The Pixel Tablet

The last Google tablet released was the Nexus 9 way back in 2014 with its software support ending in the fall of 2016. Since then, Google and others have left the Android tablet market. Now, however, Google has reentered the fray with the new Pixel Tablet. This new tablet starts at $499, which places it in-between the iPad ($449) and the iPad Air ($599) with its G2 CPU (2022) roughly equating to the A13 (2019)....

Protecting App Traffic with Relays

With iOS 15 and macOS 12, Apple introduced iCloud Private Relay. This allows traffic to be protected from a degree of introspection and anonymizes your connection with the target host via MASQUE and Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP). If you combine this with encrypted DNS, you will have a much greater sense of privacy and security regarding your network traffic. Of course, some network operators take steps to disable these features to ensure that they can introspect and shape traffic on their network....

Leveraging Mergeable Libraries

When building your application with binary dependencies, you are either statically or dynamically linking them to your app. When statically linking, the symbols used are copied directly into the binary executable and discards the unused symbols. This increases the compile time of the app and the size of the binary executable, although some additional space savings (overall) can be had by using Link Time Optimization (LTO) and by using the -Os optimization level....

Xcode Supply Chain Security

Xcode 15 includes a few changes from Apple in an effort to harden the software supply chain. The majority of these changes are being phased in, while another is actively impacting developers attempting to test on the new OS versions with the new version of Xcode. First up is script sandboxing. Xcode 14 introduced a new build setting, ENABLE_USER_SCRIPT_SANDBOXING, that prevents shell scripts from accessing any files inside of SRCROOT and the Derived Data folder without being declared as inputs and outputs to the script....

Thoughts on WWDC 2023

As telegraphed, WWDC this year introduced a new product and platform: Apple Vision Pro and visionOS. Apple calls this “Spatial Computing” instead of AR/VR and they technology behind it (hardware and software) is pretty impressive. I’m still of the mindset that there is no killer set of features that’ll make this go mass market, and as a result, will still be very expensive and niche. Funnily enough, the sessions refer to this as xrOS (the original leaked name), visionOS, and “Apple’s spatial computing platform” which means that marketing came in really late and changed the name....