macos - Stephen Radford

YouTube Music: A Real Spotify Competitor?

04 July 2018 by Stephen Radford

When YouTube Red launched in the US in 2015 I was extremely jealous. The promise of ad-free YouTube was one I'd dreamed of. Unsurprising considering I probably watch 2-3+ hours of YouTube a day (don't @ me). Though YouTube obviously thought of Red as much more than just a way to remove ads. They've invested heavily into their Originals starring creators Pewdiepie and Logan Paul (🙄) and also tacked on Google's answer to Spotify — Play Music. Fast-forward to 2018 and YouTube Red has undergone a rebrand taking on the "YouTube Premium" moniker and Google Play Music slowly transforming into YouTube…

Install High Sierra Emoji on Older Versions

29 November 2017 by Stephen Radford

I'm being extremely stubborn and refusing to update to High Sierra at the moment for good reason. The only thing that's really been annoying me is the fact I can't see emoji sent from iOS 11 or macOS 10.13 on Sierra but there's an easy fix. Emoji is just a font that renders the unicode characters. On a Mac this is called Apple Color Emoji.ttc and is located in /System/Library/Fonts. Because of this it's very easily overriden by placing a newer version in /Library/Fonts. Note the directory to place the new font in is /Library/…

The Mac Podcast App You Can't Have

16 July 2017 by Stephen Radford

I wasn't going to write this post because I've already said most of what I wanted to on Twitter. Yesterday though, I changed my mind when I saw this Tweet from Product Hunt. The Best Podcast Apps for Mac 🎙️🖥️Add your favorite 👉 https://t.co/S9X18oklTF pic.twitter.com/fGVNgRsYDH— Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) July 15, 2017 It's a link to a question posted on Product Hunt over three months ago asking for a decent Mac podcast app because iTunes is dreadful. The recommendations are what really angered me: Downcast - The is the only remotely sensible suggestion as it's…

Hacking macOS Sierra's PIP

10 September 2016 by Stephen Radford

One of the headline features in macOS Sierra is Picture in Picture. Unfortunately Apple decided to restrict this to Safari and iTunes which means the majority of users will never get to use it. Digging into the Sierra GM PrivateFrameworks directory revealed a very helpfully named framework called PIP.framework. As with any framework it can be included in a project and used like any other. However Apple remove the headers from their private frameworks which stops us from using them freely. I ran the framework through Steve Nygard's excellent class-dump spitting out a number of helpful header files in…