More and more Apple Platform developers are migrating away from CocoaPods in favor the Swift Package Manager, which is Apple’s first-party tool for managing and integrating dependencies. While it is still not quite a complete replacement for CocoaPods, it is getting closer. Unfortunately, SwiftPM’s integration with Xcode still has a number of shortcomings, even though it was introduced with Xcode 11 — 4 years ago. The worst bug is that Xcode frequently and randomly deletes the Package.resolved, which in turn produces dozens or hundreds of 'missing package product' errors. Here’s how I’ve worked around this bug on a team I work on.

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On macOS 14 Sonoma there is a regression in Swift 5.9 which causes Swift scripts that import Cocoa frameworks to fail. This issue was first reported by @rdj. I discovered it myself shortly after. There is a ticket open at #68785 on the main Swift repo on GitHub to track the issue.

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Since iOS 15 and and macOS 12, or whenever Apple launched the new “Start Page” for Safari, I’ve had various issues getting tabs to sync across my devices. It seems to be a common problem.

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I have been experiencing bizarre kernel panics with my Mac lately. I have a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro, the last Intel model before the M1 debuted. It has generally been working fine. Despite poor software quality and numerous bugs lurking around in macOS, I rarely see kernel panics anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a kernel panic before this issue. There have been no major changes on my machine and I’m on the latest version of Monterey.

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As a user, the recent issues with iCloud are extremely frustrating — especially if you’ve paid for iCloud and paid for apps that use iCloud. It seems like the iCloud team is having a difficult time preventing and avoiding clusterfucks. The lack of reliability should be a concern to everyone.

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Speaking of drunk software and not being in service to our possessions, Screen Time on iOS and macOS has been shockingly buggy for me lately. It reports that I spent over 22 hours on my devices in a single day last week, and nearly 10 hours on another day this week. In both instances, a significant portion of the usage is supposedly occurring after midnight.

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As I wrote previously, I really like iOS App Library. Automatically organize all of my apps for me? Yes, please and thank you. However, I’ve recently experienced some bizarre bugs with it in iOS 15.

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Well, it appears my saga of obscure errors with Time Machine continues. The first issue I had was in 2020 with macOS Catalina and “error 45”. That error was fixed (for me) in Big Sur in 2021. As of this week, the error is back, though this time on macOS Monterey.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about this bizarre Xcode 13 crash when running tests. I just discovered the root cause for one of the issues I mentioned in that post — I think. At the very least, I have a “fix”. The issue happens when running unit tests. Sometimes the full test suite will complete, sometimes not, and then LLDB will crash. This occurs with all of my projects. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do, the crash always happens. It has been driving me crazy.

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This post started out as a “how to” for SwiftUI, but as I started testing and verifying I realized it is just an Xcode 13 bug. Historically, if you wanted to restrict your iOS app to specific device orientations, you would check or uncheck the various “Device Orientation” options in your project settings. You can find these by selecting your Xcode Project > App Target > “General” tab.

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I discovered a bug in Xcode 13 where tests crash for framework projects, preventing unit tests from successfully running on CI. The issue is due to some obscure code signing or debugger error that did not occur on Xcode 12. Fortunately, I have found a workaround.

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I previously wrote about implementing Dark Mode in an older codebase, specifically how Dark Mode works (or doesn’t) with CGColor. I recently fixed a bug in the same project that was difficult to track down because it manifested in such a strange way. After finding the problematic code, I realized that it is an extremely common scenario in iOS codebases — so you might have this bug in your code as well!

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I was recently working on a project that uses modern collection views on iOS — that is, using diffable data sources, snapshots, and cell providers. I hooked up all the components and my collection view was working, or so I thought. I started to notice some very odd, unpredictable behavior when the collection view was updated. Some of the time, the cells were updated correctly. Other times, I would see duplicates and missing data. Here’s what went wrong.

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Previously, I wrote about Time Machine “error 45”, an obscure bug in macOS Catalina. I still have no idea what was causing backups to fail, nor what “error 45” means. However, I am happy to report that I think this issue has been fixed in Big Sur.

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This post is mostly for posterity, for anyone currently experiencing these bugs on macOS, and to praise Titanium Software’s excellent Mac utility app OnyX.

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The Touch Bar on my MacBook started freezing and experiencing UI glitches recently. It was completely unresponsive. At the time, the only way I knew to fix it was to reboot my entire machine, which felt ridiculous. Luckily, there is a better way.

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This is a first for me. I returned to my MacBook after leaving it for a couple of hours, and it was shutdown even though I left it powered on. The machine was idle. I didn’t have any specific tasks running. I figured it might have been a macOS kernel panic, but upon rebooting I discovered that the crash was caused by bridgeOS.

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This is a brief follow-up to the post I wrote about Time Machine failing on macOS Catalina.

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When I first upgraded to macOS Catalina, there was a “Relocated Items” folder on the desktop. Well, actually it was an alias to /Users/Shared/Relocated Items/. This was expected, given the new “security features” in Catalina, which includes a new read-only system volume. What I did not expect was to see this folder reappear with every single update.

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Core Data is probably loved as much as it is shunned by iOS developers. It is a framework of great power that often comes with great frustration. But it remains a popular tool among developers despite its pitfalls — likely because Apple continues to invest in it and encourages its adoption, as well as the availability of the many open-source libraries that make Core Data easier to use. Consider unit testing, and Core Data gets a bit more cumbersome. Luckily, there are established techniques to facilitate testing your models. Add Swift to this equation, and the learning curve gets slightly steeper.

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