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Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

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Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#61

Post by 7thaccount »

_jal wrote: post #22
kick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a question you get a lot, and I apologize in advance if it is, but: Why use Mac, if it makes so simple of things difficult?

App signing has always been inexplicably horrible; other than Cupertino contempt for their developers, I really don't know what would explain it, it certainly doesn't have to be that way. But things have gotten worse for developers recently with Catalina. I should note that I don't write mac-specific code - I mainly write things that target Linux servers. The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market.…

I have a System76 fully loaded little NUC. It is a beast, extremely quiet, and was a lot cheaper than a Mac. System76 customer support is really really good. You send an email and you get a response back from a developer pretty quick. I've been pretty satisfied so far. They don't make their own hardware, but they make sure a customized Ubuntu distro (Debian and Fedora are also supported) is silky smooth on all their systems. You pay a little extra, but the process was so painless and still a lot cheaper than Apple, so I'm happy.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#62

Post by nsomaru »

phs318u wrote: post #38
linguae wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Mac user since 2006, and I currently own a 2013 MacBook Air and a 2013 Mac Pro that I both regularly use. For a long time macOS was the marriage of Unix with commercial hardware support (even if tied to a specific manufacturer) and support for major proprietary software products such as Microsoft Office. I also loved the stability and quality of the operating system, not to mention that it looked wonderfu…

This exactly. I recently resurrected my MacBook Air by replacing a dead SSD (was it coincidence that it died right after the Catalina upgrade? Can SW brick an SSD?). I’m now running UbuntuStudio on there and spending great chunks of my lockdown time re-learning Linux (after a 17 year hiatus) and trying to iron out weird kinks in my config (Bluetooth detects my Logitech K670 keyboard but just won’t pair with the damn…

The lack of tb3 on the lemur is seriously discouraging me. I’m thinking about building a headless server and just xfowarding.

This way I can run a win10 be for games too

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#63

Post by ken »

kick wrote: post #12
saagarjha wrote: post #7

> In 2020, distributing requires learning the intricacies of certificates, code signing, provisioning profiles, hardening, notarization, .dmg creation, gatekeeper, and paying a $99 per year fee. I had to manually create, sign, and notarize a Mac app the other day and it was total madness. It took multiple tabs of Apple documentation ( new documentation, I might add, created this year because everyone complained last…

This may be a question you get a lot, and I apologize in advance if it is, but: Why use Mac, if it makes so simple of things difficult?

Because there isn't any other operating system that makes all the things I want to do with a computer any simpler. We've got only 3 major desktop operating systems, and they're all overly complex and poorly designed in lots of ways.

Since the late 1990's, I've alternated: I use a Mac for a while until I get fed up with it, and then I use Linux for a while until I get sick of that, and then I go back. (I've used Windows at work, and it's not any better.) I just need enough time to forget how much I hated the other one.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#64

Post by stevoski »

I created a commercial Mac desktop app in 2008. I sold it off late last year (2019).

It stopped being fun somewhere along the way. This was partly because I never knew what new requirement Apple was going to add with each new annual release of macOS. Would my app work? Would it not work? How many days, weeks, or more of work would I need to do to keep my app working while not actually making it better for my users?

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#65

Post by saagarjha »

jrs95 wrote: post #57
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…

Especially given how Mac was at one point ahead of everyone else in terms of automation...

The APIs still exist! They just sometimes don't work…

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#66

Post by ihuman »

grishka wrote: post #15
filoleg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is less about Mac development and more about submitting it to Mac App Store. You can still make an app for Mac without submitting it to the app store, without having to deal with majority of those issues. It's just sometimes there are good reasons for wanting to have it in the app store. No personal experience with either, but I would wager that you would encounter somewhat similar roadblocks if you try su…

> You can still make an app for Mac without submitting it to the app store, without having to deal with majority of those issues. Not any more. Apple is so much of a control freak lately that non-app-store apps on Catalina are still required to go through them for "notarization" to be allowed to run on an unmodified OS — and yes that requires the $99 account. For me personally, that's the reason I'm staying on Mojave…

> non-app-store apps on Catalina are still required to go through them for "notarization" to be allowed to run on an unmodified OS

Apple tries to hide the option, but you can still run non-notarization software on a Mac. The first time you run the application, open in from the right click menu. It'll give you a warning, and if you select OK it'll run. After that you can just run it by double clicking like normal, and it won't warn you.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#68

Post by tincholio »

_jal wrote: post #22
kick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a question you get a lot, and I apologize in advance if it is, but: Why use Mac, if it makes so simple of things difficult?

App signing has always been inexplicably horrible; other than Cupertino contempt for their developers, I really don't know what would explain it, it certainly doesn't have to be that way. But things have gotten worse for developers recently with Catalina. I should note that I don't write mac-specific code - I mainly write things that target Linux servers. The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market.…

> 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 Linux, on a thinkpad. I'm currently running Manjaro (plasma + i3), and tbh, the Mac's window manager is awful once you get used to the power of i3. Dev experience (for anything but Mac/iOS apps) is probably better on Linux, too...

If you haven't used Linux in a while (as was my case), I can highly recommend it.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#69

Post by markmark »

gwbas1c wrote: post #29
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…

> It’s so frustrating that automation and command-line is treated as almost second-class citizenship on macOS. Try automating signing a windows driver. It's all GUI. At least the mac code signing tools are command-line.

Isn't signing on windows done with signtool? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccrypto/sig...

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#70

Post by josteink »

_jal wrote: post #22
kick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a question you get a lot, and I apologize in advance if it is, but: Why use Mac, if it makes so simple of things difficult?

App signing has always been inexplicably horrible; other than Cupertino contempt for their developers, I really don't know what would explain it, it certainly doesn't have to be that way. But things have gotten worse for developers recently with Catalina. I should note that I don't write mac-specific code - I mainly write things that target Linux servers. The Mac has long been the best unix workstation on the market.…

> App signing has always been inexplicably horrible;

Maybe on Mac. On Windows you just run signtool.exe and you're done.

> I require that my tools do what I tell them, not the other way around.

Sounds like you'll be glad once you can ditch that old Mac and get a proper Linux dev-machine ;)

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