Hi friends,
This is the sixth issue of »With Amore«, which I use to keep you in the loop about significant project milestones and updates.
In June and July, the focus was on improving Amore for teams and CI pipelines. Additionally, Amore's Swift SDK, AmoreKit, got numerous updates, like in-app purchases and cross-platform support.
Amore for Teams
Amore is used by multiple teams, like Monologue by Every. In the past, the Monologue team would ship new code, and the product owner had to go through the Amore CLI or Amore Mac app to manually release a new version. That person quickly became the bottleneck of the team. As commonly known in software engineering, short feedback loops are essential for fast shipping teams.
To fix this, the Amore CLI got reworked to be fully usable in CI/CD environments. It now has the option for multiple release channels and supports Amore API keys so the whole Amore pipeline can be automated in the cloud.
In addition, there's now a GitHub release action to make it easy to automate the release of any macOS project that's hosted on GitHub.
It's highly customizable and includes instructions to automatically publish new releases on an alpha or beta channel after pushing to main and to the stable channel after adding a release tag.
It's already been used by multiple teams and individuals to release continuously.
AmoreCheckout
In May, Amore added a fully functional licensing system (AmoreLicensing) that's already used by a dozen apps. One drawback compared to the Mac App Store was that it used the traditional Mac licensing approach. The app would link to a pricing or checkout page, causing the user to leave the app to open a browser. The customer would then input their credit card information and get a licensing key via email, which they manually have to copy and paste back into the app to activate their license, causing support requests and lowering the conversion rate.
AmoreCheckout is the latest addition to AmoreKit which provides in-app purchases to every Mac app using AmoreLicensing. It's an optional addition that enables a smooth checkout experience that happens completely inside your app. It's highly customizable and automatically activates the license after a successful purchase. You can see the whole experience in Amore's open-source demo project, Pomodoro.
AmoreKit
In addition to AmoreCheckout, various parts of the Swift SDK, AmoreKit received little updates. It now exposes more information about the user's license, like their email address, and makes all licensing data available synchronously at launch. It also got lighter by dropping the heavy JWTKit dependency.
AmoreLicensing is now platform-independent and can be used on any platform Swift compiles for, not just macOS.
Onboarding & Docs
Like announced in the last post, the Mac app's onboarding experience improved to make it easier for new users to get started. Additionally, the agent skill got updated, and I added better agent instructions on amore.computer to make adding an app to Amore even easier.
Built with Amore
Like in previous months, I want to thank early supporters and adopters of this project that helped shape Amore into the tool it is today.
Billy is a delightful invoice manager crafted with love for all the freelancers and small businesses that want their bureaucracy to be a little more organized and beautiful. It's one of the best new Mac apps I have seen this year.
Notch is a delightful little app that makes it easy to add inspiring artifacts from your Mac to your Are.na spaces.
What's Next?
For the rest of the summer, I plan to improve the help docs and create more videos about various advanced Amore features to make it easier for developers to get started and get the most out of Amore.
Additionally, I am still keen to look into an app directory and app landing pages. This will require some thinking and working closely with other developers, which I am looking forward to.
I would like to personally onboard more developers to AmoreLicensing. If you consider Amore as your licensing system, reply to this email to get in touch. I would love to talk to you.
xoxo
Lucas