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Category: Apple

A pox on everyone’s house

Published August 17, 2020

This story appears to solely take Epic’s word about Apple’s response to Epic’s recent actions (and the headline is even worse).  I see no evidence that Apple was asked for a comment, although of course they probably wouldn’t have given one.

Given that Epic has intentionally and flagrantly violated Apple’s terms and conditions, it is not surprising that Apple would be considering revoking Epic’s developer account; they’ve done this before, and with less notice. But it’s hard to agree with framing this as “retaliation” rather than enforcing a contract.

Epic’s actions of deliberately poking the bear, and then crying foul when the bear swats them down, reminds me of the classic definition of “chutzpah”: killing your parents and then throwing yourself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that you’re an orphan. It’s clear that Epic is trying to game the situation by playing things out in the court of public opinion as much as possible. As an Apple developer, I believe that certainly Apple can (and should) do much better by their developers—but Epic’s antics are unlikely to gain them much sympathy among developers, either.

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NSFileHandle permission errors

Published December 4, 2017

In a macOS programming project I have a command that allows the user to open a file containing some configuration options. This file is a property list, so the contents were being read using NSDictionary(contentsOf:); this method simply returns nil if an error occurs. I wanted to provide more details about the failure than simply “The file could not be read”, so I looked for a Foundation method that would throw an NSError. I settled on FileHandle(forReadingFrom:) and inserted the following code:

    do {
        _ = try FileHandle(forReadingFrom: url)
    }
    catch let error as NSError {
        let alert = NSAlert()
        alert.messageText = "An error occurred while reading the options file.".localized()
        alert.informativeText = error.localizedDescription
        alert.beginSheetModal(for: mainWindow) { (response) in
            if response == NSAlertSecondButtonReturn {
                OperationQueue.main.addOperation { self.resetOptions(nil) }
            }
        }
        return
    }

Then I set up a few test cases, including a file that was owned by another user (with no read permission). To my surprise, the error description implied that I was unable to write the file:

[application icon redacted]

…and while that’s also true, that’s certainly not the error I expected to get.

I looked at the error object in the debugger, and sure enough, the error code was 513 (NSFileWriteNoPermissionError) and not 257 (NSFileReadNoPermissionError). Weird.

Well, I know I’m trying to read the file, and I don’t want to confuse the user, so I changed the catch clause to handle this case:

    catch var error as NSError {
        if error.code == NSFileWriteNoPermissionError {
            error = NSError(domain: NSCocoaErrorDomain, code: NSFileReadNoPermissionError, userInfo: error.userInfo)
        }
        let alert = NSAlert()
        //...
        return
    }

…and that seemed to do nicely. But I can’t find any documentation on whether this is expected behavior or what I might be doing wrong.

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AppKit bug in 10.12.2: NSTextField with tabs in text displays incorrectly

Published December 20, 2016

UPDATE: The bug described below is fixed in macOS 10.12.4 and the workaround described is no longer necessary (except for backward compatibility).

In a recent macOS project I have an NSTextField that contains text with tab characters in order to display a data table. (The text is an NSAttributedString to which I apply an NSParagraphStyle with its tabStops property set to an array containing a number of right-aligned NSTextTabs.)

The text field was drawn as intended (with the text aligned to the tab stops) before upgrading to 10.12.2. After upgraded, the text was no longer aligned to the tab stops, and when using monospacedDigitSystemFont there were cosmetic glitches displayed as well:

Under time pressure for a release, I implemented the workaround of replacing the NSTextField with an NSTextView. (I did this dynamically since it is not obvious how to create “bare” NSTextViews in Xcode’s Interface Builder.) Using an NSTextView I was able to get the data table to display as I had intended.

When writing up this bug (#29758498; Radar, Open Radar) I tried to create a simple test case that would illustrate the issue, but on my first try to recreate the problem from scratch, the issue didn’t appear. Puzzled, I copied the code and .xib file from my application into the test project, and was able to reproduce the issue.

By examining the text of the .xib files, I discovered that my newly created .xib file has a content view with wantsLayer=”YES”, and in this case the NSTextField works as intended under 10.12.2; but the .xib file from my application (which was created before Xcode 8 was released) did not have a layer set on the content view, and this did not work under 10.12.2 (although it had worked fine on 10.12.1 and earlier). Setting a layer on the application’s window’s content view (in the View Effects tab of the Assistant Editor in Xcode) was enough to fix the issue and make the table display as intended:

(Yes, bridge players, those point counts are bogus; my test program is generating random values to insert into the table.)

My wider questions are:

  1. What happened? We know there were a lot of graphic updates in 10.12.2, but it’s odd that the problem only occurs with the system font. I haven’t investigated whether the font file itself has changed.
  2. I can’t believe I’m the only person that’s run into this (although my usual googling produced no other hits). Is this really an uncommon case? Or is this a(nother) gap in Apple’s test suite?
  3. If Apple is expecting that the default case for content views is to have wantsLayer set, then it should certainly make this more widely known. I couldn’t find any references to this issue in the AppKit release notes.
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VisualEffectPlayground in Swift

Published April 22, 2016

When searching for information on implementing vibrancy effects and NSVisualEffectView, developers often find references to the VisualEffectPlayground sample code presented by Apple at WWDC 2014. However, they soon quickly discover that Apple pulled the sample code from the Apple Developer site. Perhaps the application was thrown together for WWDC and didn’t meet the usual standard for Apple sample code; however, to date Apple has not seen fit to post any replacement. And so the search continues.

During my own search, I discovered that a Xamarin engineer named Oleg Demchenko had ported the sample code to Mono and posted it to the Xamarin samples site. In order to get a working sample application, I decided to port this code back to Swift and posted it to GitHub.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t know C# and I’m still learning Swift. Nevertheless, the resulting application appears to perform as expected (although I haven’t made an exhaustive test). I will certainly consider any pull requests.

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Downloading Office 2011

Published October 13, 2015

What do you do when it turns out that your downloaded disk image of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is on the 3TB Seagate drive that failed last week, and you didn’t back it up because you thought all that was on it was archived TiVo recordings?

Turns Out™ TJ Luoma knows what to do. Thanks, TJ.

(Next time: recovering data from a 3TB Seagate drive…)

Update 2016-01-21: Also Turns Out™ that if you already have Office 2016 installed, you can log into your Office account and go to the Install page; there is a link that says “Install previous version”.  Clicking this will download a disk image file containing an Office 2011 installer.  (The creation date of this installer is November 20, 2015, and the contents appear to be version 14.5.9; the most recent update as of this writing is 14.6.0, so remember to run Check for Updates after installing.)

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Updating the cover of the Swift iBook

Published June 17, 2014

Apple updated the cover of The Swift Programming Language to match the new book in the series, but deleting and redownloading the book within iBooks in OS X Mavericks didn’t update the cover — it continued to display the original cover.

The solution was to quit iBooks, delete the iBooks cache located at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.iBooksX, and restart iBooks.

You’re welcome, Internet.

5 Comments

Improved cwd restoration in tcsh

Published December 19, 2013

My previous post illustrating a technique for restoring the current working directory in Apple’s Terminal for tcsh users was discovered by Khoo Yit Phang, who suggested an improved version down in the comments. I’m reproducing it here for greater visibility:

if ("$?TERM_PROGRAM") then
  if ("$TERM_PROGRAM" == "Apple_Terminal") then
    alias cwdcmd '( set echo_style = both; echo -n "33]7;file://${host}${cwd:ags/ /%20/}a" )'
    cwdcmd
  endif
endif

Compared to my approach, it has two improvements: (1) by using cwdcmd (of which I was previously unaware) rather than precmd, it only runs when you actually change directories; and (2) by using a suitably configured echo, it avoids running an external command (printf is not built into tcsh, but is present in /usr/bin).

Thanks, Yit.

Update: Of course, with this technique you have to explicitly run the command once, to restore the working directory to the title bar for the first time when you start up. Fixed above.

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Current working directory restoration in Mavericks Terminal with tcsh

Published October 25, 2013

In John Siracusa’s excellent review of OS X Mavericks, he (originally) mentioned that the Terminal application is able to restore the current working directory of open shells across launches.

However, this section has subsequently disappeared from the online version, perhaps for the reasons given below (update: see below). Try looking here for a cached version of the original; scroll down to page/slide number 94. Sorry, John. Please purchase the full review on the iBooks store or the Amazon Kindle store to support John’s work.

Of course I was excited to try this out as, in the course of my work as a software developer, I often have several shell windows open in specific directories. So I tried it, and it didn’t work. It turns out the built-in support supplied by Apple assumes that you’re using the bash shell, but as an old-timer I’m stuck on tcsh instead:

Well, that’s no good, I thought. So I looked in the supporting code’s implementation (/etc/bashrc), and figured out how to do the same thing in tcsh. Simply place the following in your .tcshrc file:

if ("$?TERM_PROGRAM") then
 if ("$TERM_PROGRAM" == "Apple_Terminal") then
  alias precmd 'printf "33]7;%sa" "file://$host$cwd:ags/ /%20/"'
 endif
endif

This uses the appropriate escape sequence to send the URL of the current working directory to the terminal before each command; Terminal detects this information and uses it to update the state of the window (including a proxy icon in the window’s title bar for the corresponding folder). It turns out that the key is doing it using precmd (tcsh’s equivalent of PROMPT_COMMAND), and not sending the sequence in the prompt string itself as one might think. (The outer if statement is necessary to avoid an error when remotely logging in, as with ssh. It has to be a separate statement because of the variable expansion rules in tcsh.)

I’ve notified John via Twitter, so perhaps he add restore this information back to his review. In any case, it’s documented here for future generations. Drop me a note below if you have any issues with it.

Update: It turns out John removed it because he discovered it was a feature in Mountain Lion as well, which had happened not to work on his machine:

If you listen to John’s podcasts, you’ll realize that makes sense: he wouldn’t let something not new in Mavericks stand in the Mavericks review. Regardless, I wasn’t aware of the feature before and it still wouldn’t have worked in tcsh, so this post is presumably still useful. (Note that I haven’t tried it on Mountain Lion, and I’ve already upgraded my working machines to Mavericks; I don’t know why this technique wouldn’t work on Mountain Lion, but use it at your own risk.)

Update 2: OK, so it turns out the feature was first implemented in Lion, and other people have already figured out how to port it to other shells; see here for an implementation in zsh, for example. How did I manage to not learn about this for the last two years? Oh, well…

5 Comments

“Regime Change” at Apple

Published October 30, 2012

Matt Drance nails it:

There’s a long-standing pattern of separating watershed products important to the company’s future. The Mac and Apple teams. Mac OS X and Classic. The iPod division. iOS and Mac OS X. Suddenly, Tim Cook has pulled the reins in. Federighi owns software. Ive owns design. Cue owns services. Period.

Apple’s insane growth has pushed the situation over the edge. Too much size and separation inevitably bring politics, chaos, dropped balls, and finger pointing. None of those things are good for Apple’s products or customers.

Best summary of the significance of the change I’ve heard to date.  This should end up being a net positive for Apple (despite the loss of Forstall’s talent, which was apparently becoming increasingly overshadowed by his interpersonal style).  And, to overuse a cliché, this is now Tim Cook’s Apple.

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Where have you gone, Fake Steve Jobs?

Published April 5, 2009

As Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons made a terrific anonymous satirist. As Newsweek’s technology columnist, he leaves something to be desired.

Pass over the Microsoft marketer’s crack about Macs being “washed with unicorn tears” pass by, because, really, that just makes him look like a dick. Move on to Lyons’ observation that Apple is declining to build cheap netbooks and instead, “in January … rolled out that 17-inch laptop with a $2,800 price tag. Talk about tone-deaf.”

Yes, how terribly tone-deaf to introduce a long awaited upgrade to a machine in high demand among Apple’s customer base, on which Apple can continue to make a comfortable profit margin in a difficult economic environment by selling customers with ready money just the machine they want. What could they have possibly been thinking?

Meanwhile, PC manufacturers race to the bottom and wring the last bits of profit from cheaper and cheaper machines. But that’s no skin off Microsoft’s nose, because they (presumably) get the same profit putting Windows on netbooks as they do on high-end workstations.

In fact, Microsoft probably makes more off netbooks, because they typically ship with Windows XP, for which the bulk of Microsoft’s R&D costs have long since been paid.) No wonder they’re “turning the corner.”

Meanwhile, Apple has consistently declined to compete in the low-end market, and yet has continued to flourish financially, to the bewilderment of analysts everywhere. Presumably, unlike doctors, financial analysts are not taught about Willie Sutton.

As for me, I’m looking towards Apple’s next set of financial results, due out on the 22nd of April. I’m also (speculatively) waiting for the day when Apple announces its next low-cost portable computing device, which I predict will (a) not be a “netbook” as we think of one today, (b) cost significantly more than $300, and (c) sell like hotcakes.

I’ll come back to Dan Lyons’ “commentary” then.

(Tip of the hat to Daring Fireball.)

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