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.

We’re joined by Ronak Shah and Beth Dakin from the Safari team at Apple about their announcements at WWDC20 and the release of Safari 14. We talk about Safari WebExtensions, Face ID and Touch ID coming to the web, Safari’s plans to advance the web platform, and it all comes down to their focus on privacy, power, and performance.

The most common setup for SSH keys is just keeping them on disk, guarded by proper permissions. This is fine in most cases, but it’s not super hard for malicious users or malware to copy your private key. If you store your keys in the Secure Enclave, it’s impossible to export them, by design.

Docker is expected about 5x slower…

Docker on a Mac utilizes a hypervisor. Hypervisors rely on running the same architecture on the host as the guest, and are about about 1x - 2x as slow as running natively. Since you’re running ARM Mac, these hypervisors can only run ARM Linux. They can’t run x86_64 Linux.

And, “VirtualBox won’t work.”

VirtualBox is a hypervisor. Therefore, it won’t be able to run x86 Windows or x86 Linux.

And, “Boot Camp won’t work.”

Boot Camp is an Apple-approved way to dual-boot Mac OS and Windows. Boot Camp will definitely not be available on ARM Macs. It might be added later with the ability to run ARM Windows, though Microsoft would have to approve.

Turns out everyone’s favorite macOS package manager has an official cask for managing fonts. Who knew?!

This Dockerfile automates the setup of OSX-KVM. All your host system needs is hardware virtualization enabled in BIOS and QEMU installed.

Suitcase is a command line tool that can be “programmed” to display a SwiftUI interface that can trigger commands and scripts.

Brent Simmons did some analysis on download numbers for NetNewsWire on iOS and Mac.

Based on the above, and knowing that way more people use iOS than macOS, you’d expect the iOS app to be way more popular. But it’s not. It’s a little more popular.

I find this super-fascinating, because it’s some data — admittedly just one app — that confirms what I’ve thought for a long time, which is that, for some types of apps, a Mac app would do as well as an iOS app.

Control Room is a macOS app that lets you control the simulators for iOS, tvOS, and watchOS – their UI appearance, status bar configuration, and more. It wraps Apple’s own simctl command-line tool, so you’ll need Xcode installed.

The author posted a nice demo video on Twitter and the response was so positive that they open sourced the tool.

You can rearrange them with ⌘ + drag and then click the arrow icon to hide.

Tyler Hall:

I completely realize and wholeheartedly own-up to the fact that I’m a geek and a Mac power user above and beyond what normal muggles will ever experience, nonetheless, this is the first-run experience I was greeted to this afternoon after upgrading to Catalina.

I’m sure Catalina will be worth it in the end, but I’m going to sit this one out for a bit until the dust settles.

We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision. The proof-of-concept, dubbed “Project Sistine” after our recreation of the famous painting in the Sistine Chapel, was prototyped by Anish Athalye, Kevin Kwok, Guillermo Webster, and Logan Engstrom in about 16 hours.

See that thing at the top of the laptop? It’s a mirror that’s redirecting the webcam downward to do the detection. How they detect a touch is (at least in principle) simple:

Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection.

Saagar Jha shared an honest perspective of using Homebrew and MacPorts. Find out why Saagar favors MacPorts over Homebrew “for the foreseeable future.”

A couple of months ago, I uninstalled Homebrew and migrated my configuration to MacPorts. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the state of package management on macOS, and here’s what I’ve come up with based on my experiences using both and interacting with their development communities.