Notices by Jeff Johnson (lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social)

If Apple wants to notify users of new features, here's a crazy idea:

Put new features only into major OS updates with Apple keynotes and massive media coverage, not into minor security updates that are installed automatically.

No billionaire has a conscience. The very act of accumulating that much money and power demonstrates clearly their priorities and values. Anyone who isn't a glutton is eventually sated, but they're never sated.

It's a mistake to view the past behavior of billionaires as representing their true selves and their present behavior as deference or fear. To the contrary, they now feel safe to take off their masks and reveal the monsters underneath, because one of their own is in power.

Web docs:
"The id global attribute defines an identifier (ID) which must be unique in the whole document."

YouTube:
> document.querySelectorAll("#dismissible").length
142

https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/id

Apple Passwords is hostile to backups

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/1/4.html

StopTheMadness Pro 13.0 released in the App Store

Can protect against double-clickjacking attacks!

https://underpassapp.com/news/2025/1/2.html

Sync is not the same as backup. That's a fundamental truth most people don't seem to understand.

One of the purposes of backups is to guard against data loss or corruption due to sync issues.

Contacts is severely fucked on Sequoia. I even tried replacing ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ but Contacts is still empty, even though all of the data is on disk!

Wait, now it suddenly works for some reason WTF.

macOS bug:

1. Select some text in a web page in Safari
2. Click in Finder to activate
3. Right-click on the text in Safari to bring up the contextual menu
4. Left-click in Safari to dismiss the contextual menu
5. Left-click again in Safari to "activate" the window

The window appears to be active, but it mostly doesn't work: hover effects, link clicks, command-w, etc.

It might be related to this bug:

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/01/02/two-foreground-windows/

WebKit adds another YouTube quirk to fix the previous YouTube quirk. Have they considered just getting rid of quirks?

I had to add a quirk to StopTheMadness to work around a bug caused by the WebKit quirk.

And once again, they desperately need Safari Technology Preview for iOS.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/1fb3367b0a4fb304a289c0f59ac61b6c85ab4101

9 year old WebKit bug just fixed!

document.execCommand("copy") only triggers if there is a selection

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156529

"This blog is not affiliated with my employer, but I just happen to blog exclusively about things that my employer pays me 6 figures a year to work on and promote."

"Few people are cut out to be the CEO of a large multinational company like Apple. Sometimes you have to eat the shit sandwich."

Tim Cook is literally a billionaire. If he was fired tomorrow, he'd be fine, indeed great, better off than any of us.

No, Cook doesn't have to eat the shit sandwich. He deliberately chose it from the menu. He chose company over country, profit over principle. He's the one of the lowest forms of scum.

That's my bug!

https://webkit.org/blog/16406/release-notes-for-safari-technology-preview-210/

Sometimes (often) I regret supporting Chrome and Firefox.

Here's a crazy thought:

How about not releasing new major OS updates every goddamn year. https://mastodon.social/@cultofmac/113639630849729042

Web Inspector: Crash when opening the web inspector for the first time

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283874

It was a one character bug: missing ! https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/113523519683254521

The question is not, what would Steve Jobs do?

The question is, what would someone do who actually gave a shit about users and the user interface?

Jobs was one of them. Cook is not. We don't need to resurrect Steve to know that, or to know what to do.

Honestly, I was never interested in the masses on Twitter. That service was best in the 2000s before the celebrities arrived.

Niche is a feature, not a bug.

It’s awesome that I rank higher than Apple in Google search results.