Fixes:

• Few incorrect associations for adoptable packages

• Wrong packages listed in the “New updates available“ notification

• Some ignorable errors not getting ignored during package updating

• Adoptable packages can now have multiple “Adoption Candidates“

  • For packages that share the same executable (Zen.app for both the Zen Browser, and Zen Privacy screen), you can now select which package to adopt the app as. Previously, only the first one in the list was chosen, which led to some weirdness.

  • This also allows you to choose if you’d like to install a different bound version - for example, a beta or an older version of the package

• Adoptable and excluded adoptable packages now have search fields which you can use to filter out adoptable packages

  • The search field works for:

    • Adoptable app executables

      

    • Cask names

      

    • Descriptions

      

  • The search field is hidden by default, and you can show it by clicking the magnifying glass button in the list’s header

    

Fixes

• A few small fixes in the app icon, by GenuCoder (#567). Thank you!

Adjustments

• None in this release

On Cork’s infrastructure

Especially recently, I started really disliking centralized internet infrastructure. GitHub is mired in its own slew of controversies. I also just dislike the USA.

Which is why in the future, Cork will be moved by my self-hosted code repo at https://code.rikidar.eu (not accessible yet), with a mirror to Codeberg.

More in-depth communication will be moved to a new dedicated self-hosted forum at https://forum.rikidar.eu, and instant communications to also self-hosted chat infrastructure (not available yet). This blog will also move from Substack, to self-hosted Ghost in the future, with no changes to the URL.

Stay tuned for more information, and follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky. You should also join the current Discord community.

• You can now exclude adoptable apps. The apps you exclude will not longer show up in the list, and are instead moved to a separate list
  

  • You can optionally set whether the entire section should not get shown at all in case you have excluded all adoptable apps. This setting is in Discoverability → App Adoption

    • The section automatically shows up again when a new adoptable app is found

Fixes

None in this release

Adjustments

• New app icon by GenuWonderer! This new icon includes all features added in Tahoe, including Liquid Glass and custom color adjustments, including a dark color theme for the first time, and other adjustments.

• Adoptable packages are the flagship new feature in this release, bringing this much-requested feature to the users of Cork for the first time. Now, Cork sees which apps you have installed outside of Homebrew, and offers to add the to Homebrew for you - after you do, you can manage them as any other Homebrew app, and have Homebrew update them.

  

  • You can right-click the adoptable app to show additional actions: revealing the app executable in Finder, and previewing its cask

  

  • You can select as many apps you’d like to add at a time. Before the process starts, you get an option to change your mind

  • This feature is entirely custom-made and extremely performant, and is an integral part of my Spirytus project: an effort to rewrite all Homebrew systems in Swift for massive performance and efficiency gains, and to decouple Cork from the often buggy Homebrew base and its toxic developers

• Casks now show the actual app that the cask installed

  

  • You can right-click on the app icon to reveal the app in Finder

  

Fixes

• Cask details now show the size of the actual app, instead of just its Homebrew metadata

• Renames packages no longer shop up as broken. A more comprehensive support for them is coming in a future release

Adjustments

• Updated Cork for the Tahoe Liquid Glass design

• Buttons for adding taps and installing packages have new icons

  

• The Settings window now animates when changing panes, like first-party Apple apps

• Added icons to relevant buttons

• Removal of the —no-quarantine flag from the install command in order to cope with another unannounced change to Homebrew

• changed Cork’s bundle ID from `com.davidbures.cork` to `eu.davidbures.cork`. This means that your settings might be reset this one time, and you may have to put in your email one more time

• bumped the min. system version from macOS 13 to 14. I already outlined the plan last year, and reminded everyone last month, and now, it’s time to make the switch. There are a lot of new things in SwiftUI that are not available for macOS 13 that make the experience of using the app much better

You can keep using the current Cork cask, I added a separate binary to it for macOS 13 in the last update.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me at dev@corkmac.app and I will do my best to assist.

Additions

• Nothing new in this release

Fixes

• Fixed the “return to status page“ sometimes being greyed out when some package details were open

• Moved configuration from `AppStorage` to the `Defaults` library for a much more robust way of storing settings, which won’ need to be reset in the future like in this release

• Fixed occasional crashing of the preview pane when opened from somewhere that’s not the package installation sheet

• Fixed a soft lock with removing a package while the detail pane is being switched to another package

• Shortcut action for loading installed packages on macOS versions newer than 14 no longer crashes Shortcuts

Adjustments

• Migrated from `ObservedObject` to `Observable` for big performance gains

• Navigation is managed by its own object for better control and performance

• A few adjustments to the sizing of large buttons

• Tagged packages are no longer saved in a `.brewmeta` file in the Documents folder, but in the system’s built-in SwiftData

• Loading of tagged and pinned packages is now faster, because it takes place right in the function for loading the packages themselves, instead of looping over the loaded packages and applying the proper statuses to them after they have been already loaded

These languages are:

• Korean

• French

• German

• Traditional Chinese

If you speak any of these languages, I’d appreciate it greatly if you’d take the languages over. To do so, join the Discord, give yourself the Linguist role and head to the `#localization` channel. You will find more info in the channel’s description. Alternatively, check out the Contributing Translations section on GitHub.

Additions

• Updated Italian and Spanish translations

Read this before you start panicking:

Additions

• Pinning packages from the sidebar. I rewrote the system for pinning packages completely from scratch, because the Homebrew implementation was way too slow

  

• Button for manually checking for outdated packages

  

• Package detail pane now fully supports package deprecation notes

Fixes

• Crash when opening some previews

• Backup date format omitted doesn't actually omit date (#499)

• Wrong sizing of update and maintenance sheets (#493)

Adjustments

• Package statuses, which include whether a package is outdated and pinned, changed to a badge on the right side of the sidebar item

  

• Caveats for packages (called “notes“ in Cork) have a new design

  

• Changed icon for updating packages, the old icon is now for looking for new outdated packages

  

  
  
  
  
  

Additions

• New states for empty package searches

• Updating packages from sidebar (#375)

  

• New settings for default backup date formats. Supports every macOS date format and includes a preview (#447)

Fixes

• Fixed a crash when previewing packages (#479)

• Fixed a compilation error related to Shortcuts (#475)

Adjustments

• A few under-the-hood adjustments for the way packages are updated

Before I sign off, you might have read this post I published on Bluesky and Mastodon:

I have not been doing well mentally, due to a lot of stress from my private life, and trying to market Cork with little outside help. I have never been good at marketing, because I know how annoying it can get.

So I’d like to ask you to share Cork, write about it, post about it… You can also join the Cork Discord (linked below) to hang out.

Thank you.

Get Cork

Join the Discord

Additions

• Support for packages that require the greedy flag, meaning those that update themselves

  • This is disabled by default, and has to be enabled in Settings under Packages → Show packages not managed by Homebrew

  • Once enabled, you will start seeing “Unmanaged“ packages in your outdated package list

  • Unmanaged packages are defined in the app’s own configuration. These packages are supposed to have their own, internal updating mechanism, independent of Homebrew

• You now get the option to automatically accept package EULAs (by Grublady)

Fixes

• Updating individual packages no longer throws the Could not synchronize packages error (#382)

• The Service Manager no longer crashes when clicking the Reload button when no services are installed (#471)

Adjustments

• Various translations have been updated

Get Cork

Join the Discord

• Fails when attempting to update when a package requires input

The bounty for implementing it is 100€

Cork Open Collective

Cork has a page on Open Collective! All proceeds made from it are redistributed among the contributors.

After a few months, we finally have a new update for Cork, due to my quite bad mental health.

Additions

• Top packages have descriptions (thanks to Grublady)

  

• Turkish translation (thanks to okturan)

• Alerts for misconfigured taps

• Errors encountered during package loading are now displayed as a list of errors, with the recommended fix. This means that more than one error at a time can be shown

  

• Optional swipe actions in the sidebar

Fixes

• The entire package loading process has been rewritten from scratch, making it much more robust

• Pressing Return when adding a tap actually works now

• Some packages were missing their compatibility listings in the package definition. This used to break the decoding process, but now, it doesn’t anymore (thanks to Grublady)

Adjustments

• Buttons in the toolbar now follow Apple’s semantic placements

• Sheets now use the new built-in button and title design

There are probably a lot other additions and fixes I have not mentioned, but this release has been in development for a long time, and I don’t remember everything that I did.

Thank you for your support. I’d really appreciate if you’d spread the word about Cork.

You should follow me on Bluesky and Mastodon to keep up with Cork news.

Get Cork

Join the Discord

By keeping Cork on macOS 13, it’s missing out on a lot of SwiftUI improvements, such as Observation (which dramatically speeds up UI updates) and Swift Data (which can be used to persist data, like tagged packages, in a native way).

So, at some point, I will have to drop macOS 13. What will happen to Cork on that system when that happens?

Do not panic!

Dropping support for a system version does NOT mean that Cork will stop working on that version. Quite contrary.

All it means is that in the future, a version of Cork will come out for macOS 13, and that will be the final version for that system version. It will keep working indefinitely, in accordance with Cork’s license.

It will just not receive any further updates. That’s all there is to it.

So, when will that happen?

I’m not sure yet. Like I write above, I’m doing my very best to keep Cork on macOS 13, even if it means missing out on essential SwiftUI features.

However, I might implement a feature that’s just not possible on macOS 13. And if I don’t figure out a workaround, I’ll fix up as many problems in that version I can, and then release it as a “final“ macOS 13 version, so users still on macOS 13 will have as good of an experience with that final version for the system as possible.

• Fails when attempting to update when a package requires input

The bounty for implementing it is 100€

This will be a short post because I’m on vacation until September 30th, and I want some peace until then.

I have added a package preview button, which you can press when you want to see information about a package that has not been installed yet:

Other changes can be found on the GitHub project: https://github.com/users/buresdv/projects/2

Get Cork

Join the Forums

Join the Discord

• Fails when attempting to update when a package requires input

The bounty for implementing it is 100€

Cork Open Collective

Cork has a page on Open Collective! All proceeds made from it are redistributed among the contributors.

Additions

• New options for showing outdated packages

• Multiple new errors have been handled in Services

• New workflow for updating Homebrew inside Cork

• Support for unexpectedly interrupted package instalations

• Maintenance is also accessible from a new, optional toolbar button

  

• New button in Services for manually reloading the list of services

Fixes

• Loading status for outdated packages on Status Page sometimes doesn't correctly update when updates finished being checked

• A few more misc fixes that I didn’ write down

Adjustments

• SwiftyJSON was completely removed, as all JSON parsing was migrated to JSONDecoder

Get Cork

Join the Forums

Join the Discord

• Fails when attempting to update when a package requires input

The bounty for implementing it is 100€

Additions

• Outdated packages can be seen directly in the sidebar. They have a clock icon next to their name

  

Fixes

• Right-clicking on sidebar items hangs for a second

• Switching displayable packages does not properly update the dock badge

• Some Casks were not showing in the outdated package list

Adjustments

• Converted from SwiftyJSON to native JSONDecoder:

  • Services

  • Top packages

  • Outdated packages

• French translation updated

Get Cork

Join the Forums

Join the Discord

• Fails when attempting to update when a package requires input

The bounty fox implementing these is 100€

Additions

• Added support for sudo package operations

  

  • When a package requires sudo, you get prompted by a dialog

  • This dialog is 100% custom made and open source, so you don’t have to worry about privacy

  • Supports Touch ID as well

• A new alert for when an invalid file is present in the package folders

  

  
  

Fixes

• The “Install“ and “Search“ buttons in the installer no longer flash when switching between them

Adjustments

None

Before we start, I’m still looking for help fixing these issues:

• Implement support for installers requiring sudo password

• Fails when attempting to update when a package requires input

The bounty fox implementing these is 100€

Additions

• Implemented the licensing scheme mentioned before.

  • The demo is now the latest version, time-limited to 7 days

  • Licensing is bypassed for self-compiled builds (a huge shoutout to Dmitri Bouniol and Ben Carlsson who came up with this system)

    

• Added basic support for Homebrew services. You can now use the Services Manages sub-window to get an overview of your services, as well as starting/stopping them. Error checking is a given, and more comprehensive controls are coming in future releases.

• A new, optional confirmation when uninstalling or purging packages. You can enable this in Settings → Packages

• Restoring from a backup by drag-and-dropping is now more discoverable

• The alert informing about Homebrew backup exporting failure is now more detailed

  

• Package loading is now much faster, and loading times should remain the same no matter how many packages you have. In a nutshell, packages will load just as fast if you have 1 even if you have 500.

• You can now right-click the Formula, Cask and Tap overview to reveal the respective folders in Finder

  

Fixes

• Trying to install a package that’s not supported on your processor architecture no longer causes a softlock

• Exporting a Homebrew backup when an identical backup already exists no longer bugs the export process out. Now, it overrides the previous backup.

• A symlink present in Cellar or Cask folders no longer causes a hardlock

• A temporary fix for an upstream Homebrew error that would write status messages to the Error output instead of the Standard output

Adjustments

• The graph of cached downloaded packages is now color-coded according to whether the cached download is a Formula or Cask. No more random colors!
  1

  

• The Homebrew location section in Settings now uses a prettier, more macOS-like way of displaying the path of the currect Homebrew executable. In the future, you’ll be able to drag-and-drop your custom executable onto the path to change it, but that’ll come in a future release.

  

• The package installation workflow now uses NSSearchFields that will hopefully make it possible to add new install options, like searching by desription and installing specific versions.

• A LOT of internal refactoring, which should make it easier to implement new features in the future. Cork was my first app, after all, so the oldest parts of it are very janky. These refactors include, among others:

  • The installation process (done by Matt Massicotte, huge shoutout to him!)

  • The “Reveal in Finder“ process

I bet there are some changes that I forgot to mention. This is a huge release that we’ve been working on for months, so I hope you enjoy it!

My birthday is coming up, so I’ll be offering a 60% discount on Cork from June 1st until June 8th! Follow me on Mastodon, Twitter or join the Discord to get the discount code in a few days!

Get Cork

Join the Forums

Join the Discord

I’d like to remind you that these two high-priority issues are still present, and if you fix either or them, you will get a nice reward:

• # no longer brings up the list of tokens

• Implement support for installers requiring sudo password

Additions

• You can now focus the search field using Command+F. This is available for macOS 14 only.

• In light of the upcoming changes to the way licenses are validated, Cork now includes a way to check if your email was correctly migrated, and instructions on what to do if it wasn’t. Read about the upcoming changes:

  

Fixes

• The list of packages that prevented cache purging is no longer ridiculously wide if you had a lot of packages that held back the purging.

Adjustments

• None in this release

Get Cork

Join the Discord

I wanted to give you a heads-up about some upcoming changes to Cork.

The Demo

Until now, the Cork demo has been a really, really old version. This made some users, who were expecting some of the newer features, confused.

This is why the demo will soon be the latest version, time-limited to 7 days.

The Licensing

Cork will always be a one-time purchase. This is not changing, so don’t worry.

There will be a slight change to the way licenses are validated. When you first start up Cork, you’ll need to put the email you bought Cork with into a license field, and Cork wil check if it’s associated with a purchase.

This is pretty much the same as most other software does it, just without annoying license keys. Your email will be your license key.

I repeat, nothing about the licensing itself is changing. Cork is still a one-time purchase, that you can install on as many Macs as you’d like.

The Tap

This is not 100% confirmed yet, but I’d like Cork to be available from the built-in Cask repo.

Okay, so what’s the plan?

These changes will not happen overnight. It will be a multi-step process:

1. In the next Cork version, you’ll get notified about the licensing validation changing. You’ll already be able to put in your email into a provisional license field, which will check if your email is correct.
   If it says that your email can’t be found, you should send me an email to dev@corkmac.app and we’ll get it fixed; I’ve been migrating the current licensing storage to a new location, and unfortunately, I had to use LOCAL OCR software to transcribe all the emails (don’t worry, I repeat, it was a LOCAL OCR software that did not share your data with any third party), so there might be some typos.

2. In the version after that, the licensing validation will fully change and you’ll now be required to put your email into the license checking field. Once it’s checked, you’ll have access to Cork the same way as before.

3. Some time in the future, Cork will hopefully be included in the default Cask repo.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to me at dev@corkmac.app, through Mastodon, Discord or Twitter.

• # no longer brings up the list of tokens

• Implement support for installers requiring sudo password

Additions

• You can now add taps from external sources (i.e. taps that are not hosted on GitHub). To do so, try to add an external tap, and in the following stage, click “Use external address“:

  

• Ukrainian translation by Igor Petruchek. Thanks a lot!

Fixes

• Some packages no longer have the tap name they come from in their package name

• You can now select individual packages to update again. There was a bug that selected/deselected the entire list

Adjustments

• None in this release

Get Cork

Join the Discord

Cork is all about its community. Without your support, it would never exist. Now, it needs your help!

Can you code in Swift? If yes, could you please have a look at these two high-priority issues that Cork urgently needs help with? If you manage to fix/implement them, there’s a nice reward awaiting you!

1. `#` no longer brings up the list of tokens

2. Implement support for installers requiring sudo password

Now, let’s have a look at what’s new in 1.3.2.

Additions

• Support for backing up and restoring! You can now back up your installed packages and taps, and restore them when you move to a different computer. The backups are made in a Homebrew-compatible .brewbak format, which you can load even without Cork.
  

• You can now filter out dependencies from the sidebar and Cork at large by default.

  

• When you have enable “Show in Menu Bar“, you can now choose to completely hide the window on startup, turning Cork into a Menu Bar-only app.

Fixes

• When shown in Menu Bar and the main window is closed, Cork’s icon is no longer present in the Dock.

Adjustments

Nothing this time!

Get Cork

Join the Discord