As MacID becomes more popular, more and more people in offices are using it.
This is awesome, but in an environment like this it really shows up an issue where MacID has to “ping” everything nearby to reconnect to your device.
I really wish I didn’t have to do this, but there are a couple of issues with Bluetooth on OS X that mean I have to.
- The APIs are meant to allow apps to search only for devices that have a specific service. Unfortunately this just doesn’t work, I’ve spoken to other devs and they’ve had the same issue.
- Apps are also meant to be able to save a device’s identifier to reconnect to it at a later date. This works, until iOS changes its identifier, which happens randomly. I suspect this is something to do with protecting users’ privacy, but it makes reconnecting difficult.
As you can imagine, both of these issues present a problem. The only solution to which is to scan for everything and then try and figure out which is the right device.
Every new version of OS X I check if this has been fixed so I can at least search for just devices that are advertising the right services but unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet.
I presume this would be why multiple “MacID[xxx]: xxx disconnected with error: (null)” entries are found in console? And why random devices are appearing briefly in my Bluetooth menu from time to time?
I’m afraid so yeah 🙁
Hi,
I really hate it when I open Console.app and thousands of messages from MacID come up.
Sorry about that, people wanted a clearer picture of what was happening so I added more logs. It’ll be toned down in the next update.
Thanks. I would be happy if there was an option to disable these logs completely.
It would be good to keep the Bluetooth connection alive in sleep mode (if possible), so the Unlock request would appear almost immediately.
Otherwise MacID is really good app.