Building DMG, EXE, and Codesigning?

Just wonder what everyone who is developing for Mac and Windows what they are using to build their DMG, EXE and code sign their apps?

We also have to upload our DMG and EXE to our website for downloading by our users and we are currently using an app that we developed in house. What is everyone else doing for this?

We’re using both a custom developed build process…
…and GitHub Actions.

See this Xojo Blog: GitHub Actions.

This topic has been discussed multiple times here on the forum. Extensively.

Building for Mac

I codesign with App Wrapper. Worth every penny. For packing, I zip rather than DMG. Building then signing and notarizing a disk image is more work for you, and your users have to do more work to get to your app. Zip is easier for everyone involved.

Building for Windows

Once you install signtool, InnoSetup can perform codesigning while it builds the installer. This simplifies the build / sign process.

Uploading to a Website

There is a very basic file uploader in Lifeboat, but for the more intricate things I do with my websites I use Transmit

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Anecdotally of course, I’ve heard the opposite. Zip’d apps wind up living in the Downloads folder. Sure, tech-savvy Mac users will move them, but realistically most users will not. And the downloads folder it probably the least organized folder on any computer, so it’s really not a good home for an app. I was originally shipping a DMG without an alias to the Applications folder, and I’d get tickets from people not understanding what to do. Or they were running it from the disk image. This largely went away when I added the alias, but a disk image with alias seems to be the most expected based on the support ticket’s I’ve received.

All of this is just a long way of saying both options suck. But I seem to get my app in the Applications folder more frequently when using the DMG with Applications alias.

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