PopClip WebMarkdown fix and other codesigning adventures

So the first project I worked on with the libraries that went into Gather was the WebMarkdown extension for PopClip. It worked great… for me. I suffered from the all-too-common hacker mistake summed up as “well, it works on my machine.”

I codesigned the binary embedded in the extension, but when you download a file from a website, it adds a quarantine bit that requires what Apple calls “notarization,” and you can’t notarize a single binary (or a zipped package like a PopClip extension). You have to distribute it as a notarized package file and installer, which is what I’m doing with Gather itself now.

A .pkg isn’t really a good option for a PopClip extension, though, so I found another workaround. Without the binary the extension should install without error just by double clicking. When you select some text and click WebMD, it looks for the gather CLI in /usr/local/bin on your machine. If it doesn’t find it there, it offers to download and run the Gather installer for you. You can just hit the OK buttons, and when it’s done, the new, improved WebMarkdown extension should work for you.

Please give it a shot!