Forem: Amir

MacOS Tips & Tricks

Amir — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 15:14:04 +0000

Charge Limiter
Microsoft AutoUpdate
Dock
Menu Bar
Brew
Updating everything Automatically
Useful Application
ZSH
Shortcuts
The Power of Option key
Common errors
General Tips
Useful Sites
Other Resources

Charge Limiter

You can use one of these to limit how much your MacBook charges:

Make sure you read the readme file and know what you are doing. In most cases, you don't need this but if you are a pro user, you might like controlling it yourself.

Microsoft AutoUpdate

Disable opening popup every day (source)

sudo plutil -replace StartInterval -integer 864000 /Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist
sudo plutil -replace RunAtLoad -bool no /Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist

Check for update manually (source)

/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft\ AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/msupdate -l

Open GUI manually:

/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app

Dock

Location of the setting file: /Users/[user-name]/Library/Preference/com.apple.Dock

Parameters description: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/dock

Lock size of the dock

defaults write com.apple.dock size-immutable -bool true; killall Dock

Lock position of the dock

defaults write com.apple.dock position-immutable -bool true; killall Dock

Add empty item

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'; killall Dock

Revert to default

defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock

Menu Bar

In order to make it visible even in the fullscreen mode, you can go to System Preferences > Dock and Menu Bar and uncheck Automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen

You can also set it individually for each app: (true means it will show it all the time in the fullscreen mode)

defaults write com.example.SomeApp AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen -bool true

💡 If you don’t know the app bundle identifier name, follow the first general tip.

Brew

Get the list of installed packages:

brew leaves

Packages that I like to install:

cocoapods
composer
ffmpeg
gh
jq
openjdk
php

Updating everything Automatically

Brew

brew update && brew upgrade && brew upgrade --cask

Python packages (without package manager)

python3 -m pip install -U pip
pip3 list --outdated --format=json | jq -r '.[] | "\(.name)==\(.latest_version)"' | xargs -n1 pip3 install -U

Check system updates

softwareupdate -l

AppStore installed apps

brew install mas # install
mas outdated # show all the packages that need update
mas upgrade # update all of them

Useful Application

Free/OpenSource:

Shottr → Screenshot / OCR / Scrolling Screenshot
AltTab → Window switcher with previews
Maccy → Clipboard manager
iTerm2 → Terminal emulator
LyricsX → Lyrics overly
HandBrake → Compress and convert video
AppCleaner → Uninstall apps
Amphetamine → Energy saver settings
Karabiner-Elements -> A powerful keyboard customizer
Yabai -> Tiling window management
MonitorControl -> Control external display's brightness & volume
MOS -> Smooth scrolling and set scroll direction
Raycast -> Better Spotlight
ImageOptim -> Reduces image file sizes
DBngin -> Database Version Management Tool
TablePlus -> Database management

CLI:

mas -> Mac App Store command line interface
YT-DLP -> Download video/audio from youtube

Paid:

BetterTouchTool -> Customize various input devices
Bartender -> Control and customize menu bar
Sound Source -> Sound control for apps and 3rd party monitors
MacUpdater -> Automatically track the latest updates of all applications installed
Movist -> Better video player

ZSH

Oh My ZSH install

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Configuration

ZSH_THEME="robbyrussell"
DISABLE_UPDATE_PROMPT="true"
HIST_STAMPS="yyyy/mm/dd"

plugins=(git extract zsh-autosuggestions)

Useful Plugins (all)

# zsh-autosuggestions
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions

Shortcuts

Change volume in small increments: Shift ⇧ + Option ⌥ (alt) + Volume Up/Down
Change brightness in small increments: Shift ⇧ + Option ⌥ (alt) + Brightness Up/Down
Entering/Exiting fullscreen mode: fn + F
Paste without formatting: Command ⌘ + Option ⌥ (alt) + Shift ⇧ + V
Permanent deleting a file: Command ⌘ + Option ⌥ (alt) + Backspace
Show hidden files in Finder: Command ⌘ + Shift ⇧ + .

The Power of Option key

Do all of these when holding the Option key!

Hit the volume icon to see both input and output
Hit wifi icon to see every little detail
Hit menu bar items to see other options
Hit close window to close all instances of that application
Right click after you copied something to show Move item here instead of paste.
When seeing an image, Click on File > Save As while holding the option to convert your image to other formats. When selecting a format, hold the option to see more formats!

Common errors

App is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

sudo xattr -c /Applications/[name].app

General Tips

1- Finding app bundle identifier:

osascript -e 'id of app "TextEdit"'

2- Three-finger drag:

Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad options and then enable dragging with three finger drag. Now you can drag any window with three fingers.

3- Change drag & drop speed:

Go to System Preference > Accessibility > Pointer Control and change Spring-loading delay.

Useful Sites

Other Resources

Defaults Commands
MacOS Awesome
Finder Tips
Jesse Skelto's Karabiner and Yabai tutorials
devnoname120's macOS setup
nnja's new computer

Flutter: Automate iOS deployment and versioning

Amir — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 09:42:49 +0000

Deploying for iOS is typically a tedious and time-consuming task. You have to open the Xcode, change the version name and number, get an archive, press a bunch of buttons, wait for each step and finally hit upload.
Today, we'll use Python to automate this process.

Note: This tutorial is for Flutter 3+, and I'm automating it with Python 3. I also worked on a bash version, but it's incomplete. You can get the entire script and bash version from this gist

3rd Party tools

There are a lot of articles and tools like Fastlane or Codemagic Cli that can help you to automate this process.
We are not going to use them in this tutorial. We do it ourselves, which will give us more flexibility in the long run.

In some projects, devs always release from the main branch, and it's easy to have the latest version number in the pubspec.yaml file and keep it update.
In other projects, you have to send a TestFlight version from different feature branches, and each time you want to deploy a new version, you must check AppStore Connect to see what the most recent version is.

Step 2 to 4 is about automating this problem. In these sections, we will request to get the latest available version from the Apple server and ask the developer what version they want to set.

Step 1: Configure Xcode

Before automating this process, we must make sure that we can build our app manually and project settings are correct. I will not include these steps in this tutorial because flutter documentation explained it very well.

Step 2: Get the API Key from Apple

To get the latest version from Apple's server, we can use App Store Connect API. But before we can use this API, We must first request to get access to API Key from Users and Access > Keys > App Store Connect API. This action is only available to the Account Holder role.

After requesting access, you need to generate a new API Key.

Hit the (+) button, Enter a name and choose the access. In the access field, make sure to select the Developer role because it has the ability to upload IPA files to the Apple Store.

After generating API Key, you can see it in the Active section. Click on Download API Key to get the .p8 file.

Step 3: Create JWT

After obtaining all required credentials, it is time to generate a JWT token for use with the Apple Store Connect API.

Note: You can find your App ID from the URL when opening the app page.
For example, In appstoreconnect.apple.com/apps/1555XXXXX, 1555XXXXX is your App ID

To begin, declare credentials in the code as follows:

ISSUER_ID = '9f4xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxx'
KEY_ID = '2F9XXXXXXX'
PRIVATE_KEY_PATH = './private_keys/AuthKey_2F9XXXXXXX.p8'
APP_ID = '1500000000'

With this information, we can now construct JWT as follows:

EXP_IN_SEC = 60

with open(PRIVATE_KEY_PATH, 'r+b') as f:
    private_key = f.read()

expiration_time = datetime.datetime.now(tz=datetime.timezone.utc) + datetime.timedelta(seconds=EXP_IN_SEC)
encoded_jwt = jwt.encode(
    {
        'iss': ISSUER_ID,
        'exp': expiration_time,
        'aud': 'appstoreconnect-v1'
    },
    private_key,
    algorithm='ES256',
    headers={
        'alg': 'ES256',
        'kid': KEY_ID,
        'typ': 'JWT',
    }
)

Note: In this section, we use a library to generate JWT, which must be installed as follows: 'pip install pyjwt'

Step 4: Get the last version

Now we can use the JWT we generated earlier to get the most recent TestFlight build.

BASE_URL = 'https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com/v1'
headers = {'Authorization': f'Bearer {encoded_jwt}'}

r = requests.get(f'{BASE_URL}/preReleaseVersions', headers=headers, params={'limit': 1, 'filter[app]': APP_ID}).json()
build_id = r['data'][0]['id']
build_name = r['data'][0]['attributes']['version']

r = requests.get(f'{BASE_URL}/preReleaseVersions/{build_id}/builds', headers=headers).json()
build_number = r['data'][0]['attributes']['version']

print(f'App version: {build_name}')
print(f'Build number: {build_number}')

We want the developer to determine the next version after we get the last build number (like 154) and build name (like 2.3.0). Most of the time, we only need to increase the build number by one, which is why I included the if-else clause. If you leave the build number blank and press enter, it will add one to the previous build number.

new_build_name = input('Enter new app version: ')
new_build_number_str = input('Enter new build number(enter to auto increment): ')

if new_build_number_str == '':
    new_build_number = int(build_number) + 1
else:
    new_build_number = int(new_build_number_str)

if new_build_name == '':
    exit('No new version number entered')

Step 5: Build the app

Now it's time to build the app, and we no longer require Python. We need the power Flutter cli to rescue us :)

To run the terminal commands from python, we can use subprocess.run in python.

def run(command: str, check: bool = None, output: bool = True, cwd: str = None):
    return subprocess.run(shlex.split(command), check=check, stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL if not output else None, cwd=cwd)

Before building the IPA file, we have to make sure all the packages are updated and we have everything we need to build the project.

# Update dependencies
print('Getting pub...')
run('flutter pub get', check=True, output=False)
print('Installing pod dependencies...')
run('rm ios/Podfile.lock', check=True, output=False)
run('pod install --repo-update', cwd="ios/", check=True, output=False)

After that, we use the following function to read the pubspec.yaml file and change the version: x.x.x+yyy with the new version we specified earlier in the input.

def change_pub_version(version: str):
    with open('pubspec.yaml', 'r') as f:
        data = f.read()
        data = re.sub(r'^(version:\s*)(.+)', f'version: {version}', data, flags=re.MULTILINE)
        f.close()

    with open('pubspec.yaml', 'w') as f:
        f.write(data)
        f.close()

We can also remove the build folder to ensure there is nothing else in there before asking Flutter to create the IPA file for us. If you are using Flutter version 3+, You don't need to do anything; Flutter handles generating IPA for you.

# you can also specify version when building like this:
# `flutter build ipa --build-name {new_app_version} --build-number {new_build_number}`
change_pub_version(f'{new_build_name}+{new_build_number}')
run('rm -rf build/ios')
run(f'flutter build ipa --no-pub', check=True)

Note: by default, flutter auto-generates some parameters from the pubspec file when building. If you haven't changed anything in the Xcode project, it will get the version from those parameters.
If it doesn't work for you, you can follow this article or this answer to fix it.

Step 6: Upload it to AppStore

We successfully generated an IPA file in the previous step. It's now time to upload it. At this point, there are two options for manually uploading it, but what's the fun in that?
We use altool to upload the file for us. We also consider that uploading or verifying the file may fail, and in that case, we open the folder and the Transporter application, so we can do it manually and determine what caused the error.

e = run(f'xcrun altool --upload-app --type ios -f build/ios/ipa/*.ipa --apiKey {KEY_ID} --apiIssuer {ISSUER_ID}')
if e.returncode != 0:
    run('open build/ios/ipa')
    run('open -n /Applications/Transporter.app')

Step 7: Add script to IDE

Now that we've finished our Python script, let's make it easier to run. You can, of course, run it from the terminal, but there are better ways.

Android studio

It is possible to add it as a run configuration and press run whenever you need it. Ensure that the Working directory is the root path of your project.

VSCode

You can store it in the .vscode/launch.json file as a run configuration.

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Deploy iOS",
            "type": "python",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "scripts/deploy_ios.py",
            "console": "integratedTerminal"
        }
    ]
}

Step 8: Get rid of "Manage compliance"

After uploading each TestFlight version to AppStore Connect, you will see the Manage compliance warning. Apple won't roll out the new release for TestFlight users until you answer those two questions in the box.

This can be annoying when you want an automated process from start to finish. Luckily, this answer will help you get rid of it.

Bouns: Flavors

Flavors are an excellent way to separate different environments. I recommend reading this article for implementing them in Flutter.

After adding different flavors to your project, you can create a new app in AppStore Connect for the dev version with different bundle identifier.

In this gist, I added an example for when you use different bundle identifier and you need to deploy them separately.

Forem: Amir

MacOS Tips & Tricks

Table of Contents

Charge Limiter

Microsoft AutoUpdate

Dock

Menu Bar

Brew

Updating everything Automatically

Useful Application

ZSH

Shortcuts

The Power of Option key

Common errors

General Tips

Useful Sites

Other Resources

Flutter: Automate iOS deployment and versioning

3rd Party tools

Step 1: Configure Xcode

Step 2: Get the API Key from Apple

Step 3: Create JWT

Step 4: Get the last version

Step 5: Build the app

Step 6: Upload it to AppStore

Step 7: Add script to IDE

Android studio

VSCode

Step 8: Get rid of "Manage compliance"

Bouns: Flavors