I ran into a search problem recently in one of my Xcode projects. Every time I conducted a particular search (in this case, the search term was “CFString”), my screen was littered with a series of cascading Xcode exception dialogs that look like this: On the one hand, it’s great that Xcode goes out of […]

What are you dressing up for this Halloween? If you haven’t chosen a costume yet, let me suggest one. Using the command line tools “tcpdump” and “curl,” you can masquerade so convincingly, almost any web site will think you’re Safari! Something that came up recently on the AppleScript-Users list was a query about how to […]

Most Mac developers have, by now, given Apple’s CHUD Performance Tools Suite at least a cursory run-through. These tools, and in particular Shark, are incredibly effective for pinpointing performance problems that may be plaguing your application (or other code). The presence of these tools has helped many developers inside and outside of Apple produc more […]

Many system services on the Mac rely on command-line tools either stored in public paths or stashed away in hard-to-find places. When I’m curiously poking around on my system (as I’m a bit too often likely to be doing), I often discover one of these master-slave relationships and wonder exactly what’s going on behind the […]