Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems.
I wonder how many Mac users still have Flash on their systems today.
Writing on her blog, after sharing how much she has made on her apps over the last few years:
It’s simultaneously a lot and a little. It’s a lot for most developers. It’s a little for the developers I follow on Twitter. Early on, someone asked me how I would define success for myself as an indie developer. I remember stressing that my apps were just side projects (they are) and that I’d be happy if my revenue could cover the cost of my personal device upgrades (it has). At the time, I think I forgot to say something about how I wanted to make things that improved people’s lives, or just made them smile. In that way, I’ve also succeeded, and hearing from happy customers has been incredibly rewarding.
Timothy Buck has a new app out that makes it easy to monitor and manage fitness progress over time. It makes seeing this information much, much easier than anything Apple’s Health app has to offer.
Apple is encouraging users to use Voice Memos and GarageBand:
Use Voice Memos to quickly capture your ideas on your iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch. And with GarageBand, you can take your recordings even further with powerful music creation tools.
The Music Memos app won’t be updated after Music Memos version 1.0.7, and you won’t be able to download it after March 1, 2021. If you have an iPhone with iOS 14 or an iPad with iPadOS 14, you can continue to use Music Memos. And if you’ve previously downloaded the app, you can still access it from your App Store purchase history. But you should export your Music Memos recordings to your Voice Memos library to make sure you keep all of your recordings.
You can now enable Family Sharing for auto-renewable subscriptions and non-consumable in-app purchases, allowing users to share their purchases with up to five family members.
Apple has a secondary page explaining how this change affects developers and users:
Once a developer turns Family Sharing on for their app, it cannot be turned off.
I assume this means we’ll never see updated emoji or a native Mac app.
Love it or hate it, it seems that the Touch Bar is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. As such, it seems wise to me to make it more useful.
A little backstory first, though… earlier this year, David Sparks finally talked me into buying a Stream Deck to use at my desk. As with most things, he was right about how much I would come to love it.
The Stream Deck is incredibly flexible, but one of my most common use cases is to tap a single button on it to open a bunch of related Safari tabs when it comes time to prepare for a show.
It’s the end of the road for the once ubiquitous Mac app, as its creator Christopher Forsythe writes:
Growl is being retired after surviving for 17 years. With the announcement of Apple’s new hardware platform, a general shift of developers to Apple’s notification system, and a lack of obvious ways to improve Growl beyond what it is and has been, we’re announcing the retirement of Growl as of today.
It’s been a long time coming. Growl is the project I worked on for the longest period of my open source career. However at WWDC in 2012 everyone on the team saw the writing on the wall. This was my only WWDC. This is the WWDC where Notification Center was announced. Ironically Growl was called Global Notifications Center, before I renamed it to Growl because I thought the name was too geeky. There’s even a sourceforge project for Global Notifications Center still out there if you want to go find it.
Joshua Stein has made a very specific utility:
StuffIt is the de-facto standard for file archiving and compression on Mac OS before OS X. Most old Macintosh software is preserved in StuffIt format, but a breaking change in StuffIt 5 makes archives created in this version unreadable in older versions of StuffIt. Since StuffIt 3.5 is the last version that works on System 6, many archives cannot be opened on compact Macs running System 6.
I’m sure it’s a bug, but it feels like yet another nudge to upgrade an OS I can’t run yet on my production machine:
This morning, Apple announced a change coming to the App Store next year:
Apple today announced an industry-leading new developer program to accelerate innovation and help small businesses and independent developers propel their businesses forward with the next generation of groundbreaking apps on the App Store. The new App Store Small Business Program will benefit the vast majority of developers who sell digital goods and services on the store, providing them with a reduced commission on paid apps and in-app purchases. Developers can qualify for the program and a reduced, 15 percent commission if they earned up to $1 million in proceeds during the previous calendar year.