‘The Developers Who Came in From the Cold’
Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog:
Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship
with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside
the company were fans, but we received very little attention from
Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders,
but it meant that we often had zero notice of breaking changes
introduced by Apple.
During this time, Apple placed an emphasis on improving the
security of MacOS, continually locking the operating system down
further and further. Though their changes weren’t aimed at the
legitimate audio capture we provided our users, they nonetheless
made that capture increasingly difficult. We labored to keep our
tools functioning with each new version of MacOS. Through it all,
we lived with a constant fear that Apple would irreparably break
our apps.
In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago
struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current
audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent.
Kafasis is a friend and frequent guest on The Talk Show (and holds his own as a podcast co-host with a combustible collaborator), and I use quite a few apps in Rogue Amoeba’s suite, so I was familiar with the broad outline of this saga. But seeing it all spelled out made clear it was a lot more precarious than I thought.
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Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog:
Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship
with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside
the company were fans, but we received very little attention from
Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders,
but it meant that we often had zero notice of breaking changes
introduced by Apple.
During this time, Apple placed an emphasis on improving the
security of MacOS, continually locking the operating system down
further and further. Though their changes weren’t aimed at the
legitimate audio capture we provided our users, they nonetheless
made that capture increasingly difficult. We labored to keep our
tools functioning with each new version of MacOS. Through it all,
we lived with a constant fear that Apple would irreparably break
our apps.
In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago
struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current
audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent.
Kafasis is a friend and frequent guest on The Talk Show (and holds his own as a podcast co-host with a combustible collaborator), and I use quite a few apps in Rogue Amoeba’s suite, so I was familiar with the broad outline of this saga. But seeing it all spelled out made clear it was a lot more precarious than I thought.