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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?

#151

Post by danielscrubs »

panic wrote: post #125
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Are anyone doing Windows or Linux only software shops in 2021 (web services not included)?

Even the ones reaching hacker news seems to fiddle down after just a couple of years and die out.

I’m starting to wonder... here around 4 out of 5 business close down within a couple of years, how is that ratio for business making a software product? Is software a victim of its own success? The market is clearly there, but the competition is ruthless, the stacks ever changing and the risk seems to increase year for year.

At the same time we code on our free time and happily give away our code for free.

Tried to find a study where they showed that gambling addiction and programming addiction operated similarly but it seems to have been scrubbed of the internet.

IMO median(!) salaries will go down relative to other diciplinaries. coding is just too fun.

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

#152

Post by sneak »

vbezhenar wrote: post #145
sneak wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To top it off, if you put a donation link in your about box when you release your totally free software in their App Store, they will reject it in review. Free apps are not allowed to include a donation link to their own website. It's to the point where they won't even let people enrich their ecosystem for free unless you dance to their tune. It's very, very hard to take anything other than a dim view of such despica…

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.

If you believe that donations accepted by authors of entirely free/open source software are "just another model of making money from software", I don't know what to tell you.

I don't understand it, so I don't think it's fair to call it "understandable".

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

#153

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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…

The barrier for entry to the Apple ecosystem is extremely high though.

Xcode is extremely hard to use. I've been programming for over 20 years, and used lots of different editors and IDEs and languages.

But Xcode is just TOO HARD. Swift was nice and easy to understand. But just editing (or even typing) code on the editor is a huge pain. Even things like selecting text, or moving the cursor around are super non-standard and complicated (and this is coming from someone who's managed to become proficient with vim).

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

#154

Post by dwaite »

mfDjB wrote: post #45

As an extension developer, I am keen to put my extension on Safari however what is preventing me at this moment is dealing with Dun & Bradstreet to get a DUNS number. A DUNS number is required to sign up to the Apple Developer Program as a corporation. So far I have been pushed to 3 different departments by D&B who keep just hand-balling me to the next department without solving my issue, and this is taking on the or…

I would normally suggest being a bit concurrent - contacting Apple and seeing if you could sign up as an individual and then migrate the registration to a corporate registration.

However, if you have had months of issues getting a DUNS number you likely are beyond wanting to move around a temporary roadblock, and on to trying to remove a more permanent roadblock first.

Getting a DUNS number for my LLC was free and not difficult, but it was confusing. There are a lot of wrong ways to try to go into the process - to the point where the DUNS sign up now has "Apple Developer" as one of the reasons you are asking for a number.

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

#155

Post by rimliu »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #153
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The barrier for entry to the Apple ecosystem is extremely high though. Xcode is extremely hard to use. I've been programming for over 20 years, and used lots of different editors and IDEs and languages. But Xcode is just TOO HARD. Swift was nice and easy to understand. But just editing (or even typing) code on the editor is a huge pain. Even things like selecting text, or moving the cursor around are super non-standa…

Well, I have been programming for 30 years now. I started with Apple when iPhone SDK was released. Had no problem with Xcode then, have nor problem with it now. How can actually IDE or editor be HARD (memes about quitting vim aside). I've used a bunch of them: HomeSite, SKEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, PHPStorm/RubyMine/WebStorm, NetBeans, Xcode, AppCode, VSCode, Nova. I liked some more, some less, but neither was HARD.

How is moving cursor not standard? Mac OS has a very consistent way doing that, across the system.

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

#156

Post by flohofwoe »

saagarjha wrote: post #119
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’ve used Xcode for many thousands of hours at this point and I have to say I actually think it’s pretty good now that I understand how it is supposed to work. But for a web developer who just shipped some JavaScript for Firefox and Chrome…just no, this is stupid however you look at it. The fact that you have to download a dozen gigabytes just to get access to what’s a glorified shell script, then packaging some web…

IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things.

Why is it such a hassle to install a vim extension, requiring code-signing shenanigans? In other IDEs and text editors this is at most a few button clicks to install an extension.

The "Scheme" system to manage per-target options is a joke even when being used to it.

The debugger variable-view-panel is extremely bare-bones.

Xcode used to be slick, but since a few years everything gets bigger, slower and laggier. Starting up, loading projects, starting into the debugger all takes much longer than it should.

It's unclear how the "new" build system is any better than the "old" one. Apart from being slower than the old one I haven't found any differences so far.

The one thing where Xcode shines and was ahead of the competition is the easy integration of C/C++/ObjC validation tools like clang analyzer, ASAN, UBSAN and TSAN.

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

#157

Post by josteink »

vimy wrote: post #14
Nextgrid wrote: post #8

In addition to the money argument raised in another comment, the Apple development experience is a major annoyance when all you need is a couple lines of JS. I have an extension idea; it's literally a single line of JS. However, to get it into Safari, I need to create a (useless, and empty) Mac app with a specific configuration in Xcode that'll allow it to appear in the "extensions" list in Safari. Then I need to dea…

Extensions don’t appear unless you go to the develop menu and turn on ‘Allow unsigned extensions’.

And the "develop menu" doesn't show either unless you go in advanced settings, and select that it should be visible.

Apple has no issues putting 200 hoops in front of you to get a simple thing done.

This is just another one of those hoops, and another reason developers don't like doing things with Apple-technologies.

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

#158

Post by Nextgrid »

dwaite wrote: post #149
Nextgrid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly confident I did that. Either way, the process is very unclear - what actually notifies Safari that an extension is available and whether it's updated? With most browsers it's clear, you open a specific file with the browser, the browser loads it and that's it. To update, you open the updated version of the file. With these apps it doesn't even seem like the app itself is doing any work - there's no code in…

> what actually notifies Safari that an extension is available and whether it's updated? Since extensions are made available via app extensions, it is: - installation of an app from the app store - first run of an app which is not from the app store This is actually the big reason why they require you to use apps - all system customizations (device drivers, web extensions, photo plugins, fonts, etc) are supported wit…

> didn't surface enough HTTP request/response access in their old API. I haven't checked yet if their Web Extension API surface includes what I needed

Nope, which is why uBlock Origin is still not possible.

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

#159

Post by lycopodiopsida »

m463 wrote: post #150
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…

I think capitalism works. That's how apple does it. That said, I was attracted to computers since an early age because it's fun to make them do things. But I think apple's ecosystem takes the MOST EFFORT of any of them to actually do anything. For example, on linux there are probably 100 scripting languages that can do fine-grained automation of just about anything you want to do. With apple.. ugh. It's either apples…

Writing AS is not a pleasant experience, I agree. IMO, it was internally abandoned long time. There was a push to move the automation framework to JS with JSX, but after the initial half-broken release nothing came and as far as I understand, the team was dissolved. Shortcuts on iOS may be the model for future automation on MacOS.

This said, one of the biggest reasons I still clamp to macOS is, actually, the state of automation tooling - even in this half-abandoned state. Your example would be trivial to implement with tools like Keyboard Maestro or hammerspoon. Then there are tools like Alferd/Launchbar, Karabiner elements or bettertouchtool for touchpad gestures... It is really a vast ecosystem which is to match.

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

#160

Post by franga2000 »

coldtea wrote: post #130
franga2000 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like web devs ship websites only tasted in latest Google Chrome? How Microsoft ships Windows tested only on a handful of hardware configs? How game devs ship games only tested on the latest graphics card? The whole point of having standards, conventions and stable interfaces is that developers do not have to test their code on every "platform" (in this case browser). If there are platform-specific difference…

> The whole point of having standards, conventions and stable interfaces is that developers do not have to test their code on every "platform" (in this case browser). Well, we don't have standards for native apps, only partial standards for different APIs and protocols, so there's that. And the change Apple made, to allow for Chrome-like extensions, is already more "standard" than before (where it was Safari-only ext…

That is my whole point though: the WebExtensions API is a standard, so it's not like you can't test your extension without owning a Mac. If your extension works on both Firefox and Chrome, it really should work on Safari too. If it doesn't, that's Apple's fault for violating the standard, not yours for not testing on their broken platform. If you want to specifically test it you can, but if you don't see a reason to, you should be able to just port it over and let people use it and beta test it for you.
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