Mac App Store

You know, you go there and say, we're on the desktop.

I don't know how that compares with the Mac App Store.

It's an interesting question.

My guess is the Mac App Store probably has more apps that are either made for Mac or iPad and iOS apps that can run on a Mac.

Tuned for desktop is an interesting way of putting it.

It's

a minute work down under.

The Mac App Store apps can now drop support for Intel Macs.

And I've heard a lot of discussion about this.

I've heard people saying it's about time, people saying, oh, my God, it's a horrible thing.

It was an emulator, right? It was the emulator.

Well, it's a technology that allows you to take an app that was never updated for Apple Silicon, and allow it to keep running.

What this is saying is their net, you know, so for the past several years, Apple has said if you're, if you're going to put something in, now, first of all, this is only for the Mac App Store, which For example, a lot of apps are not sold through the Mac App Store.

They're sold direct, so this has no impact on that.

And then they could start to study that and learn the names, faces, and countries of the people that they would be living with.

And Peter says that RemNotes for the Mac is not suitable for the Neo according to the Mac App Store.

So that's interesting.

And Quizlet.

It basically makes a small container of the application and efficiently downloads it on the Windows system, and then you can run an application in the Windows system very efficiently, and then it's cached, so it's easily cleaned up.

I originally was working with the developers of Anka to do something similar on the Mac, but they didn't see a business need with the Mac App Store.

But I was hoping some of these bigger applications like Mathematica, we could basically do a container of the application and efficiently download it on the Mac system and then easily just as a cache could it clean up after so we wouldn't have to worry about erasing the systems after they've been returned, that type of thing.

It's interesting hearing you talk about that.

So yeah, it'd be awesome to be able to not have to install everything you need, especially as storage is just getting more and more and more expensive as it gets used up with all the RAM by all the clankers out there, I guess.

So, you know, us mere mortals are sort of back to begging for scraps for what we need on our devices.

Yeah, and then you run into things like probably primarily Apple's Mac App Store apps like Logic Pro, Xcode, GarageBand, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, where you have to do all these post installs for the user to be able to use the application.

Yeah, it's challenging sometimes.

In cases when the AI can't physically, legally, or intellectually do something, the most efficient path to completing the task will often be the for the AI to handle strategy while delegating to a human to fill these gaps.

To illustrate what this delegation pattern can look like, let's look at how I recently got my Whistle synth app into the Mac App Store.

At a high level, I set the strategy, can you walk me through the process of getting this into the Mac App Store? But everything after that was either handled by the AI or delegated back to me.

It handled included figuring out what tasks needed to be done, modifying the implementation to be compatible with the app store restrictions, building the app, and giving me instructions.

And then it delegated to me to record a demo video involving whistling, physical, register as a Mac developer, legal, and clean up its app store description, intellectual.

You land on register a new provisioning profile, a page of radio buttons grouped into development and distribution sections.

3.

Under Distribution, select Mac App Store Connect.

It installs everything I had installed with brew.

I installed a bunch of Mac App Store stuff, downloaded Setapp, got all that stuff installed.

But the tragedy that I realized after the fact was I didn't back up the Hive database or any of my cloud... or any of my Claude chat history.

Like if I would have been smart enough, I would have copied over the, the dot Claude directory for my home directory.

But yeah, it just feels like there's stuff all over the place in .NET.

file world that is like i don't know i don't want to deal with it like it's all backed up through backblaze which is fine but like i don't want to deal with that on like a work laptop like i just want to bring stuff down and copy and paste yes

i i keep my environments between my work computer and my personal computer very similar so like the only thing that's different is like i don't install stuff through the mac app store on my work machine so that's the only difference between the two machines is like it just doesn't install that stuff at all But all of it is run by dot bot and homebrew and it's in a repo and I have it on GitHub and yeah, that's, that's solid for, for a long time.

Cool.

And, you know, put, you know, doing your release notes for your test flight builds.

Um, and I kept realizing that, like, often when I was uploading the test flight build, I didn't have anything to write because I hadn't actually changed anything in the Mac App Store version of the app, because every single feature I added was only in the Pro version.

[laughs]

Because you can't do anything in the Mac App Store.

Everything is, oh-

[laughs]

It's like, if an app like this can't have it, if an app like this, where you can put like a folder in a dock and click on it and open the folder and put things into it, if I can't have the entitlement that lets me do that with arbitrary folders, then what app deserves it? Because you can put arbitrary folders in a dock-like thing, and I think Apple's attitude is, "Don't make a dock-like thing."

[laughs]

This is an email they sent out.

We're reaching out to let you know that universal Mac OS apps on the Mac App Store that require Mac OS 13 or later can now remove support for Intel-based Mac computers.

which I presume a developer seeing that will, right?

I think it depends on who their user base is.