Winterfest 2023 is on. Loads of quality software for Mac and Windows from independent vendors, at a discount. This includes my own Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan, which are on sale with a 25% discount.
Find out more at artisanalsoftwarefestival.com .
Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Winterfest 2021. There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both). Sale ends 11th January.
This is a guest post from fellow software developer, Simon Kravis.
Few developers would choose their development platform on the merits of their respective Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) but it happens that applications developed in Windows need to be made available on the Mac platform.
There are many environments offering cross-platform (Mac, Windows and sometimes Android) functionality, but close inspection shows that they all have limitations. Visual Studio (the native Windows IDE) can produce apps which will run on a Mac using .Net Core – but only if they are command line apps on Windows. Other environments (like Xamarin) do support interfaces, but only involving simple controls like text boxes or drop-downs. There are other cross-platform IDEs (such as Qt) which offer better graphics support, but they are not cheap and the extent of their support is not evident. If you need functionality such as computer vision, there seems to be no alternative to creating a separate code base for the Mac. Once you start on this path it becomes obvious that Macs handle graphics (and interfaces) very differently from Windows.
Macs have evolved rather more than PCs over the decades: they abandoned their proprietary Mac operating system in favour of UNIX in 1999, adopting the NeXTSTEP platform created by NeXT. Apple originally used PowerPC chips, replacing them with Intel Core processors in 2006, and they are currently transitioning to RISC chips. The Mac NeXTSTEP programming language was Objective C, developed in the 1980s and this is still supported, although the modern Swift language was introduced in 2014, and the Xcode IDE appeared in 2003. Xcode is free, even for teams. It uses the Cocoa API, which is accessible from other environments. The current release (MacOS 13.0) supports both Objective-C and Swift and is also used for developing iPhone and iPad apps. Mac operating systems since Catalina (released in 2019) are 64-bit only. Xcode can only develop apps for Apple operating systems, notably iOS, which powers the iPhone. Most of the web questions and examples relate to iOS rather than MacOS. MacOS uses different frameworks from iOS, so some functions used in iOS are not available in MacOS, or have different parameters.
The Windows IDE (Visual Studio) dates from 1997, when it bundled together Visual Basic, Visual Fox Pro and Visual Source Safe and Visual C++. It has an open architecture based on plug-ins and supports 36 different programming languages, but the major ones are C#, VB.Net and C++. Visual Studio can develop apps for any platform via the .NetCore framework, but capability for non-Windows platforms is limited. The Community edition is free, and has almost all the functionality of paid versions.
Both Visual Studio and Xcode are highly complex applications. They both have graphical interface builders where controls are dragged from a library onto a form. Each application has a vocal supporters and detractors. My experience comes from about 5 years with Visual Studio developing C# applications. Before this I worked with Visual Basic for Applications in Microsoft Access, so I am well-versed in the Microsoft way of doing things.
Like most complex applications, Visual Studio and Xcode each have plenty of bugs, often producing completely unhelpful error messages. Reporting an Xcode bug through standard channels resulted in … nothing. Not even an automated message saying “Thank you for feedback. It will be used to improve future versions”. I haven’t even tried to report a Visual Studio bug, but I suspect that the much larger user base for Visual Studio will mean that workarounds are more readily available, even if the giant ship of Microsoft takes years to respond.
Moving to the Mac and Xcode for development was a shock as I found I didn’t know how to do the most basic things. String manipulation (used in most applications) in Objective C is highly verbose compared to C#. Google was invaluable for finding answers – mostly they were from Stack Overflow, but often from 10 or more years ago, sometimes from Apple Developer Forums. As Xcode has changed considerably since then, answers often had to be adjusted before they could be used. Another problem is that functionality once provided externally has since been incorporated into Cocoa, so attempts to find a current version of a component (or framework as they called in Cocoa) are often unsuccessful.
MacOS provides more native functionality than Windows. Features such as computer vision and PDF generation are included in MacOS, rather than requiring the use of 3rd party components, which may not as robust as desired, and may require a license for commercial use. However, documentation of MacOS functionality, if present at all, was rarely useful. A few times I asked questions on Stack Overflow which attracted the ire of the Mac gurus for either through having obvious (to them) answers or through not conforming to the forum guidelines (in their opinion). However, the integration of NuGet with Visual Studio provides easy access to the massive number of 3rd party libraries available for .Net on Windows.
The model-view-controller paradigm used on the Mac took some getting used to, as did the design of the main Xcode screen. Sometimes a useful display would disappear and I had difficulty in finding it how to bring it back. I often had to resort to retrieving earlier versions from the excellent Time Machine backup. Form design is similar on both platforms – dragging and dropping components from a library. Both Xcode and Visual Studio have bugs, as would be expected for such complex apps. Events from components are generated automatically in Windows, but have to be defined on the Mac (as Actions). References to the component you’ve added also need to be defined on the Mac (as Outlets) and are not a property of the component, whereas on Windows they are.
The Xcode environment provides only basic facilities from scratch: if you need to do something more sophisticated you’ll have to Google around to find out how. Once you know – it’s easy, but the learning curve for Xcode is much higher than for Visual Studio.
Rather than starting from scratch with the Mac version of my Caption Pro app, which uses local computer vision functionality to detect multiple photos, changes image dimensions and adds text to images, I found an existing open-source project on GitHub with similar basic functionality. This dated from 7 years ago and used Objective-C, so that was the language I opted for. An immediate handicap was that many of the answers I found to my questions used Swift in their example code, which is not interconvertible with Objective-C in the way that C# and VB.Net are. iOS applications for the iPhone (which are most common) use different frameworks from Mac apps, and routines in them sometimes have completely different syntax.
The user interfaces for the Mac and Windows versions look quite different, as shown below. There are some basic differences – menus appear separately to the application window on the Mac and are locked to the top of the screen, whereas Windows menus are part of the application screen. Toolbars offer access to common functionality on the Mac. Differences also arise from the fact the Mac application was adapted from existing code rather than created from scratch.
Open-source examples (often from GitHub) are useful, but rarely work out-of-the- box. Sometimes the modifications need are minor – like defining the development team- but sometimes it’s not possible to get them to build in a current version of Xcode.
Debugging on Xcode is frustrating – the call stack frequently contains assembler (which is perhaps why app performance tends to be better on Macs), and the debug variables window does not list all relevant variable values. Variable types may not be correct – Boolean values may appear as dates, and sometimes variables cannot even be evaluated by po (print out) statements. Printing out structure variables may show nothing. Despite the generally superior performance of Mac apps, building apps in Xcode appears to be much slower than in Visual Studio on similar vintage machines, and after code stops at a breakpoint, it may take a long time before the variables window is filled. Deployment of Mac apps can still be done on an ad-hoc basis, but you have to register as an Apple Developer to avoid blockages in installation arising from being an ‘untrusted source’. Bypassing these blockages is more than a matter of clicking “Install anyway” so it’s hard to avoid forking out US$100 per year for registration. Windows has similar blockages, which can be bypassed with a code-signing certificate. These certificates are available from many vendors, and are slightly cheaper than Apple developer registration, but the process of obtaining one may be very involved.
Ad-hoc deployment is somewhat easier on the Mac than on Windows, but the method of doing it via Archive generation is anything but obvious. Mac applications are actually disk images and applications keep all of relevant files in a folder. This makes uninstallation a matter of dragging the application icon into the recycle bin, a far simpler process than on Windows. dmg files are not recognized by IIS web servers (and may not be by Apache either), so unless the file type is registered, download from a web site will not be possible.
Apple pioneered the App Store for iPhones (it is the only way in which iPhone apps can be installed) and Mac apps can also be put there. Apple takes a commission of 30% (or 15% if you are a small company) and they review all apps before adding them. Passing the review process may be a lngthy process, as not all problems are detected in a review cycle. Fixing these issues and resubmitting may result in further problems coming to light. The review process may also be somewhat arbitrary. One App Store app presented an interface in German by default. English was available as Preferences option, but only after guessing where the Preferences option was located. App Store apps operate within a sandbox, which places restrictions on filesystem operations. Whether App Store deployment makes economic sense depends on the nature of the app, its market and price structure. Its advantages are that it targets the 16% of desktop users who use Macs, and streamlines installation (and payment, if applicable). The App Store supports ‘freemium’ pricing, where additional features are made available to paying users, but apps with free trial periods are shown as being free but with ‘in-app purchases’, which annoys some users.
Windows deployment can use .msi files, which have been around for decades, but are not easily installed by non-admin users. Self-extracting executables are more tractable, but 3rd party tools have to be used to create them. Windows 10 introduced Universal Windows Programs, which are easier to install and can be placed in the Microsoft Store, which operates in a similar way to the Apple App store, but for Windows desktops and tablets.
A key question which is very difficult to answer is “How long will it take me to convert my Windows app to run on a Mac?” Factors affecting this are app complexity, functionality and programmer skill. The time between starting work on the Mac app and first deploying it on the company web site was about 3 months, but the amount of time spent on the project each day varied between zero and 3 or 4 hours. If you are a paid resource, then the cost of a cross-platform IDE may be justified, but the requirement for local computer vision functionality added a great deal of complexity to my requirements, which is one reason why I opted for a separate code base. Substantial evaluation would be required before deciding if a cross-platform environment could support any required functionality.
Simon Kravis runs Aleka Consulting, a small software and consultancy company in Canberra, Australia specializing in information management and offering a number of software products. He has mainly developed scientific and engineering programs, starting in the era of paper tape.
Dark themes are now available for Windows 10 and Mac and it is increasingly expected that desktop applications will offer a dark theme. Previously Qt support for dark themes was patchy. But I am happy to say that it now seems to work fine with Qt 5.12.2, and I have added dark themes to both Windows and Mac versions of my Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan applications.
Easy Data Transform for Mac with a dark theme:
Easy Data Transform for Windows with a dark theme:
Hyper Plan for Mac with a dark theme:
Hyper Plan for Windows with a dark theme:
I haven’t decided yet whether to add a dark theme to PerfectTablePlan.
Adding dark themes was a fair amount of work. But a lot of that was scouring forums to work out how to integrate with macOS and Windows. Hopefully this article will mean you don’t have to duplicate that work.
Dark themes work a bit differently on Windows and Mac. On Windows changing the UI theme to dark won’t directly affect your Qt application. But you can use an application stylesheet to set the appearance. On Mac changing the UI theme to dark will automatically change your application palette, unless you explicitly block this in your Info.plist file (see below). On both platforms you will need to change any icons you have set to the appropriate light/dark version when the theme changes. Some of this may change in future as dark themes are more closely integrated into Qt on Windows and Mac.
You can add the following helper functions to a .mm (Objective-C) file:
#include "Mac.h"
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
bool macDarkThemeAvailable()
{
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
bool macIsInDarkTheme()
{
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
auto appearance = [NSApp.effectiveAppearance bestMatchFromAppearancesWithNames:
@[ NSAppearanceNameAqua, NSAppearanceNameDarkAqua ]];
return [appearance isEqualToString:NSAppearanceNameDarkAqua];
}
return false;
}
void macSetToDarkTheme()
{
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55925862/how-can-i-set-my-os-x-application-theme-in-code
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
[NSApp setAppearance:[NSAppearance appearanceNamed:NSAppearanceNameDarkAqua]];
}
}
void macSetToLightTheme()
{
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55925862/how-can-i-set-my-os-x-application-theme-in-code
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
[NSApp setAppearance:[NSAppearance appearanceNamed:NSAppearanceNameAqua]];
}
}
void macSetToAutoTheme()
{
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
[NSApp setAppearance:nil];
}
}The macSetToLightTheme() and macSetToDarkTheme() are useful if you want to give the user the option to ignore the OS theme. Call macSetToAutoTheme() to set it back to the default.
Corresponding header file:
#ifndef MAC_H
#define MAC_H
bool macDarkThemeAvailable();
bool macIsInDarkTheme();
void macSetToDarkTheme();
void macSetToLightTheme();
void macSetToAutoTheme();
#endif // MAC_HYou then need to add these files into your .pro file:
macx {
...
HEADERS += Mac.h
OBJECTIVE_SOURCES += Mac.mm
}You can detect a change of theme by overriding changeEvent():
void MainWindow::changeEvent( QEvent* e )
{
#ifdef Q_OS_MACX
if ( e->type() == QEvent::PaletteChange )
{
// update icons to appropriate theme
...
}
#endif
QMainWindow::changeEvent( e );
}If you decide you *don’t* want to add a dark theme to your Mac app, the you should add the bold entry below to your Info.plist file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
...
<key>NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>This will then force it to be shown in a light theme, regardless of the theme the operating system is in.
To set a dark theme palette you can use a stylesheet:
QFile f( ":qdarkstyle/style.qss" );
if ( !f.exists() )
{
qWarning() << "Unable to set dark stylesheet, file not found";
}
else
{
f.open( QFile::ReadOnly | QFile::Text );
QTextStream ts( &f );
getApp()->setStyleSheet( ts.readAll() );
}The stylesheet I used was a modified version of qdarkstyle from a few years ago.
To unset the stylesheet and return to a light theme just call:
getApp()->setStyleSheet( "" );Alternatively you can do it by changing the application palette.
Windows helper functions:
bool windowsDarkThemeAvailable()
{
// dark mode supported Windows 10 1809 10.0.17763 onward
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53501268/win10-dark-theme-how-to-use-in-winapi
if ( QOperatingSystemVersion::current().majorVersion() == 10 )
{
return QOperatingSystemVersion::current().microVersion() >= 17763;
}
else if ( QOperatingSystemVersion::current().majorVersion() > 10 )
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
bool windowsIsInDarkTheme()
{
QSettings settings( "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Themes\\Personalize", QSettings::NativeFormat );
return settings.value( "AppsUseLightTheme", 1 ).toInt() == 0;
}Currently there seems to be no way to conect to a signal or event that shows the theme has changed in Windows. So I connected to a signal from a QTimer that fires every 5 seconds to check windowsIsInDarkTheme().
When the theme changes you potentially need to update any icons you have set, e.g. for the toolbar.
In a light theme you can usually set the active icons and let Qt calculate the corresponding disabled icons. This doesn’t work for a dark theme as you want the disabled icons to be darker than the enabled icons, rather than lighter. So you can either calculate the disabled icons programmatically or you can provide a set of disabled icons as well. I opted for the former.
Assuming your icons are set up as resources under :/icons/dark and :/icons/light you can do something like this:
QString getResourceName( const QString& iconName, bool dark )
{
return QString( ":/icons/%1/%2" ).arg( dark ? "dark" : "light" ).arg( iconName );
}
QPixmap getPixmapResource( const QString& iconName, bool dark )
{
QString resourceName = getResourceName( iconName, dark );
QPixmap pixmap = QPixmap( resourceName );
Q_ASSERT( !pixmap.isNull() );
return pixmap;
}
QIcon getIconResource( const QString& iconName, bool dark )
{
QIcon icon;
QPixmap pixmap = getPixmapResource( iconName, dark );
icon.addPixmap( pixmap );
if ( dark )
{
// automatic disabled icon is no good for dark
// paint transparent black to get disabled look
QPainter p( &pixmap );
p.fillRect( pixmap.rect(), QColor( 48, 47, 47, 128 ) );
icon.addPixmap( pixmap, QIcon::Disabled );
}
return icon;
}Then you can reset the icon for the appropriate theme with:
bool isDark()
{
#ifdef Q_OS_MACX
return macIsInDarkTheme();
#else
return windowsIsInDarkTheme();
#endif
}
...
myButton->setIcon( getIconResource( "my_icon.png", isDark() ) );
...You may also be able to update icons through QIcon::setThemeName(). But I didn’t explore this in any detail.
Note that you probably don’t want the enabled icons to be pure white, as it is a bit too visually jarring against a dark theme.
Microsoft Clarity is a new service that allows you to see, in detail, how visitors are interacting with your website. It includes:
You just need to get a Javascript snippet from clarity.microsoft.com (for which you need a Microsoft login) and paste it into the header of each page. You can then login to clarity.microsoft.com at a later time to see your results. The service is free.
I tried it on my www.easydatatransform.com website. Here you can see a click heatmap for the buy page:
People are clicking all over non-hyperlinked text. Hmm. Perhaps they somehow couldn’t the see the effing enormous blue button next to it? Notice that numbers are starred out to avoid personal information, such as credit card numbers.
You can also see how far visitors scroll down the page with scroll heatmaps:
So I can see that the buy button is appearing well above the fold.
You can also watch recodings of people interacting with the website, showing their mouse movements, clicks, touches and scrolling. This is where things start to feel a bit stalkerish. You don’t get any identifiable information on the visitor beyond their country, browser and their operating system and I’m ok with people watching me interact with their websites like this. But it still feels a bit voyeuristic. The results are also a bit strange. Some people just click all over the place and highlight random text (touches are tracked separately from clicks). There is a distinct danger that you could watch hours of sessions and come away without much actionable information.
You can filter the information in various ways, including by country or referring website. You can even filter to see sessions with ‘Rage clicks’ (where the user has clicked or tapped repeatedly in the same area).
Watching a few sessions with ‘rage clicks’ I could see that some people indeed seem completely unable to see the effing enormous blue ‘buy now’ button on the buy page. So I have also added a text hyperlink where most people are clicking in the text and will probably try changing the button colour. Perhaps to shocking pink!
Running Pingdom Website Speed Test on the Easy Data Transform home page, both with and without Clarity a few minutes apart, I can see that it had some effect on speed, but not too much.
Without Clarity script: 175.2kb of scripts, 7 script requests.
With Clarity script: 194.3kb of scripts, 9 script requests.
The load time was actually 0.1s faster with Clarity. That is probably just an anomaly.
I have disabled Clarity for now. But may reenable it after I have made some changes to the website, to see the effect of the changes. Overall I was quite impressed with the service and it was surprisingly easy to set-up. But the cynic in me does wonder what exactly Microsoft is getting out of it.
TL;DR : If you digitally sign your software you need to make sure you have an SHA2 certificate and use it to dual sign your software with both SHA1 and SHA2 digests.
Digital certificates are used to prove who authored a piece of software and that it hasn’t subsequently been tampered with. Starting with Windows XP SP2 you get a warning message if you download software that that isn’t signed with an appropriate digital certificate. So most commercial software vendors digitally sign their software. We grumble about price gouging by the certificate vendors and the hoops we have to jump through to get a certificate. But, apart from that, the system seems to work tolerably well. However Microsoft have thrown a spanner into the works by deprecating digital certificates using the SHA1 algorithm. I only found out about this a few weeks ago from a fellow vendor’s blog. Thanks for nothing Microsoft. If you are using a digital certificate you purchased more than a year ago, it is probably SHA1. This post explains what this means for software vendors, based on my research so far. I am not an expert on this topic and things seem to be changing fast, so please let me know if there are any mistakes or omissions.
I don’t digitally sign Windows software, does this affect me?
No. But perhaps treat Windows unsigned software warning with some skepticism until Windows software vendors sort this mess out. If you only develop for Mac OS X you can feel a bit smug (at least until the next time Apple nukes your development ecosystem from orbit).
What is SHA1?
SHA1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a cryptographic hash function that was used in digital certificates issued until recently. SHA1 was known to have weaknesses as far back as 2005. Microsoft (and Google) have finally decided that SHA1 is too vulnerable and SHA2 digital certificates should be used instead.
What happens if my certificate is SHA1?
If you signed your software with a timestamp before 01-Jan-2016:
If you signed your software with a timestamp on or after 01-Jan-2016:
Windows seems to treat software that has been downloaded from the web (with ‘mark of the web’) differently. So make sure you test a version of your software you have downloaded from the web. I carried out some tests on 01-Mar-2016 using an SHA1 certificate to sign an executable and then dowload it. It worked ok when downloaded using Firefox or Chrome, but was shown as corrupt when downloaded using IE.
How do I know if my current certificate is SHA1?
What should I do if my certificate is SHA1?
If you certificate hasn’t expired you should ask the company you purchased it from to issue you a new SHA2 certificate. They should do this free of charge. In the process they will revoke your SHA1 certificate, so you can no longer use it for signing. You should then use your new SHA2 certificate to double sign new releases (see below).
I have an SHA2 certificate, now what?
If you want a new release to be treated as signed on both Windows XP SP3/Vista and Windows 7/8/10 then you need to double sign the file for SHA1 and SHA2:
signtool.exe sign /f <pfx file> /p <pfx password> /t <sha1 timestamp server> /v <installer>
signtool.exe sign /f <pfx file> /p <pfx password> /tr <sha2 timestamp server> /fd sha256 /td sha256 /as /v <installer>
Note the the order of the above is important (SHA1 first).
The Comodo SHA1 and SHA2 timestamp server is:
http://timestamp.comodoca.com
You can add a /debug flag for verbose output.
If you only want to support Windows 7/8/10, then you can omit the first line (but why would you?).
You can use chktrust.exe to check the signature:
chktrust.exe <installer>
Note that only version 6.3 and later of signtool.exe (which comes with Windows 8.1 SDK and is also available here) supports the /as flag.
I always sign the program, as well as the installer.
Can I double sign .msi files?
I have seen reports that .msi installers don’t support double signing. But I don’t use .msi installers, so I haven’t investigated further.
What happens to software I signed with my SHA1 certificate after the certificate is revoked?
Software you signed previously will not be affected, e.g. it will be treated as signed by Windows 7/8/10 until 01-Jan-2017
How do I sign Windows XP SP1/XP SP2 software?
Windows XP SP1 doesn’t warn you if there is no signature, so you can ignore XP SP1. SHA2 signatures are not supported in Windows XP SP2. So you will need to have both valid SHA1 and SHA2 certificates to support XP SP2 and all the later versions of Windows. Its not clear that certificate vendors will allow this. Also, how many people with Windows XP SP2 (an unsupported OS) are out there buying software? I won’t be bothering to support signing for XP SP2.
Does this affect SSL certificates as well as code signing (Authenticode) certificates?
I believe so. But I don’t have any SSL certificates, so I haven’t investigated further.
How does this affect signing of device drivers?
I understand there are some differences for device drivers. But I don’t create device drivers, so I haven’t investigated further.
What is the difference between SHA2 and SHA256?
SHA2 is a family of two similar hash functions known as SHA256 and SHA512. SHA256 uses 32-bit words where SHA512 uses 64-bit words.
How secure is SHA2?
Er, it was designed by the NSA. Supply your own joke.
I don’t have a digital certificate, where can I get one?
I got my Comodo code signing certificate from reseller ksoftware.net. They have a good reputation, and are significantly cheaper than Comodo. I don’t have any business relationship with them beyond being a happy customer.
Update: See renewing my authenticode digital certificate .
Anything else I should know?
Microsoft has reserved the right to move the SHA1 deprecation date forward from 01-Jan-2017.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nikos Bozinis for first alerting me to this issue and to Mitchell Vincent of ksoftware.net for fact checking this article.
Further reading
http://zabkat.com/blog/code-signing-sha1-armageddon.htm
Updates
02-Mar-2016: Added missing link and minor update.
03-Mar-2016: Minor update.
25-Feb-2023: Added link to https://successfulsoftware.net/2023/02/25/renewing-my-authenticode-digital-certificate/.
Following the success of the iPhone app store (over 6 billion downloads to date), app stores are becoming more and more of a feature of the software landscape. In case you missed it, Apple announced yesterday that there will be an App Store for Macs ‘within 90 days’. In summary:
It is easy to see why Apple would want to do this:
And this could have advantages for Mac users:
And potential advantages for Mac developers:
But the disadvantages are all too obvious:
And worse might follow:
I guess they can’t piss off developers too much – a computer without third party applications isn’t going to be very attractive to customers. But I am finding it hard to work up any enthusiasm for a Mac app store. If it is successful I can either be in the store and give up a lot of freedom and cannibalize exisiting sales at a much lower margin, or stay out and be shut out of a large chunk of the market. It isn’t an attractive choice. As my app is written in C++/Qt, rather than Objective-C/Cocoa, I am not even sure that it will be eligible for inclusion in the store. I could just abandon Mac OS X, but Microsoft is also rumoured to be working on their own app store (despite the failure of DigitalLocker). That is a truly terrifying prospect given the awfulness of their ‘Works with Vista’ approval process (I speak from personal experience).
Suddenly web apps are looking more interesting.
Apple have resorted to ugly FUD marketing in their latest ad. This seems a bit rich given that Mac OS X 10.6 has a bug that can delete all your user data.
Am I the only one being totally bombarded with ‘Give your application the green light’ and related emails from Microsoft and its minions? I must have had at least 30 so far. I took a few minutes to list my product in the Windows 7 compatibility guide (beware, cheesy audio). But that is all I intend to do.
I went to the trouble of getting the ‘works with Vista’ logo in 2007. The process was very broken:
It was easily the most frustrating thing I have done in my career as a microISV. For that I ended up with an ugly ‘works with Vista’ logo (that probably just made customers think my software didn’t work on Windows XP), an entry in Windows marketplace (I already had one) and a Verisign authenticode certificate that I wasn’t allowed to use to sign my software.
Hopefully Microsoft have cleaned up their broken logo process since the Vista launch. But the benefits of the Windows 7 logo program seem slim:
Worst of all I would have to buy another overpriced Verisign certificate to authenticate myself to Microsoft winqual, even though I already have a perfectly valid authenticode certificate from Comodo.
I think I’ll pass.
I scanned the Microsoft ad below from a recent QBS catalogue.
click for larger image
I am still struggling to understand the underlying message. Use Team System and Microsoft will get its tentacles around you? I don’t know which is more unlikely, the basketball playing Cthonians or the athletic and good looking development team.
Successful Software 