The résumé of Jeff Johnson, professional Mac and iOS developer.
Visit lapcatsoftware.com → On Hacker News Feb 2017 – Sep 2026
Security & Privacy 24Society, Policy & Culture 11Software Engineering 9Web & Frontend 4Systems & Performance 2Tools & Productivity 1
In 2012, Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X (now macOS). When you try to run Mac software downloaded from the internet, Gatekeeper checks whether the software was signed with a valid Developer ID certificate. If not, then Gatekeeper refuses to run the software. Over the years, Gatekeeper has become more strict…
It's well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I've discovered that on Catalina, pasting a…
Why do I file bug reports with Apple Feedback Assistant ? I plead insanity. Or perhaps addiction. I seesaw between phases of abstinence and falling off the wagon. I’ve even tried organizing a public boycott of Feedback Assistant, with a list of demands to improve the experience for users, but the boycott never caught…
This is a follow-up to Allan Odgaard's excellent article macOS 10.15: Slow by Design . I want to talk specifically about the first section "Spawning a new Process", because there has been widespread misunderstanding of this. Odgaard provides a simple test to show that the first run of an executable is delayed while…
I’m sometimes late to notice new and terrible things about macOS 26 Tahoe, because I use it only for testing, on a secondary Mac. My main Mac remains on Sequoia, as enforced by Little Snitch . I was of course aware that app windows on Tahoe have exaggerated corner radiuses, but I was unaware until now that the window…
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta:
Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…
Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…
This isn't a late April Fools joke. (My April Fools joke that I got hired by Apple as a Swift Evangelist backfired with a profusion of congratulations.) This blog post is a kind of follow-up to some previous blog posts. Last month I wondered what's the best way to distribute Mac apps without notarization , and I…