NeoFinder and macOS 15 "Sequoia"

[neo-admin]

Now that #Apple has officially announced the release of #macOS 15 "Sequoia" for September 16, 2024, we will of course begin with the complex certification process for NeoFinder!

As Apple has changed so many underlying modules in macOS even for firther macOS 14 versions in the recent months, we will have no choice than to carefully check pretty much everything in NeoFinder to make sure that the freshly modified Foundation and AppKit frameworks for macOS 15 don't create any new problems.

We expect that to take at least two weeks.

This will also give you good time to check out if macOS 15 has other new bugs and problems in your workflow.

As usual, we highly recommend to wait a while longer before upgrading your Mac to the latest macOS version.

neofinder_in_sequoia_-_imac.jpg (139.91 KiB) Viewed 2492 times

[neo-admin]

Unfortunately, our experiences with macOS 15.0, the final release version form Apple, have been very bad.

Networking of macOS 15.0 is very bad, connections drop all the time, the SMB client is incredibly slow, so transfering data to or from a file server is very slow, and unreliable.

We will still keep working hard to make NeoFinder run as smooth as possible, but NeoFinder requires a stable macOS to run reliably.

Better stay away from macOS "Sequoia" until Apple has released macOS 15.3 or better macOS 15.4, and hopefully started to fix the bugs.

[neo-admin]

Two massive networking problems in macOS 15 "Sequoia":


1. The built-in Firewall is buggy, and causes network connection to drop all the time. You must turn it off to get at least some work done on your Mac.


2. The iCloud Drive code in macOS 15 is massively slow and buggy.
If you use that to share your NeoFinder Database, NeoFinder will start beachballing a lot, because of that macOS bug.


All in all, stay away from macOS 15 until #Apple has fixed these and more bugs!

[neo-admin]

We found yet another very serious #bug in macOS 15 "sequoia".

The Apple NTFS driver is unable to traverse a volume using opendir();
The very first call to readdir() will often return NULL, and thus failing to read the contents of that folder, even if the folder is NOT empty. Also, the child->d_type value is often 0, which is so wrong.

That makes it impossible for tools like NeoFinder to read the contents of NTFS volumes.

Until Apple fixes this massiv bug, if they ever will, use a real NTFS driver, like Paragon NTFS, or TUXERA NTFS, or even the free ntfs-3g driver.

Especially the TUXERA driver is much faster than Apples driver anyway...

https://ntfsformac.tuxera.com/

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/#


If you can, stay away from macOS 15. Really!

[neo-admin]

We found two more bugs in macOS 15 "Sequoia"

1. Using QuickLook for SVG files crashes macOS, as their SVG plugin has some serious bugs. Also, QuickLook in macOS 15 is massively slow, often not showing a preview for a simple JPG file...

2. Synching your Calendar with an iPhone connected with a cable can cause the whole calendar database on both machines to be completely garbled, with many entires appearing multiple times a day. Make sure to have a backup!


We very highly recommend staying away from macOS 15 as long as you can.

[neo-admin]

macOS 15 can no longer give us folder icons, due to another new bug in Apples QuickLook:

QLThumbnailGenerator Error Domain=QLThumbnailErrorDomain Code=0 "Could not generate a thumbnail" UserInfo={NSUnderlyingError=0x60000295e100 {Error Domain=QLThumbnailErrorDomain Code=102 "(null)"}}

It seems that Apple has forgotten to add folder icons to their new code in QLThumbnailGenerator in macOS 15.

This is such a mess. Stay away from macOS 15, really.

[neo-admin]

macOS 15.x has massive problems with QuickLook, and this seem to also affect all Affinity products. You can see that for yourself that Apples Finder cannot show you the preview in its own QuickLook window anymore, instead just giving you the un-interesting basic file info:

noQL.jpeg (59.91 KiB) Viewed 181 times

That can cause a failure of cataloging Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher thumbnails in NeoFinder.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about that. NeoFinder relies on Apples QuickLook to actually work in these cases.

This doesn't happen in previous macOS versions, so we repeat the urgent note to stay away from macOS 15 "Sequoia", until Apple has fixed the bugs.