The Developers Who Came in From the Cold
In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected.
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With this in mind, we engaged in further discussions with the company throughout the MacOS 11 beta period. Those were much more fruitful than our initial conversation, and eventually yielded a two-part plan. First, ACE would be temporarily allowlisted, so its audio capture could continue to function for the near future. Second, Apple would work with us to develop a sanctioned method of capturing audio on the Mac.
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Happily, we’re at the end of both this story and 2024. I’m delighted to say that we have completed our transition to ARK, and it now powers all of our audio capture apps on MacOS 14 and higher. Our glorious hassle-free future has finally arrived, and you can get started with our apps in under a minute.
As with Mail plug-ins, Apple initially kept the old functionality but added hurdles that made it much more difficult to install apps that used it. The audio situation started out worse because Apple summarily dropped the functionality in a macOS beta with no replacement. With Mail plug-ins, Apple announced a replacement API at WWDC two years in advance (though without specifying the transition date). But then the fortunes reversed, as audio got a longer transition period and, it seems, a new system that was both functional and reliable.
Mail extensions continue to be neither. The API is still woefully incomplete to do the sorts of things plug-in developers were doing, and what functionality there is mostly doesn’t work, in my experience. I ended up relying on multiple layers of alternative implementations to efficiently do what I need to do, and as these are separate from the Mail extension they still require additional security/privacy hurdles to set up.
Incidentally, none of this was necessary with SpamSieve 1.0 because the initial mail clients that it supported, Entourage and Mailsmith, had top-notch AppleScript and rules support and so could do everything that was needed without loading any third-party code.
Previously:
- macOS 15.2
- Easier Mac Audio App Installs
- Mail Extension Postmortem
- M1 Macs Add Hurdles for Audio Plug-ins
