Swift has been announced at the WWDC 2014, more than 2 years ago. Most of the sample code projects from Apple are now written in Swift. But does Apple use Swift in iOS 10.1 and macOS 10.12.1?
In a previous post CryptedHelloWorld: App with encrypted mach-o sections, I created a simple macOS app CryptedHelloWorld with its (__TEXT, __text) section encrypted. The section is decrypted by a constructor function.
This post explains how to dump the decrypted app. A common way is to attach the app with a debugger (GDB, LLDB) and manually dump the decrypted memory to disk.
Mail.app in macOS 10.11 and earlier used to check the plugins compatibility using the SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs key in the plugin’s Info.plist. For example a Mail plugin would only be compatible with macOS 10.11.6 if its Info.plist contained the following:
In a previous post ( constructor and destructor attributes ), I described the constructor attribute and mentioned software protection as a possible use case:
A constructor attribute could be used to implement a software protection. You could encrypt your executable with a custom encryption and use a constructor function to decrypt the binary just before it is loaded.
In this post I describe such a protection with an example.
Until macOS 10.11.4 and iOS 9.3.1 CommonCrypto/corecrypto supported Blowfish operations with key sizes longer than 448 bits. Starting with macOS 10.11.5 and iOS 9.3.2 this is no longer the case: the minimum and maximum key sizes are now enforced (respectively kCCKeySizeMinBlowfish 8 bytes and kCCKeySizeMaxBlowfish 56 bytes).
The State Preservation and Restoration system is well documented here: Preserving Your App’s Visual Appearance Across Launches.
But what is not well known is that there is a secret preference to enable debug logs.
Let’s say you want to have a different behavior in your app depending on whether you build it in Xcode or you perform an Archive. And you want this behavior to be done at compile time. Note that the use of different configurations is not what is wanted.
OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ added a new feature to Mail.app Swipe to manage your inbox:
Swipe to manage your inbox.
Now you can take care of your email with a swipe, just like on your iOS devices. Need to triage your inbox? Swipe right to mark an email as read or unread, or swipe left to delete. You’ll be focused on what’s important in no time.
I find this new feature extremely annoying as I keep triggering it by accident. Sadly it seems that there is no preference (even secret preference) to disable this feature. But the good news is that Mail.app supports plugins.