860742 === system wallclock time adjusted

The first adjustment normally sets the clock back slightly more than necessary, but the second corrects that more accurately.

Effects on timestamps in log entries can appear confusing, as entries prior to time adjustment are given later timestamps than entries written after the adjustments have been made. This may give the impression that the order of log entries is incorrect, and any time calculations that depend on times recorded before and after adjustment require compensation by the two adjustments made. All times given below are taken from records made before system wallclock time adjustment, thus don’t require correction.

Time adjustments may need to be taken into consideration when accessing Endpoint Security events, as some may be written before adjustments are made, so might appear to be out of kilter with later events. This could apply to boot events for the launchd Subsystem, for example.

Log entries

Shortly after the start of kernel log entries with the initialisation of kprintf, the kernel banner is written, but only in macOS
Darwin Kernel Version 24.5.0: Tue Apr 22 19:53:27 PDT 2025; root:xnu-11417.121.6~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T6041

Virtual memory, logging and other fundamental features are then prepared, and in macOS (not iPadOS or iOS) TXM, the Trusted Execution Monitor, is started
TXM [Log]: build variant: txm.macosx.release.TrustedExecutionMonitor_Guarded-135.100.3
followed by the announcement of two stages of preboot, at 0.11 seconds after the start of kernel boot:
iBoot version: iBoot-11881.121.1
iBoot Stage 2 version: iBoot-11881.121.1

It’s notable that macOS gave an iBoot version of 11881.121.1, but iPadOS and iOS gave a slightly later version of 11881.122.1.

According to Apple, TXM (together with SPTM) is active on all three platforms, although it only appears to be well-reported in macOS. Apple explains: “Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM) and Trusted Execution Monitor (TXM) on iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS are designed to work together to help protect page tables for both user and kernel processes against modification, even when attackers have kernel write capabilities and can bypass control flow protections.” TXM then enforces the policies that govern code execution.

The kernel then turns its attention to loading Core Crypto support, reported in detail in all three platforms, and support for Image4 files, used extensively during and after boot:
0.295967 Darwin Image4 Extension Version 7.0.0: Tue Apr 22 19:44:19 PDT 2025; root:AppleImage4-320.100.22~1926/AppleImage4/RELEASE_ARM64E
and security policy is loaded (reported in macOS only).

AMFI and credential management

All three platforms then report loading of Apple Mobile File Integrity (AMFI), which obtains the model designator from the device tree:
AMFI: queried model name from device tree: Mac16,11
AMFI: queried model name from device tree: iPad14,3
AMFI: queried model name from device tree: iPhone16,1

which is probably the simplest way to confirm the model identifier from the log at this stage. On iOS only, AMFI next reports disabling Swift Playgrounds JIT:
AMFI: disabling Swift Playgrounds JIT services on iPhone devices

The kernel then turns to management of credentials with Credential Manager, which works with secrets managed by the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) (all platforms). One key log entry to look for is the report of SEP Key Store startup,
"AppleSEPKeyStore":326:0: starting (BUILT: Apr 22 2025 19:45:09) ("normal" variant 🌽 , 1827.120.2)

Startup of hardware systems continues, with Bluetooth reported early, followed by IOThunderboltFamily, and the Apple Neural Engine ANE. In macOS only, the remains of an old copyright notice will then appear:
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
iPadOS and iOS report Backlight startup in
AppleARMBacklight::start: Using new Backlight Architecture 1

CPU cores

After those, in macOS only, the log records registration of CPU cores and their clusters, then starts each in turn. Prior to this, all code has been run on a single core, but once the others have been started, multiple cores are available. The exact log entries recording this may vary between different M families, but typically run as follows:

  • ml_processor_register>pset_find(cluster_id=0) returned pset -1
  • ml_processor_register>pset_create(cluster_id=0) returned pset 0
  • ml_processor_register>cpu_id 0x0 cluster_id 0 cpu_number 0 is type 1
  • repeated to create each cluster and allocate CPUs to them, then
  • cpu_start() cpu: 0
  • arm_cpu_init(): cpu 0 online
  • for each CPU in turn.

Although the iPad tested has an M2 chip, no such sequence was reported for its CPU cores in the log.

Security policy

macOS reports Gatekeeper status and the start of AppleSystemPolicy:
AppleSystemPolicy GK status: enabled
AppleSystemPolicy Per file changetime scans: enabled
Security policy loaded: Apple System Policy (ASP)
AppleSystemPolicy has been successfully started

APFS

APFS follows, with differences between log entries according to platform. Initial loading is announced in each, giving the version number
apfs_module_start:3403: load: com.apple.filesystems.apfs, v2332.120.31, apfs-2332.120.31.0.2, 2025/04/22
In macOS only, NFS is announced shortly afterwards
com_apple_filesystems_nfs: successfully loaded NFS module
and handling individual file system devices follows.

Boot devices are recorded in full:
Got boot device = IOService:/AppleARMPE/arm-io@10F00000/AppleH16GFamilyIO/ans@9600000/AppleASCWrapV6
/iop-ans-nub/RTBuddy(ANS2)/RTBuddyService/AppleANS3CGv2Controller/NS_01@1/IOBlockStorageDriver
/APPLE SSD AP2048Z Media/IOGUIDPartitionScheme/Container@2/AppleAPFSContainerScheme/AppleAPFSMedia
/AppleAPFSContainer/Macintosh HD@1
(macOS)
Got boot device = IOService:/AppleARMPE/arm-io@10F00000/AppleT811xIO/ans@77400000/AppleASCWrapV4
/iop-ans-nub/RTBuddy(ANS2)/RTBuddyService/AppleANS3CGv2Controller/NS_01@1/IOBlockStorageDriver
/APPLE SSD AP0512Z Media/IOGUIDPartitionScheme/Container@1
(iPadOS)
Got boot device = IOService:/AppleARMPE/arm-io@10F00000/AppleH16IO/ans@F9400000/AppleASCWrapV6
/iop-ans-nub/RTBuddy(ANS2)/RTBuddyService/AppleANS3CGv2Controller/NS_01@1/IOBlockStorageDriver
/APPLE SSD AP0128Z Media/IOGUIDPartitionScheme/Container@1
(iOS)

Each platform states the BSD root in a paired entry:
BSD root: disk3s1
, major 1, minor 15

By that time, the boot process is well underway and log entries are being made every few microseconds.

Key points

  • Log entry times need to be corrected when they straddle clock adjustments marked by === system wallclock time adjusted
  • === system boot: marks the start of preboot, following which there are no log entries for over 5 seconds before kernel boot starts.
  • Start of Trusted Execution Monitor (TXM) is only logged in macOS, although it’s also active in iPadOS and iOS.
  • iBoot versions may differ between macOS, and iPadOS/iOS.
  • An early log entry from AMFI reports the model designator.
  • AMFI reports disabling Swift Playgrounds JIT services on iPhones.
  • In macOS only, CPU clusters and cores are registered, and started up individually.
  • macOS then reports Gatekeeper (GK) status and the start of AppleSystemPolicy.
  • The boot device is reported in full.
  • Throughout these, many other services and hardware features are started up.
  • During early kernel boot, macOS writes 20,000 log entries in about 5.7 seconds, iPadOS and iOS 10,000.

Paintings of Oslo: Environs

You didn’t have to travel far in 1887 before you left the city of Oslo, and reached the countryside around it. Following yesterday’s paintings of the centre, today I show a selection of those from nearby.

Unknown author, Map of Christiania (1887), printed with ‘Femtiaars-Beretning om Christiania Kommune for Aarene 1837-1886’, Christiania Kommune, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.

To remind you, this map shows the extent of the city of Christiania in 1887.

Peder Balke (1804–1887), Frognerkilen and Bygdøy seen from Skillebekk (c 1855), oil on canvas, 67 x 129 cm, Oslo Museum, Oslo, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.

Peder Balke’s view of Frognerkilen and Bygdøy seen from Skillebekk painted in about 1855 comes as a surprise, as he’s known today for his dramatic coastal views of north Norway, up to North Cape, its most northerly point on the mainland. This less rugged view is from the south-west suburb of Skillebekk looking to the south-west to the island of Bygdøy, with its grand neo-Gothic castellated mansion of Oscarshall, now a museum.

Georg Fredrik Nielsen Strømdal (1856–1904), Kristiania seen from Egeberg (1889), oil on canvas, 44 x 82 cm, Oslo Museum, Oslo, Norway. Wikimedia Commons.

Georg Fredrik Nielsen Strømdal’s panoramic view of Kristiania seen from Egeberg from 1889 is one of the finest of the city at the time. This looks to the west from a hill at Egeberg to the south-east of the city. The mouth of the Loelva River is in the foreground, and behind it the port and industrial buildings of Bispevika and Bjørvika. In the right distance is the Royal Palace, with Oscarshall further to the left.

peterssensummernight
Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928), Summer Night (1886), oil on canvas, 133 x 151 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1886, Eilif Peterssen painted on Fleskum Farm in Bærum, now an affluent suburb to the west of Oslo, with Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland, and others. One evening he started work on his view of the local lake, Dæhlivannet, which became one of his greatest landscape works, Summer Night (1886).

peterssennocturne
Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928), Nocturne (1887), oil on canvas, 81.5 x 81.5 cm, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons.

The following year, he took that same view, added some flowers, and worked in a nude to produce his Nocturne (1887), which was also widely acclaimed. The contrast in finish is marked, with the earlier painting crisp in its detail, while this version is more painterly.

arboviewoffrognerslottet
Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831–1892), View of Frognerslot from Skovveien (1890), oil on cardboard, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Nicolai Arbo, better known for his paintings of Nordic myth, is unusually painterly in this landscape of a View of Frognerslot from Skovveien (1890). This old manor house is set in a Baroque garden that now forms part of Oslo’s largest park.

peterssensunshinekalvoya
Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928), Sunshine, Kalvøya (1891), oil on canvas, 97 x 75 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Eilif Peterssen returned to Bærum in the summer of 1891, when he painted the Impressionist Sunshine, Kalvøya (1891), compared by the critics to the paintings of Berthe Morisot.

By 1916, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen and his family were spending their summers in a rented house in Asker, a rural area just outside Oslo that was already popular with Norwegian artists including Harriet Backer.

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Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922), Rain (1915-16), oil on canvas, 68 × 80 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Johannessen’s Rain (1915-16) is an evocative painting of a thoroughly wet day there. Asker is on the bank of Oslo Fjord, and ideal for family coastal sailing, and walking.

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Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922), Landøen in Asker (1916), oil on canvas, 82 × 96 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

His Landøen in Asker (1916) is a view of part of the dissected coastline near Asker, south-west from the city, down Oslofjord.

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Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922), The Artist’s Summer House in Asker (1916), oil on canvas, 98 × 84 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The Artist’s Summer House in Asker (1916) shows their rented property, with the artist’s wife Anna making her way up its steps.

The last brushstroke has to be Edvard Munch’s.

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Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Starry Night (1922–24), oil on canvas, 120.5 × 100 cm, Munchmuseet, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons.

Munch returned to painting landscapes after the First World War. Starry Night (1922–24) is one of the most distinctive of these, showing the woods and snow-covered hills outside the distant city of Oslo.

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