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launchd

DispatchRider into second alpha, with saved activities and more

New release lets you save and re-open activity configurations in simple plist files, and fixes a couple of annoying bugs.

May 5, 2017 Macs, Technology

Two ways to run background tasks: comparing launchd and GCD

Background activities scheduled by third-party software currently use launchd, and run the risk of affecting the user. Would GCD be a better choice of dispatcher?

May 5, 2017 Macs, Technology

Keeping Background Tasks in the Background: DispatchRider

An experimental tool to let you schedule background tasks of your own, which are managed by Grand Central Dispatch. First alpha release.

May 2, 2017 Macs, Technology

Watching Grand Central Dispatch at Work

The aim is to be able to run commands at regular intervals using GCD rather than launchd. Here are details of the code and resulting log entries, casting light on how GCD works.

May 1, 2017 Macs, Technology

App Nap, Battery Endurance, and Grand Central Dispatch

T T Read More

Despite its documentation vanishing, it’s clear that GCD does a lot more than provide an easy way to concurrency for app developers.

April 29, 2017 Macs, Technology

Has Apple fixed the bug which made Time Machine backups irregular?

Irregular Time Machine backups are one of Sierra’s great mysteries. It now looks as if they might have been fixed in 10.12.4.

April 21, 2017 Macs, Technology

How timely are scheduled events in Sierra?

Schedule a periodic task as a Launch Agent. How close to the expected time does macOS actually run it?

March 23, 2017 Macs, Technology

Blowhole version 1.2 – a more useful tool to write log entries

This command tool can now write just the integer passed to it as a log message. This is ideal for instrumenting scripts and apps for analysis.

March 6, 2017 Macs, Technology

How Time Machine backups are launched in Sierra

macOS Sierra doesn’t run periodic backups using a simple mechanism. Here’s the story in full detail.

February 14, 2017 Macs, Technology

Last Week on my Mac: Stories of gods and Grand Central Dispatch

Working out why Time Machine backups go wrong isn’t necessarily that different from unravelling classical mythology. In some ways.

February 12, 2017 Macs, Technology

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