It’s a directory of 950+ menu bar apps for macOS. I browsed it a bit, and while each page is a bit short (5 items per page), it’s great to discover new tools – and also check out UI design trends in menu bar apps.
For example, I’m surprised that there are still so many NSPopover style windows with the speech-bubble pointy thing (because almost all apps I use don’t use popovers anymore). At the same time, there are many apps with what looks like custom NSMenus to embed more complex views as menu items.
Sketch shared the news today (on LinkedIn!) that 80 employeed are being laid off. This will mostly impact Operations and Marketing, who have done great work in the recent weeks and months. Our Product team remains well-equipped, with a core team continuing to drive things forward.
The Notarization API changed a bit, so my old scripts broke. Revisiting the approach, it’s delightfully simple to notarize an app nowadays if you use the Apple toolchain on macOS. I haven’t watched the WWDC 2022 video on Notarization but did take the documentation link there into account.
Tyler Hall wrote about “Half-Assed Mac Apps” the other day. His argument goes like this: Catalyst made it easy to deploy iPad apps to the Mac. But iPad apps don’t make the best experience on Mac. Users end up with more apps, but a lot of them being “half-assed” Catalyst ports.
Sadly it’s only for macOS 11.0+, so for projects pre-Big Sur, you have bad luck. But it’s written with SwiftUI, so you may still learn one thing or another, or adapt the code to your project if you want!
Oskar Groth published a modern iteration of the “LetsMove” framework where you can show a dialog at app launch, asking the user if she wants to move the app to /Applications first.
This is still a crucial feature if you distribute downloads that unpack into the ~/Downloads folder: Gatekeeper’s App Translocation will actually start it from a random sandboxed folder. To prevent this from happening, distribute your apps as a DMG with a shortcut to /Applications to nudge your users to move the app there directly.
Berlin-based company ExactCODE, makers of ExactScan and OCRKit, experiences trouble with Catalina and a rather short time to submit bug fixes for their app before the public release of Catalina earlier this month. They decided to leave the Mac App Store behind:
each manual update review by Apple causes delay and drama
AppStore does not support paid upgrades, only new App, in-App purchase or subscriptions
Apple takes 30% and that is not sustainable to run a company and pay salleries
it is not provide to provide free updates forever
if you purchased our application this year we provide a direct license, if you had it significantly longer, we think a paid upgrade is fair for continuously developing, improvements, and support
[…]
There is mostly only one benefit [of using the MAS] for users: one central place for purchasee and updates. However, there are many negatives, such as: […]
I don’t know if they could’ve done more to prepare for the macOS upgrade. Recently, folks on Slack shared screenshots, and it turns out that as a serious Mac developer you apparently have external hard drives full of previous and future macOS versions, plus a stack of different Xcode versions (that are no longer available for download by Apple!) – that’s required by virtually everyone in order to support multiple OS versions and fix bugs. The Catalina beta also was very flaky.
After releasing the Catalina Golden Master build to developers on October the 3rd, we immediately finished fixing any new crash or issue we could find over the weekend. In our opinion, leaving developer just four (4!) days over a weekend with a public release on October the 7th is not very helpful nor professional.
They have a point here. But could they have fixed the same bugs earlier in preparation of the Golden Master release?
The call for App Store submissions went live on October 3rd, too, at the day of the Golden Master release. So even if they fixed all the bugs early, Apple would have had only 4 days to review all App Store submissions, which sounds like a bad idea nevertheless.
Shameless plug: I also wrote a book on selling outside the Mac App Store in case you want to leave the App Store, too, or make your company more resilient through availability in multiple stores.
The large update and rewrite of “Make Money Outside the Mac App Store” is finished. I have published an update of the book to Leanpub edition and the one you can get directly from my website. The print edition is still work-in-progress, but I should have something available later this month.
The following I decided to cut from the update to my book, Make Money Outside the Mac App Store. I came up with a list of arguments that you can apply to your business model and app if you haven’t decided if you want to embrace or ditch the Mac App Store.
2019 is a weird year for developer platforms. Microsoft App Center will incorporate HockeyApp. HockeyApp is discontinued in November 2019. The App Center will be supporting Sparkle feeds in the future, too. So Microsoft will offer a service that may be useful to deploy macOS apps, soon?
Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit fame released a little Swift helper to detect when a macOS app has been moved during runtime. His write-up explains everything. In short, moving an .app bundle while the app is running will inevitable result in resources not being found, and occasional also in crashes.
This or a similar helper is a practical necessity in all applications that are distributed outside the Mac App Store.
The long defunct LetsMove used to be a tool that tried to prevent the issue by offering to move the app to /Applications upon launch from any other directory.
The default Interface Builder approach of using a “Shared User Defaults Controller” object breaks down if your app preferences are not stored in the standard place. Both my apps The Archive and the Word Counter for Mac are comprised of multiple executable applications. For The Archive, it’s the main app and the Quick Entry popup window. They share some settings, like which theme and font size is used. To share these settings, I rely on NSUserDefault (or just UserDefaults in Swift now). I cannot use the UserDefaults.standard, though, because that is tied to the currently running app’s bundle ID. In the case of the main app, it’s the ID of the main app; but for the Quick Entry helper – or any helper app –, it’s the helper’s bundle ID. This way, the defaults dictionaries are not shared.
On iOS, this does maybe not happen at all, but when you want to write syntax highlighting code for macOS apps, copying together stuff from around the web, you’ll end up with broken application behavior. In short: when you type and the attributes of the line change, the insertion point is moved to the end of the line. That sucks.
Short answer: No. My trusty Mac mini served me well for years thanks to its 8 GB RAM and the 256 GB SSD. An SSD really helped make it faster back in the day. But with Xcode 9 and macOS 10.13 “High Sierra”, the machine begins to stutter. I think it’s the CPU not really liking what I demand from it. Xcode 9 builds take a ton longer and the UI is less responsive. Sure, Xcode 9 sports a UI overhaul and might not be as performant as it could be, yet. That doesn’t help with the compile times which, for my current project, now take up to 5mins; that’s not even a fresh build.
Typewriter modes depend on the feature that you can scroll farther up and down than usual. You need extra whitespace, most of the time in both directions. Let’s start with “overscrolling” to understand what we need. Regular text views show additional bottom whitespace only until you fill it with text. Take TextEdit, for example. You can start to type at the topmost edge of the text view and the rest of the window is blank.
Transitioning from Nibs to Storyboards poses a few challenges. One of them being creating outlets from a parent view controller to a child view controller. There is no such thing. You could say this is the new idiomatic way to create interfaces, but I don’t quite agree with the consequences. How do you pass data to a view controller 4 levels deep in the hierarchy? It’s not obvious. And there are no “embed” segues like you have them on iOS to obtain references.
Ditching the Mac App Store – Why, and what it means.
Is There Life After the Mac App Store? – Choosing an e-commerce provider.
Getting Back to Development – How you change your code to work outside the Mac App Store.
Plus you’ll see me live. That alone should be motivation for you to visit, no matter the topic :)
Disclaimer, aka Code of Honesty and Transparency
Maybe you just arrived on my blog and don’t know how I do things around here, yet, and how much I value morality over profit anytime. So let me erase your doubts about this webinar cooperation.
I use FastSpring to sell my stuff. I really like their service, so I wrote a guide in 2015. FastSpring in turn was impressed by my initiative and helped me spread the word a bit and provide background info whenever I needed anything. I am not getting paid by FastSpring for the book. It’s my own creative work. I maintain it because I think it helps you, fellow developer, to set up your own indie business.
Then late 2016, FastSpring approached me as their go-to expert for Mac app development. They plan to show how easy it is to use FastSpring to distribute Mac apps. In other words, they want to own part of the good news for obvious marketing reasons.
With the recent Out-of-App-Store Success Stories by Rogue Amoeba and Kapeli, it may even be a growing market.
I was skeptical at first. I will not violate my strong ethics; teaching people the One True Way™ is more important than easy money. But I came to find FastSpring values delivering useful content over running a 60-minute ad show. From the get go, FastSpring wanted me to create the content. Not even once did they suggest I add something to my slides. They totally risk I go live on Wednesday and tell people to use a competing service. But I won’t, because I know no better service provider. I liked the concept, so I agreed. I am getting paid by FastSpring for this webinar gig. But it’s 100% my webinar.
To stay true to myself, I will give genuinely helpful advice to empower the attendees to become independent. Of course I’ll show FastSpring’s features, just like the screenshots I put in my book. All because I believe in their service, not because they bought my loyalty with the speaker fee.
In short, this is not an advertisement for FastSpring. I haven’t sold my soul. It’s a cooperation out of mutual respect.
During my rather relaxed late evening workouts I catch up on podcasts now. Although I don’t enjoy listening to people talk (I prefer reading), this is a great source of inspiration and seems to be the premier way in which people share their experience.
Marco Arment and David Smith run Under the Radar. In episode 26, they talk about Marco’s deviations into AppKit—Mac app development. (Their shows are always under 30 minutes, so I suggest you give it a try.)
Marco’s app Quitter is available for free. He couldn’t put it into the Mac App Store because its main feature is to quit other apps. That doesn’t work with Sandboxing. So Marco had to release it directly.
I found a few things especially noteworthy:
Direct distribution means you have to worry about installation, updates, and payments yourself. It’s more work. So Marco made it free. (P.S.: I wrote a book on direct distribution.)
Marco was rather afraid to ship an update: maybe he didn’t test thoroughly and introduced a bug; it seemed to me he missed the safety net of app reviews.
Then again, shipping a bug fix update is fast and easy, too. It takes zero time to make an update available to customers.
The absence of app reviews in direct distribution is both frightening and liberating. I am afraid to ruin my customers’s lives with every Word Counter update I ship. It’s true, you can break things. But you can also make things right within the hour. You don’t have to wait for anybody else. (Even though iOS app review times have improved a ton, from 7 to 2 days!)
I am astonished that both Marco and David have years of experience working with UIKit but didn’t ship a single Mac app in the meantime. Or do contract work back in the day. “iOS exclusive” sounds insane to me, but for them it has worked quite well!
What’s your experience? Do you remember your first contact with AppKit? Are you afraid to try? Comment, email, or tweet me your response!
My e-book about creating and selling apps for Mac without the Mac App Store is now available on amazon.com if you prefer a print edition!
Why does print cost less?
The digital edition will be updated regularly with the latest Swift syntax. Further editions and major revisions are free for customers, too. I can’t do that with a print edition on your bookshelf, obviously. That’s why.
It feels weird, I know, because paper costs money and print book feel more precious. I’m making about 50% less with each sale, so there’s quite some cost involved printing the book. The feeling of physical good in your hand is part of the perceived value, and everyone would tell me I should factor that in, but I’m a bad businessman. It’s the right thing to do. Why should you pay more for something with less long-term value only because my costs are higher?
Shaving off VAT and then again 30% for Apple for every purchase of your app in the Mac App Store can be madness: the only real benefit is that people know how to operate the store. But if you’re just starting to run your business, discoverability is hardly a feature.
Instead of drowning in the warehouse that the app store is, put your software in your own store. You have to build an audience anyway to get started. So stay in touch with them. Know your customers. And stop giving away 30% for a promise that doesn’t hold.
Save days of research and implement the techniques today
Copy & paste Swift 2.0 code to integrate into your app in <1 hour
Utilize in-app purchase of licenses for a higher conversion instantly
2 fully functional sample applications, including a time-based trial app
Secure license code generation and verification included
This book will save you hours of research and days of fiddling with SDKs. It shows you how to set up products for sale on FastSpring including automatic license code generation and then guides you through the process of adding license verification to your app.
Don’t need all the explanations? Just follow the setup steps and copy the code into your project and you’re ready to roll in half an hour!
I’m not affiliated with FastSpring. I just think their service is awesome.
Here’s what FastSpring’s CTO Mike Smith has to say about the book:
We appreciate Christian’s efforts in creating a guide that enables Mac developers to sell applications through FastSpring’s award-winning e-commerce platform. He has provided detailed instructions to help developers configure key elements of their online sales process. The spirit of community captured in his book reflects FastSpring’s mission to connect people globally in the digital economy.
I truly believe in the spirit of community and I believe you can make it as a developer without the App Store. This book is here to empower you so you don’t have to figure out all the scary details.
So many other indies rely on FastSpring, too, including:
Smile Software (TextExpander, PDFpen)
Realmac Software (Clear, RapidWeaver)
Tyler Hall (VirtualHostX)
Ironic Software (Yep, Leap)
Bohemian Coding (Sketch)
toketaWare (iThoughtsX)
well, and me, obviously :)
Get to know their stories from this book. Be inspired and take the leap.
Because I think it’s so worth your time as a Mac developer, get it for 25% off until Christmas when you buy from my store.
I got burned this week. Pretty bad. I shipped a small bugfix release for my Mac app Word Counter a couple of days ago to prepare for the “big one” coming this week. Naturally, I built that version on my El Capitan dev machine. I pushed the update to my server. Updates using Sparkle worked. – But now users of that version cannot ever update to the next version. Because I haven’t thought about ATS.
Here’s how I fixed the inter-process communication sample app called AppSandboxLoginItemXPCDemo by Apple to make it work. When I tried it out at first, sandboxing ruined the day. You have to change a few things in order to make it work.
In June, I told you about how to customize nvALT’s Markdown preview template so you can include images from a sub-directory of your notes’ directory with ease. Turns out that you probably aren’t able to edit the preview .html file in the first place without some effort. Here’s how you configure TextEdit, Apple’s own editor which comes with every Mac by default, to edit HTML files the way you need to.
This picture shows my favorite style of previewing notes with MultiMarkdown in Notational Velocity: in a separate tool window which floats on top. I chose this so-called HUD design (“heads-up display”, like a display made of glass in aircrafts) which most of you will already be familiar with by using Apple’s Quick Look.
This is how it looks when I enable my Zettelkasten rendering mode. Bonus: another note featuring my current naming conventions is visible at the top of the list. A “Zettelkasten” is an German term describing an archive which mainly consists of annotations on literature, quotes and excerpts. Also, notes with synthesized information are allowed.
