Comment by windsurfer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by windsurfer | Hacker News Reader

I decided to give it a try, and it's almost a 100MB to download. Due to being unsigned, Mac OSX blocked running this web app. Why isn't there a demo online that I can try in my web browser? Isn't this supposed to be a simple electron app?

Anyways, I went to the trouble of unblocking it. This involved going to OSX's settings dialog and finding the Security & Privacy window to unblock.

The text rendering is awful. It's blurry and smudged on my non-retina display due to not using subpixel smoothing. Here's a screenshot comparing Atom (top) to Mark Text (bottom): https://imgur.com/UEJbsl4

Highlighting and pasting text is totally unpredictable. Try pasting in 10 * characters and you'll see that it's almost impossible. How are you supposed to do this? Sometimes it replaces * with \*, sometimes not. And sometimes it replaces it with - ??

I tried to copy paste a few paragraphs of text a few times, and once it turned into this strange highlighted text that when I started a new paragraph, deleted all of my newlines. What's going on?

This editor does not seem ready yet.

> I went to the trouble of unblocking it. This involved going to OSX's settings dialog and finding the Security & Privacy window to unblock.

The "right" way to do this is right-click on the application, and choose "Open". This allows a one-time bypass on a per-application basis.

Interesting. I didn't know that using "Open" was any different than double clicking. Thanks for the tip.

I think the theory is that when the user right-click and select “open”, this is more of a conscious choice. Because of this extra effort, you get the option to go around the default security.

I find this to be a good trade off between running any unsigned binary and complete lockdown. It’s enough of a barrier to make you stop and think, but doesn’t take too much effort to get past.

Perhaps this has been fixed; running macOS 10.15.1, I didn’t have to do anything special to run it—just double clicked.

> Try pasting in 10 * characters and you'll see that it's almost impossible.

Works fine for me: https://i.imgur.com/QssB5YV.gif

Note that:

• The premise of the app is that you type or paste in Markdown syntax, and see the corresponding rendered output in the editor (except when the cursor is inside that area). As asterisks have a special meaning in Markdown, you should expect to see bold text (rather than the asterisks) when you type or paste something like asterisk-asterisk-foo-asterisk-asterisk.

• The intended meaning of ten asterisks in a row is hard to predict from the Markdown syntax definition. Their rendering as two bold asterisks seems to be not what the majority of Markdown converters do, but according to Babelmark it is consistent with a few, including the original Markdown.pl: https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?text=Asterisks+on+the... (Of course, it is best to avoid any such edge cases where Markdown converters differ; CommonMark notwithstanding.)

If you're unhappy about your OS preventing you from running applications that you want to run, you might want to consider switching to another OS.

This is the first time it has happened to me.

Similarly if you’re unhappy that a developer hasn’t signed their releases so you can be sure it hasn’t been tampered with, you might want to consider switching to another app.

Actually his OS is saving him from boated and useless "apps"

> Anyways, I went to the trouble of unblocking

Phrasing isn't flattering to an open source app given away for free, with no tracking.

However, you are right on the usability. It's worthwhile to file a bug to sign the app, and if possible, fund the certificate

I would prefer if I didn't have to do that. Somehow other apps don't, and this was the first time I had to unblock something.

I'm sure once the project have enough regular sponsors to pay the annual $100 fee for notarization by Apple they will gladly do it. Until then enjoy foss and support if you want/can.

For instance https://qgis.org just started notarizing for MacOS Catalina, but it's easier with the huge userbase & sponsors.

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