Ordinal0 (via Hacker News):
In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools.
As part of this research, I’ve built a custom parser and compiler for .car files that doesn’t depend on any of Apple’s private frameworks or proprietary tools. To make this research practical, I’ve compiled my parser to WebAssembly so it runs entirely in your browser, so no server uploads required. You can drop any .car file into the interactive demo below to explore its content.
[…]
From the decompiled BOMStorageOpenWithSys function shown above, we can infer the overall layout of a BOM file. It begins with a fixed-size header, followed by a block index table and a variables table.
[…]
While standard BOM files store installer package manifests, .car files repurpose the container for asset storage.
Asset Catalog (.car) Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Parser WebAssembly
Brent Simmons:
Spotlight has recently become terrible for launching apps after being so good for years. Now when I type something like Cal or Calendar or even Calendar.app I have to manually select the actual app in the list, if it even appears.
I’ve never used Spotlight for this on macOS (preferring LaunchBar) but have used it often with iOS. These days, I find that searching for an iOS app with Spotlight often doesn’t show the app anywhere in the results. Sometimes it will give me a Wikipedia or App Store entry even though the app is already installed on my phone. Searching with App Library does work reliably.
Update (2026-02-19): Alex:
Spotlight on my #macos #Tahoe keeps crashing because it encounters some issue inside its index.
See also: anul agarwal (via
Mr. Macintosh).
Update (2026-02-20): TanglyConstant9:
spotlight is meant to be GOOD not randomly decide its going to search the dictionary definition of the app im tryna open. this is crazy but i lowkey miss launchpad
Update (2026-03-30): Katherine Bertelsen:
What really frustrates me about this is sometimes Spotlight will just…break. For no discernable reason. On my personal laptop, Friday it could find and run apps by name no problem. Yesterday, it couldn’t. No reboots, no changes, no real anything. Just overnight it seemed to forget apps exist!
Update (2026-04-27): Jason Snell:
My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).
I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)
Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me.
Update (2026-04-29): Craig Hockenberry:
I have a serious issue on my iPhone: the Spotlight index is corrupted and I can no longer search for apps, email, notes, or messages. It’s bad.
Of course I’ve looked for clues on how to fix it but none of these work:
- Force restart
- Changing region settings
- Toggling location services for Suggestions & Search
I have not tried Reset All Settings because I don’t want to spend the next two months putting things back in order.
Update (2026-04-30): Craig Hockenberry:
That left me with one alternative: a full device backup and restore. I did this on my Mac to make it as speedy as possible, but the process still took a couple of hours. All of which I was without my primary device.
Afterwards, there were immediately problems[…]
[…]
In short, this took several days to sort out. And the entire time, it pissed me off because it was entirely avoidable.
On the Mac, there is a simple procedure to rebuild the Spotlight index. This same affordance is not available on iOS.
It just works, my ass.
Update (2026-05-05): Benjamin Mayo:
I wonder if iOS 27 will fix this minor annoyance that has existed across all versions of 26; the pop-up key preview sometimes goes behind the Spotlight search field, rather than in front.
Bug iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Search Spotlight
Mohammad Azam:
We started with a simple model. Then we added a new property and transformed existing data. Then we introduced a uniqueness constraint and cleaned up duplicates before enforcing it. Each change felt small in isolation. But every one of those changes altered the structure of data already stored on disk.
[…]
SwiftData gives you the tools to do this properly. VersionedSchema gives you structure. SchemaMigrationPlan gives you control. Custom migration stages let you reshape data intentionally instead of hoping automatic migration handles everything.
It seems like they got this part of the SwiftData API right.
Previously:
iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Swift Programming Language SwiftData
