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

A perfect little feature: Universal Clipboard

Apple product photo for Universal Clipboard, showing an iPhone next to a MacBook Pro, with an image selected on the iPhone and 'Copy' highlighted in the pop-up menu, and that same image in a Pages document on the Mac, implying it was just pasted there.

Perhaps in karmic balance of my previous post critical of one of Apple’s APIs, I want to highlight an Apple OS feature that I use every day, that ironically is so simple, obvious, and reliable that I almost never stop to appreciate it. Universal Clipboard basically just means you can copy something on one device… Read more

-fomit-frame-pointer

Explanatory diagram of frame pointers, showing a link from the x86-64 register %rbp to the start of the current frame, which holds the prior value of %rbp that points to the top of the previous frame, and so on.

This is an elaboration of a post I made in a Swift Forums thread, SE-0419: Swift Backtracing API. The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation”… Read more

NSImage is dangerous

Screenshot of an excerpt from Xcode's debug console showing the output of AddressSanitizer, having detected data race involving NSImage.

NSImage is formally documented as largely not thread-safe: The following classes and functions are generally not thread-safe. In most cases, you can use these classes from any thread as long as you use them from only one thread at a time. Check the class documentation for additional details. Apple’s Threading Programming Guide > Appendix A:… Read more

Reminder: macOS system frameworks binaries are hidden (since Big Sur)

Every now and again I’ll go to do something really innocuous with an Apple framework, like disassemble it in Hopper or check the link headers. And every. single. time. I forget that Apple did some really weird shit in Big Sur, and removed the binaries. $ ls -lh /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/Current/AppKit ls: /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/Current/AppKit: No such file or… Read more