I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 23. Here are my solutions to them.

1: The Spinning Beachball
You never want to see me (the Spinning Beachball is always unwelcome), but sometimes I just have to hang (it’s associated with apps ‘hanging’) around a while before you want to escape (press the Cmd-Opt-Esc keys) and make me vanish again (by quitting the hung app). What am I?

2: Catalyst
I make things quicker (catalysts are used to accelerate chemical reactions/processes), at least for some to go from one platform to another (used to port iPadOS apps to macOS), taking my boards with me (with it come RunningBoard management, FrontBoard and BaseBoard). What am I?

3: What is the time interval between two consecutive values or ‘ticks’ of Mach Absolute Time in macOS running on an Intel Mac? Answer: 1 nanosecond, 1 x 10^-9 seconds, or 0.000000001 second .
Although macOS system time, as in NSDate, is normally based on a resolution of 1 millisecond (0.001 s), the system tick count has a much finer resolution, which is explained in this article. Although its interval varies across different PowerPC models, since the introduction of Intel Macs this has common units of one nanosecond. More up to date information is also here.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.