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Inspecting Network Traffic on macOS

I ran into a scenario where I wanted to sniff out exactly what was being communicated by a macOS app. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any http sniffing so it great to try out some new tools. Packet Sniffing Packet sniffing is the easiest way to see what is happening on your network device. No sudo, no proxies. However, you can only see the domain being contacted for SSL requests. Great for high level activity, not great for understanding the details of what an application is doing on your computer. Using a Proxy to Inspect HTTPS Traffic In order to view HTTP traffic, you need to route all network traffic on your device through a proxy. mitmproxy is exactly what you need…

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AppleScript Tips: Inspecting Objects, Modal Dialogs, and More

AppleScript is an amazing, quirky tool within the macOS ecosystem. It enables you to control any application on your Mac, even if the original developer didn’t explicitly write an API for it. This can be incredibly useful when attempting to automate certain actions. However, the language is incredibly weird and confusing, especially to a "real" software developer. I’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks below that help me write various tools and scripts to automate my computer (I’ve written about applescript before in case you are looking for other tricks)…

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