This is second of two compilations of some of my favourite articles published here during 2025. Here I move on to consider security, logs, macOS generally, Spotlight in particular, and some utilities that I hope prove useful in the coming year.

Security

There have been plenty of articles about different aspects of macOS security protection. Among them is this reference guide to controlling SIP (System Integrity Protection) using the command tool csrutil.

No matter how careful you are, some apps seem to get stuck in App Translocation, which can result in many problems with them. This article explains how to tell, and what you can do about it.

Most recently, I have tried to harness some of the features used by macOS security to enable us to check which apps have been changing files, using my new app Providable.

Logs

On 26 February I released the first experimental version of my new log browser LogUI. This is the first I have written that accesses log entries directly through macOS, rather than using the log show command, and my first major app using SwiftUI rather than AppKit.

The current release is available from its Product Page. To accompany that, I’ve been writing a series of articles introducing the log, and explaining how you can get the most from it using LogUI. Those currently include:

1. Goals and architecture
2. Why browse the log?
3. Log storage and attrition
4. Log entries
5. Navigation
6. Difficult times
7. Claude diagnoses the log
8. Find the error.

As LogUI is now my log browser of choice, you’ll see more from it in the coming year. I may even get round to completing its predicate editor.

macOS

macOS Tahoe brings a new ASIF disk image format, but was too late to make it into my brief history with details of supported formats. As for ASIF, the jury is still out, considering whether it does offer anything new for macOS.

I went to town on app extensions, or appexes, in several articles looking at them. An introduction and overview accompany another utility AppexIndexer.

Another new feature in Tahoe that hasn’t been mentioned yet by Apple are LaunchAngels, which you can read about here.

Extended attributes have appeared in many different articles, but one question that often goes unanswered is how they are preserved or discarded in different file actions. This is a complex topic, but this account summarises the situation as of Tahoe 26.2.

For several years, I have been so puzzled by the Finder’s approach to displaying metadata in the Preview panel that I considered it to be a bug. In November I finally realised that it worked fine, but simply hadn’t been explained in the documentation, something I’ve tried to address.

Another feature that I’ve tried to explain better are the options available for saving web pages in Safari, particularly its WebArchive format.

Spotlight

If there’s one feature in macOS that has brought more problems than any in the last year, it must be Spotlight. I have been diving deep into Spotlight’s volume indexes, and how they work with local search. From that came another new utility, SpotTest.

This article explains how you can use it to diagnose problems with Spotlight’s local search, and this one explains how you can restart Spotlight without logging out or restarting your Mac.

We also encountered and explored one of the strangest bugs I have come across, the LG bug, named after one example of text that can trigger it.

Utilities

Last year I released DropSum to check MD5 and SHA hashes on files, and test whether two files are identical. Those are explained here.

As a spinoff from my articles about exporting from Safari and WebArchives, I wrote Textovert to convert between popular text formats, including extracting plain and styled text from PDF.

In the last few days I have turned my attention to different types of clipping, including textClipping, webloc and mailloc. This may yet bring another utility in the New Year.

Finally, one article that doesn’t really fit anywhere else, but you may find of interest, is my brief history of scripting, including what was originally named Prograph, later Marten, one of the few purely visual programming languages.

I hope you enjoyed last year as much as I did, in spite of all the turmoil, and look forward to where we can go together in the coming 12 months.