I’m excited to announce the first new Blue Static product in 13 years!
Mailpopbox is an email server that helps provide
anonymity by accepting email to any account at the domain (i.e. a catch-all wildcard). All messages
are delivered to a single mailbox, from which your email client downloads all the messages.
This is version 2.0.1, which you may find surprising for an “initial release.” I’ve been running
Mailpopbox myself for more than three years, adding features and fixing bugs. So it has been fairly
well-tested in production, and I decided it was finally time to release it.
Mailpopbox is also the first product to use GitHub for issue
tracking, rather than Bugdar. I’m doing this as an experiment, so we’ll see how that goes. Pull requests are welcome
via GitHub too, though the repository source of truth will remain self-hosted here on Blue Static.
You can download Mailpopbox 2.0.1 and read more on the product page.
Today I’m releasing MacGDBp 2.0.2 to address a major issue with the auto-updater and some other
minor product bugs.
Somehow when upgrading the Sparkle updater framework when working on MacGDBp 2.0, the auto-update
relauncher binary lost its executable
bit. This resulted in the
auto-update installation hanging indefinitely. Unfortunatley there is no way to automatically
recover from this state. Users can run:
chmod +x MacGDBp.app/Contents/Frameworks/Sparkle.framework/Resources/Autoupdate.app/Contents/MacOS/*
… and re-run the in-product updater. Or simply download version 2.0.2 which has resolved the
issue.
You can download MacGDBp 2.0.2 from the product page.
In March I quietly promoted the 2.0 beta 1
release to be the final, stable build. I decided to not do a blog post because there were no changes
from the beta build.
Today I’m releasing 2.0.1 to address some issues. Thank
you to everyone who reported these bugs. The release also improves dark mode support in the source
viewer, which you can see below.
You can download MacGDBp 2.0.1 from the product page
or by updating via Sparkle.
While I did state that the first beta of
MacGDBp would be out by the end of the year, I decided against pushing a new build before
immediately disappearing on holiday for two weeks. But today is the day!
Version 2.0 is not a complete rewrite, but virtually every aspect of the app has been updated and
improved. The biggest changes are under-the-hood, particularly around the interaction between the
frontend and the remote debugger, which now accurately tracks “transactions.” This allows MacGDBp to
fetch the contents of long arrays or large objects without issue. In addition, several components
have been refactored to improve the project’s code health and the app’s robustness. These
improvements fixed numerous long-standing bugs in the app.
The biggest new feature, by popular demand, is the ability to set symbolic breakpoints. This will
pause the debugger any time a function of a given name is called, rather than having to rely solely
on file/line breakpoints.
Unfortunately, the app will remain un-sandboxed and not code signed. The Sparkle updater is not yet
compatible with the app sandbox. And Apple’s annoying
two-factor authentication requirements rule out (for me)
obtaining a signing certificate. Sparkle will still verify the updates’ signature, however.
Finally, MacGDBp 2.0 sports a new, unified interface. All of the panels and windows have been
collapsed into a single, tabbed window.
See the changelog for the full list of new features
and bug fixes.
You can download MacGDBp 2.0 Beta 1 from the product page.
First, welcome to the new Blue Static! The site has a fresh coat of paint, it has been made more
mobile-friendly, and I have updated much of the content, pruning extremely old things while keeping
still-old-but-maybe-interesting items around for posterity. For the first time in the history of
the site, Blue Static is no longer powered by PHP: the entire site is now rendered as static files
by Hugo.
It has been well over seven years since this site was last updated, and that is because I no longer
have the substantial amounts of time I once had to dedicate to Blue Static software. Since I now
spend all of my working hours writing and maintaining software, the allure of doing so as a hobby
has unfortunately diminished.
Over the past few months, I’ve pondered how to move forward with the various Blue Static projects.
I’ll outline some of those decisions now:
MacGDBp still has a large number of loyal users. I’m happy to report that in these intervening
years, I’ve worked sporadically on the next major version. The first beta of MacGDBp 2.0 will be
released before the end of the year! The entire core debugging engine has been rewritten and made
more robust, which has fixed many bugs and added new features. The new version will also be code
signed and notarized to be compliant with Apple’s increasingly locked-down macOS.
RGB Converter will remain available for download, but because Apple has removed
Dashboard
in macOS 10.15 Catalina, the widget will not be updated anymore.
Bugdar is the project that I’ve struggled to make a decision on. It is fairly safe to say that
any 2.0 greenfield rewrite will not happen. However
all of Blue Static’s bugs remain in the Bugdar instance that runs on this site, so it cannot go
anywhere over night. I am not currently enamored with other options, such as Github’s issue tracker, so
despite Bugdar’s visible age I will continue to run it for Blue Static’s purposes. There may be an
infrequent maintenance update, but I do not expect to make major changes to the software at this
time.
What drove these decisions is that I have largely stopped writing software in PHP. It is
no longer my language of choice, and my interests have moved on to other programming languages and
software domains. MacGDBp remains important to me beacuse others find it useful and the code is
still fun to work on.
I’ll close with a teaser: there is at least one new project that I will be publishing in the future
under Blue Static. It has to do with email and is geared towards power-users.
Look forward to MacGDBp 2.0 Beta 1 coming to a Sparkle update near you!
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