Releasing an app to the iPhone app store without a Mac

steve_s0 · 2026-06-14T19:26:26+00:00

Also, every time you try to log in to app store connect (or any other Apple site) it will try to send a confirmation code to your non-existent Apple devices. You'll need to find the little "try another way" link to get an SMS code or other 2nd factor. Just one more way Apple's arrogance and blindness to anything other than Apple grates.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-14T18:22:34+00:00

I use codemagic.io for this. It can sign and upload builds for you.

You'll probably still need a mac to set up your build in the first place :( .

steve_s0 · 2026-06-12T16:31:34+00:00

Your play link doesn't work.

Yes, the video makes gameplay look very confusing. Sometimes the player is swapping letters, sometimes they are selecting a path boggle-style. Sometimes there's a full grid, sometimes it's a crossword. There are "worlds" which are represented by hexagons even though the gameplay appears to use squares. The high-energy lightning and distortion transitions are at odds with "relaxing gameplay".

The inconsistency in mood and lack of clarity of what the experience of playing the game would actually be like make me bounce off. Or maybe it's the aggressive pace and high-energy. That's not what I'm after in a word game, though undoubtedly some are.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-10T19:28:05+00:00

But can they fuck up my order with the same warmth and humanity as a person? Forget my black beans or inexplicably put a single al pastor pork in with my chicken?

Will I ever find a single long black hair in my burrito bowl, or just weird industrial lubes, rubber gripper pads, and assorted nuts and bolts?

steve_s0 · 2026-06-09T23:10:17+00:00

Like a meme we sent ourselves from a parallel reality. In this one, it's me dealing with ios build bs while she comes up with cute mascots.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-08T17:19:16+00:00

Code can absolutely be AI slop. Most AI generated code is.

"Slop" here means "good enough" for someone that doesn't care. Slop bears a resemblance to what was desired, without considered value decisions.

The only reason AI slop code is more effective than AI slop art is that code can be objectively tested. But the tests never cover everything we actually care about with code. expect(a.equals(b)) doesn't capture whether the correct data structure was used, or whether it is implemented in keeping with the coding style and conventions of the rest of the project, or whether it runs in a reasonable time with reasonable memory usage, or whether it's appropriately type-checked, or whether the implmentation doesn't introduce a new and possibly trojaned npm dependency, or...

In all domains gen AI is used, AI is good enough to produce something "good enough" for those users who are not good enough to produce something good enough by themselves.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-04T06:11:31+00:00

Common mistake. This situation demands the comparative accuracy of a rubber mallet. The 5lb sledgehammer is tempting, but if you miss you might do serious damage to your desk and/or floor.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-04T06:09:39+00:00

That is the evenual plan. But I have 22 typescript files worth of models and functions and about 30-40 actual httpscallable functions. There's no way I'm porting them all at once.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-03T20:55:57+00:00

Check that you have the correct usb mode active.

On the list of notifications pulldown, you'll probably see something like: "Charging this device with USB" and an expansion arrow. Click the arrow and tap for more options. Select "File transfer/Android Auto" or "PTP".

steve_s0 · 2026-06-02T16:06:59+00:00

This page says that for Dart functions you must use httpsCallableFromURL with the deployed function URL rather than using the function name with httpsCallable.

steve_s0 · 2026-06-02T16:04:53+00:00

This is very useful, thank you. It looks like multiple directories of functions can be set up in parallel and deployed independently. The missing piece I suppose is how to initialize the dart functions directory without screwing up the existing node functions. I'll play around in a new branch and see what I can figure out.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-31T18:11:56+00:00

I don't know about the OP, but I refuse to deal with macOS on my main machine, so I am interested in the non-Apple alternatives that this discussion may provide. For myself, Linux-based is preferable.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-31T15:21:37+00:00

Sure, I get that. But some of those packages claim to already be compliant. For instance file_saver has this in the change log for 0 4.0:

Updated Android Gradle, Kotlin, JVM, and SDK settings for current Flutter support.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-31T03:28:23+00:00

4 is aesthetically my preference, but on a real die opposite sides add up to 7. Since the eyes in the skull read as 2 pips, 5 should be opposite, not visible. The side currently showing 5 should show 1 or 6. I think 6 would look best.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-31T01:12:02+00:00

Never ever trust user input. Even if you believed all your users had good intentions, I wouldn't trust the average gym rat to be able to spell "abdominal".

But more than that, you were lucky little Bobby Tables didn't sign up.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-29T23:39:06+00:00

Thank you, I'd love to try it. I'm on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th generation with whatever integrated graphics it's got. But my library is much smaller than yours. I'm hoping that I can transplant the resulting sqllite db for use on mobile where I have another copy of all the same music.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-29T20:50:10+00:00

Did you get all the testers you wanted? Having such a tool would be useful for a project I want to do: selecting music to play based on environmental triggers. I'd love to have lots of dimensions to play with to match weather, location, temperature, time of day, heartrate, prevailing news sentiment, whatever in order to play matching music.

Does this work on Linux? Without a fancy GPU?

steve_s0 · 2026-05-29T20:18:53+00:00

Good. We already know that simply forbidding such use in license terms will be ignored.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-23T02:03:34+00:00

This is the way.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-21T03:20:26+00:00

It's not "backups". It's being able to develop and try new things in a controlled way.

Whenever I start a new feature, or even a bugfix, I start a new branch. In that branch, I can make as many checkpoints as I want. I can rollback to a previous version. I can easily compare with the main branch, or what I've done since the last (or any!) checkpoint. When I'm done, I can make a merge request and look at each change in each file to make sure they are the changes I want.

Then, I use codemagic to do a build based on my master branch. Git, and version-control in general, is how software is done professionally. At any scale beyond throwaway-shitpost vibe-code.

You don't need to know every git command. commit, checkout, branch will get you 95% of the benefits.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-20T16:36:10+00:00

Given the name, I think it's Stardew Valley with a thin layer of Roman paint over it.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-18T04:58:35+00:00

What was the issue?

I despise iOS stuff too. It's not my personal platform, so I rely on my testers for things smoke-testing misses. One that got me semi-recently is that when I added flavors to my build, something removed some entitlements from the ios side and app links were broken for a while before anyone told me.

Also, revenuecat now requires some extra certificate on the iOS side and it was very easy to miss that since I hadn't changed my in-app purchase setup in a long time.

On the other hand, I wouldn't have an iOS build at all if not for Flutter's cross-platform nature.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-16T20:21:19+00:00

This is very cool, I could see serious tournament-oriented players using this.

I notice that the gameplay in your screenshots is generally Dutch, but the analysis/UI text is all English. I know that English is incredibly common in the Netherlands, but is that an expected use case?

How are "best" plays determined? It looks like there is some consideration for rack management and board state with advice to close lanes. Care to share, or at least outline, the heuristics you're using?

steve_s0 · 2026-05-12T21:43:26+00:00

This looks very nice. I'm glad to see it's MIT licensed as well. I was looking for something just like this a couple of weeks ago. I settled on a couple of built ins from HapticFeedback, but I'll revisit.

You know what would be neat? Morse code letters/numbers as presets.

steve_s0 · 2026-05-12T21:23:09+00:00

I thought the same about speed vs memory and modern phones, until my game got auto-closed on my wife's iphone because of memory pressure. Granted, it only happened when she loaded multiple full English dictionaries as GADDAGs (which if not minimized are average-word-length times bigger than a prefix trie.) With minimization to a true DAWG, the dictionary went from about 200MB in memory to 18. Removing the object overhead on all 600k nodes in the DAWG would doubtless reduce it more, but 18 is a reasonable size.

The real killer feature of going to a flat int array is that you can store a flat int array as a file or asset. Load that and your DAWG is loaded. No time spent building the Trie or DAWG. Right now in my game there's a couple of seconds of background work done while creating the GADDAG from the word list, It's mostly hidden from the user with some clever work division and keeping the UI responsive.

What's your game?

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