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Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

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Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#181

Post by coldtea »

robenkleene wrote: post #172
panic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three of those developers started writing Mac software (or NeXT software, in Omni's case) in the 80's and 90's, before Xcode or the Apple Developer Program. The wider Mac developer community was hollowed out by the iPhone in the late 2000's-early 2010's and never really recovered. Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

I'd argue that the Mac developer community was hollowed out by mandatory Sandboxing in the Mac App Store, introduced in 2011, not by the iPhone (2007). Sketch, arguably the most successful third-party Mac-only app since OS X, was released in 2010, several years after the iPhone, but almost immediately before mandatory sandboxing. I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too…

>I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too restrictive to support the kinds of productivity utilities that have historically thrived on the platform.

And yet, MS Office, Lightroom and others are on the App Store.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#182

Post by saagarjha »

mrweasel wrote: post #128
apple_innocent wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but there's nothing that says the Xcode experience has to be so painful[1] or that people have to pay Apple or that software has to be approved by Apple in order to preserve this flexibility. Purchasers should have options, including the option to write software (for themselves) that works on the computer they paid for but might not work if Apple introduces computers based on a new architecture, which the existi…

I haven't used Xcode much, so it's not for me to say if it's good or bad. However, I would assume that Apple uses Xcode internally, if it was a pain to use, in general, would Apple fix it? At least to save on development cost internally. Of cause it could be that Xcode is very finely tuned to Apples needs, which may be radically different from those of 3. party developers.

Apple uses Xcode internally very heavily, and it's less about it being tuned to Apple's needs (which it is, but as an app developer your needs and Apple's match pretty closely) but that Xcode tends to not scale very well.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#183

Post by panic »

saagarjha wrote: post #176
panic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three of those developers started writing Mac software (or NeXT software, in Omni's case) in the 80's and 90's, before Xcode or the Apple Developer Program. The wider Mac developer community was hollowed out by the iPhone in the late 2000's-early 2010's and never really recovered. Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

Semi-relevant username?

Oh yeah, to be clear, I'm not associated with the company.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#184

Post by coldtea »

_qulr wrote: post #180
coldtea wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021? A lot of people? There are more Mac users (and thus app buyers) today than ever were, several times more than in the 80s and 90s. If people don't do it it's because they can make a quicker buck elsewhere (e.g. web SaaS and such), not because it's a worse market in absolute terms. It sure beats being an indie game dev, that's for sure...

> A lot of people? Name them. This is a serious request. I'm a longtime professional Mac developer who knows a lot of other Mac developers. > There are more Mac users (and thus app buyers) The premise is true, but the conclusion is not necessarily true. The crap store and the iOSication of the Mac have really hurt the Mac software market.

>Name them. This is a serious request. I'm a longtime professional Mac developer who knows a lot of other Mac developers.

I get all kinds of great new Mac apps from new devs, so not sure what you mean. Some examples I've personally use and bought in the past year or so: Darkroom, CleanShotX, Bear, Amadine, Wipr, Keka.

If we can go a few years back there's tons of other stuff that's still going strong too with new versions regularly and everything...

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#185

Post by robenkleene »

coldtea wrote: post #181
robenkleene wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the Mac developer community was hollowed out by mandatory Sandboxing in the Mac App Store, introduced in 2011, not by the iPhone (2007). Sketch, arguably the most successful third-party Mac-only app since OS X, was released in 2010, several years after the iPhone, but almost immediately before mandatory sandboxing. I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too…

> I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too restrictive to support the kinds of productivity utilities that have historically thrived on the platform. And yet, MS Office, Lightroom and others are on the App Store.

I'm not quite sure what your point is, but those are 100% the most interesting cases of apps conforming to the Mac App Store that I wouldn't expect to. Here are my explanations:

1. Lightroom is easy, Lightroom Classic is not in the Mac App Store and is still supported. Anecdotally Lightroom Classic appears more popular than Lightroom, especially among professional photographers where it's fair to say Lightroom is shunned. So Lightroom is Adobe's attempt to have it both ways.

2. Office is much more interesting. I honestly find it shocking that Office is in the Mac App Store, since I don't think it's in Microsoft's best interest. I think the reason is that the Mac versions of Office are really stripped down and separate code bases than the PC versions, and I'd guess that this decision was in some way made possible by that separation (e.g., if there's a feature that's not possible in sandboxed version, it can just be stripped from the Mac version, which would be more difficult with a shared code base). I'd also guess that this will eventually be reversed as Microsoft is on a path to making cross-platform web-based (Electron/React Native) versions of all their software, and I don't expect those to be sandboxed.

For the record, by productivity software, I didn't mean things like Office and Lightroom (my fault for not being clear). I meant utilities like LaunchBar, Keyboard Maestro, Moom, etc... e.g., launchers, window managers, and the like, which generally need more privileges than sandboxing allows, because they involve scripting, interacting with other apps, etc... A lot of the indie Mac app community centered around these apps because they allowed users to get a lot of value without much code (relatively) by adding smaller, system-wide, features.

Document-based apps work much better with the Mac App Store, but those apps tend to be an order of magnitude more work to make, therefore there were always much fewer of them. Document-based apps also have a lot of problems with Sandboxing, but at least they're possible to make sandboxed.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#186

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

frou_dh wrote: post #167
vbezhenar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donations is just another model of making money from software. So you're going to use App Store for free and make money without Apple getting their cut. It's understandable why Apple does not accept it.

> So you're going to use App Store for free It's not free. There's a $99 membership fee every year, even for an altruistic person offering nothing but a single useful extension/app that makes zero income. --- Let's imagine a feature request on GitHub: USER: Safari supports the WebExtension API now. Please port your cool extension to Safari. DEVELOPER: Cool. I'll maybe try doing that this weekend! USER: Oh, by the way…

I still can't get my head wrapped around the complaint that the developer program costs $100/yr, as though this were some great barrier to entry. To put it in perspective, I subscribe to Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Now, Apple One, Office365, PS+, and Xbox Live, and that's just off the top of my head. Most of them are for purely-optional entertainment, and all of them cost more money than the developer program. I suspect most people who frequent this board pay for several of these too. In comparison, the $100/yr for the developer program is not a lot of money. It's certainly comparable with other optional digital services. It's less than a single restaurant lunch per month.

You can complain that it's not right to charge for the program, but the developer program has a cover charge to keep out the riff raff. I don't think this is a bad thing. We all know how much junk is in the App Store as it is, and how long it takes to get a review. Imagine if they didn't charge for the opportunity to submit apps? How much soon-abandoned junk would suddenly appear, and how long would it take for proper apps to get approved?

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#187

Post by _qulr »

coldtea wrote: post #74
chmod775 wrote: post #71

As someone who has (re-)implemented and shipped quite a few native applications across ecosystems (Apple, Android, Windows, Linux) all I can say about this is: Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague . I will do it if I'm paid for it - I generally charge twice my hourly rate for anything Apple - but I cert…

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

> Apple tho wants macOS developers (and users prefer apps from people dedicated to macOS).

This is a very strange argument to make in the context of Safari Web Extensions. Safari already had its own Apple-specific app extensions API, but it seems that Apple decided this was not sufficient, so they implemented the cross-platform WebExtensions API too. Clearly Apple is trying to recruit non-Mac developers with their command-line conversion tool for existing Chrome and Firefox extensions, and automatic generation of a Mac app wrapper.

If Mac developers were sufficient for this purpose, then WebExtensions support would not have needed to be added to Safari at all.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#188

Post by _qulr »

coldtea wrote: post #184
_qulr wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people? Name them. This is a serious request. I'm a longtime professional Mac developer who knows a lot of other Mac developers. > There are more Mac users (and thus app buyers) The premise is true, but the conclusion is not necessarily true. The crap store and the iOSication of the Mac have really hurt the Mac software market.

> Name them. This is a serious request. I'm a longtime professional Mac developer who knows a lot of other Mac developers. I get all kinds of great new Mac apps from new devs, so not sure what you mean. Some examples I've personally use and bought in the past year or so: Darkroom, CleanShotX, Bear, Amadine, Wipr, Keka. If we can go a few years back there's tons of other stuff that's still going strong too with new ve…

Keka: 11 years old! https://changelog.keka.io/

Bear: 1) Bear is not Mac-only: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bear/id1016366447 2) Bear is more than 4 years old 3) Shiny Frog, the maker is Bear, is even older than that

Wipr: 1) Again, not Mac-only. In fact, Wipr started as iOS-only. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1030595027 2) Wipr is more than 5 years old

Darkroom: 1) Not Mac-only https://apps.apple.com/us/app/darkroom-photo-video-editor/id... 2) Darkroom is 6 years old

Amadine: 1) Not Mac-only https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amadine-vector-drawing/id13391...

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#189

Post by frou_dh »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #186
frou_dh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you're going to use App Store for free It's not free. There's a $99 membership fee every year, even for an altruistic person offering nothing but a single useful extension/app that makes zero income. --- Let's imagine a feature request on GitHub: USER: Safari supports the WebExtension API now. Please port your cool extension to Safari. DEVELOPER: Cool. I'll maybe try doing that this weekend! USER: Oh, by the way…

I still can't get my head wrapped around the complaint that the developer program costs $100/yr, as though this were some great barrier to entry. To put it in perspective, I subscribe to Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Now, Apple One, Office365, PS+, and Xbox Live, and that's just off the top of my head. Most of them are for purely-optional entertainment, and all of them cost more money than the developer program.…

A Chrome/Firefox user expending some effort to make their existing extension available to Safari users is doing those users a favour. Generally one doesn't have to additionally start donating money to someone's preferred charity when already doing them a favour.

You're going to have plenty time to Wrap Your Head Around this dynamic by simply observing how the Safari WebExtension ecosystem plays out.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#190

Post by _qulr »

coldtea wrote: post #181
robenkleene wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the Mac developer community was hollowed out by mandatory Sandboxing in the Mac App Store, introduced in 2011, not by the iPhone (2007). Sketch, arguably the most successful third-party Mac-only app since OS X, was released in 2010, several years after the iPhone, but almost immediately before mandatory sandboxing. I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too…

> I believe the reason sandboxing destroyed the Mac software ecosystem is because it's too restrictive to support the kinds of productivity utilities that have historically thrived on the platform. And yet, MS Office, Lightroom and others are on the App Store.

> And yet, MS Office, Lightroom and others are on the App Store.

Microsoft has received special sandbox exceptions from Apple that are not available to other developers.

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