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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

Why are OSX applications in general so bad at telling website users which platforms they support? Like always, I have to keep digging around in the website, just to find out that it only runs on OSX...

Does anyone know a similar utility for Ubuntu/Linux systems? Paid or free, doesn't matter.

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Perhaps they thought the screenshots made it clear enough; like this one: https://www.obdev.at/Images//littlesnitch/index/alert_on_scr... shows Little Snitch blocking iTunes (with an Aqua-styled UI).

Although I'll admit it doesn't mention what OS or what version except a small line on the downloads page:

    Runs on OS X Yosemite (10.10) and later, including macOS Sierra (10.12).

A screenshot demonstrates a place where it CAN run (and potentially where the devs run it), but doesn't EXCLUDE anything.

You see screenshots of windows programs all the time with just a sidenote somewhere that is like "oh yeah, and for linux and mac too"

Not to be biased, but personal 9 years of experience tell me that if a program has a landing page "oh yeah, and for linux and mac too", it looks shit on mac.

Plenty of apps look like shit but run just fine.

Perhaps others don't share this view but I don't care so much how it looks if it gets the job done, especially if there is no other alternative.

That was an exaggeration, but many times programs that look identical (aside from window frames) across platforms don't show the window frames for every platform. Electron apps (for as unpopular as they may be) are pretty platform agnostic. If they show it on windows and just have a linux/mac download button its not a big deal.

skype.com probably fits the bill of looks shit, but it shows android and windows 10 screenshots only.

obsproject.com shows a lot of screenshots that look pretty windows 10-ish... but it also announces "Latest Releases <platform logos>" right at the top of the page.

sublimetext.com shows windows only screenshots. And then mentions platforms at the bottom of the page.

https://slack.com/is shows only mac screenshots. I imagine this reflects more on the developers than the actual product. Im pretty sure its available on other platforms.

And my point was less about quality of programs, but availability. showing the window frame of a single OS does not mean that only that OS is available, sometimes that's just the only OS the marketing team uses.

If I'm not a Mac user, I won't recognize a window manager that's only available on MacOS. And isn't there a (crappy) iTunes port for Windows?

Well, iTunes is made by Apple.

It also doesn't require the kernel-level integration of Little Snitch.

Firewalls are way more about the backend than the frontend. They are not very portable at all.

The same can be said about Windows programs very often. And about your second question: ufw goes in that direction but is not exactly the same as Little Snitch.

>ufw goes in that direction

Which direction? Does it have [plans for] learning mode or even process-based rules?

Outbound, as in you can regulate outbound connections originating from your apps.

I don't run anything like this on my Linux box (just standard iptables), but I was looking for something like this for Windows a while back. The only thing I've really found is Windows 10 Firewall Control:

http://sphinx-soft.com/Vista/order.html

It's nowhere near as nice as Little Snitch, plus it doesn't block the socket call and then allow it after you acknowledge it. The call will fail and the app has to retry the connection.

Are there any better Windows solutions?

Glasswire looks pretty similar to this. I haven't tried the various paid versions, but even the free one shows a lot of useful stuff.

https://www.glasswire.com/

I use the free version on Windows 10. I haven't tried the paid version yet. I spend most of my time on Linux instead of Windows 10.

It tells you when an app is updated, and when an app is making an Internet connection, and you can shut them off from the Internet if you wished.

Tiny Wall https://tinywall.pados.hu/

try Windows Firewall Control www.binisoft.org/wfc.php

Crossing my fingers that someone knows of an alternative for Linux, but my hunch is, it'll be some crazy iptables scripts or something :/

http://alternativeto.net/software/zone-alarm/?platform=linux

I was looking for such an app out of curiosity a while ago and found douanne. Never used it myself, but it was open source and had similar features.

This looks promising.

Firejail might be worth a try.

Yes, I would buy a Linux version of this. I use UFW, but it requires a lot of work. A gui with that network monitor would be great.

I'd argue it's sort of… insanely clear, when clicking on the download page, that there is no version available.

I dont click download links until I understand what the product is. It's disappointing to spend time learning about a product and THEN finding out I can't use it. It should be front and center, or have a logo big enough that a quick full length page scroll will show at an instant the platforms available without having to read.

https://obsproject.com/ clearly shows it is cross platform.

https://adium.im/about/ clearly shows that it is not.

I almost wonder if shortsighted optimization of the sales funnel encourages not putting the platform up front since that would drive people away (who wouldn't buy the app anyways, but that's not always apparent).

Either way it didn't cost the website owner much to lead on some people not in their target audience.

I disagree. There are a lot of sites out there that detect your OS and only show you downloads appropriate for your platform.

You are right but it's likely most people wasted a few minutes reading about it before discovering this?

Ah, the price of Running Ubuntu/OSX/Windows....it always bites you in the ass.

This is like the B2B SaaS marketspace - it's almost taken for granted that your app integrates with Salesforce. People are surprised if it isn't.

However, anyone who runs, Microsoft CRM, SugarCRM, Netsuite, etc. - are all used to hearing "Sorry, we don't integrate with X". I'd say ubuntu falls into a similar category....

Would they make more money if they let visitors from other platforms know it's a macOS app? No. That's why.

Look at the download page — it's bolded:

> Runs on OS X Yosemite (10.10) and later, including macOS Sierra (10.12).

It definitely goes both ways :) If anything I'd argue it's much more common for Windows apps to not specify Windows-only, because Windows has been the largest install-base for so long.

And yeah. Annoys the heck out of me too, in both situations.

Would just take a little icon saying so. A lot of dev communities seem to be pretty ubiquitously mac these days. I wonder if it's a side effect.

Yeah, I ended up visiting the site from my Linux machine just to find out if there was some kind of browser sniffing thing at work. Nope, osx only.

I run into this all the time with linux and windows.

Douane Firewall

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