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Archive for the ‘Jettison’ Category
Saturday, June 1st, 2024
Version 1.8.8 of Jettison was released today, adding a new option for mounting disks while also fixing some annoying issues.
When you hold down the Command key, the “Mount” command in Jettison’s menu becomes “Mount and Open.” As you’d expect from the name, selecting a disk will not only mount it so it’s available for use, but will also open a new Finder window showing its contents. This is a handy shortcut if you want to mount an offline disk and immediately get to work with it.
On the bug-fix side of things, this release fixes an issue that could wake up the display while Jettison ejected external disks. This didn’t cause problems with sleep, but could be confusing when manually putting a Mac to sleep. You’d invoke sleep, the screen would go dark and then would immediately wake back up, then it’d go black again and the machine would finish going to sleep. Just weird.
Version 1.8.8 also addresses a problem with disks not mounting properly if they’re encrypted but already unlocked, and improves error messages when failures occur while mounting encrypted disks. It also gives a more helpful error message when you try to manually mount an encrypted drive whose password isn’t in your keychain.
As always, full release notes and the downloadable update are available by choosing “Check for Updates” from Jettison’s menu in your menu bar, or from the Jettison – What’s New page.
Posted in APFS, Jettison, Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, April 4th, 2024
Two new releases of Jettison, our little utility for ejecting external disks when your Mac sleeps, have delivered a host of changes. Outwardly, Jettison no longer shows hidden volumes like Update and Macintosh HD – that will reduce confusion. It also lets you quickly open a disk in the Finder by holding down the Command key (the “Eject” menu becomes “Open”). And error messages are more informative.
Under the hood, there are bigger changes which eliminate problems when the system wakes and then goes back to sleep very shortly thereafter, it handles unlocking of encrypted drives much better, and performs numerous other disk-handling operations more smoothly.
A full list of the changes in versions 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 is available on the Jettison release page, or by choosing “Check for Update” if you’re already running Jettison on your Mac.
Posted in APFS, Jettison | No Comments »
Thursday, September 1st, 2022
Version 1.8.5 of Jettison is available. It delivers compatibility with macOS 13 Ventura, while also including a number of other improvements on all supported versions of macOS.
Mounting of disks is quicker, and for those of you using shared volumes from a file server or NAS, it’s more reliable as well. A notification is now also displayed when disks are remounted, so you know it’s no longer safe to unplug them – make sure to use Jettison’s menu in your menu bar to eject them again before disconnecting them! And for the few people that use RAM disks these days, Jettison recognizes that they’re not external disks and will not eject them when your Mac goes to sleep.
There are also tweaks to the user interface to improve your experience, error reporting and handling has been improved, and more information is logged internally for troubleshooting purposes. All in all, the changes should improve many people’s experience with Jettison.
For a full list of changes and download links, visit the Jettison release page. If you’re already running Jettison, just choose “Check for Updates…” from its menu in your menu bar to get the new version.
Posted in Jettison, Ventura | No Comments »
Friday, March 12th, 2021
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.
Posted in Big Sur, Jettison, Tips | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2020
Well, Jettison 1.8 didn’t go quite as planned. It adopted a different system API to get power notifications so that it could better handle “dark wake” events, where macOS wakes up briefly to perform backups and network maintenance while it’s sleeping. While the dark wake stuff all worked as expected, it ended up causing issues with some external drives not getting ejected before sleep because sleep notifications were delivered slightly later in the going-to-sleep sequence. It didn’t make a difference on test machines here or with our beta testers, but impacted some users out in the real world once version 1.8 was released. If you’re one of those folks, I’m sorry for the trouble 🙁
Version 1.8.1 was released today, and takes a hybrid approach, using both the old and new API’s to ensure that it gets sleep notifications as early as possible. This restores the reliability of Jettison’s eject-on-sleep capabilities.
This release also allows you to turn off the feature introduced in version 1.8 that quits Music, iTunes and Photos before sleep (to allow ejection of external media containing music and photo libraries). Apparently iTunes doesn’t correctly return to the same location in audiobooks when Jettison relaunches it after waking up, which can be really annoying. So you can disable the feature by using this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.stclairsoft.Jettison leaveAppsRunning 1
As usual, full release notes and download links are on the Jettison release page.
Posted in Jettison, Tips | 2 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2020
Jettison 1.8 wears a new icon and is now a universal application, running natively on both Intel- and Apple Silicon-powered hardware on any system from Mavericks to Big Sur. It also includes a number of improvements and fixes to smooth the ejecting and remounting of external disks on all Macs.
Before your Mac goes to sleep, Jettison will now quit software that may prevent disks from being ejected, then relaunches whatever was running when the machine wakes back up. This includes Music, iTunes, Photos, Time Machine, Spotlight and their many helper processes. When your Mac wakes, Jettison will also do a better job of unlocking encrypted disks so they can be remounted, so the whole process is more reliable.
This release also fixes a conflict with Carbon Copy Cloner that prevented CCC from mounting disks to perform backups while the machine was asleep. And an issue that could cause Jettison not to correctly load its preferences after a system restart has been fixed, along with some problems with unmounting and remounting network server volumes.
A list of changes and links to download Jettison 1.8 are on the Jettison release page.
Posted in Big Sur, Jettison | No Comments »
Thursday, December 12th, 2019
Version 1.7.5 of Jettison is now available. It ensures that encrypted sparsebundle disk images are locked after being ejected, so if you’re using them as “secure containers”, they’ll be safely locked when your Mac goes to sleep. Getting at the files on them after waking the machine will require you to re-enter the secure disk image’s password.
In addition, this release of Jettison corrects several bugs that could cause it to hang, or that caused its icon to disappear from the menu bar even when it was still running. It also lets you use function keys as keyboard shortcuts without combining them with a modifier key.
Full details and download links are available on the Jettison Release page.
Posted in Jettison | No Comments »
Thursday, September 12th, 2019
Version 1.7.3 of Jettison is now available. It fixes a problem when running on Apple’s latest Catalina beta where it would try to eject Catalina’s new system data volume if the system was running from an external drive.
In addition, Jettison 1.7.3 also improves its error reporting and handling, allowing you to quit applications that are preventing a disk from being ejected. This release also addresses an occasional problem with disk images not getting completely cleaned up after being ejected.
More details and download links are available on the Jettison Release page. If you’re already running Jettison, just choose “Check for Updates…” from its menu in your menu bar to update to the new version.
Posted in Catalina, Jettison, Mojave | No Comments »
Thursday, October 25th, 2018
Jettison 1.7.2 is now available, and contains a single fix to correct an intermittent licensing problem that a few users have experienced. On some machines, Jettison would accept and confirm a serial number, but would subsequently fail to save it in its preference file. This resulted in a very frustrating cycle for new users: You’d buy a license for Jettison, enter your serial number, then later get pestered to buy Jettison again.
If you haven’t been bitten by this bug, there’s no hurry to install this update – it’s functionally identical to version 1.7.1 except for the licensing fix.
Posted in Jettison | No Comments »
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