The Desolation of Blog

My last blog post Apple wants a sysdiagnose for a feature request inspired me to think about the lengths to which some software developers will go to avoid fixing bugs.

In October 2023, I filed a feature request with Apple’s Feedback Assistant: (FB13289075) Provide a setting to make oslogToStdio the default.

This is a follow-up to my post Academic philosophy: my quixotic quest.

I needed new App Store screenshots to submit an update of my iOS app, but I found that the Apple Files app was broken in the simulator, which prevented me from setting up my app properly for my screenshots.

Almost twenty years ago, I abruptly dropped out of school in the middle of writing my doctoral dissertation in philosophy.

I received a support request for my app Link Unshortener from an icloud.com email address.

On Friday I published a glowing book review of Apple in China by Patrick McGee.

TL;DR Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, written by Patrick McGee, published in 2025 by Simon & Schuster, is a must-read for anyone in the tech industry or interested in the tech industry.

This morning I received an unsolicited email titled “Blog feature Suggestion”: I have reviewed your blog and I think [Mac app] could be a perfect fit for it.

There's so much to say about Apple's new software design, which they call Liquid Glass and I call Liquid Crass.

This morning I was looking for something to read after I finish Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire by Christine Wenc—a nostalgic book for me, because I attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison precisely when…

Yesterday Apple announced Updates for apps in the European Union, because the EU determined that Apple's previous app developer policies were not in compliance with the Digital Markets Act.

Safari web apps arrived in macOS 14 Sonoma.

At WWDC 2018, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi asked, "Are you merging iOS and macOS?"

Today, Apple announced a self-funded study titled Global App Store helps developers reach new heights, supporting $1.3 trillion in billings and sales in 2024, but what interested me more was the subtitle: For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales…

I was testing font replacement with my web browser extension StopTheMadness Pro on https://www.apple.com, but for some reason the feature wasn't working as expected.

Stop The Mac App Store is my free, open source Mac app that stops Safari from automatically opening the App Store app from the web.

John Siracusa has recently written a couple of noteworthy articles titled Apple Turnover and Apple Turnaround.

I'm an App Store developer, and for the sake of all developers, I hope that Epic Games prevails in court against Apple.

My recent blog post Free with In-App Purchase is a sham already looked at a top grossing app in the Mac App Store, and App Store Curation at a top grossing app in the iOS App Store—err, formerly top grossing, since the latter was removed from the App Store

Last month, Apple added a note about macOS pasteboard privacy to the AppKit release notes for developers: Prepare your app for an upcoming feature in macOS that alerts a person using a device when your app programmatically reads the general pasteboard.

A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post about App Store Curation.

Last year I wrote a blog post Mac app launches slowed by malware scan: I discovered that the slow launches are caused by the syspolicyd process, specifically DispatchQueue "com.apple.security.syspolicy.yara".

Chrome version 136.0.7103.49, released today by Google, includes a new setting in its Password Manager (chrome://password-manager/settings).

Yesterday I came across an interesting Reddit post: I sometimes drag and drop images straight from Safari into Photoshop.

According to the Mozilla Developer Network web docs, "The head of an HTML document is the part that is not displayed in the web browser when the page is loaded."

I was looking at a nasty free (pirate?)

I'm subscribed to an RSS feed for WebKit commits.

My previous blog post mentioned that I filed a bug report with Apple: ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.CoreSpeech/Caches/onDeviceCompilationCaches/ recreated on every login with Siri disabled (FB17163068).

A couple of months ago I wrote about inaccessible .bnnsir files on macOS Sequoia.

Today, out of the blue, Little Snitch alerted me to an incoming connection attempt from IPv4 address 142.250.191.99 to UDP port 56878.

Apple played an April Fools joke on developers.

I just installed today's macOS 15.4 and iPadOS 18.4 updates.

I'm selling my M1 MacBook Pro, because I recently purchased an M4 MacBook Pro with nano-texture display.

Today I updated my Mac mini and MacBook Pro from macOS 15.3.1 to 15.3.2.

I stopped using iMessage on iPhone many years ago after delivery failure of some messages from my family.

Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift.

Every day I make a backup of my macOS home folder with a command like the following: hdiutil create -encryption -format UDZO -noatomic -noscrub -srcfolder /Users/jeff -verbose /Users/Shared/backups/2025-2-13.dmg Yesterday my backup failed, because it coul…

Some people who had previously disabled Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3 saw it re-enabled after updating to macOS 15.3.1 and iOS 18.3.1 today.

In My 2024 Apple Report Card, while talking about how Siri sucks and why that's important, John Gruber offered the following analogy: It doesn’t matter that Apple doesn’t offer, say, its own web search engine, because Safari can use whatever search engine…

I've been using Apple's Mail app since I switched to Mac OS X from Windows back in 2002.

I'm writing this blog post in the hope that Google YouTube engineers and/or Apple Safari engineers will notice it.

After I installed macOS 15.3 today, I saw this little gem in System Settings.

Little Snitch by Objective Development is the first app that I install on a new Mac.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post Apple Passwords is hostile to backups, macOS 15 Sequoia removed New Secure Note Item from the File menu in Keychain Access app.

In my view, a useful backup system must be (1) chronological, (2) granular, and (3) redundant.

I mentioned yesterday that I just bought a new M4 MacBook Pro, which of course comes with macOS Sequoia.

I just bought a new MacBook Pro with a nano-texture display.

This is a follow-up to my recent blog posts Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 and The internet is full of experts.

My recent blog post Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 has received widespread attention, and perhaps inevitably, it has also received widespread criticism by random internet commenters.