Archive for the ‘Jettison’ Category

Jettison 1.8.5 brings Ventura compatibility, more notifications, improved disk remounting

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.

Jettison 1.8.2 is here!

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.

Jettison 1.8.1 fixes what broke in version 1.8

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.

Jettison 1.8: Compatibility with Big Sur and Carbon Copy Cloner, better handling of Music and Photos, improved unlocking of encrypted disks and more

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.

Jettison 1.7.5 locks encrypted disk images, fixes bugs and more

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.

Get 25% Off for Black Friday!

Friday, November 29th, 2019

Get 25% off all of our products during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend! That includes Default Folder X, App Tamer, HistoryHound and Jettison. If you already own what you want, get gift licenses for friends and family to make their Mac-lives easier!

Just go to our web store and use the coupon code BLACKFRIDAY2019 when you check out.

Jettison 1.7.3 fixes a Catalina issue and improves error handling

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.

Jettison 1.7.2: A Quick Fix for License Handling

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.

Jettison 1.7.1: Fixes for Power Nap, Full Screen mode and App Store licenses.

Tuesday, October 16th, 2018

Jettison 1.7.1 is available, bringing fixes for a couple of simple problems and one complicated one.

Simple stuff:

The previous release of Jettison didn’t correctly show that it was licensed when you looked in the About box after importing a Mac App Store license. This was understandably very confusing to those of you that followed the instructions for upgrading in the FAQ. It now correctly shows “Licensed to: Mac App Store User” (since Apple doesn’t provide a way for us to get your name or Apple ID from your license) and removes the “License” item from its menu.

Also, there were occasions when all of the items in Jettison’s menu would become grayed out. This turned out to be caused by its error window getting stuck behind an application that was in Full Screen mode. It was patiently waiting for you to respond to an error message you couldn’t see – definitely not very helpful. That’s been fixed now.

Messy issues with Power Nap and Wake for Network Access:

When Power Nap or Wake for Network Access are turned on in your Energy Saver prefs, macOS may wake from sleep in ‘dark mode’ – which means it wakes from sleep, but never turns on the display. When this happens, it doesn’t let most applications – including Jettison – know when it wakes up or goes back to sleep. That means that Jettison can’t mount or eject your disks as it’s supposed to.

This would all be well and good if this temporary wakeful state mounted your disks, did its thing (like a Time Machine backup), ejected the disks and then went back to sleep. Unfortunately, while it seems to (mostly) work with Time Machine disks, if other drives get mounted during dark wake, you’ll often see a “Disk not ejected properly” error for them when you return. macOS can’t always manage the mounting and ejecting of disks correctly, even when it’s all by itself in a dark room.

Jettison 1.7.1 solves this problem by refusing to let macOS mount any non-Time Machine drives during a dark wake. This should take care of the disk errors (and associated possibility of data corruption) while still allowing you to use Power Nap and Wake for Network.

On the outside chance that you’re actually getting error messages for your Time Machine drive too, you can launch Terminal and run this command:

defaults write com.stclairsoft.Jettison disableTimeMachinePowerNap 1

That will tell Jettison to prevent your Time Machine drive from being mounted during dark wakes – with the obvious consequence that Time Machine can’t run Power Nap backups while your machine is sleeping. It’s a compromise, but at least it’ll ensure that your backups don’t get corrupted.

You can see the full change history and download Jettison 1.7.1 from the Jettison release page.

App Tamer 2.4.1 and Jettison 1.7 for Mojave

Monday, September 24th, 2018

App Tamer and Jettison have both been updated with support for Dark Mode in Mojave.

Jettison 1.7 also includes a number of features and fixes for all versions of macOS (well, from 10.8 to 10.14, anyway — that’s what Jettison supports). These include the addition of a menu command to mount all unmounted disks, options to not automatically remount specific drives after they’ve been ejected, and the fix for a bug that could cause some Macs to repeatedly cycle between sleep and wake. There are also a number of under-the-hood improvements and fixes.

Details and download links are available on the Jettison Release Page and the App Tamer Release Page — or you can just hop over to the Products Page and download them both!