Most Mac and iOS developers know that when you build an application, you advertise a number of details about the application in the “Info.plist” file, located inside the application bundle. You can examine any application on your Mac and see what kind of information the developer has conveyed about it: Navigate to a .app file […]

Dave Dribin offers a couple really handy tips for modifying the behavior of the “sudo” command-line tool, which allows ordinary admin users to acquire superuser powers for editing files, changing permissions, etc. Handy Sudo Settings – Dave Dribin’s Blog I knew about the ability to change the sudo timeout, but have never gotten around to […]

Developers, and some power users who are reading this have probably heard of launchd. It’s Apple’s “mama process,” responsible for launching other processes at startup, login, at regular intervals, or on demand. If you open the Activity Monitor application, and view “All Processes, Hierarchically,” you’ll see that there are only two top-level processes: kernel_task, and […]

Greg Miller describes in excruciating detail (or glorious detail, depending on your perspective) the steps required to compile, load, and unload a simple OS X Kernel Extension. It’s this kind of detailed analysis combined with a casual writing style that makes for great technical blog entries. File this one under “understanding what the eff is […]