I don’t have any of those. But I have Clocker. It’s just a menu-bar widget but I manage a distributed team and it’s really useful!
BTW, what do you think of DaisyDisk? Was thinking about getting it recently, but then I found that About this Mac -> Storage -> Manage -> Reduce Clutter did what I needed.
I have bought DaisyDisk a few years ago, frustrated by the average state of Diskinventory X http://www.derlien.com/. I still use from time to time to find where I’m wasting large chunks of disk. The overall UX is pretty cool.
I never really used Reduce Clutter. My main disk usage is often multiple large Git repositories with their binaries.
Further complicating this, the leading competitor to Office is just a web app. There are fewer competitors to editing audio and photos that are web apps, but it can be done.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. The App Store requires your apps to be sandboxed but the set of entitlements that you can request is pretty large. As long as you’re using the right APIs, you can have full filesystem access, access to peripherals, and so on.
The biggest obstacle I see is that Apple takes 30% of the sale price for App Store apps. This buys you two things:
Apple handles distribution and taking money.
It’s easy to find the app by searching the store.
I don’t think most Mac users search the store first (I never do, at least), so the the second option is of far less value than on iOS (where the App Store is the only place to install things and so also the first place to look for things to install). If your app is already popular then there’s no marketing advantage to the App Store. If you already have a distribution channel, it probably costs a lot less than 30%.
Doing this reminded me of the days I worked with Rust, and how wonderfully impossible a task like this would be. I don’t think I’m touching it again, I like my global atomic booleans.
Huh 🤔 it really isn’t that much different from Swift.
I probably wasn’t that familiar with Atomics when I used Rust and trying to use global Booleans seemed impossible.
I still have a not-yet-finished project in Rust, where I tried to program a Raspberry Pi Zero with 8 planet shaped sensors, to record my voice when touching a sensor, and replay it just like it would be heard on that planet’s atmosphere.
And I’m still afraid of picking it up again because of all the message passing I had to do for simple Boolean flags. This lifted up some of that anxiety.
Yeah, one of the tough things about Rust is that it’s big. It’s complicated, there’s lots of features that interact in complicated ways… there’s just lots of stuff going on. It’s hard to learn.
But this is the obvious way to write a global atomic boolean? This is basically how I would’ve written it in C++ too, or Go. It’s literally just a global atomic boolean expressed as straightforwardly as possible.
But different people have different ways of trying to discover things, and what learning methods work for one person may not work well for another. Turns out teaching is hard.
A lot of these apps are basically about rewiring core behaviors of the OS to behave like, well, not macOS. I’m sure the author really likes doing that, but A) it seems strange to use macOS if you think all the “most useful” apps for it consist of making it not behave the way it’s supposed to, and B) well, a lot of this stuff does things that are indistinguishable from the things malware would do (keylogging, etc.). Makes sense to that Apple doesn’t want that stuff in their flagship curated app store.
Oh I agree, this particular example is exactly the kind of utility that is unsuited to the stated goals of app stores in general. But there are lots of other apps that have similar use.
Of course there’s also the difference in royalty payments between selling directly, and selling through the stores. I’m sure that doesn’t influence decisions too much :D
“it seems strange to use macOS if you think all the “most useful” apps for it consist of making it not behave the way it’s supposed to”
I would wager many people use macOS for the hardware, apps and overall ecosystem - not because of defaults that users may not like or want improved. Especially with the M1 hardware - the hardware is great, but you’re saddled with macOS. (Attempts to run Linux on it notwithstanding.)
I don’t see any disconnect in a person liking, or tolerating, 80 or 90 percent of an OS but wanting to tweak other things.
As an admittedly unreformed unixer who used macs for 15 years, I can’t help but notice that this person’s app “idea” (a hotkey for each app to bring it to the front) is something I’ve used on every platform since the previous century, and is handily done with Keyboard Maestro. I agree with all their assessments about Apple’s poisonous treatment of its own ecosystem, but also feel like they’ve been swimming in it for too long if they were hoping to make money off this well-trod ground.
Well of course, I also had something similar done with static assignments in BetterTouchTool, it worked just fine.
But what I wanted in rcmd is for it to work out of the box, and dynamically based on each users running apps.
What I can do with rcmd now and I couldn’t with BTT is:
if I assigned rcmd-s to Sublime, but I also have Spotify, Sketch and Safari open, I can still rcmd-rshift-s to cycle between all those apps without having to reassign keys or go back to command-tab
if I never assigned any app for, let’s say rcmd-a, and I ocassionally launch App Store or Android Studio, I know I can switch to those with the same instant hotkey
I’m aware this is not something that a lot of people need, my purpose was never to make a lot of money out of this. It’s just that, between getting some dynamic hotkeys working in the background, and making a helpful UI for other people to be able to use it, there’s a lot of effort that I’d like to get paid for, even just a little.
As far as I can tell the only apps you’re allowed to put in the app store are ones that should have just been a web page.
I have:
Plus lots more that could have web versions (and some do) … but the native apps are proper native apps.
Along with some of the above, I have:
I don’t have any of those. But I have Clocker. It’s just a menu-bar widget but I manage a distributed team and it’s really useful!
BTW, what do you think of DaisyDisk? Was thinking about getting it recently, but then I found that About this Mac -> Storage -> Manage -> Reduce Clutter did what I needed.
I have bought DaisyDisk a few years ago, frustrated by the average state of Diskinventory X http://www.derlien.com/. I still use from time to time to find where I’m wasting large chunks of disk. The overall UX is pretty cool.
I never really used Reduce Clutter. My main disk usage is often multiple large Git repositories with their binaries.
Further complicating this, the leading competitor to Office is just a web app. There are fewer competitors to editing audio and photos that are web apps, but it can be done.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. The App Store requires your apps to be sandboxed but the set of entitlements that you can request is pretty large. As long as you’re using the right APIs, you can have full filesystem access, access to peripherals, and so on.
The biggest obstacle I see is that Apple takes 30% of the sale price for App Store apps. This buys you two things:
I don’t think most Mac users search the store first (I never do, at least), so the the second option is of far less value than on iOS (where the App Store is the only place to install things and so also the first place to look for things to install). If your app is already popular then there’s no marketing advantage to the App Store. If you already have a distribution channel, it probably costs a lot less than 30%.
Sorry, but I have to be That Rust Guy for a second: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=c6b087e83d6b54469c2c612778d7bcb7 Pretty? Not really. Difficult? Also not really.
Huh 🤔 it really isn’t that much different from Swift.
I probably wasn’t that familiar with Atomics when I used Rust and trying to use global Booleans seemed impossible.
I still have a not-yet-finished project in Rust, where I tried to program a Raspberry Pi Zero with 8 planet shaped sensors, to record my voice when touching a sensor, and replay it just like it would be heard on that planet’s atmosphere.
And I’m still afraid of picking it up again because of all the message passing I had to do for simple Boolean flags. This lifted up some of that anxiety.
Yeah, one of the tough things about Rust is that it’s big. It’s complicated, there’s lots of features that interact in complicated ways… there’s just lots of stuff going on. It’s hard to learn.
If it’s not discoverable, it’s difficult
But this is the obvious way to write a global atomic boolean? This is basically how I would’ve written it in C++ too, or Go. It’s literally just a global atomic boolean expressed as straightforwardly as possible.
But different people have different ways of trying to discover things, and what learning methods work for one person may not work well for another. Turns out teaching is hard.
If I ever started a Nerdcore band, that’d be the name for it.
My guess is that on macOS it’s a bit complicated to make sandboxed apps as there’s so much legacy behavior and API usage.
On the phone stores there wasn’t that historical behavior to compensate.
A lot of these apps are basically about rewiring core behaviors of the OS to behave like, well, not macOS. I’m sure the author really likes doing that, but A) it seems strange to use macOS if you think all the “most useful” apps for it consist of making it not behave the way it’s supposed to, and B) well, a lot of this stuff does things that are indistinguishable from the things malware would do (keylogging, etc.). Makes sense to that Apple doesn’t want that stuff in their flagship curated app store.
Oh I agree, this particular example is exactly the kind of utility that is unsuited to the stated goals of app stores in general. But there are lots of other apps that have similar use.
Of course there’s also the difference in royalty payments between selling directly, and selling through the stores. I’m sure that doesn’t influence decisions too much :D
“it seems strange to use macOS if you think all the “most useful” apps for it consist of making it not behave the way it’s supposed to”
I would wager many people use macOS for the hardware, apps and overall ecosystem - not because of defaults that users may not like or want improved. Especially with the M1 hardware - the hardware is great, but you’re saddled with macOS. (Attempts to run Linux on it notwithstanding.)
I don’t see any disconnect in a person liking, or tolerating, 80 or 90 percent of an OS but wanting to tweak other things.
As an admittedly unreformed unixer who used macs for 15 years, I can’t help but notice that this person’s app “idea” (a hotkey for each app to bring it to the front) is something I’ve used on every platform since the previous century, and is handily done with Keyboard Maestro. I agree with all their assessments about Apple’s poisonous treatment of its own ecosystem, but also feel like they’ve been swimming in it for too long if they were hoping to make money off this well-trod ground.
rcmd dev here.
Well of course, I also had something similar done with static assignments in BetterTouchTool, it worked just fine. But what I wanted in rcmd is for it to work out of the box, and dynamically based on each users running apps.
What I can do with rcmd now and I couldn’t with BTT is:
rcmd-sto Sublime, but I also have Spotify, Sketch and Safari open, I can stillrcmd-rshift-sto cycle between all those apps without having to reassign keys or go back tocommand-tabrcmd-a, and I ocassionally launch App Store or Android Studio, I know I can switch to those with the same instant hotkeyI’m aware this is not something that a lot of people need, my purpose was never to make a lot of money out of this. It’s just that, between getting some dynamic hotkeys working in the background, and making a helpful UI for other people to be able to use it, there’s a lot of effort that I’d like to get paid for, even just a little.