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.

I’ve wanted something like this for so long that I forgot I wanted it. Insta-install!

Pock can place your macOS Dock inside your MacBook’s TouchBar, letting you enjoy your screen in full-size every time!

It doesn’t look amazing right now, but there is a big update in the works that does look amazing.

Andre Marcelo-Tanner:

The most widely used container runtime on High Performance Computing now runs on Mac, allowing any developer to package their entire application into a single container. This has broader implications and possibilities of what exactly is possible by putting everything into a single file with no daemon required on OSX but I would let an expert like Greg Kurtzer talk about that :)

This was a brief topic of conversation when we had Greg on The Changelog a few weeks back.

I’m logging this not because it’s super-useful in its current form (it is not). I’m logging this not because it’s a good example of a modern Swift app (it may be, I have no idea). Nope. I’m logging FeedCompass because it represents an idea that deserves more attention.

Independent websites, loosely stitched together via open protocols, are what make the web great.

Yeah, let’s do more of that.

On this week’s Homebrew episode, we discussed Mike’s script that automates the setup of a new Mac.

Listen to the show for an in-depth discussion on why he built it, the value of automating tasks you don’t do often, and to hear how Adam rolls with new machines. Or forget all that and click the headline link to check out Strap for yourself.

We’re talking with Mike McQuaid about Homebew 2.0.0, supporting Linux and Windows 10, the backstory and details surrounding the security issue they had in 2018, their new governance model, Mike’s new role, the core team meeting in-person at FOSDEM this year, and what’s coming next for Homebrew.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: …

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. 💪