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How to Distribute macOS Apps (free ebook)

With the advent of macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple have introduced a new verification process called "App Notarization". (When you ship your apps through the Mac App Store, your apps get reviewed; if you ship outside the App Store, they could contain malware and whatnot. App notarization involved checking for viruses, among other things I don't know about, and then sign the app as "not a threat".) This makes the process of shipping actual .zip files to people a bit more complicated. Not that it was straight-forward in the past! :) So I figured, why not collect the information in a short guide.

So this is the process of me assembling a short guide.

Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

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  • I started assembling information about the notarization process (201811221820) and noticed I don't have a "what does it take to make your code into an app that runs on other people's devices?" guide anywhere. So I assembled this one.

    # 201811221821 macOS App Distribution Guide
    ##outline #mac #appdev #indie
    
    - Leave Sandboxing Enabled
    - Prepare project for app notarization [[201811221820]]
    - Ways to distribute macOS app bundles [[201704301502]]
    

    Then I collected info on how to run the commands from the Terminal (201811221920). I was shipping an update to my app TableFlip yesterday, and had to re-create a Retina Display image. I couldn't remember how to do that, so I wrote a note about that as well (201811221921; you see from the timestamps that I filed the notes shortly after another, but I didn't write them in the course of a minute).

    I also prepared a repository for the guide and set it up as a LeanPub book, both to have a PDF/ePub/Mobi generator that works really well, and to have another publication on their platform to bundle up with the others.

    # 201811221821 macOS App Distribution Guide
    ##outline #mac #appdev #indie
    
    Repository: <https://github.com/CleanCocoa/distribute-mac-apps-guide>
    
    - Leave Sandboxing Enabled
    - Use Sparkle for updates
    - Prepare project for app notarization [[201811221820]]
    - Apple App Notarization from the command line [[201811221920]]
    
    ## Download
    
    - Ways to distribute macOS app bundles [[201704301502]]
        - Favor DMG or PKG to circumvent app translocation
    - Prepare DMG that looks rad
        - Combine images into multi-resolution DMG [[201811221921]]
    

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

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