Packages

For a lot of its history, OSX (nowadays "macOS") was overly advertised as a user-friendly version of UNIX. This was of course always largely a lie, and none mores than in how it in fact lacks what all contemporary UNIX-derived OSes have had for decades: a package manager, where everything could just be installed and managed (ex. updated, removed, etc) from one interface.

Much like with #Windows, there are multiple attempts to implement such a thing in the absence of it in the base operating system. Notable ones you might consider using are:

• MacPorts, almost certainly the best one if I'm remembering correctly, full of the software you'd expect to have immediate access to on any Linux system
• Brew, the brogrammer one and the one generally used for stuff that involves a bunch binaries or random forks of things.

Packaging up Windows applications

Using Wineskin

https://github.com/vitor251093/wineskin was the way to create Wine app packages for #macOS. https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer is a bunch hacks to make that viable on modern versions that have gutted 32-bit support.

Vexingly, the original project page seems to have died, and in true Mac developer fashion the forks didn't bother with any documentation on how to actually use the damn thing. The original project's documentation is at least available at archive.org.

Salient steps are basically,

1. Run the Wineskin app
2. Get it to auto-update the runtimes and such
3. Create a new package by clicking the Create New Blank Wrapper button
4. It'll give you the option to see the new wrapper in Finder, which will be a .app file in probably ~/Application/Wineskin.
5. Inside that .app is Wineskin.app, which is the setup utility and also runs by default if you haven't run it yet. You can run that to package stuff into the .app you created, as well as configure other aspects like the icon.

Using Winebottler

Alternatively, one could perhaps use https://winebottler.kronenberg.org

Uhh that all seems complicated can't I just run things?

I mean maybe, PlayOnMac might Just Work.

Okay, now I have a .app file that's actually a folder, but they usually come as .dmg files

Yeah, both because then they're single files and because OSX traditionally took the approach of them being self contained to the point of there being no such thing as an installer, the traditional way of distributing .app folders for Macs has been to put them inside a .dmg disk image that contains two things, the .app folder and a symlink to /Applications so people can click-drag the .app folder into their Applications folder. (And then run it and pin it forever to the dock until it's tiny as hell, from what I've observed in the wild, but anyways.)

https://gist.github.com/jadeatucker/5382343 seems to be a reasonable enough explanation of creating a .dmg file manually, and https://github.com/create-dmg/create-dmg is a script for creating such images and includes a few more alternatives at the end of its readme.

Running the results

Whatever method you use, you may want to note the official instructions for running unsigned apps.

Downloads will likely have to have some attributes cleared via something along the lines of xattr -c ~/Downloads/among-us_v71_macos-winewrapped.app