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XPC

Controlling processes and environments

How can you run an app in a language different to that set for your system? Why doesn’t that work for command tools? And how difficult can a tool make controlling its environment?

December 10, 2020 Macs, Technology

Bad design makes macOS a Tower of Babel

SilentKnight was producing some results in a mixture of English and Dutch. Its environment settings needed correction. When that didn’t fix it, I looked deeper to find language-unfriendly design in a command tool.

December 5, 2020 Macs, Technology

Background activity scheduling with CTS in Catalina

CTS now schedules many important services, including syncing Calendar, Contacts, Messages, running weekly firmware checks with eficheck, and more.

October 19, 2020 Macs, Technology

What happens when background scheduling fails

CTS scheduling and dispatch of background tasks has no user interface, and no controls. How can you tell that there’s a problem, and what to do about it?

October 17, 2020 Macs, Technology

How macOS schedules and dispatches background tasks using CTS 3

What does it take for an app to have ‘activities’ managed for efficiency by CTS? Not a lot – but in return, the management is a black box.

October 15, 2020 Macs, Technology

How macOS schedules and dispatches background tasks using CTS 2

In the first article in this series, I explained how a great many background activities in macOS, including […]

October 14, 2020 Macs, Technology

How macOS schedules and dispatches background tasks using CTS 1

Rather than using cron or launchd, many background services in macOS are now run using Centralized Task Scheduling (CTS). This is how it works.

October 13, 2020 Macs, Technology

Hardened runtime, sandboxing and XPC services

Jeff Johnson of @lapcatsoftware has just published an excellent technical article looking at controversial issues over hardening, sandboxing, […]

November 7, 2019 Macs, Technology

Starting up in Sierra: a fuller account for troubleshooting

T T Read More

A detailed examination of what happens during the first few minutes after starting your Mac up. Vital for anyone trying to diagnose problems in that period.

November 20, 2017 Macs, Technology

Reliability of macOS Sierra: scheduled and background activities

Scheduling background activities like making backups has moved from cron to launchd, and now to a more complex system. This has reduced the reliability of macOS and made it harder to support.

August 26, 2017 Macs, Technology

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