Changelog

Mac users don’t care about mac apps like they used to. Today and the future is a web platform world with JavaScript at the center morphing into this gigantic blackhole (mainly a gravity metaphor) with everything else being pulled into its orbit. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care about what makes for a good Mac app. John Gruber also quoted SwiftOnSecurity regarding Microsoft’s switch to Chromium as Windows’s built-in rendering engine, saying: This is the end of desktop applications. There’s nowhere but JavaScript.

The closer your development environment mirrors your production environment, the better. And we’re all using HTTPS in production, right? Right?!

Ever wanted to have light and dark apps live side-by-side in harmony, well now you can. With Gray, you can pick which apps should use the light and dark appearance with a click of a button. You set your Mac to use the dark appearance, then use Gray (a frontend for defaults write) to configure individual apps to use the light aqua appearance. I only left dark mode on for a half hour or so, so this app isn’t for me. I’d love to see screenshots of this in use, though. Maybe I’ll be converted to the gray side.

🌝 👆 🌚 👆 🌝 👆 🌚 👆 🌝

A missing manual on setting up YubiKey as an OpenPGP smart card for SSH on macOS. Log into remote servers and push to GitHub securely with hardware encryption. Make your setup stick once and for all.

Want developers of great software to be able to make a living doing it? Want free trials in the App Store? Join The Developers Union! Dear Apple, We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store. Today, we are asking Apple to publicly commit — by the tenth anniversary of the App Store this July — to allowing free trials for all apps in the App Stores before July 2019. After that, we’ll start advocating for a more reasonable revenue cut and other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.

This list is a lot longer than I expected! Alongside each app is an icon indicating whether it’s written in Swift or Objective-C, which is nice for those of us looking for reading material. 💪

If this is a repeat for you, then pay no attention. I was recently introduced to this tool by @jerodsanto who logged this awhile back when he found it. 💫 If you’re on macOS you don’t want to open up Numbers to fiddle with a .csv file — that’s why Jakob Egger, the creator of Egger Apps, created it. Download it on the Mac App Store.

It’s unfortunate that this only works with iTerm2. Anybody up for a port? 😏

This is a macOS app for the gifski encoder, which converts videos to GIF animations using pngquant’s fancy features for efficient cross-frame palettes and temporal dithering. It produces animated GIFs that use thousands of colors per frame. Sindre is so good at building these little Mac apps that do one thing well. 🥇

Invoke vim-anywhere with a keyboard shortcut and it’ll open a buffer for you. Close it and the buffer’s contents will be copied to your clipboard for easy pasting.

I can’t resist at least skimming a fellow hacker’s post on how they setup their machine. Nick Taylor: These are the tools you absolutely need on your Mac — Homebrew and Homebrew Cask, Spectacle, and Alfred. But, let’s not stop there… Nick goes on to share a ton of resources for his Mac setup; tools for web dev, shell/terminal setup, useful utilities, and tweaks to macOS. Spend a few minutes skimming this. There’s a gem in this post for everyone.

Docker for macOS makes it easy to have Docker containers running on your Mac in just a few minutes and now it has experimental Kubernetes support. We’re proud to announce that Docker for Mac with beta Kubernetes support is now publicly available as part of the Edge release channel. With this release you can now run a single node Kubernetes cluster right on your Mac and use both kubectl commands and docker commands to control your containers.

I ran a script awhile back (found it on GitHub, can’t recall its name) that created Slack-style keyboard shortcuts (via the pref pane) for all common emoji, but it was a one-off and I’ve run in to many emoji that are missing. Rocket looks like a better version of that same idea.

Add instant, native micro-GUIs for shell scripts and CLIs to your Mac’s Terminal using a JSON-based format. Behind the scenes, it’s a JavaScript framework (similar to Electron). Cool idea, but it’d be even more compelling if it shipped with some useful default GUIs.