Deleting items from reading list. Also, items are opening up without my trackpad near them.

Question

Deleting items from reading list. Also, items are opening up without my trackpad near them.

I just updated last night and am having 2 problems. First is: I cannot delete items from my reading list. I read the info. Says to hit command and click while on that item and a new menu comes up with "delete item" as an option. So I do that but no menu comes up, and the item that I want to delete and a new tab opens with that item on it.

Also second item: in mail, or any page that has more than one thing on it, the items on the page keep opening up without me clicking on them. The page just kind of bounces around with various items coming up. I set my trackpad for hard touch, but that isn't helping. I thought maybe I was brushing on the trackpad by mistake, but it has never happened before with Catalina.

Anyone have any ideas for me?

Thanks

Diane

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 14, 2020 5:50 PM

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Answer 1

marybaum

Level 1

4 points

Nov 18, 2020 9:27 AM in response to dianefromsan angelo

This sounds very close to an issue I'm having — as the hours go by, the cursor gets wildly more inaccurate.

Try hovering over an item in the Dock and notice which OTHER item shows you its name (developers call this the hover-state behavior); for me, on a very high-resolution display, some 3300 pixels wide, the distance last night grew to about four inches. I had code to fix (still do!) and had to text the client it wouldn't be happening until today.

I can work around the issue by logging out of my account and logging back in, which means closing every single app, but then, a few hours later, it starts right back up again. Also, it gets worse when I've been working with one or two specific apps, notably the open-source 3D-modeling package Blender (version 2.9 with most vetted add-ons active). I'm also looking at the Adobe Creative Cloud with a jaundiced eye, given some funky windowing behavior I noticed in Adobe Bridge. An app restart fixed that.

I'm guessing this is some sort of memory leak? As we use a computer longer and longer, Diane, there's an item in the Activity Monitor called the kernel task that takes up more and more memory. Restarting the machine sets that item back to its starting point, and if I didn't have three other things to do today, I'd probably be tempted to start poring over activity logs.

So that's my story.

Diane, if you're inclined, try that Dock hover test and see what happens—I do think you have my problem.

Apple Support, is this the gateway drug to getting me to learn XCode at 60? Since starting PHP and JS at 50, I've been joking Python would be next. 😜

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Answer 2

marybaum

Level 1

4 points

Nov 18, 2020 10:05 AM in response to marybaum

Diane, do you use Chrome as your web browser?

My cursor was FINE until I had been using Chrome long enough to write the above post. Then I went to a couple of other sites, then came back into Chrome, and suddenly my cursor was about a half-inch wrong. I quit Chrome, and suddenly everything was fine again!

I'll be interested to see what happens from here ...

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Answer 3

Nov 18, 2020 3:23 PM in response to marybaum

Hi Mary,

First I started with Chrome as it was handy but it was awful so switched to Safari. Still awful. And, when I hover over "anything" nothing happens. Hovering over the dock is nothing. And now, when I hover over the sender of an email, nothing. Yesterday I could hover over email and see the sender. I do that when it seems to be spam and of course, when it's a bunch of letters and numbers that make no sense, I can delete without having to open. But not today. And also, a new thing...when I go to a new mail and have my pointer over any mail item, about 6 or so emails away the word "select" shows up. And all this is the same with my mouse and with the trackpad. I do use gmail but have been using Safari and not Chrome. I have not yet tried Firefox. That was my usual browser. But not sure why it would be any better. I would think that because Safari is for Macs, it should work the best. I say I "would" think that, but again, wrong. Also, when I managed to get it to click on an email that I want to delete, that email doesn't delete but one 3 or 4 away does. What the heck?

I have rebooted, turned it off and gone back in several hours, and still had the problem as soon as I sign on. And I have signed out of everything and it doesn't help. But it is very good at annoying me. LOL

I learned Cobol and Fortran in college (I'm older than you!) and other than being able to hack an ATM, it has not proved to be helpful to me with this stupid problem.

I welcome more ideas. I don't "think" it is possible to go back to Catalina, but sure wish I could. All of this is such a time waster.

I just noticed that the info underneath my first post said I had Catalina, but I don't. I have Big Sur. You probably gathered that already.

Diane

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Deleting items from reading list. Also, items are opening up without my trackpad near them.

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