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Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

blog.tumult.com

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Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#101

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

realusername wrote: post #59
Frondo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I actually prefer the app store version wherever I can download it, because I like not having to think about updates; I let the software updater do it. Is this an uncommon attitude?

Developers care a lot about updates, your average user does not. For them, an update means there's a chance the app isn't going to work like it used to be. People went as far as disabling all windows updates manually. Also as a second point, you can totally have a software updater without an app store.

This isn’t true. And it has nothing to do with OSX.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#102

Post by PeterisP »

ashishb wrote: post #88
dan1234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think Apple want hobbyist apps in the store. They want apps that will create revenue and the fee creates a filter of sorts. It would be good to be able to side load hobby apps, but that’s never happening. The fee does also get you 2 tech support requests, which should connect you with their engineers if you need help (never needed this, can’t say how extensive it is). Also, I did read somewhere that they waiv…

Google Play store has a 25$ one-time fee. Much more affordable IMHO than 99$ annual fee. If I am being charged a 99$ fee, I simply can't share my creation without finding a way to make money off of my users. That isn't easy. Future hobbyists will be created on non-Apple platforms.

That's the whole point - making it not too affordable so that users browsing the App Store don't have to wade through too many nonserious hobbyist apps. Lowering the bar too much hurts users.

I mean, all this is about mass distribution to unsophisticated consumers, not hobbyists - without that $99 you can work on your hobby projects and you can share them with other hobbyists; the only place where that $99 is a barrier is the distribution channel to non-hobbyist users.

In essence, the message from Apple to hobbyist developers is to 'go big or go home' - if you're seriously developing something useful, then $99 is insignificant; and if the time effort you're putting in that app is not much, much more than $99 then it's reasonable to draw a line that they don't want such hobby projects on the app store. You can experiment with it and share it in small communities and when (if!) you think this project has become serious enough to go beyond hobbyists to the mass market, only then you need to pull out that symbolic $99 to demonstrate that you mean it.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#103

Post by [deleted] »

schwartzworld wrote: post #99
tincholio wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market. It is solid, generally stable (although that's been slipping), and certainly has by far the best window manager. It has nice consumer apps for when you need them and is a solid, if not always up to date, unix. The hardware is generally great. I was on that same line of thinking until some time ago when my old macbook pro died, and I ended up again on Li…

Yeah, modern plug and play distros like Ubuntu are not the Linux of yesteryear.

[deleted]

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#104

Post by earthboundkid »

lang_agnostic wrote: post #34
earthboundkid wrote: post #31

Every modern web framework has auto reload, so this is an app that’s only targeting people who know HTML well enough to hand write a page but don’t know about modern web development. Good luck, but I can’t imagine it’s a growing market.

Education?

Students cheapskates unless they're forced to buy something by the school.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#105

Post by 1-more »

comex wrote: post #52
1-more wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A year or so back I wrote a little ffmpeg concatenation helper to make a friend's life easier. It was an OK shell script but it needed a config file to list all of the files that needed concatenation, and I wanted to just make a GUI that would let her add and reorder files to a list, then generate a temp file with the list (ffmpeg required the list to live in a file for some reason) and fire off the ffmpeg command to…

Unless you wanted to submit this to the Mac App Store, you could have just turned off sandboxing. With that off, the only permission required would be Catalina’s permission dialogs when any app first accesses various folders (Documents, etc.), and those are automatic without needing any code in the app to request them.

I thought I could locally, but it crashed on her machine which makes me think I did it wrong. I could have kept at it but I think one debugging session on her computer would have wiped out any time savings she would have realized.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#106

Post by henvic »

davidvartan wrote: post #35
makecheck wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so frustrating that automation and command-line is treated as almost second-class citizenship on macOS. You know how I log into a remote server securely without ever entering my password? I enter the command "ssh" and the server name. Why the hell isn’t notarization implemented, effectively, as "notarize appname.app" where all the details are resolved securely, just as magically, to your developer keys? Yet if y…

Shameless plug: I created xcnotary [1] to make command line notarization quite a bit less painful. It will poll the service and block for completion, return a non-zero failure code for CI, and will even audit your app for some common code signing issues prior to uploading it to Apple. [1] https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary

That's amazing! Thanks!

Shameless plug of my own: Last month I shared a post sharing a few thoughts on secure software redistribution, notarization, safe updates, and so on: https://henvic.dev/posts/cs-security/

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#107

Post by tumultco »

rcarmo wrote: post #73

I still use Tumult's Hype 3 (Pro, I think) to do HTML5 animations - it's pretty great, even if moving to 4/Pro for the (very few) features I'd like to have seems a bit steep at $99. Whisk appeals to me because I _know_ it's going to be a polished, lightweight app, but with VS Code having quite usable previews I don't see the value of its current price point (to me).

Note that we do have upgrade discounts available, and if you purchased v3 after Oct 14, 2017 it is a free upgrade to the corresponding v4 edition.

https://tumult.com/hype/support/upgrade-discounts/

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#108

Post by njhaveri »

saagarjha wrote: post #80
njhaveri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I build my website with Jekyll 4 and use livereload, but have actually found some use out of this tool for writing small snippets. Seeing your CSS come to life with every keystroke in real time (without having to press CMD+S in your IDE) is surprisingly useful. The main use-case where this tool has been useful, though, is when I'm working on my Mac app that uses WKWebView and Javascript pretty extensively. It's much…

Jekyll is kind of slow :(

After I upgraded to Jekyll 4, stopped using the GitHub pages gem (deploying to Netlify instead), it's been WAY faster for me personally!
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