turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef

Writing by tag: bugs

The MacBook sigh of death

15 February 2022
Updated: 16 February 2022

I have been experiencing bizarre kernel panics with my Mac lately. I have a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro, the last Intel model before the M1 debuted. It has generally been working fine. Despite poor software quality and numerous bugs lurking around in macOS, I rarely see kernel panics anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a kernel panic before this issue. There have been no major changes on my machine and I’m on the latest version of Monterey.

Continue…

Screen Time is drunk

16 January 2022
Updated: 14 February 2023

Speaking of drunk software and not being in service to our possessions, Screen Time on iOS and macOS has been shockingly buggy for me lately. It reports that I spent over 22 hours on my devices in a single day last week, and nearly 10 hours on another day this week. In both instances, a significant portion of the usage is supposedly occurring after midnight.

Continue…

Xcode LLDB RPC server crash

22 November 2021

A few weeks ago, I wrote about this bizarre Xcode 13 crash when running tests. I just discovered the root cause for one of the issues I mentioned in that post — I think. At the very least, I have a “fix”. The issue happens when running unit tests. Sometimes the full test suite will complete, sometimes not, and then LLDB will crash. This occurs with all of my projects. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do, the crash always happens. It has been driving me crazy.

Continue…

Xcode 13 device orientation options bug

13 November 2021

This post started out as a “how to” for SwiftUI, but as I started testing and verifying I realized it is just an Xcode 13 bug. Historically, if you wanted to restrict your iOS app to specific device orientations, you would check or uncheck the various “Device Orientation” options in your project settings. You can find these by selecting your Xcode Project > App Target > “General” tab.

Continue…

Fixing a hard-to-find bug in Dark Mode

15 July 2021

I previously wrote about implementing Dark Mode in an older codebase, specifically how Dark Mode works (or doesn’t) with CGColor. I recently fixed a bug in the same project that was difficult to track down because it manifested in such a strange way. After finding the problematic code, I realized that it is an extremely common scenario in iOS codebases — so you might have this bug in your code as well!

Continue…

Debugging a DiffableDataSource CellProvider

11 July 2021

I was recently working on a project that uses modern collection views on iOS — that is, using diffable data sources, snapshots, and cell providers. I hooked up all the components and my collection view was working, or so I thought. I started to notice some very odd, unpredictable behavior when the collection view was updated. Some of the time, the cells were updated correctly. Other times, I would see duplicates and missing data. Here’s what went wrong.

Continue…

Obscure bridgeOS crash

22 December 2020

This is a first for me. I returned to my MacBook after leaving it for a couple of hours, and it was shutdown even though I left it powered on. The machine was idle. I didn’t have any specific tasks running. I figured it might have been a macOS kernel panic, but upon rebooting I discovered that the crash was caused by bridgeOS.

Continue…

Swift, Core Data, and unit testing

Working around Swift's constraints to unit test models 05 January 2015

Core Data is probably loved as much as it is shunned by iOS developers. It is a framework of great power that often comes with great frustration. But it remains a popular tool among developers despite its pitfalls — likely because Apple continues to invest in it and encourages its adoption, as well as the availability of the many open-source libraries that make Core Data easier to use. Consider unit testing, and Core Data gets a bit more cumbersome. Luckily, there are established techniques to facilitate testing your models. Add Swift to this equation, and the learning curve gets slightly steeper.

Continue…