A perfect little feature: Universal Clipboard

Apple product photo for Universal Clipboard, showing an iPhone next to a MacBook Pro, with an image selected on the iPhone and 'Copy' highlighted in the pop-up menu, and that same image in a Pages document on the Mac, implying it was just pasted there.

Perhaps in karmic balance of my previous post critical of one of Apple’s APIs, I want to highlight an Apple OS feature that I use every day, that ironically is so simple, obvious, and reliable that I almost never stop to appreciate it. Universal Clipboard basically just means you can copy something on one device… Read more

-fomit-frame-pointer

Explanatory diagram of frame pointers, showing a link from the x86-64 register %rbp to the start of the current frame, which holds the prior value of %rbp that points to the top of the previous frame, and so on.

This is an elaboration of a post I made in a Swift Forums thread, SE-0419: Swift Backtracing API. The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation”… Read more

The most unpopular popular websites

Screenshot of the Kagi Search home page, showing a very clean, simple page with essentially just the logo, the mascot Doggo, a text field, and a Search button. Very reminiscent of what Google Search's home page used to look like a long time ago.

Tonight I decided to give Kagi a try, after hearing John Gruber mention it a few times on Daring Fireball. I’ve used a mix of DuckDuckGo and Bing for over a decade now, and occasionally will still try Google in desperation. What I’ve noticed is a decade-long trend – accelerating in the last year or… Read more