Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

From Niels Leenheer:

It is not difficult to find some incredibly shitty takes on Electron, and every time it boils down to: It’s slow. Downloads are huge, and it uses a lot of memory. Electron apps are just websites. Developers that are using Electron are taking the lazy or easy approach to cross-platform development. Native apps are just better in every single way.

And somehow, these arguments often come from Apple fans when they discover one of their apps isn’t “native” or when a macOS favourite is considering moving to Electron. How dare they!

And on the surface, I agree with pretty much everything that people say about Electron. And at the same time, I don’t care at all. And neither should you.

Niels goes on to explain why you shouldn’t care. But, where’s the evidence for those shitty takes on Electron? Let’s use the recent example of 1Password.

Some have said that 1Password has “simply decided that the Mac isn’t important enough,” which we’re hoping to uncover in our upcoming dual podcast series with 1Password Founder Dave Teare on Founders Talk and Mitchell Cohen and Andrew Beyer on JS Party.

Drop some comments if you have questions/topics we should bring up.

PlayCover lets you sideload iOS apps and games onto your Mac and run them like any other app. Simply drag-n-drop the .ipa file and wait for PlayCover to convert and launch the app. Here’s a video of it in action playing Genshin Impact.

A new open-source desktop operating system that aims to provide a similar experience and compatibility with macOS on x86-64 systems. It builds on the solid foundations of FreeBSD, existing open source packages in the same space, and new code to fill the gaps. Airyx aims to feel sleek, stable, familiar and intuitive, handle your daily tasks, and provide as much compatibility as possible with the commercial OS that inspired it.

This is largely the effort of one hacker in her spare time. It’s still early days, which she admits in a tweet:

For the record, I know how much airyx.org sucks rn and I’m working on it Face with tears of joyFace with tears of joy Be patient.

Gotta respect the ambition on display here. Go get it, Zoë! 💪

On this episode we’re talking with our good friend Mat Ryer whom you may know from the Go Time podcast. Mat created an awesome open source tool for putting just about anything in your Mac’s toolbar. It was originally written in Objective-C, but it just got a big rewrite in Go and abig rename from BitBar to xbar.

If you don’t use a Mac don’t hit skip on this episode quite yet! There are lessons to be learned for anyone interested in hacking on tools to make your life better. Plus, with this rewrite Mat has positioned xbar to go cross-platform, which we talk about as well.

Lima launches Linux VMs on your Intel or ARM-based Mac with automatic file sharing, port forwarding, and containerd. That means you can easily do cool stuff like:

$ echo "files under /Users on macOS filesystem are readable from Linux" > some-file

$ lima cat some-file
files under /Users on macOS filesystem are readable from Linux

$ lima sh -c 'echo "/tmp/lima is writable from both macOS and Linux" > /tmp/lima/another-file'

$ cat /tmp/lima/another-file
/tmp/lima is writable from both macOS and Linux"

Mat Ryer just finished a complete rewrite of his popular BitBar mac menu bar appusing Wails (which you may have heard about on Go Time) and there are hundreds of pre-built plugins for you to choose from. ✨

Fatih Arslan takes you through his journey to bring dark mode to his macOS terminal apps.

Mike McQuaid:

Thanks to all our hard-working maintainers, contributors, sponsors and supporters for getting us this far. Particular thanks on Homebrew 3.0.0 go to MacStadium and Apple for providing us with a lot of Apple Silicon hardware and Cassidy from Apple for helping us in many ways with this migration. Enjoy using Homebrew!

And a quick note on the Apple Silicon support:

Homebrew doesn’t (yet) provide bottles for all packages on Apple Silicon that we do on Intel x86_64 but we welcome your help in doing so.

I’d be surprised if this undertaking could be described as anything less than large. Congrats to Mike and the entire team! Homebrew is a gigantic blessing to developers (who use Macs) everywhere and a shining example of open source done well. 👏

MacDriver is a toolkit for working with Apple/Mac APIs and frameworks in Go

It’s made of 3 layers: bindings for Objective-C, framework packages like cocoa/webkit, and a bridge system that makes it easier to integrate with native macOS systems like menus, windows, etc, in a separate process. Lots to like here!

As I became to customise my settings more and more, having to set up a new environment wasn’t an exciting thing to do anymore. I not only have to remember to install all of these things that I need, but it became also tedious and demanded a large cognitive effort. Also, I got frustrated many times because I thought I was all set up until I realised I forgot to install a particular tool. This post shares some things I’ve learned when comes to automating my environment setup.

Works with 20+ meeting services, including all the usual suspects.

About 18 months ago I started a project which had to develop directly against containerd with a full Linux system.

This presented a problem which I’d not really encountered before - Docker and Kubernetes on my Mac were no longer enough, I needed a full Linux environment, and so did the community.

This is how it went and what we learned along the way.

A sad, but unsurprising day:

Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.

Growl is one of the reasons I originally fell in love with the Mac. It belongs in the pantheon of open source projects that don’t merely cease to exist, but are so influential that they change the very platform they are built on.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this amazing project over the years. 💚

If you’re intrigued by the overwhelmingly positive reviews of Apple’s M1-based machines, but not sure if your favorite (or necessary apps) have made the transition, this site has your back.

(Hat tip to Christian Witts in our #applenerds channel for linking this up)

We have a BIG show for you today. We’re talking about the future of the Mac. Coming off of Apple’s “One more thing.” event to launch the Apple M1 chip and M1 powered Macs, we have a two part show giving you the perspective of Apple as well as a Mac app developer on the future of the Mac.

Part 1 features Tim Triemstra from Apple. Tim is the Product Marketing Manager for Developer Technologies. He’s been at Apple for 15 years and the team he manages is responsible for developer tools and technologies including Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, the Swift language, and UNIX tools.

Part 2 features Ken Case from The Omni Group. Ken is the Founder and CEO of The Omni Group and they’re well known for their Omni Productivity Suite including OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner – all of which are developed for iOS & Mac.

Sam Soffes:

Today, my new 13-inch MacBook Pro arrived! I was super excited to get it out of the box and set it up. This thing is fast! I am already very impressed. When I started setting up my development environment, things started to get a little frustrating. Have no fear, it’s solvable!

The biggest issue for me was Homebrew. According to this issue “There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come.” No big deal though. Homebrew can work just fine with Rosetta 2 and some things work natively.

Now that youtube-dl is back, you may be downloading videos with renewed vigor. If you prefer the warm embrace of a GUI over the cold efficiency of a terminal, ViDL is worth a look.

It even has a Safari extension (and bookmarklet for other browsers) so you can download a video directly from a page you’re viewing. 👌

If you’ve upgraded to Big Sur and your desktop feels disjointed because all of Apple’s apps have the new icon style, but your 3rd party apps from Adobe, Omni, and others don’t… check out this repo of 1500+ replacement icons.

Darling is a lot like Wine only for macOS.

It implements a complete Darwin environment, runs macOS software directly without requiring a hardware emulator, and aims to integrate apps into the Linux desktop experience.

The only downside is they haven’t quite gotten GUI apps working yet:

This took us a lot of time and effort, but we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications. It requires some special setup for now though, so do not expect it to work out of the box just yet. We’re working on this; stay tuned!

This is like having a nice, OS-integrated GUI for all of your common scripts and tasks. It has a bunch of functions built in and scripting support is coming soon so you can add your own as well. $9 cheap or if you’re really cheap you can build it yourself from source. 😉

If you use Vimium (a Chrome extension which provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor) and you’re on macOS, Vimac is a no-brainer. You can scroll windows with HJKL keys, perform clicks using hint letters, and even perform right (and double) clicks with your keyboard.

James Blizzard, writing for Browser London:

in my view, a number of factors are converging to make change ever more likely. Namely, the huge scale of cloud computing providers, Apple’s plans to migrate their laptop products to ARM-based processors, and the opening up of the educational space to include ARM-based systems.

There are some great thoughts from James in this article. From my vantage point, ARM is well-positioned for the short/medium-term, but RISC-V might just disrupt that for the long-term. One small piece of evidence: how Apple positioned this transition to Apple Silicon instead of to ARM.

You’ll need the latest (macOS Big Sur beta and Xcode 12 beta) to get this up and running, but if you’re interested in modern macOS development and SwiftUI, it’s probably worth it so you can poke around the source and see how it all fits together.

We had an excellent interview with Beth Dakin and Ronak Shah from the Safari team about what’s new and interesting for developers in Safari 14. There were so many good moments that I figured a round-up post was warranted. ICYMI (or don’t have time for the full convo), here’s the highlights from my POV.