Changelog

From installing Mac’s command line developer tools (Xcode), Homebrew, Git, npm, to your code editor — Michael Uloth walks you through all the steps and details to get a new Mac ready for web development. This guide is a good start and purposely leaves out items that aren’t strictly required for web development. If you’re into automation and tweaking things, then thoughtbot/laptop is another route to consider. It automates most of Michael’s steps and can also be customized to install only exactly what you want.

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Today, I’m excited to announce updates to our guides to Swift Codable and Numbers, as well as a brand new Guide to Swift Strings. Everything is up-to-date with the latest from Swift 5 and Xcode 10.2, and now — for the first time — available in print! If you dig NSHipster, you’ll love Flight School. Amazing cover design! I love it when the cover of a book makes you want to read it.

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Everyone’s favorite package manager for macOS released version 2.0 with official support for Linux and Windows 10 (with Windows Subsystem Linux). Cross-platform setup scripts just got a whole lot easier.

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This post from Daniel Weibel not only explains how macOS uses an outdated version of Bash, but also how to upgrade to the latest Bash via Homebrew. One thing that many macOS users don’t know is that they are using a completely outdated version of the Bash shell. However, it is highly recommended to use a newer version of Bash on macOS, because it enables you to use useful new features. $ bash --version GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin18) Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. The reason Apple uses this old version of Bash has to do with licensing. Bash 4.0 and newer uses the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), which Apple doesn’t support. There are some discussions about this on Reddit. Version 3.2 of GNU Bash is the last version with a license that Apple is willing to accept, and so it sticks with it.

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A hypervisor that traps Linux system call and translates them into Darwin’s system calls. It can interpret ELF files so Linux binaries run without any modification.

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Mattt over at NSHipster explains two important abstractions on Apple platforms: bundles and packages. Despite being distinct concepts, the terms “bundle” and “package” are frequently used interchangeably. Part of this is undoubtedly due to their similar names, but perhaps the main source of confusion is that many bundles just so happen to be packages (and vice versa). So before we go any further, let’s define our terminology: …

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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.

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

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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.

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🌝 👆 🌚 👆 🌝 👆 🌚 👆 🌝

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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.

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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.

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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. 💪

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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.

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

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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. 🥇

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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If you’re looking for an easy guide to install Node.js and npm on OS X and macOS — this is it. The default method for installing Node.js is to download a pre-built installer for your platform, install it and make sure it’s on your $PATH. However — if you’re a Homebrew fan like me and prefer to install all of your packages with it — ensuring your packages are installed using the same commands and directories and allowing Homebrew to easily manage upgrades and updates, then this guide will help you get started. Install Node.js and npm with Homebrew First, install Homebrew. /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" Then run brew update to make sure Homebrew is up to date. brew update As a safe measure you should run brew doctor to make sure your system is ready to brew. Run the command below and follow any recommendations from brew doctor. brew doctor Next, add Homebrew’s location to your $PATH in your .bash_profile or .zshrc file. export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH" Next, install Node (npm will be installed with Node): brew install node To test out your Node and npm install, try installing Grunt (you might be asked to run with sudo): npm install -g grunt-cli If that worked then congratulations — you’ve installed Node.js, npm, and Grunt. If not — retrace your steps or post a question to Stack Overflow. Listen to Related Podcasts on The Changelog Since you’re interested in Node.js, npm, and Homebrew — listen to some recent related podcasts we’ve done on those subjects. #223: Homebrew and Package Management with Mike McQuaid #200: JavaScript and Robots with Raquel Vélez, a.k.a. rockbot #178: OAuth 2.0, Oz, Node.js, and Hapi.js with Eran Hammer #155: The Future of Node.js with Scott Hammond #139: The Rise of io.js with Mikeal Rogers #119: MEAN.js & Full-Stack JavaScript with Roie Cohen and Amos Haviv #116: Node Black Friday at Walmart with Eran Hammer #113: Keep npm Running with Isaac Schlueter and Charlie Robbins #101: npm Origins and Node.js with Isaac Schlueter

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