How stop an iOS app from being upgraded by iTunes

So there's that app that you like the current version and newer ones just suck but iTunes doesn't make it easy to stop arbitrary apps from being upgraded. The problem with trying stop an old app from being upgraded is that it's all or nothing - you can either switch off automatic updates or you have to manually select the apps you want to upgrade every time.

The way to stop this is to change the permissions on the app so that it's can't be deleted (nor upgraded) by iTunes - first locate the app (e.g. /Users/test/Music/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications/Twitter\ 2.19.ipa ) Then you set the immutable flag on the app from the Terminal:

chflags uchg /Users/test/Music/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications/Twitter\ 2.19.ipa

When iTunes tries to update the app it tries to delete and replace it with the newer version but it fails ('Saying the original file can't be found'). But you can ignore that warning.

If you want to upgrade it at another point you'll need to just delete it and rerun iTunes so that it fetches the new version.


Note: That apps are unique to your user ID so you can't just copy an app (an .ipa file) from someone else an install it on your device, though you can with if you have older copies of an app for your device installed with that user ID.

Update:27nov15: Unfortunately it's not clear that this technique does stop iTunes from upgrading the apps in all situations;(

Update:23feb16: If this doesn't work you can copy the desired version of the app ipa file elsewhere and then delete the app from iTunes and then copy in the older version and sync again.

iTunes stopped syncing with iPhone?

The other day - as had happened a few times before - when I plugged my iPhone/iPad into my Mac iTunes failed to automatically start. Indeed iTunes didn't even seem recognise that my iPhone was plugged in - neither when directly plugged into USB nor when trying to 'sync over WiFi'. Another odd symptom was that my iPhone suddenly started to ask if I wanted to Trust this computer (that I have always synced to the past). A reboot had usually fixed this in the past but that's a pain so I snooped around for other answers - The usbmuxd daemon seemed to be complaining about weird stuff in the logs so I figured lets try and kill it! And low and behold that fixed the problem - usbmuxd restarted (probably care of launchd) and all was well again - iTunes saw my devices and wanted to talk to them again - a handy quick fix.

Here's the command line way to kill it - to be safe quit iTunes and unplug your iPhone beforehand:

sudo killall usbmuxd 

Hide twitter app worldcup menu

Since the World Cup started the Twitter app has been suggesting I look at the latest World Cup game. I'm not that interested anymore but it keeps on bothering me. 

The good news is that you can disable or hide the world cup menu in the Twitter app by tapping and holding on the world cup banner till you get an option to "Hide" or "Never Show Again", or "Cancel". Choose Hide or never show again and it's gone forever.

Spotlight not working?

You just tried to use Spotlight and it found nothing apart from a dictionary word?! Spotlight seems to shut itself down for a variety of reasons  - one being lack of disk space - it seems to need about 5% of your disk space to free to operate effectively. Here's one way to fix it.

Firstly you can check if Spotlight has indeed stopped (from a terminal):

mdutil -s /

If it says: "No index." then you can re-enable it again - making sure you have about 25GB free if you have a 500GB hard drive - you'll need to type in your password as it requires root privileges:

sudo mdutil -i on /

It should say "Indexing enabled" - sometimes you have repeat this last step a couple of times until it says "Indexing enabled".

If you have no joy enabling it you can go one step further and try erasing and rebuilding the Spotlight index:

sudo mdutil -E /

Or as a last resort try removing it manually - firstly you should disable Indexing:

sudo mdutil -i off /

And then remove the index:

rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100

And finally re-enable Indexing:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Once you have enabled Indexing again be prepared to wait for a few hours before it's finished (it'll tell you roughly how long if you click on the Spotlight icon). However you can actually use Spotlight whilst it is building the index - it starts to provide some results fairly soon after it begins indexing.

Uninstall Silverlight on OSX

It seems that even Microsoft can't explain how to remove their own software (they omit the first step) so here's how to do it:

sudo rm /var/db/receipts/com.microsoft.SilverlightInstaller.*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Silverlight.pkg

Mounting OSX Time Capsule shared drive on Linux

If you've been trying to mount an OS X Time Capsule disk over the network using Samba/CIFS/SMB and you've recently run into the problem: "mount error(13): Permission denied", and you KNOW the password is right then this may help. Basically you now need to inform Linux CIFS of the specific security mechanism to use (sec=ntlm). E.g. To mount the drive as root (where share_pwd is the password required to access the drive):

# mount -t cifs //server_ip/Data /mnt/Data -opasswd=share_pwd,sec=ntlm

As an alternative it is also possible to use the Netatalk package under Linux to mount the Time Capsule drive using Apple Filesharing Protocol (AFP).

PS: If you were hoping to mount the Time capsule drive that you either had plugged in or removed from inside your Time Capsule see my earlier post.

[28jun14: Updated to clarify that this regarding network mounting]

Cure unresponsive iPhone voicemail (and gain some space)

It seems that Apple's 'Visual Voicemail' is all very well but when you delete a message it doesn't actually get deleted - it gets put in a "recycle bin" taking up space and slowing the phone down or 'freezing' it (and hanging around when you though they had gone). This seems to be a particular problem on iPhone 4's running iOS7, though can also affect newer iPhones such as the 4S, 5, and 5S.

To fix this open the Phone app and select voicemail, then scroll right to the bottom of the list of voicemails where it says 'Deleted Messages'. Tap on that and you'll see all your old voicemails - to get rid of them tap on 'Clear All' at the top right and they're finally wiped away. You might also want to delete some of you existing voicemail messages to gain some additional space, and generally speed up voicemail and the Phone app  a bit more.

If you're having trouble with iPhone freezes, or it going slow, when attempting to delete all those voicemail messages then try switching on Airplane Mode and deleting them all, then switching it back off again when you're done.

Viewing Preview's PDF annotations on iOS

If someone sends you a PDF document that has been annotated on a Mac using OSX Preview the default PDF viewer in iOS (Iphone/iPad) does not show the annotations (which is a bore). A search doesn't reveal an immediately useful answer so I thought I'd create one. So far I've found two free apps to view Preview's PDF annotations:

• PDFMate by realazy
• Documents Free by Savy Soda