I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 302. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Shortened characters into the most common extension, formerly ASCII.

2: Medical practitioner at the end of word files until gaining a cross in 2002.

3: At the end of real estate inventory, most commonly for Info and preferences.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: Shortened characters into the most common extension, formerly ASCII.

2: Medical practitioner at the end of word files until gaining a cross in 2002.

3: At the end of real estate inventory, most commonly for Info and preferences.

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.

Disk images, files that contain the contents of a physical storage medium, go back long before the first Mac. Among other tasks, they were originally used to contain representations of floppy disks for replication in manufacture.

Today disk images are at the heart of macOS, and widely used by third-parties. They’re an essential part of macOS installers, home to Recovery mode, and the basis for cryptexes. They’ve been used to burn and replicate optical disks, to archive disk contents, extensively for network backups, and for the distribution of software.

Classic Mac OS

In Classic Mac OS there were two utilities that worked with different formats: Disk Copy used replicas later in DC42 format, after Disk Copy version 4.2, while compressed formats known as DART were handled by the Disk Archive/Retrieval Tool, hence their name.

Mac OS 9 brought Disk Copy 6.0 with added support for the New Disk Image Format (NDIF), which supported resource forks, and ended with its last release version 6.3.3. This also supported read-only Rdxx formats.

By this time, variants of formats had become complex. Here, Disk Copy is configured to create a read-only compressed .img file containing the contents of a standard 1.4 MB floppy disk. In the upper window, it has completed validating the checksum on a self-mounting .smi disk image that’s part of a DiskSet. These could also be signed, using certificates issued not by Apple but by DigiSign.

Here’s Disk Copy saving an image of a hard disk using a similar read-only compressed format, this time to accommodate 1.5 GB.

Mac OS X

The release of Mac OS X 10.1 Puma in 2001 brought Apple’s new Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF), used in DMG disk images, which only had a single fork as its resource fork was embedded in the data fork. Although pre-release versions of Disk Copy 6.4 and 6.5 were available with UDIF support for Mac OS 9, neither was ever released, leaving Classic Mac OS without access to UDIF images. Its support for compression options in Apple Data Compression (ADC) unified the two disk image types, and extended support for images larger than a floppy disk. This new format enabled disk images to represent whole storage devices, complete with a partition map and disk-based drivers.

Tools provided in Mac OS X for working with disk images include Disk Utility and the command tool hdiutil.

On 21 January 2002, the first version of DropDMG, a third-party substitute for creating disk images, was released by C-Command Software. This quickly enabled developers to create disk images with artwork, licences and other features that weren’t accessible from the tools bundled in Mac OS X. DropDMG has flourished over the last 23 years, and remains popular today.

DropDMG’s options for creating a new disk image far exceed those in Disk Utility. Particularly helpful are the compatible version hints shown on various options, to remind you of which file systems are available in different macOS versions, and which types of disk image container are supported. DropDMG will even convert old NDIF disk images last used in Mac OS 9 to more modern formats. It will also change the password of an encrypted disk image from a menu command.

In Mac OS X 10.2 (2002), UDIF and most other supported formats were served from a kernel extension without requiring a helper process. The following year, 10.3 Panther started using a faceless utility DiskImageMounter to mount disk images. Apple then dropped support for embedded resource forks in disk images in Mac OS X 10.4.7, and newly created disk images became less compatible with older Mac OS versions.

Sparse bundles

Until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007, all disk images had used single-file formats, although some could be segmented across file sets. Leopard introduced the sparse bundle with its folder of smaller band files containing data. These enabled the image to grow and shrink in size, and became popular means of storing mountable Mac file systems on servers using different file systems.

This is another third-party tool that improved access to disk images from the GUI, DMG Packager, seen in 2009. Unlike DropDMG, this appears to have vanished without trace.

In 2011, with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple removed more support for old disk image formats. DiskImageMounter no longer opened NDIF .img, .smi self-mounting, .dc42 and .dart compressed formats, although the hdiutil command tool still retained some access to them.

Disk Utility, seen here in 2011, has provided basic access to many disk image formats, but these are only a small selection of options available in the hdiutil command tool, or in DropDMG.

This shows the complex set of options available when creating a new disk image in Disk Utility in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, before the advent of APFS.

Support for compression was enhanced in OS X 10.11 El Capitan with the addition of lzfse in a new ULFO format, and macOS 10.15 Catalina added lzma in ULMO. In both cases, these new formats aren’t accessible in older versions of macOS.

APFS support

The arrival of a pre-release version of the new APFS file system in macOS 10.12 Sierra brought its support in disk images, although only for experimental purposes, and Apple cautioned users to ensure their contents were well backed up.

In addition to adding the more efficient ULMO compressed format, macOS 10.15 Catalina is the last to support many Classic Mac OS disk image formats, including those from DiskCopy42, DART and NDIF from Disk Copy 6.x. Support for AppleSingle and MacBinary encodings, and dual-fork file support, were also removed in macOS 11.0 Big Sur in 2020.

This ‘warning’ alert from 2020 illustrates one of the longstanding issues with disk images. Although integrity checking of disk images using checksums has been valuable, when an error is found there’s no possibility of repair or recovery as the image can’t be ‘attached’, so its file system can’t be mounted.

macOS 12 Monterey in 2021 brought multiple deprecations of older formats, including UDBZ using bzip2 compression, segmented UDIF images, and embedded resources. It’s also thought to be the first version of macOS in which UDIF read/write images (UDRW) have been stored in APFS sparse file format, although Apple has nowhere mentioned that. This has transformed what had previously been space-inefficient disk images that retained empty storage into a format that can prove almost as efficient as sparse bundles. This results from the Trim on mounting HFS+ and APFS file systems within the image freeing unused space, enabling that to be saved in the sparse file format.

Disk images have never been glamorous, but have remained at the heart of every Mac.

References

man hdiutil
Introduction
Tools
How read-write disk images have gone sparse
Performance
Bands, Compaction and Space Efficiency

Appendix: Disk image formats

Supported

• UDRW – UDIF read/write
• UDRO – UDIF read-only
• UDCO – UDIF ADC-compressed
• UDZO – UDIF zlib-compressed
• ULFO – UDIF lzfse-compressed (OS X 10.11)
• ULMO – UDIF lzma-compressed (macOS 10.15)
• UDTO – DVD/CD-R master for export
• UDSP – sparse image, grows with content
• UDSB – sparse bundle, grows with content, bundle-backed, Mac OS X 10.5
• UFBI – UDIF entire image with MD5 checksum.

Unsupported

• DC42 – Disk Copy 4.2 (Classic)
• DART – compressed, for Disk Archive/Retrieval Tool (Classic)
• Rdxx – read-only Disk Copy 6.0 formats
• NDIF – Disk Copy 6.0, including IMG and self-mounting SMI
• IDME – ‘Internet enabled’, on downloading post-processed to automatically copy visible contents into a folder, then move the image to the Trash. Now deemed highly insecure.
• UDBZ – UDIF bzip2-compressed image (deprecated).

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 301. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Roll pasted on the interior background.

2: Secure partition for the idle display.

3: Pastime bull’s-eye for the player.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: Roll pasted on the interior background.

2: Secure partition for the idle display.

3: Pastime bull’s-eye for the player.

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.

Given that it was over three years before Apple first shipped a Mac with an internal hard disk, it’s not surprising that one of its early shareware apps was Harry Chesley’s PackIt III for compressing archives of files, in 1986. At that time, the emphasis was more on working out how to archive both forks of Mac files and how to restore them, and less on achieving efficient compression.

The following year, 16 year-old Raymond Lau, then still a high school student, developed and marketed its replacement, Stuffit, which rapidly established itself as the standard, and probably the most popular shareware utility for the Mac. From 1987 until the release of Mac OS X in 2001, Stuffit had few rivals and its .sit archives were widespread across Macs, but didn’t make it to PCs or Windows until much later.

In 1988, Aladdin Systems was formed to take over development and sales of Stuffit, and in 2004 it changed name to Allume Systems, and was bought by IMSI. The following year, Allume was bought by Smith Micro Software, Inc.

Aladdin continued a shareware version as Stuffit Classic, and launched a commercial version as Stuffit Deluxe. This line-up was later augmented with a freeware decompressor Stuffit Expander that was bundled in Mac OS X until 10.4 Tiger.

Less known today are Stuffit’s self-expanding archive apps, with built-in decompressors and the extension .sea, that enabled the few Macs without a copy of Stuffit to open them with a double-click.

Until more powerful Macs of the mid-1990s, compression was performed in software and painfully slow. One of the more popular add-in cards for expandable Macs like the Macintosh II was Sigma Designs’ DoubleUp NuBus card that compressed in real time using Salient Software’s DiskDoubler.

This is Stuffit Deluxe version 8.0.2 from 2003, the year before Aladdin was renamed Allume.

Stuffit Deluxe included support for conversion to and from BinHex encoding, used for sending binary files via email without the risk of data corruption.

DropStuff was a drag-and-drop tool or droplet for compressing files into Stuffit, Zip or Tar archives, with support for encryption, and segmentation for use where file sizes were limited.

Its Zip option also preserved resource forks.

Archives in a range of formats, including RAR, could be managed in Stuffit Archive Manager, which could even schedule automatic creation of archives.

Although Aladdin launched a Mac OS X version with a new archive format, .sitx, and support for additional compression methods beyond its own proprietary formats, Stuffit entered decline by the time it was acquired by Smith Micro. Compression requirements had changed in Mac OS X, with decreasing use of resource forks, and free availability of bundled cross-platform compression tools such as GNU Gzip.

In 2007, BetterZip supported a standard set of compression formats, including 7-Zip, but never really caught on.

This is cross-platform WinZip seen in 2015, five years after its first release for the Mac. This originated as a graphical interface for PKZIP.

Apple started including compression tools in /System/Library/CoreServices, initially with BOMArchiveHelper in Mac OS X 10.3 Jaguar, which became Archive Utility that lives on today, supporting the Compress command in the Finder’s contextual menu. This uses a modified implementation of the Zip method that preserves extended attributes, successor to the resource forks of Classic Mac OS.

For many years, Mac OS X has had access to compression at a system level, but Apple has unaccountably not opened that up to developers. In modern Macs, compression is extensively used both on disk and in memory. However, in macOS Big Sur in 2020 Apple introduced AppleArchive with its system-level support for LZ4, LZMA, zlib and a proprietary implementation of LZFSE, and those are available in a new command tool aa.

Archive Utility offers a few options, and from 2020 has included support for plain and encrypted AppleArchive format.

The arrival of Apple silicon Macs has expanded options available for compression utilities to make better use of their two core types and energy efficiency. Freeware Keka now gives the user the choice.

Legacy copies of Stuffit are still available from here.

The reality of urban life was that precious few who migrated from the country ever made their fortune in the city. For the great majority life was a constant battle to avoid poverty that, in the long run, turned out to be their only reward. Just as there were social realists who painted rural poverty in the middle of the nineteenth century, so there were a few who depicted urban poverty in its closing decades.

During the mid-1870s, Jean-François Raffaëlli started painting the poorer residents of Paris and its surrounds. The Ragpicker from 1879 was a great success, and his work was promoted by the influential critic Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Raffaëlli’s elderly Garlic Seller from about 1880 is making his way across a muddy field just beyond one of the new industrial areas on the outskirts of Paris, his battered old wickerwork basket containing the garlic he hoped to sell. Behind him is his companion, a dog.

Raffaëlli painted these Parisian Rag Pickers in about 1890 using mixed media of oil paints and oil crayons.

In 1882, George Hendrik Breitner met Vincent van Gogh, and the pair went out sketching and painting in the poorer parts of The Hague. Among Breitner’s paintings of that campaign is his watercolour Distribution of Soup (1882), showing those from poor families queuing for free soup.

Most of Fernand Pelez’s paintings of the poor are deeply unsettling, often frankly depressing. His Homeless from 1883 shows a worn and weary mother and her five children living on the street. She stares from sunken eyes straight at the viewer, as her children huddle in filthy blankets and sacking around her.

Pelez’s painting became even more pointed, as in A Martyr – The Violet Vendor from 1885, showing a child of the street. One of the small bunches of violets has fallen from his tray. His eyes are closed, and his mouth agape: is he dead asleep, or simply dead?

In the late 1880s the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg had been working on his next major painting, The Struggle for Existence (also translated as The Struggle for Survival) (1889). It shows Karl Johan Street in Oslo in the depths of winter, almost deserted except for a tight-packed crowd of poor women and children queuing for free bread. This was Oslo’s main street at the time, and three years later was to be the setting for Edvard Munch’s famous painting of Evening on Karl Johan Street.

The people are wrapped up in patched and tatty clothing, clutching baskets and other containers for the food. A disembodied hand is passing a single bread roll out to them, from within the pillars at the left edge. That was yesterday’s bread; now stale, the baker is giving it away only because he cannot sell it. A policeman, wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, walks in the distance, down the middle of the icy street, detached from the scene.

Better known for his many paintings of schools and children, Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy’s painting of The Night Hostel or The Soup Kitchen (1891) shows homeless women and children being fed in what appears to be almost a prison.

In Denmark, Erik Henningsen’s Evicted from 1892 shows a family of four being evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 300. Here are my solutions to them.

1: The first chips with six-packs celebrated Halloween.

2: First with FireWire and almost see-through in its two-tone case.

3: It brought Exposé, Fast User Switching and Xcode.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: The first chips with six-packs celebrated Halloween.

2: First with FireWire and almost see-through in its two-tone case.

3: It brought Exposé, Fast User Switching and Xcode.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them. To celebrate this anniversary edition, that’s a number which can be expressed in a way that a Roman might read as being one less than it really is.

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

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

With Mac OS X came a new tool for installing and updating the system, quite different from what had been used in Classic Mac OS. The Mac OS X Installer app uses packages (.pkg), and metapackages (.mpkg) containing multiple packages to be installed together. Apple thus provided installations and updates as metapackages that could either be downloaded from its update servers using Software Update, or from the update’s web page. The same method was used until Big Sur, when updates changed again.

A system update in Mac OS X 10.1.3 in March 2002 was installed by the Installer app following authentication.

This update required just 148 MB of disk space, and could readily be accommodated by any of these volumes of 11.5 GB capacity.

Most updates were concluded by a period ‘optimising system performance’, as determined by the post-install scripts in the package.

Here, Software Update is delivering Security Update 2004-05-03 to Mac OS X 10.3.3 Panther. Some system components like QuickTime were still supplied and installed separately, but the great majority of Mac OS X was integrated into a whole, and there were no options to install separate components.

Over this period, the system and user data shared a single boot volume, and updating the system mainly involved replacement of updated files. Installer packages contained those replacements together with scripts that were run to update the contents of the boot volume. For much of this, firmware updates were still supplied and installed separately, although later they were integrated into macOS updates.

Until the introduction of System Integrity Protection (SIP) in El Capitan, the only protection provided to system files and folders was in their permissions. Incomplete or incorrect installations and updates were therefore not uncommon, as despite its name, SIP didn’t have any means of verifying the integrity of system files. A procedure was introduced to verify directory structures and permissions against those listed in the Bill of Materials (BoM) for macOS updates, by repairing permissions, but that was still unable to verify the integrity of the files themselves.

Installer metapackages are highly portable, and were commonly downloaded to be installed on multiple Macs. To keep updates as small as possible, they were provided in two forms: a Delta update converted only the previous release, while a Combo update contained everything required to update the last major version and all intermediate minor versions in a single step.

The High Sierra 10.13 upgrade in September 2017 brought greatest change, with its inclusion of Apple’s new file system APFS. Macs that didn’t have a Fusion Drive had their system volume converted to APFS during the upgrade, although it was another year before the same happened to Fusion Drives.

Updates didn’t always work out right for everyone. This was a common problem with High Sierra Supplemental Update of 29 November 2017, for example.

This all changed with the first version of macOS to boot from a signed snapshot, Big Sur, in November 2020, to support the improved Secure Boot of Apple silicon Macs. This abandoned the use of Installer packages, relying instead on an Update Brain integrated into each installer app and downloaded update.

From then onwards, Apple has provided several different presentations of macOS installers and updates:

• Updates are only delivered through Software Update or its command tool equivalent softwareupdate, and have to be downloaded from Apple’s servers, or delivered through a local Content Caching Server.
• Full macOS installer apps are offered in the App Store then delivered through Software Update.
• Full macOS installer packages are available through softwareupdate or direct from Apple’s servers, and are named InstallAssistant. When installed, these create a full installer app.
• Full macOS installers are offered in Recovery, from where they’re downloaded from Apple’s servers.
• Full IPSW images containing firmware, Recovery and macOS partitions can be installed to restore Apple silicon Macs in DFU mode, using Apple Configurator 2 or later versions of the Finder. Those effectively reset that Mac to factory condition with that version of macOS pre-installed.

There are further complications to this. For instance, an older macOS Installer app can’t be run in a newer major version of macOS. The workaround for that is to create a bootable installer volume, and boot from that to run its older installer.

macOS updates are supplied compressed, and require up to 30 minutes preparation before they can be installed.

There are now no optional installations, as every copy of any given version of macOS is identical within its Signed System Volume (SSV).

The size of these new updates is considerably greater than those of older Installer packages, particularly in Big Sur, as engineering optimisations were being performed.

This chart shows cumulative sizes of updates to macOS on Intel Macs from 10.14 Mojave, with its traditional single boot volume, through to macOS Sonoma 14.6. Each point represents the cumulative sum of all updates to that major version of macOS required to reach that minor version. Thus the point for 14.2 is the total of update sizes for 14.1, 14.1.1, 14.1.2 and 14.2. Sizes used aren’t those reported by Software Update, but those of the download itself, as reported in articles here, indexed on this page. Lines shown are best fits by linear regression.

Update sizes rose markedly from Mojave, with its single boot volume, to Catalina, with its boot volume group, and again to a peak in Big Sur, with the SSV. They fell again as Monterey introduced greater efficiency, and Ventura and Sonoma have been almost identical, and smaller than Mojave.

Apple silicon Macs started with the huge updates of Big Sur, which were even larger than those for Intel models, and benefitted from the improved efficiency of Monterey and Ventura. Unlike Intel Macs, though, Sonoma has seen further reduction in update sizes, although in each update they remain significantly larger than those for Intel models.

macOS Ventura in 2022 experimented with Rapid Security Responses (RSRs), much smaller updates intended to provide urgent security fixes to Safari and some of its supporting components. These take advantage of cryptexes, cryptographically verified disk images stored on the hidden Preboot volume. Updating cryptexes alone is far quicker too, as the SSV is left untouched. Unfortunately, the second RSR resulted in serious problems with Safari so had to be replaced three days later. The last RSR was released on 12 July 2023, and they appear to have been abandoned since.

Upgrading to the first release of the next major version of macOS had required downloading its full installer app from the App Store. Apple broke from this in macOS Ventura in October 2022, when that new macOS was installed as an update instead. Although this reduced its size and installation time required, it caught many users on the hop, as Apple provided no warning of the change. This approach has since become standard with both Sonoma and Sequoia.

Installing and updating the Mac’s operating system has probably changed more over the last 41 years than any other feature.

Prostitution isn’t the only occupation that has been claimed to be the earliest, and that claim wasn’t even made until the late nineteenth century. However, it certainly was one of the most common ways for women to earn a living in the growing cities of Europe during the nineteenth century. Like bars and places of entertainment, prostitution only thrived where there were plenty of potential customers with money. London and Paris were renowned for the number of women who worked as prostitutes, catering for all classes and pockets.

Thoughts of the Past (1859) was the first of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s paintings to be exhibited at the Royal Academy, and remains one of his best-known works. It shows a woman standing by a window looking out onto the River Thames in London, and is a faithful depiction of the studio below that used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the time, in Chatham Place.

The woman and her surroundings contain rich clues as to her status: behind her, a gaudy cloak with some white lace hangs. The small dressing table is tatty and covered with cheap, garish jewellery. Potted houseplants straggle up for light from the window, and at their foot is a man’s glove and walking stick. She’s dressed for the bedroom, with her long red hair let down, and looks gaunt, her eyes tired and sunken. The view looks towards Waterloo Bridge, with the Strand embankment to the right, at the time a popular haunt for prostitutes.

In Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1863), the profligate woman in the foreground wears a torn and tattered red dress (detail below), although it’s faded rather than full scarlet. With her gaggle of unruly children and a babe in arms, she’s portrayed as a prostitute.

Like Manet’s notorious Olympia (1863) before, the contemporary surroundings and heap of clothes beside Henri Gervex’s Rolla (1878) ensured it was deemed immoral by the Salon jury. This was inspired by a poem by Alfred de Musset about a prostitute, and Gervex depicted her asleep in bed as her client gets dressed the following morning. In the end, the artist got a commercial gallery to exhibit this painting, where it attracted far more attention than it would have in the Salon.

Jean-Louis Forain’s candid view of endemic prostitution shown in his watercolour The Client (1878) surpassed those of Edgar Degas, and were later to inspire the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

One response to the popularity of Naturalism was Félicien Rops’ tender portrait of a low-end prostitute Down and Out in 1882. While she stands next to a sheet on the wall headed TARIF making clear her trade, a single small red flower adorns her flaunted cleavage.

In Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation from 1880-85, the man settling his bill is only seen by the hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive, looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade. This is one of a series by Gandolfo depicting the poor in the city of Catania on Sicily.

The theme of prostitution dominates many of the paintings of the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, who was also an author.

Just before Christmas 1886, Christian Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. Krohg was found guilty of the offence the following March and fined, although the police were only able to seize 439 of the first 1600 copies to go into circulation.

At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87). He also painted other scenes from the book.

In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that is, of course, exactly what happens.

Albertine isn’t the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer: Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a motley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.

During Joaquín Sorolla’s period of Naturalist painting, he depicted the contemporary trade in prostitutes in Spain. His White Slave Trade (1895) is set in a bleak railway compartment, where four young women are asleep while being transported in the care of an older woman. In contrast to their guardian who wears black, the young women are dressed in bright-coloured Valencian regional costumes, and wear fashionable shoes. Their few possessions are stacked on the bench at the right, and include a guitar. The ‘slave trade’ to which the title refers is the movement of prostitutes between brothels, in this case from the city of Valencia to the port of Cartagena, then over to Orán and Algeria.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was another Norwegian who took up the cause with Krohg. He had been born in Hammersborg, a poor suburb of Oslo, but his paintings weren’t exhibited until after his death in 1922.

Forced into Prostitution, also known as Night Wanderer, from 1915, shows the artist’s wife Anna in the role of a prostitute in the city of Oslo. Here an odious-looking client with bushy eyebrows and a thick-set face is pressing against her from behind, wanting to pick her up.

Aside from the ecstasy brought by intense religious experiences, considered in the first of these two articles, this trance-like state can most commonly result from physical pleasure. Until recently, professional painters have been cautious to stay within the bounds of what has been deemed decent for their time and society. One way to push those boundaries is to depict classical times.

Lovis Corinth’s painting of Ariadne on Naxos from 1913 shows a group of figures from classical myth on a symbolic, if not token, island. At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in ecstasy on Theseus’ left thigh, as shown in the detail below. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right. They are from the later part of this myth, after Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the island. Bacchus then turned up and the couple married.

Bacchic festivities or Bacchanals are another opportunity for a bit of physical ecstasy.

In 1896, Lovis Corinth painted this Bacchanal, with several of its participants staring heavenward with open mouths, clearly in physical ecstasy.

The ecstasy of love and sex was a trickier theme left for the brave or foolish, like Jacques-Louis David in 1809, when Napoleon was approaching the height of his power. David then chose to paint a legend that tells of the love of the poet Sappho for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was his great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon didn’t charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming his physical appearance. Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

David’s Sappho and Phaon was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently occupied bed behind them, and an ecstatic gaze on Sappho’s face, resembling those of Corinth’s Bacchantes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was more coy in his pen and ink painting of Sir Launcelot in the Queen’s Chamber from 1857, taken from the seamy side of Arthurian legend. While Lancelot is brandishing his sheathed sword at knights on the other side of the door, Guinevere, King Arthur’s queen, already seems to be transported in ecstasy, to the consternation of her chambermaids behind. At least she conforms to Victorian standards of decency in being fully clothed, and doesn’t even expose her feet.

My remaining examples are taken from the transition of the story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom at the whim of Herodias, to the femme fatale of Salome in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Following Gustave Moreau’s startling paintings that changed the original post-Biblical story in The Apparition (c 1876), Oscar Wilde wrote his play Salomé, published in 1893.

Richard Strauss saw Wilde’s play performed in Berlin in 1902, and his opera of the same name premiered in Dresden at the end of 1905. The following year, as an even more immediate inspiration for Franz von Stuck, the dancer and choreographer Maud Allan produced the show Vision of Salomé in Vienna, featuring a notorious version of the Dance of the Seven Veils, and sparking the wave of ‘Salomania’ that swept Europe.

Von Stuck’s Salome (1906) is one of several similar versions. His Salome is the erotic dancer of Wilde, Strauss, and Allan, decked with flamboyant ‘oriental’ jewellery, naked to the waist and in ecstasy. Behind her, in the dark shadows, an ape-like creature grins, and holds out a platter on which is the head of John the Baptist.

Gustav Klimt had already conflated this novel Salome with Judith, who had killed the enemy general Holofernes.

Klimt’s approach was influenced by his decorative experience, and he returned to using gold leaf in what therefore became known as his Golden Phase. In his Judith I from 1901 he emphasises her neck with a broad gold choker studded with gems, and echoed in a golden belt at the foot of this painting. Her glazed eyes are almost closed and her mouth open in overt ecstasy.

In 1909, Klimt followed that with greater ambiguity in what could be Judith II or Salome (1909). Below her is the severed head of either Holofernes or John the Baptist, in a disturbing link between erotic ecstasy and death.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 299. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Lucida or obscura, it rests between lights and action.

2: Robot production line controls other apps including system events.

3: Interconnected with the neighbourhood inside your router.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: Lucida or obscura, it rests between lights and action.

2: Robot production line controls other apps including system events.

3: Interconnected with the neighbourhood inside your router.

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.

Installing and updating the Mac’s operating system has probably changed more over the last 41 years than any other feature. Initially in Classic Mac OS there was little more to do than install the System and ‘bless’ that disk to make it bootable. As the System became more complex and grew various extensions this required a more formal installation process, and Mac OS and its components were stored inside the System Folder. In this article, I summarise how this worked towards the end of Classic Mac OS, in version 9.1 in 2001, the same year that Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was released.

By this time, Mac OS was distributed on CD-ROM rather than a stack of floppy disks, and it was quite usual to install only selected parts of it. Installation was considerably easier if you had more than one volume available on your Mac’s hard disk, as that allowed you to run from one volume while installing or updating into another. As those were HFS+ volumes, they were fixed-size partitions of the disk, corresponding to containers in APFS.

ROM updates were provided separately, and you had to check Apple’s support site to discover whether your Mac required an update. If it did, then that had to be performed as a separate step before upgrading Mac OS.

Another vital task before installing or upgrading Mac OS was to run the new version of Disk First Aid provided on the CD-ROM to check and repair disks. Minor errors were common, but if left they could bring disaster, leaving one or more volumes completely broken.

Once all mounted volumes had been checked and repaired using Disk First Aid, you opened the Drive Setup utility provided on the installer CD-ROM. Although the Mac OS installer would by default update any disk drivers it could, it was best to do this manually first, then restart the Mac, so those updated drivers could be used during installation.

Classic Mac OS installer apps relied on proprietary compressed archives called tomes containing the software to be installed. A full installation of Mac OS 9.1 consisted of multiple tomes for each of its components including the main system, Internet access, ColorSync, and so on.

Once restarted you then ran the installer, which was largely self-explanatory. If you were updating a volume that already had Mac OS on it, you could opt to perform a clean install by selecting this as one of the install options. There was also a freeware Clean Install Assistant to help move over old System Folder contents easily.

Although recent installers had improved considerably, most normally opted for a ‘custom’ installation by clicking on the Customise button, rather than just accepting that recommended.

That enabled you to browse through the components to be installed, and to ensure that nothing important to you was missed out. If you didn’t get those right first time, you could always run the installer later to add the bits you forgot.

It was also common practice to check what was in the Recommended Installation for each component. There were a great many components in the main Mac OS 9.1 install item, some of which were seldom wanted. You needed to take your time and browse these thoroughly before pressing ahead. Once the installation had completed, you then used the Startup Disk control panel to select the volume containing Mac OS 9.1, and restarted.

Starting up from the newly installed system then opened the Mac OS Setup Assistant to configure the new system. You might then find that some drivers were missing, in this case for a Graphire pad. Many of those could be found and installed from the Internet.

The installer could also be run to install or re-install individual components of Mac OS using its Customize button.

For example, to re-install the OpenGL components from within Mac OS 9.1, you opted for a custom installation mode for the Mac OS 9.1 group, and unchecked all the other components. Because these were listed in a hierarchical series, this was fairly quick provided you were careful not to leave any checked inadvertently.

Some components, such as QuickTime, weren’t readily installed from the Mac OS Installer. If you looked through the folders on the CD-ROM could locate their installer scripts. Sometimes, double-clicking that script would start the installation process. However, particularly with Mac OS 9.1, you would probably see this error message. In that case, you’d have to perform a manual install from its file tome, using the freeware TomeViewer utility.

You dragged and dropped the installation tome file on TomeViewer, and it opened up its contents as a list like this. You could either get it to extract the entire contents of the tome, or you could select one or more files and extract them into a folder before installing them manually into the System Folder of your choice.

Once you had saved the individual components you needed, you dragged and dropped them onto your System Folder. It would automatically put them into the correct folders within – Control Panels, Extensions, etc. However, some might require to be put in sub-folders within those. If you were unsure, you could always copy the layout of a fully functional System Folder.

Installing and maintaining Mac OS 9.1 was a complex process even when you were content to follow the recommended installation, and it could easily occupy you for several hours to get it just right.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 298. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Causing to act with a tress of hair stops the thief from using your Mac.

2: Twice 250 validates your account with two pieces of evidence.

3: Complete safety measures set in recovery.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: Causing to act with a tress of hair stops the thief from using your Mac.

2: Twice 250 validates your account with two pieces of evidence.

3: Complete safety measures set in recovery.

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.

Early versions of classic Mac OS didn’t offer a lot of choice in terms of settings, and those that did were often implemented in their own tools as printers and networking were in the Chooser. Separate Control Panels came of age with System 7 in 1991, where they became applets accessible from Apple Menu Options. Originally, most were implemented as cdev code resources, but by the time of Mac OS 9 many had become full-blown apps.

Mac OS 9: Control Panels

The Energy Saver control panel offered three separate settings for sleep, each with its own slider: for putting your whole Mac to sleep, including its CPU, and optional separate controls for the display and hard disk(s).

In those days, virtual memory was controlled by the user in the Memory control panel, and RAM disks were popular among those Macs with ample physical memory.

Internet access and app settings were largely configured in a dedicated control panel, among the more complex in classic Mac OS. Details entered here, particularly for incoming and outgoing mail, applied to all compliant apps.

Mac OS X 10.0: System Prefs

By the end of classic Mac OS, there were 32 control panels, from the original Apple Menu Options to Web Sharing. Reproviding similar support in the first version of Mac OS X came in System Prefs, before its name was expanded to System Preferences a little later. These stepped away from being apps, and became the modernised equivalent of cdevs, using the NSPreferencePane API from Mac OS X 10.1 in 2001, and are assembled into bundles. Those have survived to the present, through System Preferences to the current System Settings.

Unlike control panels, System Prefs constrained all its panes to a fixed size, leading to deep and labyrinthine interfaces.

The QuickTime preference pane from 2002 illustrates how complicated these became.

In 2001, the Network pane was still used to configure AppleTalk, as supported by Apple’s own printers, the last of which had been discontinued in 1999. This also shows how individual panes had to cross-reference others, making navigation messy.

Individual views often contained remarkably few settings, here just five popup menus.

Mac OS X: System Preferences

At some time after 2002, System Prefs was expanded in name to System Preferences in a redesign, although its panes remained fixed in size.

QuickTime’s pane changed remarkably little in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (2003).

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (2005), the customisable favourites bar at the top was replaced by a navigation bar with search. Accessibility had been introduced as Universal Access, and in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion of 2012 it was revamped under its current name. The following screenshots show examples from around OS X 10.11 El Capitan in 2015.

The most visually impressive of all these panes was that for the Trackpad, containing embedded video clips demonstrating each gesture. These came at a cost, though: the pane was almost 100 MB in size as a result.

Bucking the trend to increasingly complex detail, Energy Saver in El Capitan was stripped down from its three separate sliders of Mac OS 9.

At its peak in macOS 12 Monterey in 2021-22, System Preferences provided around 30 panes arranged in what was intended to be logical order. Only after extensive use did many know where each was located. As some like Touch ID were model-specific, even experienced users sometimes took several seconds to locate the pane they wanted. Some, like Security & Privacy, had long outgrown the limitations imposed by their tiny windows.

macOS 13: System Settings

Apple’s radical redesign in macOS 13 Ventura of 2022 shocked many. Although it finally brought resizing to the System Settings window, that was confined to the vertical direction, resulting in many panes becoming long lists arranged in no obvious order. Given that almost all displays are wider than they are tall, that appeared an odd decision. Moreover, although it’s thought that SwiftUI was used to implement System Settings, little use has been made of its rich and extensible controls.

This is System Settings’ entry view in macOS Sequoia of 2025. Although its search feature has been improved, locating the appropriate section without using that remains a challenge for most.

Extensive use is made of floating modal windows, which in some settings can be nested so deep that reversing out of them is disorientating.

The greatest sin of all was that the wonderful video clips used previously in the Trackpad item had been dropped completely, and replaced by unhelpful static designs. After mass protests, Apple recanted and added animations, as shown above, but they were a pale shadow of System Preferences.

For all its shortcomings, and the limitations of fixed window size, System Preferences is one feature that many would like to see reinstated. Maybe the next redesign will be better conceived and received.

Women in towns and cities were widely engaged in light factory work, commonly that involving the production of fabrics and garments such as spinning, weaving and assembly. Large numbers were also employed in domestic service industries including laundry and sewing, the subject of this article.

Concentration of people in urban areas transformed what had been a small-scale household function into a sizeable service industry that was eventually industrialised by companies who have concentrated on the hotel trade. Individual washerwomen who might have been servants in households collected, laundered and finished clothing and linen that were then returned to the customer.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris, with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge. The bridge shown here connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town, probably one of the suburbs of Paris. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of works showing laundresses. Woman Ironing (c 1869) shows one of the army of women engaged or enslaved in this occupation in Paris at the time. She is young yet stands like an automaton, staring emotionlessly at the viewer. Her right hand moves an iron (not one of today’s convenient electrically-heated models) over an expanse of white linen in front of her. Her left arm hangs limply at her side, and her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. She is surrounded by pieces of her work.

Degas’ less gloomy painting of a Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) maintains the impression of this being protracted, backbreaking work, only slightly relieved by the colourful garments hanging around the laundress.

Washing, drying and ironing clothes was long and arduous, paying but a pittance. At the end of the day came exhaustion.

Fernand Pelez’s early portrait of a Sleeping Laundress from about 1880 is one of a group of works showing poor women reclining. For all her obvious poverty, there is a faint smile on her face, as she enjoys a brief rest from her long hours of washing.

In Christian Krohg’s view, young women came to the city to work as seamstresses, who later ended up as prostitutes. The young woman seen in his Tired from 1885 is one of many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work. Krohg and others claimed that the paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient and drove women to seek alternatives. Prostitution was tolerated in Oslo (then known as Kristiania) from 1840, with the introduction of police and medical supervision of women sex-workers.

Eva Bonnier’s Dressmakers (1887) features two women dressed in plain working clothes, who are collaborating on the making of a dress for a special occasion.

Judging by the sheer volume of garments in Hans Best’s undated Sewing Women in the Room, these two women are professional seamstresses working at home, sharing the single sewing machine.

It took two world wars in the following century to start changing the division of labour between men and women.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 297. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Can still spin a disc with five between two five-hundreds.

2: Joins overhead and face together in shared video.

3: Railway inspector for the hound of Hades.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: Can still spin a disc with five between two five-hundreds.

2: Joins overhead and face together in shared video.

3: Railway inspector for the hound of Hades.

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.

Passwords and other secrets were little-used until the arrival of email and the Internet. Secure storage for them in keychains was developed for the PowerTalk mail engine in Apple Open Collaboration Environment (AOCE), and was first released in about September 1993, probably in System 7.1.1. When AOCE was dropped from Mac OS 8, keychains languished until their revival later that decade, and were probably first supported by the System in around 1999 in Mac OS 8.6.

Those early keychains were the ancestors of what’s now referred to as file-based keychains, in contrast to the data protection keychain that can be shared in iCloud. Although macOS Sequoia still supports classic keychains, their use was discontinued with the introduction of Mac OS X in 2001, when they were replaced with newer keychains supported by the SecKeychain API.

SecKeychains gained full support in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002, and ever since have provided the central login keychain still used in Sequoia over 20 years later. These are encrypted databases containing login credentials and other secrets. Each keychain can be unlocked using a single password, with that of the login keychain being the same as the user’s login password, enabling it to be unlocked following login.

With the introduction of iPhones and their iOS operating system, they didn’t use SecKeychains, but a new and more secure relative known as the Data Protection keychain, with a separate SecItem API. Although support for that was added in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009, it wasn’t until OS X 10.9 Mavericks in 2013 that Macs started using Data Protection keychains for their iCloud Keychain. Two years later, with OS X 10.11 El Capitan, SecKeychains and their ancestors were formally deprecated, although much of their APIs still remain.

Throughout Mac OS X and into macOS, the bundled tool for maintaining keychains has been Keychain Access provided in /Applications/Utilities. With the arrival of the iCloud Keychain, Safari provided access to passwords stored in the iCloud Keychain, and that was later augmented in a Passwords item in System Preferences and Settings.

Earlier versions of Keychain Access, such as that seen here in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005, provided a valuable First Aid tool to verify and repair keychains. That was dropped some years ago.

After the introduction of iCloud Keychain, the login keychain has steadily lost importance. Here it’s seen at its zenith in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

This shows the login keychain again, in Keychain Access from OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014.

macOS Sequoia brought a dedicated app Passwords that only works with the Data Protection keychain, and relegated Keychain Access to /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications, where it can still be used to work with traditional file-based keychains as well.

login keychain

For each user, their default personal file-based SecKeychain is the login keychain, located in ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain-db. This is unlocked automatically when the user logs in as it has the same password as that user account. It’s here that each user can still store certificates, secure notes, etc. for general use on that Mac.

Although kept unlocked, readable and writeable while the user is logged in, that doesn’t guarantee access to its contents. If an app makes a call to the macOS security system to retrieve a stored password for its use, that system determines whether the app is trusted to access that information, and whether that keychain is locked. Assuming the password is stored there, the app is trusted, and the keychain is unlocked, then the password is retrieved and passed back to the app. If the app isn’t trusted or the keychain is locked, then the security system, not the app, displays a distinctive standard dialog asking for the password to that keychain to authenticate before it will provide the password to the app.

Access to secrets is determined by the security system, the specific access it grants to an app, and to individual items in that user’s keychain. At its most restrictive, the system can limit all other apps from accessing a particular secret in the keychain, but specific secrets can also be shared across several different apps.

System keychains

For the system, there two two vital groups of keychains:

• in /System/Library/Keychains, in the SSV, are SystemRootCertificates and others providing the set of root security certificates for that version of macOS;
• in /Library/Keychains is the System keychain and others providing certificates and passwords required for all users, including those to gain access to that Mac’s Wi-Fi connections.

Data Protection keychain

Since OS X 10.9, Macs have also had one and only one Data Protection keychain that’s accessed using the SecItem API. If you share your keychain in iCloud, this is the local copy of that shared keychain and is known as iCloud Keychain; if you don’t share it in iCloud, then it’s known as Local Items instead. The local copy of this is normally stored in ~/Library/Keychains/[UUID]/keychain-2.db, where the UUID is that assigned to that Mac.

This Data Protection keychain stores all the standard types of secret, including internet and other passwords, certificates, keys and passkeys. Prior to macOS 11, it only synchronised internet passwords using iCloud, but from Big Sur onwards it synchronises all its content, including passkeys, which have now become first class citizens. Unlike file-based keychains, secrets in the Data Protection keychain can be protected by the Secure Enclave in T2 and Apple silicon Macs, and can therefore be protected by biometrics including Touch ID, and Face ID on iOS and iPadOS. Hence they’re required for passkeys, which can’t be supported by traditional file-based keychains.

Future

Much as Apple wants to support only the Data Protection keychain in macOS, there are still many that rely on the login and other file-based keychains. SecKeychain will thus remain supported reluctantly until macOS can finally call it a day on keychains that originated well over 25 years ago.

References

Apple TN3137: On Mac keychain APIs and implementations
Apple Keychain Services

Long before cities gained their bright lights they had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. Persistent drunkenness has been recognised as a problem since ancient times, but it wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that its consequences on health were reported. Of course, alcohol abuse also took place in the country, but it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

In French cities like Paris the main culprit was seen as absinthe, produced from species of wormwood plants, and claimed to contain addictive and destructive drugs in addition to its high alcohol content. It was developed in the late eighteenth century, and popularised the following century, particularly among artists and writers.

Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 laments the fate of those who ended up drinking it. Pale green to yellow in colour, it was normally diluted with water, turning it cloudy, as seen is this woman’s glass.

Absinthe wasn’t the only route to alcoholism, though, as shown in Édouard Manet’s Drinker of Bocks from about 1878-79. Bock is a strong and dark lager originally brewed in Germany, and was often viewed as the start of the descent to absinthe and oblivion. Its equivalent in England was barley wine, with its similarly high alcohol content.

In The Absinthe Drinkers (c 1880-81) Jean-François Raffaëlli followed from Degas, here with two down-at-heel men sat outside a bar.

The Drinkers, or Monday’s Work (1884) is one of Émile Friant’s first social realist paintings, showing two unemployed and unskilled men sat drinking together against an exterior wall. The hands of the more distant man are conspicuously grubby and unkempt, and a small dog looks on accusingly.

Jean Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives a glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. The man looks rough, and is unshaven, although the woman is elegantly dressed, and apparently engaged in writing a letter. His battered old brown bowler hat suggests a working past before he succumbed to absinthe.

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 bottles containing alternatives.

As with Edvard Munch and so many other artists, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was prone to bouts of heavy drinking. In The Drinker’s Family from 1916, perhaps painted during a period of remorse over his behaviour, the artist here includes two self-portraits, as the young man at the right, and the wrecked alcoholic at the left.

The Morning After (1916) is another self-portrait of Johannessen as a drunkard, his arm around a woman who pokes her tongue out in disapproval of his addiction.

The culmination of this descent is shown in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888, where a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies have arrived at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 296. Here are my solutions to them.

1: No amateur volume has gone from Yonah to M4 Max.

2: Prophetic revelation is in favour of spatial computing.

3: The first desktop with Apple silicon took six months to release.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: No amateur volume has gone from Yonah to M4 Max.

2: Prophetic revelation is in favour of spatial computing.

3: The first desktop with Apple silicon took six months to release.

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.

If the Mac is to be the computer for the rest of us, it also needs to give access to more advanced controls by scripting its actions. This article traces some of the more significant attempts to bring scripting to the rest of us.

Over the last forty years there have been dozens of programming and scripting languages that have been developed for, or ported to, Mac OS. The great majority have had no pretensions of use by regular users. The first intended to be used by anyone and everyone was HyperTalk, released three years after the original Mac.

HyperTalk (1987)

Apple’s hypertext authoring environment HyperCard contained its own scripting language HyperTalk. For many of those who built brilliant HyperCard stacks, this new scripting language was the first programming language they had used. Sadly, although seriously cool in its day, HyperTalk was both limited and limiting, as most came to discover.

If you’ve written AppleScript, HyperTalk has a distinct familiarity in its informal language, often mistakenly claimed to resemble normal English. This code snippet illustrates that:
on mouseUp
put the value of card field "age" into theAge
end mouseUp

HyperTalk spawned many imitators, and some like SuperCard went on to outlive it, but by 2000 HyperCard and HyperTalk were all but dead.

UserTalk (1988-92)

In 1988, Dave Winer started developing a scripting language that became UserTalk in Frontier, released in 1992. Built around an object database, Winer took his early work to Apple. In 1988-89, Jean-Louis Gassee, then president of Apple Products Division, announced the formation of a HyperTalk Standards Committee to develop a scripting language, and Apple agreed with Winer that they would each develop their own mutually compatible scripting systems.

After Apple’s release of AppleScript, Frontier’s UserTalk declined in popularity. By 1994, Winer was burnt out, and the following year Frontier moved on to become a cross-platform Web content management system.

AppleScript (1988-93)

In some respects a successor to HyperTalk, AppleScript was released in October 1993, with System 7 Pro version 7.1.1. Despite all the odds, and several determined attempts to strangle it, it’s still supported in macOS Sequoia.

The concept behind AppleScript is simple: scripts that compile to a series of instructions for dispatch by macOS to their destination application, which in turn is controlled by those commands to perform a co-ordinated sequence of functions. At their simplest, these can open a document and print it, for instance. At their most complex, they can automate intricate and repetitive tasks that are messy in a GUI.

As a minimum, every application supports a core of commands to play clean with the Finder and macOS. Those, and the suites of additional commands that bring joy to the scripter, are documented in standard formats within each application’s dictionary, which can be browsed by the bundled Script Editor and other tools. Rather than having to locate additional documentation sets specific to each application, all a scripter should need to do is open the dictionary.

Complexity comes because AppleScript is in fact an object-oriented language as sophisticated as Objective-C; don’t be deceived by its apparently relaxed and informal style, with examples such as
tell application "System Events"
set mailIsRunning to application process "Mail" exists
end tell
if mailIsRunning then
-- do one thing
else
-- do another thing
end if

You might use that code to set up a script that interacts with the Mail app. It first asks macOS whether it knows that Mail is running, and depending on the answer it executes the code that you insert where the comments (prefaced by ‘--‘ characters) are placed. Unlike the majority of programming languages, punctuation marks are used sparsely in AppleScript, making it considerably easier to write code that works, rather than tripping over a missing semicolon.

When ready to test your script, it compiles into intermediate code, and the editor automatically checks, formats and colours your source code, reporting any errors that it finds. When run, the intermediate code works through macOS to fire off AppleEvents (AEvents) to trigger the target applications to perform the actions.

For the more serious AppleScript coder bundled support was too limited, and it was the arrival of Mark Alldritt’s Script Debugger in late 1994 that unleashed its full power. Sadly, Script Debugger is retiring this year after over 30 years of innovative development.

Although AppleScript was integrated into Apple’s Xcode as AppleScript Studio, in recent years it has been left to languish, with occasional rumours of its demise.

Prograph (1982-89)

In 1989, the visual programming language Prograph was launched on the Mac. Sometimes described as a dataflow language, and thoroughly object-oriented, it won awards, was ported to Windows in the late 1990s, but was last seen running as Marten.

In this example method, data flows from the top to the bottom. Normally terminals on the top ‘shelf’ of the method diagram represent the inputs to that method. Data then flows from the top shelf through the intermediate processes, until it reaches the bottom. If there are outputs from the method, they are gathered by connections made to terminals on the bottom ‘shelf’ in the method. Order of execution is not prescribed, and can take place whenever data is available; this allows for inherent concurrency, and the potential to exploit multiprocessor systems without the need for language primitives.

Shell scripts (2001)

With the advent of Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah came Terminal and shell scripts, inherited from NeXTSTEP. Although powerful and popular with those who prefer this Unix-based approach, they have predictably had limited impact on the regular user wanting to script actions on their Mac.

Automator (2002-05)

Even ‘natural’ programming languages like AppleScript have to be learned, a task that many find too verbal and mechanical. Recognising this, Apple introduced Automator in OS X 10.4 in 2005 to produce custom workflows and apps using more intuitive visual tools.

Although often assumed to be a development of AppleScript, apart from its ability to run AppleScript objects, Automator is very different. Instead of relying on AppleEvents and dictionaries, Automator’s modular actions are separate code objects installed in the Automator folder in a Library folder. macOS comes with a huge free library of actions that can accomplish tasks you might pay good money for, so familiarity can save cost.

Automator is highly extensible, as its actions can include both AppleScript code and Terminal shell scripts. Thus if you cannot find a standard action to do what you want, if it can be expressed in a suitable script, you can build that into your workflow. Nevertheless, in 2021 Apple announced that Automator was to be succeeded by Shortcuts.

Swift Playgrounds (2014-16)

From the early days of the Mac, Apple has invested in programming languages designed to make best use of its APIs. In Classic times, that was Object Pascal, and its open-source class library MacApp. In 2014, Apple released a new language intended to be the preferred choice across all its platforms, Swift. From those early days, Swift has had an interactive mode, based on the read-eval-print loop (REPL) popularised by Lisp. This versatility has been developed in Swift Playgrounds, recently renamed in the singular, both within Xcode and as a standalone app targeted at those learning to code for the first time.

As an introduction to Swift in education, this has been impressive, but it hasn’t yet proved a gateway for those who didn’t really want to learn how to use Xcode in the first place.

Shortcuts (2014-21)

Shortcuts started out in the winter of 2014-15 as Workflow by DeskConnect. Apple bought it in 2017, and it became Shortcuts the following year, when it was integrated into Siri in iOS 12. Its arrival in macOS 12 was announced at WWDC in 2021, as Automator’s intended successor.

While Shortcuts on macOS can run AppleScript and shell scripts, the mechanisms involved in Shortcuts’ actions are completely different from AppleScript and Automator. For an app to support all three well requires it to present four different interfaces: one for the user in the GUI, AppleEvents for AppleScript, Automator actions, and now Shortcuts actions.

While Shortcuts has attracted quite a following, particularly in iOS and iPadOS where it’s the first real scripting environment, its impact in macOS has so far been limited. Like all its predecessors, it still hasn’t brought scripting to the rest of us.

Credits

HyperTalk: Dan Winkler
UserTalk: Dave Winer and Doug Baron
AppleScript: William R Cook and many others
Script Debugger: Mark Alldritt and Shane Stanley
Prograph: Tomasz Pietrzykowski, Jim Laskey and others
Automator: Sal Soghoian and other Apple engineers
Swift Playgrounds: Chris Lattner, Doug Gregor, John McCall, Ted Kremenek, Joe Groff and others
Shortcuts: Ari Weinstein, Conrad Kramer and Nick Frey

Selected references

HyperCard Pantechnicon, in the Internet Archive
Dave Winer’s Story of Frontier and AppleScript
Apple’s AppleScript Overview, last revised 31 October 2007
Apple’s Mac Automation Scripting Guide from 7 June 2018
Script Debugger history from Mark Alldritt
Wikipedia on Prograph
Automator and other automation
Apple’s Swift Playground page
Apple’s Shortcuts User Guide for macOS

Many of those who came to live and work in urban areas were refugees from the numerous wars and unrest that had spread across the mainland of Europe. Their livestock and crops had been stolen or destroyed as armies or uprisings passed through the country, leaving them the task of rebuilding and restoring their food supplies.

As many of those living in the towns and cities of north-east France discovered during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, they were no better off, and the riots of the Paris Commune that followed brought further problems.

Although only a boy at the time, Maximilien Luce must have retained vivid memories of the Commune, which he finally committed to paint in his A Street in Paris in May 1871 (also known as The Commune) in 1903-6.

With the rise of cities and industrialisation, the urban poor were in even greater distress than those in the country, while those who owned factories and businesses became obscenely rich at their expense. Social inequality drove movements aimed at ending such injustice, including those to improve the rights of workers. Strikes broke out in many of the poorest areas, such as the coalfields in the north-east of France and nearby Belgium.

One of the first prominent paintings of a strike is Alfred Philippe Roll’s Miners’ Strike, exhibited in the Salon of 1880 or perhaps the following year. It’s most probably based on a strike at Denain in the Nord-Pas de Calais coalfield of that year. It shows the desperate and increasingly worrying gathering of striking miners and their families. A woman is restraining one man from throwing a rock at the pithead buildings. Most of those present are barefoot. Mounted soldiers or police are present, handcuffing one of the strikers.

Roll agreed to sell his painting to the state at cost price, on the understanding that it would be hung in the Ministry of Commerce, but he was tricked and it was sent instead to the local museum in Valenciennes, where it would bring less embarrassment. It has since become badly damaged, and is now only known from this reproduction, printed in Le Petit Journal of 1 October 1892.

This painting may well have influenced Émile Zola when he was preparing to write his novel Germinal, about a miners’ strike in the same coalfield as that painted by Roll. This painting and Zola’s novel also appear to have inspired a series of Naturalist works showing other strikes across Europe.

Robert Koehler’s masterpiece of The Strike in the Region of Charleroi was made in 1886, when there was a succession of strikes across Belgium. These started in Liège as a commemoration of the fifteen anniversary of the Paris Commune, but spread through industrialised zones to the region around Charleroi and Hainault.

Koehler shows a group of workers standing outside the smart entrance to offices (detail below). The top-hatted owner stands on the top step, one of his managers looking anxious beside him. The leader of the workers is at the foot of the steps telling the industrialist of the workers’ demands. Wives in the crowd are remonstrating with their husbands, one demonstrator is picking up a rock to use as a projectile, and at the far left is a young wife with her two children, looking anxiously at the proceedings. The situation is looking increasingly nasty, although there are no signs yet of police or troops, or of violent confrontation.

The strikes of 1886 led to the formation of a parliamentary socialist party in Belgium, and increasing industrial strife. This came to a head in 1893, when there was a general strike called by the Belgian Labour Party in a demand for universal male suffrage. It has been claimed that this was the first such general strike in Europe.

The general strike was called to start on the evening of 11 April, and is depicted in Eugène Laermans’ An Evening’s Strike, or The Red Flag (1893). Instead of Koehler’s small group of workers, the whole population, men, women and children, are on the march, and distant factories have fallen silent.

The Belgian government tried to quell growing clashes between strikers and troops, which by the 17 April led to The Riots of Mons shown here in an anonymous illustration published in Le Petit Journal the following month. The artist here concentrates attention on the civilian casualties. Between 13 and 20 civilians were apparently killed, here by the Civil Guard shown in the right background. The following day the government acceded to the demands, and the strike came to an end.

Strikes were prominent in other European countries at the time, including regions of Spain. In the Spring of 1892, workers in Valladolid, in north-western Spain, came out on strike.

José Uría y Uría’s painting After a Strike from 1895 is different from those above, in showing the inside of one of the factories. In the foreground, a worker lies apparently dead, his wife and young daughter grieving beside his body. Next to him is a large forge hammer, presumably the cause of his death. In the distance on the left are two policemen or civil guards, one of whom is comforting an older daughter. An opening in the factory wall at the right edge shows mounted forces outside. The likely reading is that the worker shown was killed during the violence of the strike, which has now been suppressed by troops.

Ramon Casas i Carbó’s The Charge, or Barcelona 1902 was dated by him in 1903, and refers to a strike that took place in Barcelona in the previous year. It shows a rider of the Civil Guard trying to avoid running over a member of the crowd, during a violent confrontation.

Another fine anonymous illustration from Le Petit Journal of 1 April 1906 shows continuing unrest in the French coalfields, here in The Miners’ Strike in Pas-de-Calais. Attention is drawn to the increasing strength and politicisation of strikers and their families, as they stride forward under numerous red banners, and the growing socialist movement across Europe.

One of the most disturbing paintings of strikes during this period is Stanisław Lentz’s Strike (1910). He shows three workers, who are presumably all involved in a strike at the time. At the left is an older man who is singing or chanting his commitment to the workers’ movements; in the centre is a younger worker, his arms folded in his determination not to be moved; at the right is an angry man who looks ready to fight for his rights, his right hand already clenched into a fist and ready to punch.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 295. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Visible vapour after I sync with remote storage.

2: From SoundJam it brought everything from lectures to tracks until broken up in 2019.

3: √-1 spider’s threads brought single-click sites until 1 came along.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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

1: Visible vapour after I sync with remote storage.

2: From SoundJam it brought everything from lectures to tracks until broken up in 2019.

3: √-1 spider’s threads brought single-click sites until 1 came along.

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.