Apple Silicon build?

[ngocphamm]

Do you think it'd be possible to have a native build of the app for Apple Silicon?

I have a new mac mini to test it if you want. Please let me know.

Thank you for making such a great app!

Best,
Ngoc

[lwouis]

Another user said something similar on Discord:

Just dropping by to thank @lwouis for the awesome app. Have been using with Apple Silicon for the past 3 weeks without any issues. I look forward to when the app will support arm natively!

I replied:

Glad to hear this! I've no idea how the new arch impact the ecosystem. Is there some kind of universal app, or would we need to release 2 separate apps going forward? If you have a good link for what's involved, I'm interested. I may also interact and be combined with this issue: #158

[lwouis]

I'm guessing that building a native Apple Silicon app is as easy as flipping a switch in XCode. The issues are around distribution. See the reason #158 is not already implemented. Many problems arise when we go from 1 universal release to multiple releases for multiple platforms.

I've interested in hearing proposals though

[ngocphamm]

I honestly have no idea either as I don't do iOS/macOS dev. I was just curious if you know what it takes to have the universal build for this app. Currently, it's running just fine (so far) on the M1 I have. I was just thinking the universal build would probably somewhat faster, just like almost any other apps when they moved to support Apple Silicon natively.

[PolCPP]

@lwouis Just got an m1 and tried to build locally. It compiles fine on my mbp 16 but the m1 seems to have linker problems on app center.

ld: warning: ignoring file /Users/polcpp/Downloads/alt-tab-macos-master-2/Pods/AppCenter/AppCenter-SDK-Apple/macOS/AppCenterCrashes.framework/AppCenterCrashes, building for macOS-arm64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-x86_64
ld: warning: ignoring file /Users/polcpp/Downloads/alt-tab-macos-master-2/Pods/Sparkle/Sparkle.framework/Sparkle, building for macOS-arm64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-x86_64

Seems to be related to this microsoft/appcenter-sdk-apple#2111
(TLDR app center pod is not working, you need to get the framework as a GitHub asset, which I guess makes distribution harder)

[lwouis]

@PolCPP Have you seen the PR? It bumps AppCenter's version to get support for ARM.

Note that other pods are not ready for ARM, thus blocking us from delivering a Universal App: #771 (comment)

[PolCPP]

Duh! Forgot to check it out.

Actually it compiled and it's kinda running. Don't have rosetta installed yet so its working natively? O_o

But I had to comment out this line GeneralTab.swift, otherwise I would get segmentation faults.

let _ = LSSharedFileListInsertItemURL(loginItems, kLSSharedFileListItemBeforeFirst.takeRetainedValue(), nil, nil, itemUrl, nil, nil).takeRetainedValue()

[lwouis]

Actually it compiled and it's kinda running. Don't have rosetta installed yet so its working natively? O_o

Apple docs mention this command to test the architectures in the binary:

lipo -archs /System/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
x86_64 arm64

I suggest you run this lipo command and see what you get

[PolCPP]

% lipo -archs /Applications/AltTab.app/Contents/MacOS/AltTab
x86_64 arm64

[lwouis]

Ok so it's universal. Normally when you build in Debug, it creates a native build. Another way to make sure is to change the Architecture setting in XCode, build again, comfirm with lipo that there is only arm and run 👍

[lwouis]

Closing this as duplicate of #771. Let's keep the conversation there 👍