Unboxed: Postmortem+
Earlier this month, I wrote about building Unboxed, a native macOS app to convert Google Vault MBOX exports into PDFs. The goal was simple: make email archives accessible to non-technical staff handling open records requests. The app worked, but it had a problem—it was slow. Really slow. Large MBOX files would chug along, eating up memory and often crashing the app entirely. I suspect the culprit was PDFKit, Apple’s framework for generating PDFs, struggling to keep up with the workload. ...