MacFormat UK – September 2019

EDITED BY HOWARD OAKLEY

What’s inside

60

SECURITY

ERROR FIX

Another way to

open ‘quarantined’

documents in macOS

61

iOS SOFTWARE

Swipe away your

touchscreen troubles

62-63

MAC HARDWARE

We help to solve your

hardware hassles

64-65

MAC SOFTWARE

We resolve restrictions

with your Mac apps

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ADVICE

56 | MACFORMAT

Easily open ‘quarantined’

documents such as PDFs

The first may seem uncommon until you

realise that opening any document using a

‘sandboxed’ app writes a quarantine flag to

that document, even if you don’t save it.

As all apps from the App Store, most of

those bundled with macOS, and many others

are ‘sandboxed’, chances are that more than a

quarter of all the documents on your Mac now

have quarantine ‘flags’, and could trigger this

if you were to change the app used to open

that specific document from the default.

Thankfully, there are workarounds:

opening the document from within an app

bypasses this altogether, and using Finder’s

contextual menu (≈-click) and its Open

command brings up a dialog, which enables

you to proceed.

Q

Whenever I set a PDF document to

open in another app in Finder, I can’t

double-click it without it being

blocked by a weird security error. Have you

come across this happening? Is it a bug?

by PETE MARTIN

A

No: it’s an obscure and longstanding

security feature of macOS. For this

to occur, there has to be a collision

of three circumstances: the document must

be in quarantine; in the Finder’s Get Info

dialog, you must have chosen to open that

document using an app other than the default

for that particular document type; you then

tried opening the document in Finder, for

example by double-clicking.

Work around this weird security

error using the Finder’s contextual

menu Open command rather than

double-clicking to open a document.