Seth Willits (2024, bug):

There’s a deprecation warning in Xcode for URL.path that reads:

WARNING: path will be deprecated in a future version of macOS: Use path(percentEncoded:) instead

The problem is something like this:

Bundle.main.url(forAuxiliaryExecutable: "tool")!.path

… which returns the expected file path (ex: /Applications/MyApp.app/Contents/tool)

would be quickly rewritten as suggested to:

Bundle.main.url(forAuxiliaryExecutable: "tool")!.path(percentEncoded: false)

… which simply returns tool, because the URL returned is relative to a base URL.

[…]

I’ve always found it not-completely-obvious to newcomers how to get a standard file path string from a file URL and this only makes it more confusing.

There are at least three issues here:

1. url.path returns an absolute path, but url.path(percentEncoded: false) returned a relative path as of his writing. I tested this on macOS 26, and now it returns an absolute path. The documentation now says, “This function will resolve against the base URL.” It seems the behavior of the method changed without it being documented when, so be careful if you’re deploying to a mix of OS versions.

2. percentEncoded has a default value of true, whereas path did not return an encoded string. In other words, url.path() and url.path are completely different. So this is another case where Apple updated the API but flipped the default—a good way to introduce bugs.

3. It’s not obvious how to get the full file system path out of a URL. With NSURL, url.path was natural and did the right thing. Now, the URL equivalent is deprecated.

   The natural replacement, url.path(), is wrong. So is Xcode’s recommendation of url.(percentEncoded: false).

   url.absoluteURL.path(percentEncoded: false) is correct but verbose.

   url.absoluteURL.standardizedFileURL.path(percentEncoded: false) is possibly better but even more verbose.

   FilePath(url)?.string uses a newer API but gives you an optional, even though for a file URL it should never fail.

   This seems like such basic functionality, but there’s no API that’s the obvious right choice, concise, and ergonomic.

Previously:

• The Switch From File Paths to URLs
• Swift URL Improvements at WWDC 2022
• Proposed Foundation URL Improvements
• URL Path Retrieval Cheat Sheet
• NSURL Path Handling

EagleFiler 1.9.22 is a maintenance release of my Mac file/note organizer and e-mail archiving app. This version works around various bugs in macOS 27, adds capture support for the Thorium Web browser, and improves importing from Mariner Paperless.

• macOS 27 broke several things with drag and drop out of Apple Mail. Simply trying to read a URL from the pasteboard will cause a hang while it waits forever for the pasteboard server (FB24803817). The same thing happens when using PasteboardSetPasteLocation() and reading kPasteboardTypeFileURLPromise directly, which I was doing (instead of using newer API) to work around bugs in older versions of macOS. EagleFiler now uses NSFilePromiseReceiver for drags from Mail on macOS 27, which works better, but I also had to work around a bug where Mail would promise superfluous files for which the reader callback was never invoked at all.

• macOS 27 also seems to include various regressions when reading PDF and Word files, producing invalid strings containing NUL characters. Also, displaying certain PDF files worked fine on macOS 26 but now crashes.

• I also ran into (and worked around) a bug where macOS 27’s NSTextView would get into an infinite layout loop when displaying an attributed string that included images.

• Drag and drop from Airmail is still an issue. When using the newer drag APIs, it will often hang Airmail or not produce a file, and this also happens with other apps like Finder as the destination. EagleFiler works around this using older APIs with Airmail and tries to report a helpful error when there’s trouble. Single-message drags work best.

• I’ve also been investigating a problem where saving a file with a colored tag in iCloud Drive will, a few seconds later, change the color to gray, but I don’t have a solution for this.

Previously:

• EagleFiler 1.9.21

SpamSieve 3.3.2 is an update of my Mac e-mail spam filter that improves remote training, can export more rule information, and improves uninstallation, help, and more. The most significant news is that Microsoft has changed plans again. They will no longer be preventing users from continuing to use Legacy Outlook and in fact will keep it available for download as part of the combined Outlook app. This gives more time to adapt to their change in plans for AppleScript. Exchange (EWS) support remains an issue. Microsoft is still planning to cut off Legacy Outlook users, and Apple has yet to announce when Mail will support Graph. So far, I’ve not heard that it’s enabled in the macOS 27.2 beta.

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Some interesting engineering issues were:

• Updating NSWorkspace APIs introduced a problem because with the old launchApplication(at:options:), the .withErrorPresentation option is off by default, whereas with the newer openApplication(at:configuration:completionHandler:), the promptsUserIfNeeded option is on by default.

• Previously, Core Data would strip leading BOMs from NSStrings when saving to a SQLite database. With macOS 27, this happens for Swift Strings, too.

• I have lots of unit tests that check for memory leaks. These caught a change where addPersistentStore(type:configuration:at:options:) now seems to return an autoreleased store. Without adding a pool, it looked like there was a leak.

• Also, the tests were finding lots of “leaks” because KVO was retaining NSTabView, which retains a controller. Previously, XCTestCase.waitForExpectations(timeout:) would spin the run loop, and everything would get cleaned up. With Xcode 27 and macOS 27, I need to manually spin the run loop before waiting for the expectations.

• During a software update, macOS may decide to reload the Dock icon. The application package no longer exists because it’s been replaced with a new version. This wasn’t a problem before because SpamSieve had been drawing to an image in memory and setting that as the Dock icon. Now, with the Liquid Glass–imposed removal of custom Dock icons, macOS tries to load the icon from disk, and rather than handling errors gracefully it will crash. I fixed this by setting an image with a memory representation before starting a software update.

• SpamSieve 3.3.1 introduced a crash affecting a small but significant number of users when doing a Core Data fetch of a large number of objects. The private [_PFManagedObjectReferenceQueue _processReferenceQueue:] method was seemingly releasing an object that had already been released. What’s odd is that, as far as I can tell, none of the related app code had changed since the previous version, yet suddenly crashes started happening all the way from macOS 12 through macOS 27. If I had to guess, this was triggered by upgrading from Xcode 26.2 to Xcode 26.6. Maybe Swift’s ARC optimizations are doing something subtly different?

  The crash was triggered by an autorelease pool that I had inserted to promptly clean up any temporary objects after a fetch. (The actual fetched objects were returned and used outside of the pool.) Interestingly, both Gemini and ChatGPT were convinced that this is a well-known exception to standard memory management rules. They said it’s never safe to use managed objects outside of a pool they were fetched in because they depend on internal Core Data objects that the pool will have released. I was not able to find any basis for this “belief,” but it was easy enough to test. As expected, removing the pools (during the beta cycle) just made the same crashes happen slightly later.

  I think there’s probably something wrong in Core Data’s internal bookkeeping, but this does not seem to be a popular crash (and I’ve never seen it on any of my Macs), so my code must be doing something uncommon to trigger it. My current best guess is that it was related to calling refreshAllObjects() after saving. (I bet there’s some fancy bookkeeping to make that efficient.) I was doing this throughout the app to break retain cycles so that unused objects could be deallocated. But it wasn’t necessary in this particular case because the entity being fetched has no relationships. So far, removing the refresh seems to have stopped the crashes, but I won’t know for sure until more people have been using this version for a while.

Previously:

• The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook
• SpamSieve 3.3.1
• SpamSieve 3.2.2