Archive for the ‘APFS’ Category

Jettison 1.8.8 opens disks when you mount them; fixes screen wakeups and issues with encrypted disks

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.

Jettison 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 deliver numerous improvements and fixes

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.

Jettison 1.6 improves remounting and APFS support, adds AppleScript commands

Friday, March 16th, 2018

Jettison 1.6

Jtsn iconBefore starting a reorganization and rewrite of Jettison’s internals, I figured I’d better officially release the myriad little changes that I’ve been trickling out to various folks as they’ve contacted me with issues.

Version 1.6 brings Jettison up-to-date with APFS (the new file system format released in High Sierra) as well as making its drive mounting / remounting procedure more robust. There are also a bunch of bug fixes and improvements in error checking and error reporting, and new AppleScript commands for ejecting, remounting and sleeping.

You can grab the update from the Jettison Release Page, as well as seeing a more complete list of changes there.

Known Issues

There are still a few issues with Jettison on High Sierra, primarily due to some flakiness on High Sierra’s part that I haven’t been able to pin down. If Jettison can’t eject a drive and tells you “try ejecting it in the Finder,” that means that macOS refused to eject the drive, won’t tell Jettison why, and there aren’t any files open on the volume that should logically keep it from being ejected. In that case, Jettison just throws up its hands and says “I give up!”

If you ask the bus driver to stop the bus and he just keeps on driving, what can you do? (Well, you could open the window and jump out of the speeding bus, but I doubt you want me to do that with your external drives…)

So I’m continuing to chase down that issue, as well as a rare one where the machine continually cycles between sleep and wake states every few seconds, resulting in hundreds of “External disks ejected” notifications from Jettison while the machine was supposed to be sleeping. This situation is rare and I’ve been unable to reproduce it here, making it a tough one to figure out. If it’s happening to you, please let me know at support@stclairsoft.com.