Leaving the Mac App Store • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#381

Post by nickonline » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:01 AM UTC

muddi900 wrote: post #377

ethbro wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious as to why they have that organizational blindspot. Because when you have a captured userbase, there's no incentive to improve / innovate?

Apple has had the largest market share in mobile revenue, yet iOS keeps improving.

Most of the most visible features and improvements I've seen in iOS over the years were developed by the jailbreaking community and eventually apple incorporated into iOS.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#382

Post by jjoonathan » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:16 AM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #355

kitsunesoba wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s countered a bit by less of a need for custom widgets. In fact I’d argue that one of the big points of appeal for native Mac apps is that they eschew tons of custom widgets in favor of the standard system kit whenever possible. There’s also a good deal of power that you gain when writing custom Cocoa widgets; drawing is usually done with Core Graphics, which is a blazing fast, extremely capable C API. T…

Yes but the context is the mac app store which is much more a web-layout than a native app layout.

That's the problem, yes.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#383

Post by mh- » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:38 AM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #364

dav- wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really an OSX developer, but shouldn't it be possible to bypass the sandbox in a way by offering the user to install an unsandboxed auxiliary application via a download from your website which then communicates with the main sandboxed App Store application using some protocol and performs any actions which the MAS version would be otherwise unable to? For example, perhaps the auxiliary application runs a loca…

Against Apple Terms I believe. They will ban you if they find out. I was talking with apple support and they basically said that if we even offered some extra component to get rid of the spinning gear we would most likely be banned.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Boom 2 does.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/boom-2-best-audio-enhancemen...

Note their reference in the description to an 'optional component' that enables system-wide effects.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#384

Post by rarepostinlurkr » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:42 AM UTC

nickonline wrote: post #381

muddi900 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has had the largest market share in mobile revenue, yet iOS keeps improving.

Most of the most visible features and improvements I've seen in iOS over the years were developed by the jailbreaking community and eventually apple incorporated into iOS.

Care to actually list that? I find that incredibly hard to believe. While there may be a list of 5-10 features that meet the criteria, seems like most OS releases have hundreds of improvements here & there.

All of Apple is just sitting around waiting for jail breakers to innovate for them, no one has any ideas about what to do with their time.

Don't even get me started on hardware! Incorporating all that stuff Samsung & Dell or whoever is doing.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#385

Post by jjoonathan » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:52 AM UTC

alextgordon wrote: post #290

ThomPete wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that laying out using xcode isn't as easy as using a web view for the kind of layout that are needed for something like the app store. Not sure why this is such a crazy thing to say that I need to be down voted for it.

100% with you. I love AppKit, but the amount of code required to make a simple custom button is insane. What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment. It doesn't make sense to say that WebViews aren't "native". With a little effort they can be made to blend in perfectly. It's the same CoreGraphics.

> What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment.

Imperative graphics and view hierarchies certainly make simple things tedious, but they'll never match the DOM's ability to occasionally make simple things nigh-impossible either.

I'm curious, if you call drawRect ugly then what do you call the menagerie of frameworks required to strong-arm the declarative environment of the web into the simplest of desktop tasks (shadow DOM, anyone?) Pot, kettle?

> With a little effort they can be made to blend in perfectly.

I'll believe it when I see it. I'll grant you that this works OK on windows, but that's due to MS making the decision to bring the widget kit down to web-level rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, iTunes and the AppStore continue the long and well-established tradition of poor integration.

> It's the same CoreGraphics.

Hidden behind a dozen trendy frameworks, a hundred bloated abstractions, and a thousand crusty layout engine implementation details to glue it all together.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#386

Post by imron » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:54 AM UTC

odbol wrote: post #312

VeryVito wrote: post #46

I'm glad to see successful apps exiting The Mac App Store, and I hope others will follow. Unlike its iOS counterpart, which is great in many ways (new app discovery not being one of them), the MAS has unfortunately done more harm than good to the once-thriving indy Mac app-development scene. It offers a low cost of entry, but also encourages "pump-and-dump" development, in which developers are actively (though surely…

Low cost of entry? It's actually quite high... my company still has to distribute instructions on how to disable Gatekeeper on your Mac so you can install our app. We don't have the resources to pay the $100/year "Apple tax" and also spend the 2-3 days developer time on figuring out how to sign our app and make it work with sandboxing. For me, low cost of entry means "you put the app up for download, the user downloa…

If $100/year is too high for your company, you quite probably have more serious problems than the App Store.

I don't distribute Mac apps through the app store, and signing a regular app (no need to worry about sandboxing) with your developer certificate so that it can run without disabling Gatekeeper literally involves clicking a single radio button in Xcode.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#387

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #350

robotresearcher wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a parent of young kids, and fire up steam maybe once a month. Guess what happens to my precious game time nearly every single time.

So, you can do a couple of things: * Start Steam when you log in to your computer, but have yourself signed out of Friends so you don't get friend activity notifications. * If you're concerned about data usage, or don't want all of your games to update when you launch Steam, set your games to only update when you launch them. [0] Sadly, there's no way that I can see to make this the default update strategy, so you ha…

Thanks, friend. I appreciate the help, and I'm sure others will too. I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only, but I'll take advantage of your advice when I can.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#388

Post by rarepostinlurkr » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 5:57 AM UTC

greggman wrote: post #367

dperfect wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS…

No non-free upgrades. To release version 2 of your app with a fee you have to release a new app. There's no connection between the two and AFAIK no way to provide a discount for existing users. As for the MAS harming devs it's the "official store of OSX" so users are arguably being trained to look there and only there for apps. So sure you can look elsewhere but Apple is fighting against you. 30% cut is very high as…

How are these issues any different than the iOS App Store? They both play by the same set of rules.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#389

Post by rarepostinlurkr » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 6:01 AM UTC

s73v3r wrote: post #220

dperfect wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate: what specific things about the MAS "[do] more harm than good" or encourage "pump-and-dump" development as you say? I'm not trying to defend the MAS, and I think it definitely needs improvement, but are we really worse off for it? The two things mentioned by the Sketch developers are app review time and sandbox limits. Those same things exist on iOS, but I keep hearing people say the MAS…

I would say the sandbox limits on the MAS are worse, because they go against what a computer is supposed to do. Limits on the phone are considered ok, because first and foremost, the phone has to operate as a phone.

If I cannot use my computer to give a presentation because some "utility" app is crapping all over other apps because it has free reign of the system, isn't that going against what my computer is supposed to do for me?

The ability for any normal person to identify, understand and resolve issues caused by the wild west of "desktop computing" should be well understood at this point -- they cannot.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#390

Post by simoncion » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 6:18 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #387

simoncion wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you can do a couple of things: * Start Steam when you log in to your computer, but have yourself signed out of Friends so you don't get friend activity notifications. * If you're concerned about data usage, or don't want all of your games to update when you launch Steam, set your games to only update when you launch them. [0] Sadly, there's no way that I can see to make this the default update strategy, so you ha…

Thanks, friend. I appreciate the help, and I'm sure others will too. I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only, but I'll take advantage of your advice when I can.

> I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only...

Implying that Steam only runs rarely.

Yeah, that complicates things. :( Best of luck!