#Simbl plugins how to
#Simbl plugins mac os x
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I finally discovered the “key” to unlocking the Cookies.binar圜ookies file, which was quite simple in retrospect.

#Simbl plugins mac os x

With the release of Mac OS X Lion looming, the certain demise of my business model, and many sleepless nights - I changed course, went back to studying the file header and looking for potential similarities to rest of the file. I even at one point resorted to asking a friend studying a PHD in Physics to throw some data points I had collected into MatLab to see if there was some kind of linear formula I could use to read the individual cookies. I spent many weeks staring at my hex editor trying to make sense of the seemingly garbage bytes. Translating the python implementation into Objective-C was not much of an issue, but where to start with decrypting the individual cookie data was much more of a challenge. His implementation was also written in an unknown language to me… Python. (I would post a link, but the page is no longer online) It was however unfortunately incomplete, only documenting the headers in the file, but not giving access to the individual cookies present. I finally managed to stumble across a security researcher’s work on documenting the format. ResearchĪpple developer docs were mostly useless, and StackOverflow also didn’t really provide much in the way of what was needed to parse the file. Successfully decrypting the file was the only option, as failure would lead to the eventual obsolescence of the app, and a loss of a substantial (at this point) portion of my income. The only way to keep my app working in the next OS X release was to reverse engineer the file format, and there was not a lot of info around its’s content in the early days… in fact I still believe it is a sparsely undocumented file format.

So, I had this app in the Mac App Store from the beginning, and with the announcement of Mac OS X Lion (I think?), It was clear that the global NSHTTPCookieStorage object was being siloed into per app sandboxes and the easily read ist file was being deprecated in favour of the undocumented Cookie.binar圜ookies binary file format. When the Mac App Store was announced, I knew the only way forward was to rewrite the plugin as a standalone app as SIMBL plugins were slowly being deprecated. Over the next few years, I taught myself to code, and released the plugin as shareware. I asked if he would let me get the plugin updated to work with the latest version of Mac OS X - and Surprisingly he said yes, and sent me his codebase! I needed a challenge, and managed to somehow find an email for the dev. I was working gigs as a clown/juggler at the time, just married, and was spending a lot of time at home with my young son.

Now, I forget the exact name of plugin I grew fond of, but I think somewhere around Mac OS X Tiger, the developer stopped updating it.

The laptop was actually stolen by a so called friend in Calais, France a few months later. I discovered a number of SIMBL plugins for Safari and installed them all.

#Simbl plugins install

The 500MHz PowerBook G4, what a beast! One of the first things I did was to look for and install something which would clear my cookies. I felt like a hacker… hah… clearing any trace of my browsing sessions before leaving the store/Internet cafe I was in.Īfter working as a furniture removalist in San Francisco for around 6 months, I’d saved enough cash to buy my first laptop.

#Simbl plugins how to

Needing ways to clear traces of what I had been looking at on public computers, I discovered HTTP cookies, and promptly Yahoo’d (most likely) how to clear them from the public Browsers I was leeching internet time from. I had become interested in Privacy back in the early days of Mac OSX, while backpacking around the US in 2000. The initial project was inherited from previously defunct Safari SIMBL plugin which had been abandoned by the original developer. I was working solo on the simple cookie manager app for Safari at the time. This is when Apple give us Devs just a few months to prepare for the next macOS release, with all the deprecations and outright course changes that come with it. An Indie Developer’s short tale in overcoming one of MANY problems developing for the macOS platformīuilding products for the Apple ecosystem, while a very rewarding experience can be stressful… especially around the dates for the Worldwide Developers Conference.