Cocoa Switch

Charles proxy checklist
Charles documentation and some blog posts advise to use Help → SSL Proxying → Install Charles Root Certificate in iOS Simulators command. But this stopped working for me in recent years. However, I have found a workaround. Instead of the install command, I press “Save Charles Root Certificate…” into my Mac and then drag the .pem file into the Simulator.

Then go through the checklist.
1. The Simulator has a certificate installed at Settings → General → About → Certificate Trust Settings.
2. Add domain and port to SSL Proxying Settings, e.g. apple.com:443
3. Finally, enable the macOS proxy for the Simulator through the menu or menu bar icon
→ 11:17 AM, Apr 15

Watched the Civil War two days ago, it was a thrilling emotional ride. A film about war photography. We watched it at Curzon in Victoria (London). The screen (screen 5) was not huge it had nice seats and the sound was separated. The screen didn’t feel small. It worked great in the cinema because the picture took the entire canvas.

A bit earlier this week we also watched Oscar winner 20 Days in Mariupol at home. Be warned it has footage of dead babies killed by Russian invaders. Picture quality is not good for obvious reasons, but you shouldn’t worry about these things while watching real war footage unfolding.

→ 12:48 PM, Apr 13

‘We’re only holding back the Russians with crowdfunded drones’, says Ukraine commander

I listen to every episode of Ukraine: The Latest since August last year. I would like to share yesterday’s episode – it has an interview with Lt Col Куриленко. This is the first time I heard him and both questions and answers are insightful and valuable. Listen to Russia sucks top naval commander (Overcast). Also available as an article.

→ 9:08 AM, Apr 13

I’m introducing my kids to Patapon remasters. Sadly Patapon and Loco Roco developers were laid off in April 2021. I had great memories playing both on the original PSP. If you worked on any of these amazing games, thank you. Japan Studio, you are legends.

→ 8:37 AM, Mar 21

Word of caution on Sonoma 14.3.1 using the save command on PDF form using new AI features in Apple Preview erases my edits. Ironically just closing a window works as expected and content is not lost. I reproduced this bug on 2 Macs already.

→ 7:17 PM, Mar 20

I realised that custom or overcomplicated user interfaces irritate me even more over longer periods. I have little energy when doing repetitive tasks daily on my iPhone and Mac, I don’t enjoy interacting with one-of-a-kind interfaces.

→ 8:00 PM, Mar 16

Had a long and frustrating experience using my iPhone. The keyboard was especially slow. I knew something was odd and was blaming old hardware instead of realising it was a dream.

→ 10:08 AM, Mar 10

I can’t be 100% sure but I think I just lost my 2FA after doing iCloud Keychain import from 1Password. I had the same password in both places but 2FA existed only in iCloud Keychain. Lessons learned — only import passwords into an empty keychain.

→ 1:39 PM, Mar 6

This week there’s an interesting interview with Mark Zuckerberg defending the Meta Quest. I welcome the competition. Android was a tremendous factor in pushing Apple to make the iPhone better. I am convinced that investment behind the Apple Silicone is partially possible due to competition from Google and Samsung. Apple’s custom processors are a big win for iPhone consumers. I am hopeful that Meta products will push Apple to work harder.

From my podcast feed, two close friends recorded a podcast while wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets. Listen to The Talk Show with Adam Lisagor. If you are optimistic and excited about Apple Vision Pro, you will enjoy this episode. In short, the episode reassured me once more that Apple made the right choice by shipping this device in 2024. John mentioned that he was eager for more people to get the headset so they could experience what he experienced. And they talk about powerful feelings and excitement almost reaching the level of the original iPhone debute.

→ 7:13 PM, Feb 16

Disable Safari iCloud features

Yesterday I had an issue using The Telegraph website, subdomain pages didn’t recognise active login sessions and hid parts of the content offering me to sign in. iOS Safari lacks some of the great Mac features. For instance, it doesn’t allow cache management per domain basis, it only has the option to remove all cache at once. After I nuked all the caches it fixed my issue but something unexpected happened. I started to notice that Safari auto-fill stopped working on my Mac. Turns out that clearing website data on my iPhone removed all auto-complete suggestions from my Mac. I didn’t expect this and for me, it felt like a bug, not a feature.

Naturally, I disabled iCloud toggle for Safari on my Mac. Previously I only had it off on my work laptop. I can’t see any benefits to keeping it enabled on my personal Mac either.

I also found using shared history overbearing. When looking into history, I am always looking into websites I open on a current device. Disabling iCloud for Safari also made it better.

You can disable iCloud for Safari by opening System Settings, clicking on your avatar and then iCloud, then “Show More Apps…”, and then you can turn the Safari toggle off.

Something to keep in mind, iCloud Tabs won’t work. Unlike Chrome, Safari doesn’t sync tabs, which I like. It does show open tabs from other devices, it used to be more accessible with a button, now iCloud tabs are a section on the Safari start page.

I think it is good that Apple offers this setting, and it is also available for the rest of the apps but there’s room for improvement. As mentioned many times by Michael Tsai, when you sign in to iCloud for the first time, it enables all the services by default. When considering the use case using work Mac, what you want by default is everything to be disabled, and then granting access to the only things you want to sync. I wish there was an extra confirmation step to make these settings more discoverable and help avoid personal files downloading into work Macs.

→ 7:13 PM, Feb 16