The Desolation of Blog

I wasn’t going to blog about the Return To X fad. At least it’s voluntary, unlike the Return To Office fad. What finally inspired me was a blog post by Matt Birchler, Why does this chart just go down? The blog post spotlights this issue: What makes Mastodon a place most people come to and go, "no thanks"? Answering this question is key if you, like me, want Mastodon to thrive. The blog post also presents a chart of Mastodon monthly active users over the past four years. Although I won’t dispute…

This blog post is not about passkey attestation. I have no strong opinion on the subject that has inspired a controversy over the past few days. However, the controversy did inspire me to write about passkeys again, and passkeys do currently feel like a trap to me, for reasons other than attestation. Admittedly, my reasons may be specific to the Apple ecosystem, as someone who stumbled into a career writing software for Apple devices, with no financially viable alternative. Three years ago I…

Many people have suggested that macOS 27 Golden Gate is a “Snow Leopard” release. I never believed that for a second. I’ve argued many times that the perception of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as a bug fix release is a myth. Every major OS update introduces more bugs than it fixes, and the software quality of Snow Leopard that people now remember fondly was achieved only after nearly two years of minor bug fix updates. Moreover, 10.6.0 itself arrived nearly two years after 10.5.0. Nowadays Apple…

Almost everyone misunderstands Chrome extension manifest version 3, the successor to Chrome extension manifest version 2, MV3 and MV2 for short. As a professional web browser extension developer, I had to migrate my Chrome extensions from MV2 to MV3, which forced me to learn the difference. In this blog post, I hope to dispel the common misunderstanding. The reason almost everyone misunderstands MV3 is that they mistakenly equate the extension manifest version with the content blocking API,…

I wrote macOS Tahoe silently sabotaged the login keychain on September 10 and macOS 26.4 silently enabled login keychain data protection on September 21. These blog posts necessarily included some conjecture, because Apple itself was silent on the issue. It turns out that nobody outside of Apple fully understood the technical details. On September 24, six months after the release of macOS 26.4, Apple finally provided some documentation by adding a new section Backing up a file-based keychain to…

Below I’ve embedded via youtube-nocookie.com a screen recording of a macOS Virtual Machine showing the first run experience of the Meta Muse app. If you’d like to view the video on YouTube, here’s a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkYhS6Wo_F0 I created the VM (running macOS mac 26.6.2, because I already had an ipsw file of that version downloaded) using the VirtualBuddy app. For testing I used a fresh VM, not signed in to my Apple Account, because of course I don’t trust Meta with…

Reddit announced yesterday the end of RSS support: Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives. For common mod alerts, we recommend Devvit apps like Discord Relay. If your mod team relies on RSS, review your setup and migrate workflows before November 13 to ensure your needs are uninterrupted. If you use RSS for feeds…

On macOS, the most popular web browsers, and the ones I use most frequently, are Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. My tool of choice to test these browsers is Little Snitch. The quietest of the three web browsers appears to be Safari. It’s important to note, however, that Chrome and Firefox are self-contained, whereas Safari is part of macOS and can delegate some of its functionality such as iCloud sync to other macOS processes, many of which phone home to Apple. I personally don’t use sync or…

My blog post yesterday, App Store review allowed a Meta Muse copycat, highlighted not just one but three obvious scams currently in the App Store. Reactions such as this Reddit comment are frustrating but common: Considering the thousands of apps submitted daily and the queue management the App Store maintains, it’s easy for some apps to fall through the cracks. To call it abitrary [sic] and that it “doesn’t even work” is a bad and reductionist take based on outliers. I understand the…

Muse from Meta in the App Store: Muse AI in the App Store: Compare the two app icons: Muse from Meta has the app subtitle “Your personal AI agent,” Muse AI “Your professional AI Agent.” Muse from Meta screenshot headers include “Your personal agent that takes things off your plate,” “Approve what gets sent or spent,” and “Connect the apps you already use.” Muse AI screenshot headers include “Your professional AI agent that gets work done,” “Approve what gets sent or connect,” and “Connect the…

I’m boycotting the feedback-hostile Apple Feedback Assistant, so this blog post is my bug report. The bug was brought to my attention by a reader of my blog, who said that it was introduced in iOS 26 and continues in iOS 27. I’ll illustrate the bug with screenshots. First, you need to save a pdf file to the Files app. I recently filed a WebKit bug report (the WebKit Bugzilla is less hostile than Feedback Assistant) with a sample downloadable pdf, so I used that to test. (Don’t worry, the…

TL;DR Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary, written by Geoffrey Cain, published in 2026 by Penguin Random House, recounts the life and career of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs between his stints at Apple, starting with his departure in 1985 and ending with his return in 1997, a period spent mostly at NeXT, another company cofounded by Jobs, ultimately acquired by Apple. The book includes a number of stories that I had never heard before and…

This is a follow-up to my September 10 blog post macOS Tahoe silently sabotaged the login keychain A subsequent addendum to the blog post noted that the change was introduced in a specific version of macOS Tahoe, 26.4, released by Apple on March 24. In brief, macOS 26.4 added a restriction to the login keychain that makes it non-portable, impossible to unlock outside of its original context. Consequently, recovery of login keychain data from backup has also become impossible in some critical…

With great dismay I read the blog post by Rich Trouton, Manually copying login keychain files from one Mac to another no longer works on Secure Enclave-equipped Macs running macOS Tahoe. As far as I’m aware, this blog post has not yet received widespread attention, but it should, and I hope to remedy that with my own blog post. According to Apple, all Apple silicon Macs, as well as some Intel Mac models, have the secure enclave processor, so the issue affects millions of Mac users. In short, I…

On Monday, Apple will release iOS 27 and macOS 27 (among other operating systems). Yesterday, developers received iOS 27 and macOS 27 release candidates. I would like to note two bugs that I reported during the beta period that remain unfixed in the release candidates, and barring a last minute miraculous reprieve, will remain unfixed in the public releases on Monday. This is disappointing, because I thought the point of the betas was for Apple to fix the bugs found by beta testers. While these…

This blog post may be coming a year late, but I’m still running macOS Sequoia on my main Mac, macOS Tahoe only on a secondary Mac, so there are subtle Liquid Glass changes that take a long time for me to notice. I haven’t seen anyone else mention this one, though. The Safari status bar, enabled in Safari’s View menu, displays the URL of a link on hover. Here’s how it looks on Sequoia: The screenshot is of an old blog post of mine, which I was using to reproduce another Safari bug (Reddit links…

Six years ago I published a blog post Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings that received quite a bit of attention: Michael Tsai, Hacker News The Register, The Verge, and Gizmodo, among others. The blog post was about a Google Chrome bug that mysteriously exempted Google-owned sites from the setting to automatically delete all site data. Eventually, spurred by my report, Google did fix the bug. You can probably guess why I’m writing about the bug again: I’ve noticed Chrome…

Last year I wrote a blog post Apple in China, Ripoff in Amazon about a copycat book in Amazon search results. Sadly, it appears that Apple Books is no better than Amazon. I’m currently rereading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita for a book club. I read the classic novel for a Russian literature class way back as a college undergraduate but hadn’t read it since. The English translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, $9.99 USD in Apple Books, was recommended to me. When…

Occasionally my blog posts become news stories. This has actually occurred more than once recently, and many times over the years. You may or may not be surprised to learn that news media outlets usually don’t talk to me, don’t ask for comment, before publishing stories about my blog posts. Of course this phenomenon is not exclusive to me: it’s just a bad habit of the news media. I know that it’s happened to Mysk as well. Unfortunately, the lack of communication from the news media has resulted…

Although my business is to “stop the madness” on the web, I can’t seem to stop myself from the quixotic madness of posting articles on the web criticizing Apple’s curation of the App Store. Can my little blog counteract the PR of one of history’s largest corporations? Doubtful, but I’m just mad enough to try. First, an update to my recent article Spicy tale of an App Store fraud. Apparently the App Store developer in question saw my article in the news, because the fake App Store reviews posted…

I was reading Apple’s August 13 court filing in the Epic trial, helpfully hosted by 9to5Mac, and I was surprised by a statement Apple made about its developer program: Unlike cost-only based commissions, Apple’s revenue-based commissions incentivize continued investment. Apple charges developers a $99 annual fee for the Apple Developer Program. May 17, 2021 Trial Tr. at 2762:21–2763:13. This modest fee—designed to prevent fraud and expressly not intended to compensate Apple for the use of its…

The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta: In macOS 27.0, hdiutil is deprecated. Use diskutil image instead for all disk image operations. diskutil image provides subcommands for attach, create, resize, info, and chpass. ASIF (Apple Sparse Image Format) images are only supported by diskutil image and are not supported by hdiutil. There’s also a DEPRECATION NOTICE at the top of the man…

In response to my article App Store allows developers to spam the submission and review process, MacStories published an article Raising the Gates Is Not the Way to Improve the App Store. I highly respect MacStories, and of course subscribe to their RSS feed, but I disagree with their article’s framing of my article. I did not raise the gates or erect the barriers, Apple did. Apple is the one gatekeeping its own platforms. From the beginning of iPhone in 2007, I’ve disagreed with Apple lockdown…

Yesterday I published a spicy tale of an App Store fraud perpetrated by a developer deep into AI slop. My blog post was linked by Daring Fireball and 9to5Mac, which I appreciate! Coincidentally, on the same day well-known developer Marco Arment complained on social media that his new, unreleased Mac App Store app had been waiting 12 days for review by Apple. Reportedly, Apple app review is having trouble keeping up with the increased volume of App Store submissions due to AI slop; anecdotal…

Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, because two of my own extensions are currently on the list, when I noticed the TabControl Extension. TabControl Extension is the #13 top paid Safari extension in the United States Mac App Store as of the time of the above screenshot, #12 when I…

Ten years and one day ago, on August 9, 2016, I abruptly quit my job. I mark this occasion as the beginning of my indie software developer career. Happy anniversary to me and to my customers! I didn’t formulate a plan until after I quit. I decided that I could afford to indulge a dream, express myself, design and build my own app from scratch. I could be my own boss for once. My journey as an indie developer mirrored an enduring aphorism: it takes five years to become an overnight success. That…

I use iCloud only for testing the iCloud sync feature of my App Store apps. As I mentioned in my recent blog post Apple account email address disclosure via Mail app, I don’t have an iCloud email account. As you can see in my screenshots below, iCloud is disabled in System Settings for all uses of Mail. Nonetheless, when I send an email in Mail app, from a non-iCloud account to an non-iCloud account, Mail immediately triggers an iCloud connection, as revealed by Little Snitch. In testing, I’ve…

In 2023 I published a blog post The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard that included links to the release notes of some Mac OS X updates. Well, let's look at the release notes for the 10.6.1 update: […] It looks like the so-called "bug fix update" itself needed a number of bug fixes. How about the 10.6.2 update? […] We're not done. Here's 10.6.3: […] And 10.6.4: Sadly, the links above now result in Page Not Found on Apple’s website. The Wayback Machine last successfully archived these…

I’ve written very little on my blog about so-called Artificial Intelligence, an old term applied to a relatively new technology, Large Language Models (LLM). I don’t think I have anything new to say about the subject, and my first-hand experience with LLMs is negligible, since I eschew them. Fortunately, my employer does not force me to use AI. (I’m self-employed!) The benefit of writing a blog post expressing my opinion about AI is that I can refer to it in the future when someone—some…

I could have terminated the title of this blog post with “App Store” but wanted to talk about something specific that came up for me today: App Store user ratings and reviews. This subject is related to yesterday’s blog post No, you curate the App Store. Despite the fact that Apple employees privately review every version of every app before developers can publish to the App Store, supposedly ensuring the quality of apps, verifying that they do what they claim to do, Apple nonetheless also…