Hi friends,
This is the first issue of »With Amore«, which I plan to use to keep you in the loop about significant project milestones and product updates.
Since my blog post back in late November the project evolved into a fully-fledged Mac app that's able to take care of every step of distributing app updates to your users and already has a couple of developers using it.
Last week I introduced a new help page that hosts Amore's documentation and shows how to get started. It's a good way to get an overview of what Amore is currently capable of. I strive to make this one of the best documentations for a developer tool.
Let's dive into some of the things Amore can do for you today.
From Archiving to Releasing
To streamline the release process, Amore's cli offers a command to be used with Xcode' archive post-actions, which will automatically handle every part of the release process after you archived your project.
This includes:
- Exporting the archive
- Code signing your executable
- Creating an installer DMG (optional)
- Notarizing your app
- Signing your app for the Sparkle updater
- Creating a new
appcast.xml - Uploading your app binary
Amore for New Apps
The help pages now include a Get Started article that describes how to configure a new app for distribution via Amore. The process consists of 3 easy steps:
- Register app with Amore via drag and drop
- Configure Sparkle in your project. (Amore can do parts of this automatically)
- Publish your first release
I tested this with multiple developers now and the whole process takes around 10 minutes.
Amore for Existing Apps
Over the last month I did dozens of developer onboarding sessions and learned that developers with existing apps face different problems and would like to keep their existing Sparkle setups.
Most of these setups included distribution of updates via the developer's S3 bucket and some custom scripts to create notarized DMGs and upload the result to S3.
I am happy to report that Amore now supports the same convenience for apps distributed via S3 buckets. You will be able to use your own S3 bucket from any cloud provider to distribute updates. Only minimal configuration will be required. You won't need to change the source code of your app to get started with Amore.
Once setup, Amore can take care of the full release pipeline and you can even edit the appcast.xml right from inside Amore. This means you can tweak release notes or change settings like beta channel or phased rollouts without ever leaving Amore.
Early Access Promo
As a thank you for your early support, I offer you the sexy price of $69 per year instead of $99, which won't change, even when I raise subscription prices in the future. You can get it here.
What's Next?
Currently I am working on the public beta release of Amore and looking for a few developers who are interested in personal onboarding sessions. If that is something that interests you, please reply to this email to get in touch.
xoxo
Lucas