This year’s WWDC keynote brought with it some major changes to macOS, both in terms of its look, but most importantly, to what the future of Mac hardware looks like. With Apple Silicon, Mac developers have to create Universal Binaries of their apps.
- เผยโฉม Apple store สาขา Central world ร้านแอปเปิ้ลแห่งที่ 2 ในไทย Jul 23, 2020 Gojek บริษัทที่สร้าง Imapct ด้วยเทคโนโลยี.
- First up: ToothFairy, available in the Mac App Store for $3. The app puts an icon in your Mac's menu bar that you can click to connect and disconnect your AirPods. The other app is.
- The AirBuddy app is celebrating another successful Apple week by opening up pre-orders on v2.0. The original, which arrived in early 2019, brought a pop-up to the Mac when a pair of AirPods were brought near — bringing simple ecosystem integration to the desktop before Apple did. The update, which.
.AirBuddy ($5) - AirBuddy is a Mac app for the AirPods. It lets you pair your AirPods to your Mac the same way you do on your iPhone - just by opening up the AirPods case next to your Mac and then clicking. It's super simple, but if you use your AirPods with your Mac often, it's invaluable. App developer Guilherme Rambo last year released AirBuddy, an app that’s designed to bring iOS-like AirPods integration to the Mac, and today, Rambo is releasing an updated version of the app, AirBuddy 2.
I had the opportunity to do just that for my Mac apps today, and I’d like to share the results and some overall stats with you. Of course this is just my experience, so your mileage may vary, as they say.
One of the most important things to keep in mind is that the more external dependencies that you have, the more complicated it’s going to be to get a universal build up and running, especially if those dependencies are currently being included in your app as pre-compiled binaries.
Another disclaimer is that I don’t yet have access to a Mac powered by Apple Silicon to actually run the builds that I’ve created on — so there could still be some work that I have to do — but given that I don’t have any code that’s low-level enough to be concerned with the underlying CPU architecture that it’s running on, I believe these builds are good to go.
The numbers
Let’s start with some numbers. I have tried and successfully built three of my apps for Apple Silicon: ChibiStudio, FusionCast, and AirBuddy. AirBuddy¹ is an AppKit app, it’s distributed directly to customers as a notarized build, and it has approximately 27k lines of code — mixing Swift, Objective-C, C++ and Objective-C++. FusionCast is also an AppKit app, distributed both directly and via the App Store, and it has approximately 3k lines of Swift code. Finally, ChibiStudio² is a Catalyst app, and has approximately 50k lines of Swift code.
It took me a total of around 30 minutes to successfully archive all of those apps as Universal 2 binaries, containing both
x86_64
and arm64
slices. No code changes were required, but I did stumble upon two details that I would like to share with you now.Getting the right build of Xcode
At the time of writing, Apple is distributing two separate builds of Xcode in the developer portal. The version called “Xcode 12 for macOS Universal Apps beta” is the one with support for building Universal 2 binaries, so make sure that’s the one you have if you wish to build your Mac apps for Apple Silicon.
I expected to have to change a few build settings manually in order to enable Universal 2 for a given target, but as far as I can see, that was all done automatically by Xcode. If you have changed your “supported architectures” build setting though, you may need to revert that setting to its default value.
To change a build setting back to its default value in Xcode, select the setting within the list and press delete.
Pitfalls that I have encountered
There were only two things that I had to change in order for my apps to compile successfully. The first was related to having resource bundles with bitcode turned on. That setting must be off for resource bundles. I probably enabled it accidentally at some point, but turning it off was all that was needed in order to get ChibiStudio to build successfully as a Universal 2 binary.
The other one is related to dependencies. While I prefer to avoid external dependencies as much as possible, sometimes they are needed to perform some specialized type of work. In FusionCast, I use a popular solution to generate App Store receipt validation code, but it requires OpenSSL. Since the version of OpenSSL that I have on my Mac is not ready for
arm64
, I temporarily disabled that functionality until I can sort that out.Try to setup build flags that enable you to turn off certain external dependencies if necessary. That way, you can still test your app’s main functionality using the new versions of Xcode, without having to wait for a given dependency to be updated.
Conclusion
Airbuddy App
Apple were not exaggerating when they said that it would only take “a few days” for most apps to be ready for Apple Silicon. In fact, I think they were actually under-promising. I’m really happy that I was able to get my apps building so quickly. The next step will be to actually run them on a DTK machine to see if anything actually breaks.
¹ Tests performed with an unreleased version of AirBuddy.
² ChibiStudio for Mac is not publicly available yet.
² ChibiStudio for Mac is not publicly available yet.
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Apple’s super-streamlined pairing and management of AirPods on iOS devices only has one real annoyance: it highlights how less elegant the process is on macOS. New app AirBuddy aims to fix that, though, replicating the simple way that iOS shows AirPods battery status and connectivity for your Mac.
![Airbuddy Mac App Store Airbuddy Mac App Store](https://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2012/05/Mac-App-Store_Business.jpg)
Currently, if you want to use your AirPods with your iPhone or iPad, it’s a simple process. Open the charging chase near the iOS device and a pop-up shows current battery status for the case and each earbud. Put one or both in your ears, and they automatically connect.
In contrast, the macOS experience is a little more clunky. You have to click the Bluetooth icon in the status bar, then select the AirPods from the list, and finally choose connect. In theory Apple synchronizes the Bluetooth pairing across any device signed into the same iCloud account; in practice, it can take a few connection attempts to actually get a link going.
AirBuddy does away with that. As on iOS, when you open the AirPods case near your Mac, you see a pop-up of their status straight away. A single click from that dialog connects them.
There’s also a battery widget for the macOS Notification Center. That shows either power remaining, or how long the AirPods should take to finish charging. The same widget will also show iOS device charging status, too.
It’s not just the AirPods, mind. AirBuddy will work with any Apple W1-based headphones, which means select Beats models should show up just fine, too. It’s also thoughtful in how it handles audio input settings, too, not automatically switching away from your Mac’s microphone – or an external mic – even if the audio is routed through your AirPods.
![App App](https://preview.redd.it/s26kafaslbb41.png?width=2880&format=png&auto=webp&s=c52a6ef7cd1440f9d887b5cba75e006a5ff76c37)
Airbuddy For Pc
AirBuddy is the handiwork of Guilherme Rambo, better known for his numerous leaks about iOS and macOS. He’s releasing it as donation-ware, effectively asking users to pay what they believe it’s worth to them. Down the line, meanwhile, the plan is to open-source AirBuddy completely.
In the future, Rambo says, he’s considering adding the same sort of status monitoring for Magic Mouse, the Magic Keyboard, and other Apple wireless devices. A notification when a nearby device is running low on battery is another idea, as is a less-intrusive version of the status window. Even so, out of the gate this is the AirPods management tool Apple probably should’ve have delivered in the first place, and if you’re a Mac-using AirPods owner then you should give it a try.