The Desolation of Blog

This may sound far-fetched, but I already found that iCloud remotely triggers iMessage sign-in and sync (as well as FaceTime sign-in). I have circumstantial evidence that iCloud also remotely enabled Protect Mail Activity on my Mac, and I can’t think of any other explanation. Let me describe the circumstances in detail. Yesterday, inspired by social media, I was looking through the Mac Mail app for its one remaining NSDrawer (which turns out to be attached to the Mail Connection Doctor window.)…

WebKit, to quote its website, “is the web browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store, and many other apps on macOS, iOS, and Linux.” Obviously, Safari uses WebKit to display web pages, but did you know that Mail app uses WebKit to display email messages? This is true not just for HTML emails but also for plain text format emails. There are a couple of ways to reveal the presence of WebKit in Mail, both of which may be bugs. If you disable “Auto-play animated images” in the Accessibility…

Despite the fact that I never filed a report with Feedback Assistant, the bug that I discussed in my March 26 blog post App Store Connect analytics missing platform versions appears to be fixed now. The analytics are no longer missing iOS and macOS versions. Did my blog post spur the bug fix? I have no idea, since Apple is uncommunicative, but I’m going to try again with another bug. This time I made the mistake of first filing a report with Feedback Assistant: FB22952887 App Store Connect page…

For years, I’ve followed Reddit via RSS. I mentioned Reddit RSS feeds in a 2022 blog post. Among the various ways my customers can contact me, there’s a subreddit for my products. I follow a number of Apple-related subreddits such as r/apple, which is helpful to me in unearthing information relevant to my business and helpful to redditors, whose technical questions I sometimes answer. I also follow a few local, Wisconsin-area subreddits. Overall, I subscribe to around 25 Reddit RSS feeds. This…

Safari has traditionally supported the latest three major macOS versions. For example, Safari 26 supports macOS 26 Tahoe, macOS 15 Sequoia, and macOS 14 Sonoma. Currently, the Safari 27 beta is available only for the macOS 27 Golden Gate developer beta, but the release notes indicate that the Safari 27 beta will also become available for Tahoe and Sequoia soon, perhaps along with the macOS 27 public beta: “Safari 27 beta is available for iOS 27 beta, iPadOS 27 beta, visionOS 27 beta, macOS 27…

Back in September, I blogged about a bug that I discovered: URL/NSURL double-encodes characters unnecessarily. Despite my well-known hatred of Feedback Assistant, I reluctantly used it in this case. I’ve filed a bug report in Apple Feedback Assistant: “URL/NSURL double-encodes characters unnecessarily” (FB20439045). It turns out that miracles do happen. See today’s macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta Release Notes and iOS & iPadOS 27 Beta Release Notes. Foundation Resolved Issues Fixed: +[NSURL…

The web browser vendors continually add JavaScript API that prioritize the needs of web developers over web users. The interests of the two groups can conflict, for example because web developers often want to fingerprint and track web users, and I would note that Google Search advertising revenue provides a large part of the funding for all three of the major web browser engines: Chromium, Gecko/Quantum, and WebKit. The Origin Private File System (OPFS) is such an API, that I would call…

The Mythical Man-Month is a book by Fred Brooks about software project management. The book has become famous in the industry, along with an observation from the book known as Brooks’s law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review, the continual appearance of countless scams in the App Store, is to suggest that Apple hire more…

Checking the Mac App Store charts for my own apps, I happened to notice an oddly-named app in the top ten list of Safari extensions in the United States: App for YouTube ℠. Who names their app App? That’s absurdly generic, like naming your child Child. Or Jeff Johnson. Also curious is the service mark symbol in the app name. The App Store allows developers to use a third-party trademark in an app name (see my own Homecoming for Mastodon) as long as the trademark appears at the end of the app…

I’m unaware of any explicit policy, but Apple’s long-standing practice is to release security updates for the latest three major versions of macOS. Currently, those are macOS 26 Tahoe, macOS 15 Sequoia, and macOS 14 Sonoma. On Monday, two days ago, Apple continued that practice by releasing macOS 26.5, 15.7.7, and 14.8.7. Another long-standing practice is to include Safari updates along with the latest major version of macOS but release Safari updates separately for the previous two major…

“Prevent cross-site tracking” is a Safari privacy setting, enabled by default. When “Prevent cross-site tracking” is enabled, Cloudflare challenges require an extra step, to manually click “Verify you are human.” This extra step is not required when “Prevent cross-site tracking” is disabled, nor is it required at all in Chrome or Firefox. Here is a Cloudflare challenge demo you can try: https://sergiodemo.com/security/challenge/managed-challenge In Chrome and Firefox, as well as in Safari with…