Hands on with macOS Sierra’s Console: Now it’s easier to get the Mac information you need

If you’ve ever looked at the Console app in OS X, you’ve seen how frustrating it can be to glean any useful information from its overladen logs. Console displays log information that can help you troubleshoot problems on your Mac, but it also records a plethora of status messages. Wading through a never-ending stream of messages in Console has always been difficult, but Apple has reworked Console in macOS Sierra, making it a lot more usable. Here’s a brief overview of what’s new.

Read the rest of the article on Macworld.

10 thoughts on “Hands on with macOS Sierra’s Console: Now it’s easier to get the Mac information you need

      • Especially on a slow connection when you load a lot of tabs quickly from an RSS reader. 10 minutes later, multiple simultaneous videos start playing. Muting the tabs is insufficient, because they’re still chewing up most of my throughput. I finally blocked all content from brightcove at macworld That often blocks useful images as a side effect, but I haven’t found anything yet that can block all autoplay. ClickToPlugin is no longer supported, and with the latest safari update, it’s gotten so flaky I’ve had to toss it.

        Aside from that, I’m glad I read the article–it never occurred to me to look for changes in Console. I love the changes, but the third party issue sounds grim. Hopefully that will get improved before release.

    • I actually came to the comments to say the same thing. I will not be following any more Macworld links due to this.

      • Especially on a slow connection when you load a lot of tabs quickly from an RSS reader. 10 minutes later, multiple simultaneous videos start playing. Muting the tabs is insufficient, because they’re still chewing up most of my throughput. I finally blocked all content from brightcove at macworld That often blocks useful images as a side effect, but I haven’t found anything yet that can block all autoplay. ClickToPlugin is no longer supported, and with the latest safari update, it’s gotten so flaky I’ve had to toss it.

        Aside from that, I’m glad I read the article–it never occurred to me to look for changes in Console. I love the changes, but the third party issue sounds grim. Hopefully that will get improved before release.

    • I actually came to the comments to say the same thing. I will not be following any more Macworld links due to this.

  1. What you may not realize, however, is that behind the UI changes in Console there’s a fundamental change to the logging API that is a nightmare for 3rd party app developers and their customers. In Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.11, log messages were saved to disk by default. This is no longer true in macOS 10.12. Suppose that you’re running an app, and you experience a problem. You contact the app’s developer, and they tell you to check in Console for errors. In Sierra, you won’t find anything, because if you weren’t already running Console *while* the problem occurred, log messages are not saved. It’s like the log messages never existed!

  2. What you may not realize, however, is that behind the UI changes in Console there’s a fundamental change to the logging API that is a nightmare for 3rd party app developers and their customers. In Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.11, log messages were saved to disk by default. This is no longer true in macOS 10.12. Suppose that you’re running an app, and you experience a problem. You contact the app’s developer, and they tell you to check in Console for errors. In Sierra, you won’t find anything, because if you weren’t already running Console *while* the problem occurred, log messages are not saved. It’s like the log messages never existed!

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