Archive for December 6, 2019

Friday, December 6, 2019

NativeConnect 1.0

Vadim Shpakovski (via Daniel Jalkut):

NativeConnect is a desktop client for App Store Connect. It allows you to edit metadata, generate promo codes, and work with customer reviews in the native and modern 100% AppKit interface.

If you are tired of signing in to App Store Connect, digging through its slow navigation or configuring multiple filters for sales and trends, you should greatly benefit from our app.

Basic features are free; uploading changes, generating promo codes, and replying to reviews are $100/year.

Unfortunately, the public App Store Connect API is too limited to provide all this functionality. Hopefully the API isn’t as slow as the site itself.

Hopefully someday they’ll find a way to send you a notification when an uploaded build has finished processing and can be added to an app version.

Previously:

1 TB microSD Card

Western Digital (via Peter Hosey):

Get extreme speeds for fast transfer, app performance, and 4K UHD. Ideal for your Android™ smartphone, action cameras or drones, this high-performance microSD card does 4K UHD video recording, Full HD video, and high-resolution photos. The super-fast SanDisk Extreme® microSDXC™ memory card reads up to 160MB/s* and writes up to 90MB/s.

Amazing that these tiny cards can how hold 1 TB. It would be great to have a microSD slot on the MacBook Pro.

The 1 TB version costs $250, whereas Apple charges $400 to upgrade from 1 TB to 2 TB of storage on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. You’re getting very different things, though. The MacBook Pro’s internal SSD is much faster, but it can’t be expanded later, and you have to pay for it all up front. SD Cards keep your data separate, so you can use them for backups and transfer them between Macs. You can keep adding more to store more files.

Previously:

Dash 5

Kapeli:

New Search and Navigation Interface – The search and navigation interface was completely redesigned to be more intuitive and fast

New Search Result Sorting and Nesting – Search result sorting and nesting were completely rethought and redone.

[…]

Dash 5 uses WKWebView, the latest browser engine from Apple. Supporting WKWebView required rewriting a huge part of Dash, some of which to JavaScript, so please make sure to report any bugs you might encounter, no matter how small

$20 upgrade to an essential app for developers. I like how the search is now in the middle rather than on the side. It feels more like LaunchBar, with more width to see the search results.

Before, you could type a class name and a space and then a keyword to scope the search to that class. Now, there’s a separate field that both searches within the current page and filters the list of methods at the left.

Previously:

Apple’s Technology Transitions

Martin Pilkington:

While this saving of disk space and RAM usage certainly benefits the Mac, there are arguably more important reasons to Apple for dropping 32 bit on the Mac. They don’t actually have much to do with 32 bit itself, but more with decisions that were made in 2007 when 64 bit was finalised.

[…]

When Apple introduced 64 bit with Mac OS X 10.5, they also introduced Objective-C 2.0. Part of this was a new and improved runtime, designed to fix problems with the old runtime. Unfortunately, these fixes were not compatible with existing apps, so they made the decision to only make this runtime available in 64 bit. However, this meant the (now) legacy runtime would have to stick around as long as 32 bit apps existed.

[…]

The behaviour of the legacy runtime effectively means that Apple can never update their existing objects with new ivars without breaking existing apps.

PDFKit accidentally did just that in Sierra, causing crashes in 32-bit apps that displayed PDFs, as the framework tried to access variables that didn’t exist.

ARC has been off-limits, too. Apple’s framework developers have been working with one hand tied behind their backs.

Previously:

Update (2019-12-17): Pierre Lebeaupin:

Leopard (10.5) only ostensibly added support for 64-bit GUI apps. It was considered still rough and very few 64-bit GUI apps shipped until Snow Leopard (10.6), but the best indicator is iTunes, which ended up requiring Lion (10.7) to run as 64-bit.

[…]

the major reason why 68k ended up being supported as long as it was was that it supported mixed-mode. This meant no duplicate use of RAM, since all apps were using the same copy of all OS-supplied code, and no duplicate maintenance effort, for the same reason.