The Desolation of Blog

This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search.

This blog post has undergone some revision and correction since first published.

Yesterday, Apple released Safari version 18.2, included with iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2, as a separate update for macOS 14 and 13.

I'm not talking about the tint of the extension icons this time.

As far as I can tell, the Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant, which I launched a year ago, appears to have gone nowhere and made little impact, unfortunately.

This is a follow-up to my blog post macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions from five months ago.

StopTheMadness Pro has three variants, one each for iOS, macOS, and visionOS, because I created native apps for each platform rather than simply porting an iPad app to Mac and Vision Pro.

In my first blog post of the year, way back at the beginning of January, I wrote about how Safari can improve extensions, offering a number of suggestions.

This problem was highlighted the other day in an update to Michael Tsai's earlier blog post about “Damaged” Mac App Store Apps, but I think it's important enough to warrant a dedicated blog post, because Mac developers who missed the update need to know a…

I never use the sidebar in macOS Safari and always keep it closed.

It turns out that the monthly screen recording prompts are not even the most annoying new "feature" of macOS 15 Sequoia.

All credit for this discovery should go to Ricci Adams, who told me about it.

My M1 Mac mini, which I use for software testing, has five APFS boot volumes, one each for macOS 15 Sequoia, 14 Sonoma, 13 Ventura, 12 Monterey, and 11 Big Sur.

Today I downloaded a copy of my data from https://privacy.apple.com, Apple's Data and Privacy website.

When I search for the same text in multiple Safari tabs, I experience a lot of trouble with Safari failing to remember the search string in the find panel.

I learned of this issue from a Reddit post and decided to investigate.

I keep this website under version control in a git repository on my MacBook Pro.

I first saw this bug on the macOS 15 Sequoia betas, which I ignored as a beta issue, but I've started to see the bug on Sonoma too after updating to macOS 14.6, and the bug continues on macOS 14.6.1.

When you launch an app, macOS connects to Apple's OCSP service to check whether the app's Developer ID code signing certificate has been revoked by Apple.

Yesterday, App Store developers were paid for app purchases made during the period of June 2 through June 29, 2024.

Here's a tip for iOS app developers and mobile web developers: today I learned that Smart App Banners don't appear in private browsing.

Dearest gentle reader, this author opens new Safari windows with an empty page, like a proper member of The Ton.

Yesterday I discovered a deluge of recent fake customer reviews for a number of top paid apps in the United States Mac App Store.

In April, a StopTheMadness Pro customer contacted me about an incompatibility with the Amazon Web Services Management Console.

A bookmarklet is a bookmark stored in a web browser that contains JavaScript commands.

Advanced tracking and fingerprinting protection is in the Safari Advanced Settings on both iOS and macOS.

This is a follow-up to my blog post macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions.

I really want to report bugs to Apple.

Mail app on macOS has a privacy setting Block All Remote Content that prevents downloaded emails from connecting to the internet.

This is a follow-up to my blog post Apple started cheating me out of App Store bundle purchases.

I bought a new M1 MacBook Pro in April 2022.

Four days ago, I updated my MacBook Pro from macOS Ventura to Sonoma.

Two days ago I updated my main development Mac from Ventura to Sonoma.

This is a follow-up to my blog post Updating from macOS Ventura to Sonoma silently enables iCloud Keychain.

This is not a new issue.

TL;DR I've discovered that starting in February, Apple mistakenly subtracts the price of the previously purchased app twice from the proceeds of a "Complete My Bundle" purchase, thereby causing me to take a loss on each such bundle purchase.

How do I report a YouTube bug?

After I posted my funny story of how I recovered the password of an encrypted Mac disk image, I received an email from a reader of the blog, who schooled me on some UNIX.

This is a story about so-called "secure" password entry that doesn't allow you to see the password you're typing.

The App Store app on macOS is the default handler of URLs with the macappstore: scheme.

Here's a screenshot of the Search pane in the Preferences window of Safari 16 on macOS Big Sur.

I've always attributed slow Xcode launches to Xcode simply sucking, but I've noticed that the FileMerge app frequently launches slowly too.

Are you still on macOS Ventura or Monterey and prefer not to install Sonoma yet?

The HTML <dialog> element was introduced ten years ago by Google Chrome.

The Safari Extensions section of the iOS Settings app has a More Extensions link that takes you to the Safari Extensions section of the App Store.

This is a follow-up to my post StopTheMadness Pro postmortem: crApp Store still crappy.

As a longtime Safari extension developer, I have a number of suggestions about how Safari could improve its extension support.

In case you missed the announcement, StopTheMadness Pro is available now!

The App Store has strict screenshot requirements.

Apple released iOS 17.2 today, and I've noticed that it has started to show the wrong Safari extension icons in some places for some extensions.