Ghostmoon.app – A Swiss Army Knife for your macOS menu bar(mgrunwald.com) |
Ghostmoon.app – A Swiss Army Knife for your macOS menu bar(mgrunwald.com) |
I used to be sympathetic to complaints about not wanting to pay the developer account fee. But when you’re vibe coding, you’re probably paying a good chunk of change to your LLM supplier of choice every month, and the yearly developer account fee seems minor in comparison
Also, it’s just such a bad security precedent. This page describes the error you get as “the typical macOS Gatekeeper warning”, as though it were just another piece of corporate silliness, like clicking through a EULA.
Anyway, I don't see a problem with getting it out the door. People can just choose not to install it if they don't like it. I mean that's the whole idea of being early anyway, isn't it? Don't like a crappy bodged together UI? Don't like a lack of support? Don't like an unsigned app? You can wait until it has those things according to your preferences. In the meantime, the creator gets real users and feedback ASAP.
Right now it's closed source binary with a big fat "DOWNLOAD FOR FREE" button and instructions casually telling you to disable the last barrier between your system and persistent malware. Nobody should recommend this to anybody
Is that a US thing? Because in the UK you just get one for free - Companies House sends the info over to them, and a couple of days later it is available to search
Where are these displayed?
I see vagueposting has found its way into HN.
I just downloaded your app and ran it through hopper. There is a LOT of embedded Apple Script. I would never run an app like this with SIP disabled or without an active network blocker.
Your app requires direct access to major OS components: code signing, even during alpha should be a requirement.
It is my machine and I paid for it, why does the OS care about what I do with it? The only thing this leads to is making sure your customers grow into good little lemmings.
For everyone else it's probably sane to have it, works as a decent filter so someone not tech-savvy don't get hurt by installing malware disguised as an app, one would just need to state incredible features that almost any normal user would like to have, and make them click to install. Gatekeeper diminishes that risk by a lot unless you learn how to bypass it, which requires you having decent skills and probably wouldn't fall for the bullshit that malware apps try to bait people with.
Apple has a lot to be criticized for but gatekeeper (and SIP) isn't that.
People like and need the apple sandbox. Others need an unlocked *nix machines
I've never ended up with undesired software on my system except for under two circumstances: either (a) it's installed by the OS vendor, or (b) some proprietary indie software I used got bought by a shady company who now wants to spy on me and sell my data. Systems like Gatekeeper don't protect against either.
> Also, it’s just such a bad security precedent. This page describes the error you get as “the typical macOS Gatekeeper warning”, as though it were just another piece of corporate silliness, like clicking through a EULA.
It mostly is another piece of corporate silliness. For most people it rarely does something useful. But I agree; if you're courting normie users you should just pony up and get your code signed and notarized. Otherwise just tell people that if they don't already know what Gatekeeper is and understand the risks of bypassing it as well as how to do so, your software isn't for them.
Even though it's more troublesome to submit apps to App Store, it's one signal that the app is not a malware.
In AI conversations, people often forget that at the end of a day, an actual human needs to use your stuff.
Let’s not forget when Apple’s certificate server was down and suddenly you couldn’t launch apps on macOS, to say nothing of the abuse of user rights.
I applaud that they didn't kowtow to Apple's attempt to exercise control over their app and extort money from them. Why should we accede to policies that are designed to exploit us developers?
We developers add the real value to a platform. Don't believe me? Look up on how popular Sailfish OS or Windows Mobile OS is and why they failed or struggle. Apple should be grateful to this developer that they seek to add value to their platform instead of trying to figure out money grubbing ways on how to control and exploit them. (Of course, ultimately it is the users of the platform who are exploited - all charges by Apple are ultimately bore by them when they purchase an app through the App Store).
It's just sad that whether you are a user or a developer, Apple Fanbois would rather (ignorantly) place Apple's interest over their own consumer rights.
You think notarizing an app is "placing Apple's interest over" our own?
Do you not realize that spending money on other useful services makes it harder, not easier, to waste on dev fees?
If you really want to ban Gatekeeper you can. sudo spctl --master-disable
As the saying goes about being careful, measure twice and cut once.
It IS another piece of corporate silliness. Though silliness is an extremely charitable word for what it really is
Cheering on the loss of autonomy and control over our own computers under the guise of 'silliness' is disgusting
Why don’t you purchase your own developer account and sign it yourself if you trust it? Or are you saying them paying Apple $100/yr in perpetuity is what will make you trust it?
An example is I have my airpods bound to ctrl+alt+b to connect via Bluetooth. This is to have it yank back control from my android phone.
https://sindresorhus.com/supercharge
I was skeptical that I’d find it useful since I can do all of these shell commands and such, but one feature I like is being able to effectively pare the feature set down to just what you need, making for a small but very useful menu.
Meanwhile, I'm running Claude Code and asking it to make me stupid bespoke things that only I want and I'm not spamming the internet with those tools because they aren't novel or useful for most people and you can have Claude Code build a version for the way that you work.
Go away, green accounts. Everyone is pretty tired of your presence.
I get the frustration with the overload of new vibe-coded tools, but this particular attitude towards new people - can we not?
Pre-release feedback from the community is definitely valuable though. I didn't know this part is the most diffcult.
I might consider adding this in a future release, although at this point I'm focusing on keeping the app's footprint minimal, so every feature addition has to be carefully considered :)
- Website looks great overall, but the fixed and overlaid header title is awkward and hurts readability for not much benefit.
- Battery Health on my M3 Max MBP reads as "1%", when System Report shows Condition: Normal, Maximum Capacity: 100%. What is this reading from?
- Handy password generator is great; any chance of an option for "correct horse" [0] style passwords? I find these are preferable for reasonably secure passwords which can still be remembered or hand-typed as needed.
Looking forward to seeing how the app evolves!
Yes, the pre-release is intended for testing purposes, so thanks for bringing the battery health issue to my attention. It is calculated from the the battery's reported design capacity and current capacity, but the reported values seem to be unreliable across different systems.
The password generator suggestion is interesting, but I intentionally gave the user only one password generator option in the base version of the app - the most secure one :)
Thus, notarization also acts as a way for Apple to spy on its user and determine what apps they run - both when you install from the App Store or when you install it from outside the App Store. The way the whole process works, open source softwares (which are popular and compete with Apple's own app and other paid apps but often cannot bear the unnecessary burden of jumping through Apple's hoops) are also tarnished with all the popups about security threats, thus discouraging their use amongst non-technical users. This is great for Apple ofcourse because they can't make money of free open source developers (unless of course, they use their code to make their own applications, which they have no qualms about).
Imagine this too - How would you like it if Apple allowed you to view websites in Safari (or other macOS browsers) only if they had an SSL certificate from Apple?
So it is a disingenuous argument that people here are being "stupid" for complaining about Notarization. It's Apple forcing itself as the middle-man here and then exploiting its developers and users that's the issue.
[0] https://support.pushpay.com/s/article/Acquire-your-D-U-N-S-n...
> I don't know how obvious it is these days, but the default path through D&B's website is the terrible one. They will try to extract money from you and harass you forever. You had to find Apple's own embedded form for it by using their search and going through some flow.
Otherwise, you have banks and MAFIAA and others off-loading their own security and compliance costs to users by flat out discriminating based on the status of the sandbox.
Full stop. I still talk to people every working day who don't realize that rebooting a computer is actually a real troubleshooting step. They seem to think it's bunk tech support mumbo jumbo rather than a genuinely useful step. It's 2026 and they're still surprised when that works.
It indeed is. It's a way of coping with systems that are fundamentally illegible and unpredictable. If you have full rights over your machine and you're not running extremely shoddy software, you should never have to reboot your computer to make an issue go away. And rebooting your computer often guarantees that you'll never actually understand whatever issue is plaguing you.
Encouraging people to reboot their computers is promoting a fundamentally superstitious mode of engagement with machines that are generally reliable and predictable, instead of approaching them in terms of cause and effect. At best, it's the tired point-and-click sysadmin's workaround for not knowing what their system is doing.
Maybe for overwhelmed IT departments running half-baked operating systems loaded to the gills with invasive and meddlesome corporate spyware suites so inherently complex and complicated in their interactions with each other that the system itself is rendered more or less incomprehensible (even to the people administering it), just asking users to reboot is the right play to write in the tech support playbook. Maybe it's got the right ROI for a geek reluctantly roped into giving free tech support for a relative. But it's absolutely mumbo-jumbo and a sign that the "troubleshooter" is probably either ill-equipped to understand what's going on or just not interested.
It's like you are saying that potentially dangerous tools shouldn't have safety guards whenever possible, with little impact for the common use of the tool. Kinda absurd to think that way... If some advanced use-cases require safety guards to be removed that's when the user should be trained enough to know the risks.
People want to use a computer for their tasks, the whole motto of Apple was to make technology accessible to normal people without requiring them to be tech-savvy, what you want goes in complete opposition to that mission.
About two weeks ago, some Adobe Acrobat update introduced a hang that results in “Acrobat won’t open.” Open Task Manager and there’s four to eight stuck processes. Kill them and it works again most of the time, but once in ten it simply doesn’t recover.
Adobe acknowledged the issue to someone on my team. There’s no need for me to understand further; telling the user that a reboot will solve it is prudent advice. It’s on Adobe to fix it. You made assumptions about the environment where I tell people to reboot without understanding the conditions and I have an immediate real world case demonstrating why your statements don’t apply.