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PSA: Bartender Mac App Under New Ownership, But Lack of Transparency Raises Concerns
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What??? This thread is about a specific app reliably communicated - up till now. Nothing to do with random apps from sketchy sites.
It's probably because SetApp needs to sign new contracts with them due to a change of ownership and possibly because they want to review the app as well.
The screenshot of Control D shows that those are DNS requests. Little Snitch blocks the actual traffic to the website that the DNS name resolves to.
I removed Bartender from all my Macs, and switched to Ice. I put together a small commandline tool to help catch these developer cert-swap situations in the future. Wrapped it up in a LaunchAgent to periodically check and alert to this condition. In case it helps anybody...
github.com
GitHub - luckman212/cscheck: outputs codesigning info for macOS binaries
outputs codesigning info for macOS binaries. Contribute to luckman212/cscheck development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
I'm giving Ice a try, though it's not the most ideal solution for notched screens at the moment. Frankly, I wouldn't have minded the possible changes to subscription models, or the new owners, etc. so long as it was communicated. I wouldn't mind going back as well if the new owner could give us a good write-up on what was going on behind the scene.
Your comments are exactly what I was thinking.
I've moved on to Hidden Bar (free in the MAS). So far, it's working great...
That's exactly what "not longer very reputable" means.
It has nothing to do with laws. Just that he threw away his reputation.
It looks like the Amplitude framework was quietly added to the last 5.0.52 release based on discussion in the reddit thread, so I think any of the earlier versions won't have it.
Interestingly, it seems the Applause Group has a similar history with the Voice Dream Reader community (although that purchase was at least publicly announced), in which they added user analytics and moved to a subscription service before reverting for legacy users. I'm glad they listened to that community in part, so I'm curious what will happen with Bartender. I've not found any alternatives with a drop-down menubar and such sophisticated triggers yet...
It's pretty inexcusable selling your product and not letting your customers know.
Ben Surtees has published a statement here:
Not sure how I feel about that. It is still three months overdue, and it feels written under pressure (probably under pressure from Applause). It also feels as if ChatGPT wrote this.
Not sure how I feel about that. It is still three months overdue, and it feels written under pressure (probably under pressure from Applause). It also feels as if ChatGPT wrote this.
Here's a couple apps to use to find out background processes and where they phone home to
www.obdev.at
and my favorite-
objective-see.org
Internet Access Policy Viewer
Explore the IAP of all apps installed on your Mac to find out which Internet connections they make and for what purpose.
www.obdev.at
and my favorite-
Objective-See: LuLu
objective-see.org
Yikes! That doesn't really help. I've been following him for many years now, and even get RSS feeds from his site.. I'm at a loss. At least I can keep the prior version installed from before it was sold! lol
Not really. We don't know why Ben sold it. Maybe he is done with development. It was his property to do with as he chose. He chose to sell and walk away. I get the disappointment, but he had no obligation to disclose anything. It's incumbent on the new owner to gain your trust if he (they) hope to be successful with Bartender moving forward.
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And hope that version remains backwards compatible with macOS 15... that's been problematic in the past - the last two versions of macOS required updates to Bartender to make it work.
