So much effort, just to run Xcode remotely. For those of you who want to ship code to macOS from CI (e.g. Electron apps), you should check out my companies product at https://hydraulic.dev/ ... It lets you package, sign, notarize and upload self-updating Mac apps from any OS including Linux. Amongst other things it bundles Sparkle on the fly also, so you don't have to deal with Squirrel, and it can do the same... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

I work on a tool that simplifies deploying desktop apps, and we're looking at what improvements the Electron community might benefit from the most. It'd be great to get feedback on where your biggest pain points are and what you'd find most valuable in such a tool. Source: 8 months ago

You could try experimenting with Hydraulic Conveyor [1]. I built it originally due to the frustrations involved in distributing P2P software during my old Bitcoin days so you won't get any hate from me about that ;) Conveyor can package Electron apps and also do all the Mac specific stuff from any platform including Linux. So it can sign, notarize and staple the app itself, also bundling Sparkle updates as it... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

What do you think is a fair price for a solo dev trialling a small app? I'm asking because my firm makes a competitor to ToDesktop (sort of) [1], and this is a question we often get. It's free for open source apps and cheaper than ToDesktop, but the "I just want to trial an idea and not spend any money on it" use case isn't well supported by this pricing model. One possibility is a trial period, but then how long... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

Apple bundles compared to Flatpaks: • Both use reverse DNS to globally identify themselves, neither actually verifies DNS ownership. • Almost everything is a bundle, except for CLI apps. FlatPaks on the other hand are being auto-converted from previous packaging systems. • Bundles don't have dependencies. In theory they can, but in practice they never do. You depend on macOS/iOS as a unitary platform and bundles... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

I’ve had to do this before and it some what sucks but if you do have a look at Inno Setup. Source: 6 months ago

Use Inno Setup. It's comparably sized, VSCode uses it and GOG.com uses customized builds of it (it's open-source but written in Delphi), and it has a much more declarative (though still extensible) approach that does do stuff like uninstall tracking by default. Source: about 1 year ago

We eventually settled on a combination of InnoSetup with InnoSetuo Dependency Installer and NetSparkle which offered a much cleaner experience and use of AzureAD Authentication for Azure Storage Blobs (for updates) as well as InTune Deployments with proper version detection. Source: about 1 year ago

You don't typically make these things yourself from scratch, you use a tool that does it for you. E.g. InnoSetup: https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php. Source: about 1 year ago

The two most popular such installers are Inno Setup and NSIS. Inno is much easier to use (and will handle most tasks automatically), while NSIS creates somewhat smaller installers (but requires you to basically micromanage everything). Source: about 1 year ago