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Comment by Ecio78 | Hacker News Reader

Hi Ethan, it looks very interesting, one feedback and one question: Feedback: you should try to slow down the gif demos, at least in my Chrome/laptop they are quite fast and the viewer can't really appreciate it completely

Question: I see that XCode is required, I don't have a Mac only an iPhone). Any possible way to use Jasonette without a Mac? I've seen some services like Mac in a cloud but I was more thinking about alternative methods. For example, as the only setup required is to provide the URL, couldn't you create a generic Jasonette test/dev app where you can provide the url and do the testing/development directly only on the json side?

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You can run the latest MacOS in VMware on Windows. It works perfectly - Google "VMware Unlocker" as a starting point. This setup actually runs faster than the older Mac Mini I bought specifically to develop for iOS, and it's obviously much more convenient to be able to use a Mac from Windows whenever needed. Both Xcode and a $99 Apple Developer subscription are required if you wish to distribute the app anyway, so I'd suggest you go the VMware route if you don't want to buy Mac hardware or use a cloud service.

I heard that running MacOS on a non-Apple hardware was not considered a legal solution. Am I wrong?

I thought my idea of having a test Jasonette app where you put the url from the app after the boot to do your testing could be very easily doable and way not it could allow also to test the various existing apps that OP created: he could create a test app that downloads a list of his demo apps (so it is always up to date), show a dropdown or similar to choose the demo app + allow you to specify your own custom test url using the keyboard of the device. In this way you have both a demo and a test application :)

IANAL but I'm fairly certain that given Apple's resources, if they wanted to stop this practice, they'd have obliterated VMWare Unlocker from the map. It's been around for years, they certainly know about it, and they haven't done anything about it. So if not expressly legal, they certainly don't seem to have a problem with it.

> I thought my idea of having a test Jasonette app where you put the url from the app after the boot

This is how many UX Prototyping apps, like Invision or Origami works. You download the Origami Studio iPhone app, input in the URL of your prototype, and it loads it into it.

This is an excellent solution for getting up and running with Jasonette without a Mac.

Technically/'legally' it's against the EULA - it only supports virtualising macOS on Apple hardware.

In practice, it's very easy to do.

Yes, it's called Jason, it's on the appstore https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jason./id1095557868?mt=8

In fact, I first created Jason about 5 months ago, and have since been working on open sourcing it, which became Jasonette.

One warning though, note that this current version of Jason is not completely up to date with the most recent version of Jasonette (I've been too busy trying to release the open source), which means about 95% of the apps should work but not all. I plan to push an update soon, please follow the project or join the slack channel to stay updated :)

I tried to download it (the description doesn't really match what we were discussing but still.. I tried) and then I tried instagram, weather and the maps from jasonpedia and they all fail with "please enter a valid url" :/

Answer: Please try Jason on the appstore https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jason./id1095557868?mt=8

Note that this current version of Jason is not completely up to date with the most recent version of Jasonette, so some apps may not work. I plan to push an update soon, please follow the project or join the slack channel to stay updated :)

He actually has released a version like that [1], I believe this is what he's referring to when he says he extracted Jasonette from an existing app.

1: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/jason./id1095557868?mt=8

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