During the last few Xojo releases we have been improving the signing options for macOS apps, making it easier to meet Apple’s requirements both for direct distribution of your apps or for Mac App Store distribution. Still, there remained a discrepancy when debugging from the IDE: sandboxing, hardened runtime and the use of entitlements and provisioning profiles were not applied, so there could be a difference between the app you debug and the real behavior of the distributed app.
Comments closedTag: macOS
In Xojo 2026r1 we revised the macOS Developer ID field and replaced it with a Team-based popup menu that aligns with the style found in iOS projects. This change aims to offer a cleaner, more intuitive way to manage developer certificates for the distribution of your built macOS app.
Comments closedIf you followed the previous two articles in this series, you should be set up properly now, right? Your Mac developer certificates are stored in Keychain Access, so you only need to fill in the Developer ID field under Build Settings > macOS > Sign with the appropriate certificate value, click Build (or Publish), and distribute your new amazing app worldwide. Well, not quite. There are still other pieces to consider when signing and distributing your macOS app.
Comments closedOn the Apple side of code signing with developer certificates, we already know that the required root certificate, acting as the base anchor of the…
Comments closedYour macOS app is finished and ready to go. But unless you plan to run it only on your own machine, there’s one essential step before sharing it with others: code signing with certificates.
Comments closedThe Keychain is a system-wide feature on macOS that securely stores account passwords for applications. Until Xojo 2025r1, updating the password for an existing KeychainItem—that is, for a given Service Name—required first removing the item from the Keychain and then recreating it from scratch. Not exactly the most efficient process. But with the introduction of the KeychainItem.UpdatePassword method in 2025r1, things have gotten much easier. Read on to see how you can take advantage of this new functionality.
Comments closedStarting in Xojo 2025r1, all new Desktop projects will include the Window menu by default, as it is a standard feature across most applications. Xojo macOS apps will immediately benefit from this update!
Comments closedBy default, macOS adds several menu options to the Window menu of any Desktop app. Those options have been getting more interesting in the latest releases of the operating system, allowing, among other things, to set the position and arrangement of the Window on the screen, split the screen between the Window of one app and another app, or even sending a window of an app to an iPad as an “extended” screen in your macOS setup. Read on, adding these options to your Xojo-built macOS apps is just a few Declares away!
Comments closedWith macOS Sonoma, users can add a Xojo web app to the Home / Dock. That brings icon badges and manifest files to Xojo web apps starting with Xojo 2023r2. Let’s see how you can use them to make your web apps more accessible and useful.
Comments closedXojo creates native apps and uses the native user interface toolkit on each platform. This is important from the end-user’s point of view – we’ve all used apps that didn’t feel quite right, often Java or Electron-made apps. But it’s also important from the developer’s point of view because many of these design changes are effectively done for you.
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