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I made an app: "AstroWall" - opensource astronomy wallpaper statusbar agent

H

hvedemelsbof

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 21, 2016
15
10
Hello. I made an opensource app, that fetches Nasa Astronomy Picture of the Day and embeds the title and description in the image. Then puts it on display as wallpaper.

Main page: https://wiegell.github.io/AstroWall/

Source: https://github.com/wiegell/AstroWall

Project made to try out C# on macOS. Ended up pretty good IMO.

Feedback welcome.
demo.png
 
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Reactions: PatrickCocoa, bwillwall, T'hain Esh Kelch and 7 others
I like it but the res of the pics seems really low and on my 2k monitor it looks really pixelated. The app itself seems great tho!

EDIT: I didn't realize if I I clicked it it gave me the full res photo. SMH
 
Error message in Monterey 12.6.1 (21G217), app in /Applications/Astro Wall.app
"Incorrect Astro Wall install location
Current install location not suited for updates. Please confirm move app to user applications folder. A link will be created in the regular applications folder"
error.jpg
 
bogdanw said:
Error message in Monterey 12.6.1 (21G217), app in /Applications/Astro Wall.app
"Incorrect Astro Wall install location
Current install location not suited for updates. Please confirm move app to user applications folder. A link will be created in the regular applications folder"
View attachment 2117908
Click to expand...
Yes that’s sort of intentional. The app should launch whether you click either button. I’ve considered moving the app silently (the pkg installer already does this). Did you understand the message or find it confusing? It moves the app from /Applications to /Users/{user}/Applications, which is needed to run updates.
Thanks for the response!
 
Jack Neill said:
I like it but the res of the pics seems really low and on my 2k monitor it looks really pixelated. The app itself seems great tho!

EDIT: I didn't realize if I I clicked it it gave me the full res photo. SMH
Click to expand...
Great! Glad you like it. And thanks for trying it out.
The low res preview is to make the browsing more snappy. I run a 2015 macbook pro, an M1 might be able to change full res snappy - what model do you run?
 
hvedemelsbof said:
Yes that’s sort of intentional. The app should launch whether you click either button. I’ve considered moving the app silently (the pkg installer already does this). Did you understand the message or find it confusing? It moves the app from /Applications to /Users/{user}/Applications, which is needed to run updates.
Thanks for the response!
Click to expand...
Well, I understood the message, but:
- /Users/{user}/Applications is not were macOS apps are supposed to be, as they will be available only for that user
- clicking “Sure!” does not move the Astro Wall.app into /{user}/Applications if that folder doesn’t exist. It just creates an alias to the app inside /Applications/Astro Wall.app
 
bogdanw said:
Well, I understood the message, but:
- /Users/{user}/Applications is not were macOS apps are supposed to be, as they will be available only for that user
Click to expand...
Frankly i would like to have it located in /Applications, but the updater i've created relies on automatic running of a .pkg file, and the installer absolutely want's an admin password to update any app in /Applications, even if it's owned by the current user. So to be able to make the updates silent i had to go with /Users/{user}/Applications.
bogdanw said:
- clicking “Sure!” does not move the Astro Wall.app into /{user}/Applications if that folder doesn’t exist. It just creates an alias to the app inside /Applications/Astro Wall.app
Click to expand...
Just made a patch that should remedy this. 0.1.13 - would you please try and update and see if it fixes the problem?
 
hvedemelsbof said:
Just made a patch that should remedy this. 0.1.13 - would you please try and update and see if it fixes the problem?
Click to expand...
Problem partially fixed when installing from the 0.1.13 dmg. The folder /user/Applications is created if it doesn’t exist, the app is moved and an alias is created in /Applications/. But the message is still displayed after login. Probably because com.astro.wall.Astro-Wall.plist tries to open the binary /Applications/Astro Wall.app/Contents/MacOS/Astro Wall

I’m not a developer, try to ask on https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/ios-mac-tvos-watchos-programming.135/ if there is another way to update the app in /Applications/
 
bogdanw said:
Problem partially fixed when installing from the 0.1.13 dmg. The folder /user/Applications is created if it doesn’t exist, the app is moved and an alias is created in /Applications/. But the message is still displayed after login. Probably because com.astro.wall.Astro-Wall.plist tries to open the binary /Applications/Astro Wall.app/Contents/MacOS/Astro Wall
Click to expand...

I appreciate that you're taking time to test this. I just made 0.1.14 that removes any old installation in the user applications folder before moving the new one from /Applications. I think this should solve it - would you mind trying?

bogdanw said:
I’m not a developer, try to ask on https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/ios-mac-tvos-watchos-programming.135/ if there is another way to update the app in /Applications/
Click to expand...

I read through tons of old threads regarding installation on macOS. It seems like the pkg format is under prioritized by apple, since people have a lot of weird issues with it. My guess is that they put all their effort in the App Store. There is already another opensource update framework that could solve my problems, but requires the app to be signed with an apple developer ID, which i didn't want to pay for at the moment. Could be an option if the app gets any traction.
 
hvedemelsbof said:
I just made 0.1.14 that removes any old installation in the user applications folder before moving the new one from /Applications. I think this should solve it - would you mind trying?
Click to expand...
v0.1.14-alpha makes the problem worse, the message is displayed again after login and the app in /users/user/applications is replaced with an alias.
My suggestion would be to release the app only as pkg, include in the script mkdir -p ~/Applications and install the app directly in that folder.
 
bogdanw said:
v0.1.14-alpha makes the problem worse, the message is displayed again after login and the app in /users/user/applications is replaced with an alias.
My suggestion would be to release the app only as pkg, include in the script mkdir -p ~/Applications and install the app directly in that folder.
Click to expand...
I actually started with only the pkg, but thought people would prefer a dmg. I’ll double check when i get back home, but i didn’t get the message on my machine, but maybe you could try and completely delete both the app and alias from the two folders and once again put the app in /Applications from the dmg and run?
I have a ton of console output from the app i can use for debugging, but it’s not saved to a log file atm. I will implement that in a couple of days and then it will be easier for me to troubleshoot. Thanks again for testing.
 
hvedemelsbof said:
but maybe you could try and completely delete both the app and alias from the two folders and once again put the app in /Applications from the dmg and run?
Click to expand...
In a Monterey 12.6.1 (21G217) VM
 
Works great, thanks for putting this out there. Only thing I would change would be option to hide the menu bar icon.

Thanks again
 
LouisPiper said:
Works great, thanks for putting this out there. Only thing I would change would be option to hide the menu bar icon.

Thanks again
Click to expand...
Thanks! Hmm… i will try and see if opening another instance of the app can somehow be redirected to showing the icon again.. How would you like to get the icon back again if needed otherwise? Do you know of any other apps that does this?
 
hvedemelsbof said:
Thanks! Hmm… i will try and see if opening another instance of the app can somehow be redirected to showing the icon again.. How would you like to get the icon back again if needed otherwise? Do you know of any other apps that does this?
Click to expand...
That is unnecessary in my opinion, the user can just quit the app.
Alternatively, the com.astro.wall.Astro-Wall.plist can be modified to start it at a specific time/date with StartCalendarInterval, each day after a new "picture of the day" is published.
https://launchd.info
 
Yea but i would need to make a separate windows based gui to control the agent then? Maybe not that much work, but still…
 
hvedemelsbof said:
Thanks! Hmm… i will try and see if opening another instance of the app can somehow be redirected to showing the icon again.. How would you like to get the icon back again if needed otherwise? Do you know of any other apps that does this?
Click to expand...
Sure, Rectangle allows you to hide the menu bar icon. Opening the app again opens the settings.
 
bogdanw said:
In a Monterey 12.6.1 (21G217) VM
View attachment 2118190
Click to expand...
I had an upload error, so 0.1.15 was not uploaded, sorry. Now 0.1.16 is there with a crash fix for todays image, which is in a slightly different format than usual (so description and title cannot load for now). I will try and make the app more crash proof, so it can reach the auto-update feature in case of errors. Everyone on 0.1.15 and below will crash on todays image and not get to auto update atm. bc. the app will crash on processing todays image before the autoupdate is run. So a redownload is needed unfortunately. It happened bc. Nasa skipped a certain keyword today, that i use in the scraping.
LouisPiper said:
Sure, Rectangle allows you to hide the menu bar icon. Opening the app again opens the settings.
Click to expand...
Will look into this!
 
More crash fixes today. The updater should be more reliable (updates before a potential crash), so further redownloads hopefully are not needed.

Jack Neill said:
Ok sure!
Click to expand...

I tried making previews 1080p in another branch (pkg can be found here). It's not working too well on my machine. If i move the mouse quickly over all the options in "browse latest" and then exit the menu, it will not always revert to the originally selected image, but stay on one of the previews. The wallpaper change also lags behind the menu item hover. Do you get that behavior too?
 
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