I’ve been thinking about a potential mac version of Thrive a bit more lately and wanted to ask for some feedback.
First off the easy part is the launcher, which should be pretty easy to make mac versions. At least if the notarization that is needed is very similar to what is needed for thrive itself, as we need to solve that issue there, so the launcher can piggyback off that work. Some links I found regarding that: https://medium.com/cacher-app/getting-your-electron-app-working-on-macos-catalina-10-15-63e53f397da2 https://github.com/electron-userland/electron-builder/issues/4179
So then the much harder part: getting thrive working on a mac. First off, the first problem is lack of hardware meaning that for a mac version to be made we need to buy apple hardware, as it is very much against apple’s licenses to run a hackintosh or cross compile to mac( if that was possible).
The second related problem is that the build process (all the libraries have been selected so that they advertise mac support) need to be tweaked to work on mac, and that takes somewhere between a little bit of time to quite a large amount of development time (and no developers on a mac have offered to do this). So probably I would have to do it. So it would take away from development time used on other things, and I’d like to get paid a reasonable amount for working on the mac version, which isn’t a platform I like.
So taking that into account, quite a bit of money needs to be raised for the mac version. The cheapest mac I can get is a little over 900 dollars (mac mini, which needs an external monitor for extra 100 bucks). Then I’d estimate around 10-50 hours of work to get everything properly done for the mac version of thrive, with a good hourly rate of 20 dollars, that all totals to around 1200-2000 depending on the amount of needed work. What’s also a bit uncertain is that if the mac mini is suitable for this or if I would need some more expensive hardware to do this. But the minimum amount of money is around that ballpark. So are the mac users ready to cough up that much money to get a thrive version on the mac?
I’m not ready to launch a patreon for myself working on thrive just yet, so it isn’t yet possible to pay money to support a mac version. But once launched it could be used to collect money towards a mac version. However ongoing mac dev builds would cost around 40 dollars a month extra due to mac servers being very expensive to rent (compared to a basic linux server costing only around 6 dollars a month). Due to the uncertainty of monthly donations, I’d like to have the hardware for the mac version paid off in two years. So all of this combined comes up to (assuming an average of 10 hours of mac related work per month): 280 dollars a month for mac version. So whichever method to fund the mac version is selected the apple users need to be ready to cough up some quite serious cash.
Hopefully someone read this whole post, but basically I’d like to know if you think this is worth it. And if you have a mac, I’d like to know which one you have and which OS version you have? As those are quite important in gauging what the target requirements for mac should be.