presentedWindowStyle is not windowStyle

This post is mostly to herald a pretty good Apple bug report response, which as we know is a too-rare event. But it might also help others with this confusing SwiftUI API. What’s the difference between presentedWindowStyle(_:) and windowStyle(_:)? Well, one does something, the other doesn’t, basically. I tried using the former, and observed that… Read more

NSPasteboard crashes due to unsafe, internal concurrent memory mutation when handling file promises

This is a public reposting of FB14885505, in case it’s helpful to anyone else or especially in case someone else has seen this too and knows how to work around it. NSPasteboard mutates itself simultaneously from the main thread and the global concurrent Dispatch pool, w.r.t. to its internal type cache. This is surprisingly trivial… Read more

When all you have is a Core Data, everything looks likeā€¦

Still from the scene in Orgazmo with the Mormon Missionaries greeting a homeowner at their door and asking "Have you heard the good news about Core Data?".

Reading SwiftData vs Realm: Performance Comparison reminded me of an anecdote from my days working on Shark, at Apple. I don’t really remember the timing – sometime between 2006 and 2010 – but presumably around 2006 as I recall it was when Core Data was still relatively new. For whatever reason, there was a huge… Read more

Apple antitrust & music piracy

The position of many folks – most recently the U.S. Department of Justice – against Apple has drawn an unexpected parallel to that of music pirates in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. If you’re too young to have personally lived that time, just know this key point: back then, buying or streaming music online… Read more

Apple Vision Pro first impressions

Apple PR photo of the Apple Vision Pro viewed from the front.

This morning I tested out Apple’s Vision Pro in an Apple Store. And I’ve decided to write about it, mostly for my own future nostalgia, but also because my experience was markedly different to what’s been widely reported in tech news. I had intended to just buy an Apple Vision Pro on release day, but… Read more

Proactive Peek & Reveal on Edge Hover

Screen capture video showing an attempt to grab the scroll handle and how it's foiled by Proactive Peak stealing the click away to resize a previously-closed sidebar.

These are two misfeatures that appeared in macOS Sonoma (I believe). They are where a closed sidebar forces its way back into view temporarily, if the mouse comes to rest near the relevant edge of the window. It’s easy to see how some UI designer thought this was a good idea. Surely if you move… Read more