Archive for April 2, 2025

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Moving Targets

Nick Lockwood:

Airdrop on macOS has this “great” feature where it displays receivers asynchronously as it finds them and they are sorted alphabetically, so the order shuffles randomly under the mouse as you are trying to click

Brought to you by the guy who sent a file to a random colleague when trying to share it between two machines 😩

Norbert Heger:

Hey Apple, I found a layout bug in Mail.app. The rightmost category button is always truncated…

I assume this is intentional because otherwise there would be no indication that you could scroll to find more buttons.

Mario Guzmán:

Lesson 1 in #UIUX… your buttons should not be moving targets. Especially if they’re toggles.

Look at how if I toggle on “Transactions” and then toggle it off, I am no longer in the bounds of that button. TF?!

I have a feeling this was designed for touch and touch only. It wouldn’t matter there because you lift your finger after tapping…

Previously:

Swift Testing: Return Errors From #expect(throws:)

Also new in Swift 6.1, ST-0006:

We offer three variants of #expect(throws:):

  • One that takes an error type, and matches any error of the same type;
  • One that takes an error instance (conforming to Equatable) and matches any error that compares equal to it; and
  • One that takes a trailing closure and allows test authors to write arbitrary validation logic.

The third overload has proven to be somewhat problematic. First, it yields the error to its closure as an instance of any Error, which typically forces the developer to cast it before doing any useful comparisons. Second, the test author must return true to indicate the error matched and false to indicate it didn’t, which can be both logically confusing and difficult to express concisely[…]

Note that, with Swift 6.0, only the third variant actually lets you access the thrown error. So that’s what I always used, but I found it awkward. I’d been using a helper method to make it a little better:

func expect<T, E>(sourceLocation: SourceLocation = #_sourceLocation,
                  _ performing: () throws -> T,
                  throws errorChecker: (E) -> Void) {
    // @SwiftIssue: Must write this separately or it won't type-check.
    func errorMatcher(_ e: any Error) throws -> Bool {
        let error = try #require(e as? E, sourceLocation: sourceLocation)
        errorChecker(error)
        return true
    }
    #expect(sourceLocation: sourceLocation, 
            performing: performing, 
            throws: errorMatcher)
}

This would do the cast, but I think it was still not great:

expect {
    try // something
} throws: { (error: MJTError) in
    // check `error`
}

With Swift 6.1, the first two variants return the matched error, so I can just write:

let error = try #require(throws: MJTError.self) {
    try // something
}
// check `error`

Much better! Note that I’ve switched from #expect to #require because it doesn’t really work to do:

if let error = #expect(throws: MJTError.self) // ...

The if doesn’t interact well with the trailing closure syntax, so I think I would have to write it like:

let error = #expect(throws: MJTError.self) {
    try // something
}
if let error {
    // check `error`
}

if I really wanted to continue after the error didn’t match.

Note that if you don’t care what the error is but do want to look at it, you can pass (any Error).self as the error type.

I was also wondering, now that we have typed throws, why doesn’t it check at compile time that the test code throws the right type of error? The answer:

If we adopted typed throws in the signatures of these macros, it would force adoption of typed throws in the code under test even when it may not be appropriate. For example, if we adopted typed throws, the following code would not compile[…]

Previously:

Severed Edits

Ernie Smith (via Hacker News):

But it of course raises the question: Do they make Apple‘s shows on Macs? As the second season of Severance ended in dramatic fashion, Apple decided to answer that question, and the answer was … surprisingly confusing.

[…]

In the video Apple released, which highlights the Mac-driven editing process that Ben Stiller's team is using, something stood out to me: Wait, the video is super-jittery—this makes the Mac Mini look rough. What's going on?

Then, after about 10 minutes of watching, I saw it: The show’s lead editor, Geoffrey Richman, was working on a remote Mac through Jump Desktop, a screen sharing tool known for its high-speed “fluid remote desktop” feature.

[…]

To me, though, it highlights a huge issue with Apple’s current professional offerings. They are built to work on a single machine. At least for high-end use cases, the remote workflow threatens to cut them out of the equation entirely, as cloud devices with access to nearly unlimited resources gradually outpace individual machines. In fact, there is a version of the editor he was using, Avid Media Composer, that is cloud-based and built specifically for this very use case.

See also: John Gruber.

Previously:

Rebuilding the Social Security Administration’s Codebase

Makena Kelly (Hacker News):

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

[…]

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

[…]

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

When the original X.com merged with PayPal, Musk wanted to rewrite the code and switch everything from Unix to Windows. Part of the thinking, if I recall, was that it would be easier to hire Windows developers. The original PayPal engineering team rejected this and maneuvered to have him replaced as CEO.

It probably is a good idea to modernize old government systems and get them off COBOL, but Musk is not known for the careful approach that doing this properly would require. Still, it’s interesting to think about how this should be done. I wonder if they could run the new system in a sandbox for a year, feeding it all the same inputs, and see whether it generates the same outputs.

Note that the existing system is tested but not problem-free. It seems to be pretty reliable about dispensing payments, but there have been multiple multi-month periods where I was not able to log into my account or I could log in but it wasn’t functional.

Previously:

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