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Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

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Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#111

Post by iknowstuff »

musicale wrote: post #94
hermitcrab wrote: post #37

I have been developing software for Macs and PCs as an Indie for 20 years now. I sympathize with the author of the post. You get the feeling that Apple thinks you should be grateful that they allow you to develop apps for their platform. The author didn't mention Apple's contempt for backward compatibility. Apple like to regularly nuke their entire developer system from orbit. Try running an app developed 10 years ag…

> Apple's contempt for backward compatibility This is absolutely correct. Instead of maintaining any sort of ABI and API stability, Apple offloads a constant burden of maintenance updates across thousands of developers, just to keep existing apps from breaking every year with a new iOS version. This takes time which could be spent in more productive ways such as fixing bugs, adding features, or developing new apps. I…

well it also made macOS the nicer platform with modern, well maintained apps for the past 2 decades.

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#112

Post by benoau »

seam_carver wrote: post #104
hermitcrab wrote: post #37

I have been developing software for Macs and PCs as an Indie for 20 years now. I sympathize with the author of the post. You get the feeling that Apple thinks you should be grateful that they allow you to develop apps for their platform. The author didn't mention Apple's contempt for backward compatibility. Apple like to regularly nuke their entire developer system from orbit. Try running an app developed 10 years ag…

Honestly, I kind of support this lack of backward compatibility. So many apps I use from big companies are still Intel based and leaving tons of performance on the table. This will finally force them to change when Rosetta is deprecated. Open source apps are all native.

The alternative to this was continuing to optimize Rosetta while simultaneously processors improve, soon enough the performance gap wouldn't matter in the slightest. By the end of the decade you'd probably be comfortably running that software on a MacBook Neo w/ A20 Pro.

Rosetta and its underlying tech enable 10,000s of games and applications to run so it's a tremendous loss overall, it doesn't sound like much will be left if this means x86 OSX games:

> "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks"

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#113

Post by saurik »

Zetaphor wrote: post #59

How does anyone who cares about open source or even development more generally see this and go "Yeah that's the OS I want to use"? I genuinely don't understand why so many developers are willing to compromise so much for a thin laptop.

It isn't just thin: they are quiet and fast with the best trackpads, reasonable keyboards that (except for the idiotic move when they released the touch bar and dropped the escape key) have a reasonable layout that doesn't change much, and all of the power states work correctly every single time.

I am the second most stubborn person I know in my friend group on this, and after only using a desktop for a couple years during the pandemic, I avoided having a mac laptop for the subsequent five years and it sucked. I finally caved after I realized the new M5 Macbook Air is actually likely to be faster for web browsing tasks and is somehow also (awkwardly?!) competitive at compiling code to the monster modern Xeon build I had just completed, and it doesn't even have a fan!

As far as I am concerned, it is over: Apple has won on everything except screen quality (I am sadly now addicted to OLED and I fundamentally disagree with the Apple position of not having a touch screen on a laptop, a stance that is only more emboldened now that I spend a lot of time with children).

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#114

Post by chr15m »

aiisahik wrote: post #110

1 year ago i would have agreed with you. Today, I'm going to take the other side on this. The amount of malicious code embedded in software now is going up exponentially. Yes this is a painful tax imposed on all software, malicious or not, but until they figure out a better system, this system actually will disuade a certain percentage of malicious actors to give up - ESPECIALLY having to pay a fee. As a mac user, i…

There are many cases of signed & notarised software that pwned users.

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#115

Post by chr15m »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

Any user who does not like Gatekeeper can turn it off on their machine in ten seconds by running this in a Terminal: sudo spctl —-master-disable People will say, no, that’s too big a hammer, it’s not safe… but then, like, what do you actually want? Either you keep Gatekeeper because you like the friction it introduces, or you don’t like that friction and you should go turn it off. Pick one, you obviously can’t have b…

> what do you actually want?

To make gatekeeper happy without paying a large amount of money and own Apple hardware (same thing).

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#116

Post by cosmic_cheese »

musicale wrote: post #94
hermitcrab wrote: post #37

I have been developing software for Macs and PCs as an Indie for 20 years now. I sympathize with the author of the post. You get the feeling that Apple thinks you should be grateful that they allow you to develop apps for their platform. The author didn't mention Apple's contempt for backward compatibility. Apple like to regularly nuke their entire developer system from orbit. Try running an app developed 10 years ag…

> Apple's contempt for backward compatibility This is absolutely correct. Instead of maintaining any sort of ABI and API stability, Apple offloads a constant burden of maintenance updates across thousands of developers, just to keep existing apps from breaking every year with a new iOS version. This takes time which could be spent in more productive ways such as fixing bugs, adding features, or developing new apps. I…

Maybe it’s worse for games, but I’ve been maintaining non-game apps on both iOS and Android for many years and keeping the iOS halves functional has generally been pretty chill. Updates aren’t required all that often and it’s rare that APIs break entirely on me, especially if targeting older SDKs. Usually the worst post-WWDC fallout is needing to recompile the app in question with minimal changes.

By comparison, Android is much worse. The Play Store kicks you off for not submitting updates much more quickly and the whole ecosystem is in a permanent state of simultaneous flux and obsolescence. Whatever deity help you if you let an Android project collect dust for a year or two… you’re gonna be fighting battles on multiple fronts getting everything up to date. Gradle conflicts, APIs getting deprecated without fully baked replacements, divergence in behavior between OS versions… it’s a real hoot.

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#117

Post by justinclift »

seam_carver wrote: post #39
ryandrake wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 seconds or 30 seconds, it's just too much friction to ask end users to do. I actually develop on a Mac, but I've written off Apple as a target system for hobby/open source projects. Between quarantine, code signing, and notarizing (which requires $99 a year), it's just not worth it. Good for Apple users if they like this shit--I'm just not going to bother with distributing to the platform anymore. macOS is slowly…

Isn't code signing even harder/more expensive on Windows?

For Open Source Software, you can use SignPath for free: https://signpath.org

That's what we did for DB Browser for SQLite (sqlitebrowser.org), and it works well: https://sqlitebrowser.org/blog/signing-windows-executables-o...

SignPath also does stuff for commercial places too (https://signpath.io), but I have no idea of the pricing.

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#118

Post by tdeck »

aiisahik wrote: post #110

1 year ago i would have agreed with you. Today, I'm going to take the other side on this. The amount of malicious code embedded in software now is going up exponentially. Yes this is a painful tax imposed on all software, malicious or not, but until they figure out a better system, this system actually will disuade a certain percentage of malicious actors to give up - ESPECIALLY having to pay a fee. As a mac user, i…

Malicious actors can easily pay a fee - they're either running a business or they work for a state actor.

Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

#119

Post by musicale »

iknowstuff wrote: post #111
musicale wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's contempt for backward compatibility This is absolutely correct. Instead of maintaining any sort of ABI and API stability, Apple offloads a constant burden of maintenance updates across thousands of developers, just to keep existing apps from breaking every year with a new iOS version. This takes time which could be spent in more productive ways such as fixing bugs, adding features, or developing new apps. I…

well it also made macOS the nicer platform with modern, well maintained apps for the past 2 decades.

Unfortunately well-written native macOS desktop software (Apple's own apps are sometimes exceptions, if we ignore monstrosities like the Music app) seems to be dying (new "desktop" software often being a wrapper for a clunky web app), while half of my Steam library that used to run on macOS no longer does. (And removing Rosetta2 might kill the other half.)
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