Tips to help you investigate and tackle problems arising in Catalina with its new privacy protections, particularly those of folders such as Documents.
xattr
When you can’t save to somewhere else, only to your startup volume, even though you’ve shown user intent. Privacy through perversity perhaps?
How does Catalina’s new privacy protection extend to folders such as ~/Documents? New information fills in detail.
Classic resource forks passed into Mac OS X, but were deprecated by Apple in 10.8. Now in Catalina they can stop working: is this a new security measure?
A future version of macOS (?10.16) will check code signatures more thoroughly than at present. Here’s what to do to start preparing for that.
Xattrs are marvellous features of macOS, but unless a developer is aware of their lability and how to preserve them, they aren’t good places to store metadata of any importance.
Need to clean documents of metadata, remove versions, and zero their datestamps? Here’s the utility to help, when used wisely.
Updates to two utilities to create and edit metadata in extended attributes, which work better with Spotlight search. Now compatible with Catalina.
Is it worth entering author name, title, keywords and so on in a document’s Properties?
Apple’s attitude to document metadata remains ambivalent. But macOS does offer good support for extended attributes to pass through iCloud, if you know how to access it.
