Michael Tsai - Blog
Bill Gates (via Slashdot): It feels like just yesterday that Paul and I were hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company. That code remains the coolest code I’ve ever written to this day—and you can see it for yourself at the […]
Reuters (PDF, Slashdot): Apple was hit with a 150 million euro ($162.4 million) fine by French antitrust regulators on Monday for abusing its dominant position in mobile app advertising on its devices via a privacy control tool. […] “While we are disappointed with today’s decision, the French Competition Authority has not required any specific changes […]
Joe Mullin: In a moment of clarity after initially moving forward a deeply flawed piece of legislation, the French National Assembly has done the right thing: it rejected a dangerous proposal that would have gutted end-to-end encryption in the name of fighting drug trafficking. Despite heavy pressure from the Interior Ministry, lawmakers voted Thursday night […]
Apple: Starting today, with the availability of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4, Apple Intelligence features are now available in many new languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India — and are accessible in nearly all regions […]
Nick Lockwood: Airdrop on macOS has this “great” feature where it displays receivers asynchronously as it finds them and they are sorted alphabetically, so the order shuffles randomly under the mouse as you are trying to clickBrought to you by the guy who sent a file to a random colleague when trying to share it […]
Also new in Swift 6.1, ST-0006: We offer three variants of #expect(throws:):One that takes an error type, and matches any error of the same type;One that takes an error instance (conforming to Equatable) and matches any error that compares equal to it; andOne that takes a trailing closure and allows test authors to write arbitrary […]
Ernie Smith (via Hacker News): But it of course raises the question: Do they make Apple‘s shows on Macs? As the second season of Severance ended in dramatic fashion, Apple decided to answer that question, and the answer was … surprisingly confusing. […] In the video Apple released, which highlights the Mac-driven editing process that […]
Makena Kelly (Hacker News): The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within […]
Holly Borla: Swift 6.1 enables custom Swift Testing traits to perform logic before or after tests run in order to share set-up or tear-down logic. If you write a custom trait type which conforms to the new TestScoping protocol, you can implement a method to customize the scope in which each test or suite the […]
Apple (security, downloads): Clang now defines TARGET_OS_* conditionals as built-in macros based on the provided target triple.[…]Searching in the documentation viewer may start an indexing process which makes no progress. This may result in missing search results and increased CPU usage.[…]Fixed: Foundation encoders/decoders user info dictionaries now require Sendable values. This may cause build errors […]
SpamSieve 3.1.2 improves the filtering accuracy of my Mac e-mail spam filter, amongst other enhancements and fixes. Some interesting issues were: I made some more table view improvements enabled by the lazy Core Data collections mentioned in the previous release. Since it no longer loads the whole selection into RAM, it’s now possible to operate […]
Elon Musk (Hacker News): @xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt). Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed […]
Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW): With macOS 15.4, Apple is bringing Mail Categorization to the Mac. The Mail app features dedicated categories like transactions, updates, and promotions, with important emails organized into a primary section.Apple News+ subscribers now have access to an Apple News Food section with recipes, food articles, […]
macOS 14.7.5 (full installer, security): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. macOS 13.7.5 (full installer, security): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. Previously: macOS 14.7.4 and macOS 13.7.4
Juli Clover (no iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, enterprise, no developer): iOS 18.4 adds Priority notifications for Apple Intelligence-capable devices, showing you your most notification first. There’s a dedicated Apple Vision Pro app for Vision Pro owners, and a new Apple News Food feature for Apple News+ subscribers. There’s lots more quoted in her article, though […]
Juli Clover (release notes, security, no developer): Apple shares full release notes for tvOS in its tvOS support document, which is updated after each new version of tvOS comes out. But all it says is “performance and stability improvements.” Previously: tvOS 18.3.1
Ryan Christoffel (no release notes, no security, no developer): After initially listing watchOS 11.4 on its website as released, the site has since been updated to remove the update. It’s unknown when it will return. Previously: watchOS 11.3.1
Juli Clover (no release notes, security, developer, enterprise): The visionOS 2.4 update brings Apple Intelligence to the Vision Pro for the first time, putting it on par with the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. […] Along with Apple Intelligence, Apple added a Spatial Gallery app for the Vision Pro. The Spatial Gallery app offers a curated […]
Apple: This update includes performance and stability improvements. Previously: audioOS 18.3
Patrick Wardle (tweet): Since TCC is designed to protect these resources, it poses a challenge for malware that often tries to access them. Generally malware takes one of two approaches: exploiting TCC bugs, or obtaining explicit user permission access to the TCC protected item. The former is rather uncommon, while the latter is much more […]
Jeff Johnson: ChangeTheHeaders is a Safari extension for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS that allows you to customize HTTP request headers such as Accept, Accept-Language, Cookie, and User-Agent. ChangeTheHeaders is available now in the App Store. […]You might ask, why didn’t I just add this feature to StopTheMadness Pro? On macOS, StopTheMadness Pro is a […]
Howard Oakley: LaunchServices compiles a large registry database of apps and their associations with and capabilities for handling different document types. Its records determine which app opens a document when you double-click on its icon in the Finder, and most prominently which are listed when you open the Open With… item in the Finder’s contextual […]
Timothy R. Butler (Hacker News, Slashdot): The latest releases — MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 — are screaming for such a reset. Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who don’t actually use that software. In the 22 years since I […]
Dave Nanian (Mastodon): Since a given APFS container can hold multiple copies of the OS, Preboot and Recovery have folder structures that include UUIDs corresponding to the volume that “owns” that part of their shared volumes in the group. Inside that UUID-named folder are the files that “pair” with the system you’re trying to boot.In […]
Andrew Liszewski: Amazon has released a software update for the current-generation Colorsoft and Paperwhite that lets you double-tap on the sides or back of your Kindle to turn the page. The new feature, as spotted by The eBook Reader, is listed in the release notes for the 5.18.1 update and can be found in Settings […]
Ben Schoon (via Hacker News): The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has left most of Google’s work in developing Android as an operating system visible to the public eye. But, starting next week, Google is moving that work behind closed doors.Google confirmed to Android Authority that “all Android development will occur within Google’s internal branches,” […]
Kevin Perry: It’s clear from community adoption and feedback that Codable has had a lot of success in the years since it was added to Swift 4, but that it doesn’t satisfy some important needs. One of the foremost of those needs is performance more in line with programming environments that compete with Swift. As […]
Ryan Christoffel: Wayne Ma writes today at The Information about the state of Apple TV+ as a business, analyzing where the streamer stands in terms of revenue and subscribers after five years.In the heavily-paywalled article, Ma reports that Apple’s losses on TV+ amount to over $1 billion per year. While it’s long been known that […]
Nathan Edwards (2023, via Nick Heer): It was fine until my yellow ink cartridge (allegedly) ran out, and the printer stopped printing in color. I soldiered on with the black cartridge. Until one day I tried to print a return label (in black and white!) and the printer decided it wouldn’t. Not until I replaced […]
Wikipedia: Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997 and the first public betas appeared in 1999. The original design of CUPS used the Line Printer Daemon protocol (LPD), but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was initially called “The […]
Tim Hardwick: Apple will bring lossless audio and ulta-low latency audio to AirPods Max in its upcoming iOS 18.4 software update arriving in April, according to the company.[…]Apple also said that today it is making a USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable available to buy for $39 from its online store, Apple Store app, and authorized […]
My Intel MacBook Pro died, and even though I have an M1 MacBookAir ready to replace it, it’s taken several days to get back to the point where I can run older versions of macOS for testing my apps. I had all the old versions installed in separate partitions on an external SSD. Prior to […]
Drew DeVault: Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. […] If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots […]
Mark Edwards: The image above shows the same drop shadow values, rendered by CSS on the web, Android, and iOS. It’s a dark and extreme shadow, to make the differences more pronounced. The shadows are black, with no X offset, 24px Y offset, and a 24px blur radius. I’ve used “px” when noting the values, […]
Flexibits: Multiple Windows! See your schedule from different views or dates at the same time. Open new windows at File > New Window Finally. The main use case for me is to compare the same month for different years. I have been doing this by opening one of them using the macOS Calendar app, but […]
Simon Sharwood: Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing.Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data […]
Bryan Irace: It’s one thing for Apple’s AI product offerings to be non-competitive. Perhaps even worse is that as Apple stands still, software development is moving forward faster than ever before. Like it or not, LLMs—both through general chat interfaces and purpose-built developer tools—have meaningfully increased the rate at which new software can be produced. […]
Scharon Harding (Hacker News): If you’re frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from “over 75,000" mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month.The data is detailed […]
ST-0008: One of the first enhancement requests we received for Swift Testing was the ability to test for precondition failures and other critical failures that terminate the current process when they occur. […] This proposal introduces new overloads of the #expect() and #require() macros that take, as an argument, a closure to be executed in […]
Natalia Panferova (tweet): This book distills the core principles and foundational concepts behind SwiftUI, the modern UI framework for building apps across Apple platforms. My goal is to help you go beyond surface-level understanding and develop a deep, practical knowledge of how SwiftUI works under the hood. SwiftUI provides a simple, declarative way to build […]
John Gruber (Mastodon): Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.” David Price: I’d […]
Andrej Karpathy: There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even […]
Howard Oakley: For most, Console isn’t the right tool. It only offers the options of viewing its live stream, or making an archive of the whole log and wading through that when you need to look at an event in the past. Although my log browser Ulbow gives much better access, for many it’s still […]
Bjango: In the beginning, Bjango was just a couple of friends making free OS X Dashboard widgets. We started working on those widgets prior to OS X 10.4 Tiger’s release on 29 April 2005, so my best guess is we started working together some time in March 2005.After releasing a few successful widgets, we moved […]
Karin Matussek (Hacker News): The judges on Tuesday said the Federal Cartel Office was right to find that the iPhone maker’s footprint across markets meets the threshold for more oversight.[…]Apple was attempting to topple a May 2023 decision by the German antitrust watchdog, which subjected it to the so-called 19a rules on the grounds that […]
John McCall: SE-0446 added basic language support in Swift for non-escapable types, whose values are restricted in scope. However, it intentionally left out the ability for functions and properties to return values of these types, pending a future proposal to add lifetime dependencies. The design and implementation of that proposal is still in progress. In […]
Benjamin Mayo (Hacker News): The EU has followed up on its Digital Markets Act specification procedures for Apple regarding the iPhone’s interoperability with third-party connected devices like smartwatches and headphones, as announced last fall. Today’s announcement details exactly what third-party integrations the EU commission expects Apple to implement. This includes giving third-party devices access to […]
Eric Migicovsky (via Dare Obasanjo, Hacker News): During Pebble v1, I learned how much harder it is to build a great smartwatch experience on iPhone than it is on Android. It sounds like things have actually gotten worse over the last 8 years. I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app […]
Arin Waichulis (Hacker News, MacRumors): It’s now been revealed that a serious HTTP bug left Passwords users vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months, from the initial release of iOS 18 until the patch in iOS 18.2.Security researchers at Mysk first discovered the flaw after noticing that their iPhone’s App Privacy Report showed Passwords […]
Ric Ford: Apple’s exhorbitantly-priced Mac storage comes with impressive benchmark claims but has some serious, hidden bottlenecks in certain scenarios, as do other SSDs. David Harry illustrated this clearly in a video, using Activity Monitor as a novel window into dramatic SSD slowdowns when moving large amounts of data to an Apple internal SSD from […]
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