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
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 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
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
I just read up a bit on io_uring, prompted by a Swift Forums thread relating to it, and it made me laugh. To a lot of people it’s an amazing new[ish] high-performance I/O system for Linux. Which it is (albeit with some serious security concerns, apparently). A lot of people are very excited by it.… Read more
A little quiz to separate the Mac power users from the padawans. Read more
macOS Sonoma is in so many ways a dumpster fire. It’s the worst Apple OS update I can remember (although admittedly there’s been some real stinkers over the years, so maybe I’m overlooking some repressed memories). There was of course the bug whereby encrypted external drives no longer mounted automatically. That was pretty special, because… Read more