Contrary to popular belief, macOS isn’t immune to malware. The platform has been lucky thus far since its relatively low market share makes it a less attractive target for malware makers. In contrast as macOS gain more users, it would likewise be a more attractive target to make malware for—regardless of market share.

For that reason Apple is stepping up macOS security. For example the mandatory notarization which require developers to digitally sign the app and then register it with Apple. In turn, Apple would scan the app for known malware. In effect Apple would then provide a stamp of approval should none was found. On the other hand, Apple can also revoke its approval if at a later time the application turned out to be malicious.

In summary, the notarization process is like centralized anti-virus scanning. On the positive side, each app need to be scanned only once—that is during notarization. Each user’s mac would only need to verify the integrity of the app and whether it has a valid notarization ticket from Apple. To explain, a notarization ticket states that the app is free from malware, hence the operating system would only need to verify that the files which makes up the app hasn’t changed since it was scanned by Apple. Obviously this saves users from needing to continuously run anti-virus software which periodically scans applications. Simultaneously centralized scanning gives back precious computing resources that would otherwise need to be spent for periodic anti-virus scanning on each computer.

Since notarization requires code signing, it also ensures integrity of the application. If a virus injects itself to the app, this would invalidate the code signature and by extension the notarization ticket. Likewise code signing helps ensure accountability on the developers’ part. Each signed application can be confidently traced back to either an entity or a natural person who signs it. Therefore if a developer knowingly distribute malware, Apple would be justified to revoke their code signing credentials–effectively stops them from distributing new signed applications.

As a user, if you see the “app cannot be verified for malware” dialog, you shouldn’t open the app. Even if you trust the developer who produced it. A point often overlooked is that the app could gave been tampered. In any case, you should contact the developer of the app and advise them to notarize it.

The developer may say that they don’t have much time to notarize applications. It is a mundane process anyhow, notably when done manually. Nevertheless the developer may not know how to automate the notarization process. In this case you should recommend my book, How to Notarize macOS Application Notarization to them. This book can save about 50 hours of a developers’ time for trial and error in automating the notarization process as well as setting up a system for it.

To repeat, if you couldn’t open an app because of the “macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware” dialog, do the developer a favor by sending them this link. Likewise if you know a developer planning to launch a macOS application or thinking to make one, stress the importance of notarization and how they can easily automate it.

That’s all for now, take care!

The following are currently available applications and their corresponding in-app purchases:

• Bigger Picture (macOS) – Super Resolution.
• Speech Timer for macOS – Custom Speech Types.
• Speech Timer for iOS – Custom Speech Types.

Furthermore, one-time purchase applications have been supporting family sharing since their beginnings:

• Rooster (tvOS)
• Go Edit (iOS)

Family sharing allows people in the same family group to share purchases without needing to share Apple ID passwords. Purchase applications once and let your entire family (up to six persons) use it on all their Apple devices.

Image processing is now done in sequence to avoid freezing some systems on very large batch sizes (over 50 items). Nevertheless each processing of each image fully leverages the underlying system’s parallelism levels.

BiggerPicture is our image enhancement solution for the Mac. The application enable you to create print-quality images from mere screenshots without getting blurry or blocky results. BiggerPicture requires macOS 10.13 “High Sierra” or later versions.

• New application icon to match Big Sur’s iconography.
• The Timer Display window’s corners now matches the new larger corner radius, as well as the corner radii of timer lights.
• Fixed color signaling in the Timer Display which was previously not working in Big Sur betas.
• Optimized Timer Display window’s live-resize responsiveness.

Speech Timer is designed for use in Toastmasters’ regular chapter meetings to keep track of speech durations, signal the speaker, and provide the Timer’s Report at the end of the session

Speech Timer requires Mac OS X 10.9 “Yosemite” or a later version.

This release also provides a number of bug fixes and feature enhancements:

• Fixes an issue when opening documents in-place from the Files app.
• Fixes flickering in the document list when downloading from iCloud.
• Should saving to iCloud fails, the app would fall-back to save documents locally into the device.

Go Edit is our markdown and rich text combo editor that supports embedding images via the Textbundle file format. You can the app to create markdown documents and perform round-trip conversions to HTML. Go Edit 1.2.0 supports the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad running iOS 9.0 or later.

• Added full dark mode support when running on iOS 13.0 and later.
• Improves compatibility with .textpack format files – on import, export, as well as locally.
• Improves performance on handling files stored on iCloud.
• Fixes scrolling issues of the markdown editor when running in iOS 13.
• Fixes opening files sent from AirDrop.

Go Edit is our markdown and rich text note taker. The application works natively with the standard TextBundle file format with the ability to create markdown and HTML files as well as conversion between the two.

Go Edit requires iOS 9.0 or later and supports the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

Enabling the GPU should make the image enhancement process significantly faster, notably on machines having one or more discrete GPU. Examples include current middle and upper tier iMac and MacBook Pro.

Why only use the GPU when the application is active? It is a compromise for performance reasons – notably performance of other applications. Remember that the GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit – it is also used to drive the display. Our testing shows that when the GPU is used for image enhancement, it may cause the system’s graphical user interface to become unresponsive. Scrolling would stutter, window switching lags, or in some extreme cases the mouse pointer would jump between locations.

In conclusion if you’re need the enhancement result in a hurry, you should keep BiggerPicture in the foreground. However if you need your Mac to do other things, feel free to minimize or hide it and it will continue in the background without disturbing your work. When you’re done with those other work, be sure to switch back to BiggerPicture so that it can continue using the GPU to enhance your images.

As always, there are also stability improvements in this release. Thank you for sending in those crash logs.

BiggerPicture 1.1.9 requires macOS 10.13.2 “High Sierra” or later with an Intel processor.

Until next time.

This release primarily focuses on iPadOS features such as:

• Split view – run Speech Timer side-by side with another app.
• Slide over – run Speech Timer in a small window on top of other applications.
• Multiple timers – have more than one timing session running (iPad only).

In addition a few user interface tweaks and improvements were added:

• The flag button is moved to the left-most side on iPad to prevent accidental pushes.
• Updated tab bar icons to better comply with iOS’ human interface guidelines.
• All timer displays now use monospaced system font for better .
• Updated notification system.
• New welcome screen and notification setup.

Speech Timer is our application designed for use in Toastmasters sessions. It keeps track of speech durations and ensures the speaker meets yet not exceeding the allotted speaking time. Speech Timer 2.4 requires iOS 9.3 or later.

Now you should no longer see stuttering in the user interface when BiggerPicture is rendering output. The application is now less aggressive in consuming CPU power and thus more is available for handling the graphical interface.

A number of crash cases reported through the crash logs has been addressed. Thank you for those reports, and if you encounter a crash, please send the crash log so that it can be addressed.

Likewise reliability during app restoration has been improved. BiggerPicture would reliably re-open previously open images as long as they are still accessible. Note that you would need to disable the Close windows when quitting an app checkbox in System Preferences to enable app restoration behavior.

Furthermore this release adds workaround to the vertical-banding problem when reading HEIC files under macOS Catalina. When open these high-efficiency formats (likely imported from more recent iOS devices) using BiggerPicture, they no longer came out having vertical bands in the rendered output.

BiggerPicture uses artificial intelligence to create higher-resolution versions of photographs or scanned line-art images up to 8× of the original pixel width and height. You can use BiggerPicture to create high-quality prints from screenshots or simply to upgrade your web graphics to fit today’s retina displays. BiggerPicture 1.1.8 requires macOS 10.13 “High Sierra” or later releases. BiggerPicture is available exclusively on the Mac App Store.

When you enable dark mode (through Settings, then Display & Brightness), Speech Timer screens would follow the system’s dark color scheme. This would be useful in “conference theater” situations in which lighting focuses on the stage and generally dark elsewhere. Enabling dark mode when timing speaking sessions in such situations would prevent the device’s screens from lighting your face as well as being easier on your eyes.

This release also provides better support for iOS 13’s page sheets. On the iPad, speech type configuration as well as other ancillary options are displayed as modal dialogs. Now in iPadOS 13, these sheets can be dismissed by pulling it down – should there isn’t any uncommitted changes. This pull down gesture is functionally equivalent as canceling the dialog.

Support for large text sizes has also been improved. When you select Larger Text (via Settings, Accessibility, then Display & Text Size), Speech Timer’s controls would also increase in size should the text size you’ve selected exceeds the space normally allocated for them. This should help when you find it hard to read the default text sizes, as well as to see the controls when the device is placed further away.

Speech Timer is our application to monitor speech durations in Toastmasters sessions as well as assisting the orator to meet the minimum speaking duration and not exceeding the allowable speaking time. Speech Timer 2.3 requires iOS 9.3 or later.