YoungCraxy: This is about to drive me crazy, whenever I capture a snapshot, when I press the camera, sometimes a black screen pops up and this doesn’t go away, I can’t shoot anything, I have to go in and out of the camera again. There are two really annoying iOS camera bugs, which I’ve been meaning to write about for years: Sometimes, when I launch the Camera app, I see the controls but everything else is black. It’s as if there’s a cover over the lens. Exiting and reopening the app fixes the problem, although if I had opened the camera from the lock screen, swiping back to the lock screen ..read more

SE-0436 (via Becca Royal-Gordon): Swift has always had a mechanism that allows Objective-C code to use Swift types: the @objc attribute. When a class is marked with @objc (or, more typically, inherits from an @objc or imported Objective-C class), Swift generates sufficient Objective-C metadata to allow it to be used through the Objective-C runtime, and prints a translated Objective-C declaration into a generated header file that can be imported into Objective-C code. The same goes for members of the class. This feature works really well for mixed-language apps and project-internal frameworks ..read more

Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News): At least 224 people with diabetes have reported injuries linked to a defective iOS app that caused their insulin pumps to shut down prematurely, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On Wednesday, the agency announced that California-based medical device manufacturer Tandem Diabetes Care has issued a recall for version 2.7 of the iOS t:connect mobile app, which is used in conjunction with the company’s t:slim X2 insulin pump. Specifically, the recall relates to a software issue that can cause the app to repeatedly crash and relaunch, resulting ..read more

Emma Roth (Hacker News): Apple has apologized after a commercial meant to showcase its brand-new iPad Pro drew widespread criticism among the creative community. In a statement provided to Ad Age, Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.” “Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Myhren told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and w ..read more

Apple (PDF, via Ivan Krstić): Unless otherwise noted, this documentation covers the following operating system versions: iOS 17.3, iPadOS 17.3, macOS 14.3, tvOS 17.3, and watchOS 10.3. Apple: Topics added: Cryptex1 Image4 Manifest Hash (spih) Cryptex1 Generation (stng) BlastDoor for Messages and IDS Lockdown Mode security About App Store security WidgetKit security I thought I must have missed last year’s update, but it looks like the previous revision was in December 2022. Apple: Certain instructions on ARM64, including but not limited to those described in Arm Architecture ..read more

Adam Kohler and Christopher Lopez: The downloaded DMG contains an application bundle. Normally, macOS applications instruct the user to drag such apps into the /Applications folder. But in this case, it tells the user to right-click on it and click Open. […] Looking into the upd file in the original bundle, we found that it is signed adhoc with no developer ID. This means that Gatekeeper will initially stop the app from running and require the user to manually allow it. […] The application then creates a new copy of upd, renames it DumpMediaSpotifyMusicConverter, and places it in a hidden fol ..read more

Eswar: A new local privilege escalation vulnerability has been discovered in macOS which could allow any user to escalate their privileges to root by mounting filesystems using “diskutil” command line utility. This new vulnerability has been assigned with CVE-2023-42931 and the severity is yet to be categorized. […] If a user has mount privileges on the macOS, then the user needs to find a file which has the following conditions. Owned by root when mounted in “owners” mode; Considered owned by myself when mounted in “noowners” mode; Not protected by SIP. […] After creating this suidshell bi ..read more

Caleb Basinger: We don’t buy apps through the App Store. Rather, we purchase licenses in bulk—one for every employee or device—through Apple’s Apps and Books program, part of Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager. […] The only problem is that Apps and Books doesn’t support in-app purchases or in-app subscriptions. That means we can’t access the features we need with the licenses we buy that way. […] Without altering your existing app on the App Store, you could use the same code-base to create a second, fully paid premium version of it that includes all the features we need. You cou ..read more

Federico Viticci: In iOS 17, you can create a contact poster, which is essentially a combination of a profile picture and artwork that will represent you when calling other people on the phone, FaceTime, and other apps compatible with the CallKit framework. […] When a call comes in from one of my friends who’s created a contact poster on iOS 17, I like that I can see a little bit of their personality and taste in the poster they’ve chosen for themselves. Just like profile pictures before, you can choose to automatically share your poster with your contacts; you can either accept someone else ..read more

Maxime Chevalier: What I’ve concluded, based on experience, is that positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve made yourself subject to the whims of the canonical implementation. They have control over the direction of the project, and all you can do is try to keep up. In the case of JITted implementations of traditionally interpreted languages, there’s a bit of a weird dynamic, because it’s much fas ..read more