Ordinal0 (via Hacker News): In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools. As part […]

Brent Simmons: Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears. I’ve never used Spotlight for this on macOS (preferring LaunchBar) but have […]

Mohammad Azam: We started with a simple model. Then we added a new property and transformed existing data. Then we introduced a uniqueness constraint and cleaned up duplicates before enforcing it. Each change felt small in isolation. But every one of those changes altered the structure of data already stored on disk. […] SwiftData gives […]

Paul Ford, in an op-ed for The New York Times (gift link):

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple invited select members of the media to the event in three major cities around the world. It is simply described as a “special Apple Experience,” and there is no further information about what it may entail. The invitation features a 3D Apple logo design composed of yellow, green, and blue discs.

It is notable that Apple is specifically using the word “experience,” rather than “event.” Unlike a full live-streamed event from Apple Park, the March 4 event in other cities is likely to be smaller in scale.

Among the products expected soon — either by annual schedule predictability, or via the rumor mill — are the iPhone 17e, an updated iPad Air (going from the M3 to M4), an updated base-model iPad (going from A16 to A18), updated MacBook Pros with the M5 Pro and Max, updated MacBook Airs (going from M4 to M5 — the M4 models were released in early March last year), and, per Gurman, the long-rumored new lower-cost MacBook with an A18 chip (a “MacBook e”, if you will, although I certainly don’t think that will be the name — my guess is Apple will just call it “MacBook” without an adjective).

What strikes me is that March 4 — the “experience” day — is a Wednesday. So my spitball guess is that they announce all these products via Newsroom press releases, day-by-day. Like, say, the iPhone 17e on Monday, new iPad(s) on Tuesday, and new MacBooks on Wednesday. And then the “experience” will be a hands-on thing with in-person demos. Spread the announcements out across a few days, but then have in-person events for members of the media to get a hands-on experience with all of them, station-by-station, without needing to produce an Apple Event keynote film.