Version 1.8.2 of Jettison is now available. It brings a number of improvements, including several fixes for problems remounting disks after they’ve been ejected.

Jettison’s error reporting has also been improved so that it catches edge cases where a disk unmounts after Jettison has been told by the system that the unmount failed. This should prevent those error messages that said a problem had occurred, but then didn’t list any disks in the error details.

For several releases now, Jettison has been quietly quitting Photos, iTunes and Music before it ejects disks, then relaunching them when those disks are remounted. This prevents problems for the many people that keep their photos or music on external drives. In doing this, however, Jettison was a little too aggressive: It quit the apps when you chose “Eject External Disks Now” from its menu as well as when the machine went to sleep. That turned out to be a Bad Idea, so now it’s only done before ejecting disks when the machine is actually going to sleep.

In a similar vein, there are now some preference settings accessible via Terminal to tweak this behavior. You can turn off the auto-quit / relaunch behavior using this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.stclairsoft.Jettison leaveAppsRunning -bool TRUE

If you want to keep the behavior, but need to add other applications to the list of apps to quit, use:

defaults write com.stclairsoft.Jettison appsToQuit -array com.apple.TextEdit

where you substitute the bundle identifiers of the apps to quit where com.apple.TextEdit appears above.

Non-application processes (such as system background daemons) can be terminated before disks are ejected by using:

defaults write com.stclairsoft.Jettison processesToTerminate -array photoanalysisd

where a whitespace-separated list of process names goes in place of photoanalysisd.

And yes, if these options prove popular, they’ll get their own place in the preferences dialog so you no longer have to use Terminal to set them up.

So anyway, this is available in Jettison 1.8.2, with details and download links on the Jettison Release Page. Or if you’re already using Jettison, choose “Check for Updates” from its menu in your menu bar.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2021 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Big Sur, Jettison, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.