No-no-no-notarised: Apple gives Microsoft's Visual Studio Code the all-clear for Mac devs

Microsoft's open-source code editor is now notarised by Apple so the nagging of macOS Catalina should be a thing of the past with the February release of Visual Studio Code. Among Catalina's many delights, Apple introduced a requirement that Mac software distributed outside of the cosy walled garden of Apple's App Store must …

[trevorde]

Amazing!

People actually using a Mac to develop code!

[Sgt_Oddball]

Re: Amazing!

Scoff all you want, for us Macs mean it's closer to our Linux servers and its less likely to shit the bed installing an update/dependancy/bash script than our locked down corporate windows boxen (I would consider a Linux distro but I can't guarantee all teleconference apps I use will behave on Linux so MacOS it is).

[phuzz]

Re: Amazing!

The devs where I work use MacBooks, and they do seem like nice bits of hardware that can perform the important task of opening up an SSH connection to the linux server where they're doing their actual programming.

[Paradroid]

Re: Amazing!

Quite the opposite! Macs are very popular for developing with many non-Microsoft languages like PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript front ends and node apps.

Windows Subsystem for Linux was actually added by Microsoft to try and make Window more appealing to these developers because they knew they were losing that market.

[Richard 12]

It's truly ridiculous

An application that uses binary plugins has to be signed and notarized, but doesn't have to require the plugins to be signed, let alone notarized.

*Old* versions of an application suddenly needs to be notarized, even though they were already signed, unless they were installed before Catalina.

Notarization takes an "unknown" length of time and checks for a continually-changing set of things, with an output that's machine-formatted but not machine-readable.

At the time of writing, some of the requirements mean it's impossible for an application to support older versions of macOS - meaning users have to choose between staying on an old version of the application, or losing some of their older software.

Testing this is an utter nightmare.