How to discover what went wrong when a document doesn’t show the right thumbnail, but a generic icon instead. How to dive deeper to solve problems with 3rd party thumbnail and preview generators.
appex
From the first image thumbnails around 35 years ago, the Mac has delivered better thumbnails and previews of documents, most recently using QuickLook. Here’s how it works, and how it can fail.
How to discover which apps were launched, which appexes were run, and life cycle events for executable bundles, and map waypoints and events in the log.
Wrangle Unicode normalisation, discover all the app extensions in your Mac, browse the log with nanosecond times, and preserve documents versions when moving them.
The differences between bundles and packages, the differences between app and framework bundles. What you can find inside them, and where to look.
Detailed listings of which appex and plugin types are managed by System Settings, PlugInKit, and beyond. Even the terms used aren’t consistent.
How PlugInKit gets information about all installed app extensions, nd how it informs the services that use those extensions. Why killing the LaunchServices database may not be a good idea.
New version of app extension explorer offers 4 sort orders, adds support for UUIDs, and a ‘live’ search feature to find a UUID quickly and efficiently.
From speech synthesisers and Blu-ray encoders to wallpapers and widgets, appexes have proliferated far beyond the wildest dreams of the OpenDoc designers, but so little is known about they’re managed by macOS.
Explore the app extensions installed on your Mac, in a list of well over 400, including many in macOS, and those in 3rd party products.
The Eclectic Light Company 