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Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

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Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#91

Post by Nextgrid »

jcfields wrote: post #60
bluedino wrote: post #3

The old app really still looks quite nice. Even windows 98-era apps look pretty good in a way. One part of me doesn't like how much space is wasted by the new Mac UI trends shown in the second screenshot, mostly the left side panel. But I understand screens are different these days as well.

I think Mac apps have settled into a pleasant place for the most part, though I'm not a fan of the look of Apple's newer apps like the App Store and News. I'm glad that the brighter colors are more subdued now, annoying UI elements like drawers and palette windows have mostly been replaced by inspector panes, and brushed metal is long gone.

Yep these new apps (including the "Marzipan" or "Catalyst" or whatever it's called) are pure garbage both in terms of design and usability.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#92

Post by williamdclt »

rickdeckard wrote: post #86
mullingitover wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s so frustrating that automation and command-line is treated as almost second-class citizenship on macOS. Sure, they're horrible, but I look at it as Apple generously creating jobs for engineers. I had a full-time job as a build engineer specializing in navigating the Lovecraftian nightmare of iOS build automation. Sure, they could've made it easy, but instead they chose to help transfer large sums of money from…

This is a hilariously weird response to a valid criticism. "Yeah, internet-outages are horrible. And sure, AT&T could fix that. But instead they chose to help people to disconnect from time to time and focus more on their families, which is overall the biggest contribution a company can make to society and should be rewarded by buying more of their services" I keep seeing this kind of other-worldly self-defense only…

I think (though not entirely certain) the comment you're responding to was sarcastic

> Positioning a brand as an element of the users' personal identity is truly an impressive thing

Apple definitely did an impressive job at that!

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#93

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ashishb wrote: post #67

The 99$ annual fee is ridiculous. Big companies don't talk about it because it is a regressive tax. It hurts hobbyist more than anyone else.

I'm not sure it has that much of an effect, after all Macs aren't exactly cheap. I'd assume most people who are cost conscious are going to be targeting Android.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#94

Post by elsurudo »

soapdog wrote: post #84
elsurudo wrote: post #78

Cool story. In a way I'm surprised one would try to adapt the old code after so much time has passed, rather than just starting fresh. It can definitely be interesting, just more... frustrating.

I guess Objective-C/Cocoa might have not changed much between the last HyperEdit version and now. If the developer organized his codebase well, replacing the old webview with the new stuff and so on should be less work than rewriting the whole app (IMHO). I haven't coded for the mac in more than a decade but what I remember from ObjC/Cocoa was that it was quite pleasant to use and very powerful. By powerful I mean th…

That's true. I maintain a couple of obj-C iOS apps (one of those ~10 years old) and apart from framework upgrades (iOS 6-7 was a big one) and dealing with a few deprecations, it's been surprisingly friction-free.

macOS is probably even more stable.

Swift, on the other hand... it's been a moving target for sure, and I'm glad I didn't just rewrite everything (like I did for one app).

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#95

Post by iainmerrick »

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?

Using apps is generally great on a Mac.

It’s very nice for command-line development too as it’s a decent Unix under the hood.

Developing Mac apps can even be pleasant! Xcode has its good points and the APIs are mostly very nice.

The hassle of distributing Mac apps is the only big downside. It’s the same on iOS, but there you don’t have a command line and scripting available.

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#96

Post by iainmerrick »

flir wrote: post #36
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…

It's the trackpad that keeps dragging me back in... it's a hard habit to break.

Yeah, you’d think all other manufacturers would just start making trackpads that don’t suck.

(Sarcasm, of course... Although I don’t quite see what makes it so difficult a problem. Unless there are patents involved, maybe?)

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#97

Post by robenkleene »

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).

What do you use for a preview in VSCode? Do you mean this extension? https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=auchenbe...

(Personally, I find the extensions I’ve tried clunky, so I’m curious if there’s a better way.)

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#98

Post by cwizou »

Razengan wrote: post #83
userbinator wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and that's how a lot of stuff is released on GitHub, but you can't get into Apple's walled garden that way.

You can still distribute macOS apps on your own, just have to get users to trust you. Why do you want to publish on the Mac App Store? If you think there's an advantage, then the costs are justified.

Sadly, this does not work for everything, as users can't always override the notarization requirement that was introduced in Catalina. I had the issue with Aerial, it's a screensaver which, technically, is a plugin and not an application. As such, the user will never get prompted for anything (and I'm putting aside the compounding effect/slight madness that screensavers are now a plugin to an appex to two different applications with different permissions set ! Oh Catalina...).

The only solution was to sign/notarize it, and I have to admit it took me more than a few days to figure it out, as finding exactly what works for distributing a plugin was not documented. And this is just to distribute a usable plugin on GitHub !

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#99

Post by schwartzworld »

tincholio wrote: post #68
_jal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Li…

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

Re: Reviving a 16-year-old Mac App

#100

Post by pinfisher »

rickdeckard wrote: post #86
mullingitover wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s so frustrating that automation and command-line is treated as almost second-class citizenship on macOS. Sure, they're horrible, but I look at it as Apple generously creating jobs for engineers. I had a full-time job as a build engineer specializing in navigating the Lovecraftian nightmare of iOS build automation. Sure, they could've made it easy, but instead they chose to help transfer large sums of money from…

This is a hilariously weird response to a valid criticism. "Yeah, internet-outages are horrible. And sure, AT&T could fix that. But instead they chose to help people to disconnect from time to time and focus more on their families, which is overall the biggest contribution a company can make to society and should be rewarded by buying more of their services" I keep seeing this kind of other-worldly self-defense only…

I assumed it was satire.
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