All about helpd and HelpViewer, how they index and maintain Help books. And what has gone wrong recently, including an odd difference between Intel and Apple silicon Macs.
documentation
Never work with children, animals or TCC. Its interface sprawls over two sections in System Settings, and its command tool can only wipe out its settings, forcing you to start from scratch.
Writing good documentation often takes longer than coding and testing. Is it a good investment of time when documentation seems so little used? Is there a better way?
Ventura’s switch to using Settings is going to be messy in apps, but System Settings will pose serious problems for macOS support material.
Apple could have chosen to make APFS open source or to document it fully, to help third parties develop maintenance tools. It chose not to, but Disk Utility still doesn’t work as it should.
Monterey changes the way that Recovery works on M1 Macs, making them more like Intel Macs by using a paired Recovery volume. But that could spell trouble.
Have you found Time Machine docs helpful in solving problems? Do you know what “custom access” means in the Permissions section of Get Info?
A major new version of macOS bringing few big changes, but lots of opportunity for improvements and fixes.
Apple hasn’t trusted us with the knowledge of what’s in macOS 11.5.2 update, but expects us to trust it not to abuse its checks on CSAM.
Three recent WWDC sessions extolling Apple’s “extensive reference material” and Xcode can’t find anything on these rich and extensive libraries.
The Eclectic Light Company 