turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef

Writing by tag: apps

Introducing Taxatio

24 April 2023

I’m excited to share that I recently released a new app, a tax calculator for freelancers called Taxatio. It is specifically for self-employed sole proprietors based in the United States — freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, and indie developers (like me!). One of the more confusing and difficult aspects of going independent is taxes. And that’s why I made this. It is a multiplatform SwiftUI app for iOS and macOS available as a universal purchase on the App Store.

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To distribute in the Mac App Store, or not

Is the app sandbox worth it? 02 June 2021

For the past few weeks I have been debating on whether or not to distribute a new Mac app via the Mac App Store or independently. I have arrived at a crossroads in development where I need to make this decision. I am mostly code-complete for my MVP 1.0 release. The question I am facing is how I want to spend the remainder of my time to cross the finish line.

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On non-native apps: JavaScript doesn't suck but your app might

16 May 2020

The other day Slack went down and I tweeted to express my dissatisfaction and sarcastically comment that non-native apps are the future. I should have known it would get as much attention as a tweet about Elon Musk. People argued about the merits of native versus non-native app development, which seems like a never-ending a controversy. However, I really do not care which technologies are used to make an app. I only care about the quality of an app and the user experience it provides — which is the problem with Slack.

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Mac app tests fail with hardened runtime enabled

23 February 2020

I recently discovered that unit tests and UI tests for a macOS Xcode project will fail with obscure error messages if the hardened runtime is enabled. It took me awhile to realize what the actual source of the problem was, because the error messages led me in the wrong direction. Hopefully this will save you some time.

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Implementing right-click for NSButton

15 August 2019

This isn’t complicated, but I found it confusing. Perhaps I am spoiled by the more modern APIs in UIKit. When writing Lucifer, a menu bar app, I wanted to have different actions for left-clicking and right-clicking on the button in the menu bar. To my surprise, this was much more cumbersome than I expected.

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Summoning Lucifer: on making my first Mac app as an iOS developer

26 March 2019

I made my first Mac app — Lucifer. It is a menu bar app that allows you toggle Dark Mode on and off in macOS Mojave. To be honest, it feels like a stretch to actually call this a Mac app. It is less than 100 lines of code in a single AppDelegate.swift file and the meat of the program is an AppleScript that tells System Preferences to enable or disable Dark Mode. As an iOS developer, much of the experience was familiar. The most salient aspect, however, was learning the frustrating and obscure details of app sandboxing, the “hardened runtime”, and app notarization — altogether it was like visiting hell and giving Satan a bubble bath. Appropriate, I suppose.

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Status bars matter

Perfecting your app screenshots for the App Store 03 August 2014
Updated: 13 October 2014

You have spent countless hours, days, months, or maybe even years perfecting your app. There has been plenty of blood, sweat, and tears. Your relationships and your health have suffered through the development process. You are ready for 1.0 and the time has arrived to prepare all of your content for the App Store — app icon, keywords, description, localizations, and screenshots (and soon app previews).

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