Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Rewriting Apple’s Password Monitoring Service in Swift

Ricky Mondello et al. (2025, Mastodon, Hacker News): The migration from Java to Swift was motivated by a need to scale the Password Monitoring service in a performant way. The layered encryption module used by Password Monitoring requires a significant amount of computation for each request, yet the overall service needs to respond quickly even […]

Swift Server Powers Things Cloud

Vojtěch Rylko and Werner Jainek (2025): The robustness of this work is ensured by a rigorous theoretical foundation, inspired by operational transformations and Git’s internals. After twelve years in production, Things Cloud has earned our users’ trust in its reliability. But despite the enduring strength of the architecture itself, the technology stack lagged behind. […] […]

Mac App Store Search Not Showing Mac Apps

Jeremy Provost: When you search for Morpho, the App Store automatically flips you over to iPhone & iPad Apps, even though there’s a perfectly good Mac app that matches the search. To add insult to injury, searching for Morpho on the iPhone or iPad App Store does show our app first. But specifically because we’ve […]

Mac App Store Design in Tahoe

Tony Arnold: The attention to detail in Apple’s App Store app is just… not there. I draw your attention to the “Available on” subtitles below each app in the grid — they’re inconsistently truncated, some not even indicating that they are truncated. The spacing and padding also seems to be “best efforts” (check the device […]

App Store Comparison Shopping

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon): Hot on the heels of my previous blog post My collected App Store critiques, I have yet another critique. It’s undoubtedly old news to many people, my critique coming years too late, but in my defense, I almost never shop for apps in the App Store. Rather, I merely download apps in […]