cliff.wootton

This is great news. I am hopeful that Apple will focus some more attention on this area as it is incredibly helpful.

One of the really useful (but somewhat hidden) features of macOS is moving your home folder to an external drive. It's been able to do this for a long time and was (I think) originally provided for network mounted home folders. The config is easily accessible from the user account settings. It helps a lot with undersized boot drives (or SSDs) which then only need to store the applications you install and the OS itself. An external 5TB Seagate portable drive helps bring back an under-equipped Mac mini very nicely. Its worked fine like this for years.

BUT...

This just got broken in recent OS releases (Sonoma).  I have confirmed that FontBook and iCloud Files for sure do not work when your home folder is on an external drive formatted as HFS+. I suspect it might also stop the Feedback Assistant app logging in too but that's not proven yet. The iCloud files support in older OS versions works just fine but it will not mount in Sonoma and FontBook will install the files from your home folder but will not display them in its browse view.

I did file bug reports about this a while back (and will again soon). I suspect the broken apps all access the same toolbox API that was changed and the HFS support was broken or removed internally. I'm hoping this will lead to an investigation that will reverse that, which might allow the engineers to close multiple outstanding bug reports with a single fix.

Notes: I prefer the older HFS+ file system for non-boot drives so I can share that external drive out to (a few) legacy Macs running apps on older versions of the OS that cannot understand APFS when I want to pull files across (read only). I know I could mount the shares from the other direction and push the files but it's not so convenient and requires remote write permissions - less secure.

These Synology NAS devices are just so useful.  Even more so because they all run the same OS (DSM).  With 4TB drives becoming really inexpensive these days, you can get a lot of TB readily accessible for quite a modest cost.  Upgrading to larger capacities is easy by swopping the drives out one and replacing them with bigger ones as you can afford them.  If you can afford to buy a bigger chassis with more slots, you can run with only a few of them filled to start with.

I had a small spare 4 bay DS414 (and this would work with any Synology NAS) and used it to set up a local DNS, web server with PHP 7, Mariah DB with AFP & SMB file sharing and use it as a Web Site development box.  With the web content volume mounted on my desktop I can edit files as if they were locally stored and just hit refresh on my web browser as soon as I finish an edit. This really speeds up web development a lot because there is now no need to upload file to a web server for testing.  I got pretty good performance out of my DS414 after I tuned the Mariah DB config parameters.  The performance is on a par with a web hosted service from a major web provider.

It is just a fantastically well put together combination with lots of software add ons available from Synology and also others from a community repository.

The web admin  tools front end is a lesson in how to develop a dynamic UI that works across all the browsers and still operates trouble free as far back as Safari 6.

I've migrated from a 4 bay to an 8 bay unit by just moving the physical drives across with no trouble. You must make sure they are kept in the same order but that's no big problem.  I've had two drive failures on DS 1815 units because I was using old recycled drives.  I dropped in replacement (new) drives and saw the RAID rebuild itself within a much shorter time than the Drobo units I was using before.  It's been completely trouble free since then for a couple of years.

I think it is worthwhile maxing up the memory when you deploy them.  They run faster with a decent bit of cache memory available.

The Synology NAS also runs as a brilliant Time Machine server for multiple Macs with no additional software required.

It all integrates so well with macOS running on a bunch of Mac Mini workstations.  Even if you are only using the NAS for file sharing.

I can't speak too highly of these units.  They are just magnificent.

My biggest worry about subscription models is that when you stop paying, your software dies, even if over the years you've paid way more than the purchase price would have been if you bought a perpetual license. I would be less worried if it just stopped getting updates but continued to work indefinitely in an unchanging fashion with no new features.

While you are in a well paid job, subscription pricing is fine. You can well afford it.  Along with subscriptions to cable, satellite and online TV services that provide more hours of content than you can possibly ever consume at a price which is more than buying the Blu-ray and DVD disks and having access to the same contet indefinitely.  You could easily blow more than several hundred dollars a month on a rental lifestyle that is affordable now but not later when you get older.

When you retire and live on a low and fixed income (pension) or just try to eke out your savings, you cannot afford the rental fees and your software dies.  You won't be watching much TV either because you won't be able to afford those rental fees. That means you can no longer open the family history photograph collection, play the videos, edit the media and other assets you collected over the years.  You are now hostage to a subscription that you can no longer afford.

Nobody seems to have a plan for senior citizens being able to pay for a one time perpetual license for a locked and non upgrading version of the software when they want to exit the subscription.

If you like subscriptions, that's fine and that might be just what you want but I wish the software providers would give us other alternatives as well. Instead of trying to lock us in to a more expensive licensing model.

There are always other alternatives out there and I would hope that the companies who offer perpetual licensing would then thrive on the business from people who want to migrate away from subscription based models.

This is where Apple Mail hurts us the most. We've got Macs running all day so we can have rules set up to deal with things but what we can't easily do is act on messages.

Unless the engineers removed it in the latest versions, you can run an AppleScript based on a mail rule match in the macOS mail client.  I haven't done this in a while because on older OS versions, it was a bit buggy. The script was called to action before the e-mail had been completely ingested from the server so I stopped using it.  Might be interesting to try it out again on the latest OS versions. If you can run an AppleScript, then there is a pathway to call a shell script or hand things off to other applications. Do be aware of the security implications of hooking something up like this though. You should only be calling active code if you know the provenance of a message that matches the rule.

Even without using AppleScript the rules help you get a lot done with filing or highlighting items in regular news feeds etc.

Where I think it could be improved though is some of the tools for managing rules and also possibly having ways to mark rules as only being applied in certain cases such as, on receipt of a message, on send or on running the filters manually.  These are all different contexts and some rules might be relevant only in one situation.

Being able to call specific rules, possibly by clicking on a toolbar icon would be a nice feature too.

Really helpful article though and its definitely worth looking at some of the other mail clients (being careful not to lose any mail in the process of switching between them).