Plugins vs. the Mac app bundle

[Paul Hibbert]

Thank you for your reply Richard, I’ll try some answers…

> Well, if you want to truly own your computer there's always Ubuntu, or any other Linux. :)
> 
> Apple and Microsoft are proprietary systems.  They each make a fine OS, but to use it you play by their rules. In terms of the UX, it's more of a lease than a purchase. That's neither a feature nor a bug, just one way of working with an OS.
> 
> If you like what they provide, enjoy it.  If you want total control over the computing experience, I'm hard pressed to think of anything but an open source system that'll provide that.

Having used Macs for over 25 years I am most comfortable on OS X. I’ve used many other proprietary systems during that time too most of them running on Unix boxes. I find Windows too annoying and my recent experiences on Linux have usually ended in frustration, so I tend to leave them well alone.

> But frankly, even then I'd think twice about modifying signed files. Bypassing security is rarely advantageous.

I wasn’t making the changes to bypass any security issues, I just wanted to modify the menus slightly, I didn’t even think about code signing and didn’t see any problems after making the changes.

> With LiveCode, however, I believe it's not quite so deep.
> 
> The issue here is specific to changing the files on disk within the application bundle.
> 
> But why do that?

Coming from a professional graphics background I am used to relying on keyboard shortcuts to speed up my workflow, some I find so ‘normal’ in everyday use, but they are missing in LC, so I wanted to put them in, it’s not very difficult and I got the shortcuts that “I wanted".

> Any changes made to the IDE stack files will be gone with the next update anyway.

When I found out how easy it is to add the shortcuts to the menus I just wrote a little routine to update the new version - run once then forget it.

> Time and again, as we explore IDE customization we come back to the same solution:  write scripts that modify things on the fly in memory.

I tried this too, but then when I quit the app it just asked me if I wanted to save the modified stack, if I agreed it just threw an error because of the permissions problem, maybe I approached it wrong.

> This lets you have anything you want, and when you don't want it (such as IDE testing) you just remove the plugin that does it and restart. And it survives IDE updates.
> 
> Richmond's revMenubar changes are an excellent example:  in v8 that stack is assembled on the fly in a script.  Find the portions you want made differently, put those in a plugin with your changes, and you're good to go.

I looked for this on the LiveCode Share site and couldn’t find it, I also looked on the forums, but he has several reMenuBar hacks there that don’t look much like they add in any shortcuts, so I couldn’t decide which one you were referring to, the most likely one I could see dated back to 2014.

I did write a plug-in to put some shortcuts into the frontscript of the DE and it worked OK, but they didn’t show up in the menus, so I felt it was cleaner to modify the revMenuBar script once and be done with it, however, now I know there are issues with the bundle code signing I’ll revisit the plugin and see if I can improve it.

Off to play with the new RC1 now...

Kind Regards,

Paul