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How to: Migrate from App Store Witch to direct Witch

As you may have heard, the App Store is now enforcing sandboxing. As such, apps that aren’t sandboxed cannot be updated with new features; only bug fix updates are acceptable.

Unfortunately, with the rules that are presently in place, Witch is not sandboxable, which means that today’s release of Witch 3.9.1 is the last with any new features in the App Store—unless Apple changes their mind, which has been known to happen if enough users let them know how they feel about things (hint hint!). We fully intend to continue updating Witch with new functionality, but all such updates will only be applicable to the direct sales version. That’s the bad news…

The good news is that we have a way for you to easily migrate to the direct sales version, and making this move is completely free. The process is actually quite simple, too.

  1. Make sure you’ve run the App Store version of Witch 3.9.1 (it must be the most-recently-updated version) at least once.
  2. After running once, quit the App Store version of Witch.
  3. Download Witch 3.9.1 from our site, and install it. (The direct sales version of Witch is a System Preferences panel, not an application; you’ll find it in the Other section of System Preferences after installation.)
  4. There is no step four. Just check the Enable Witch box in the Witch System Preferences panel, and you’re good to go.

You can tell you’ve successfully licensed your app by looking at the About tab; the license in the middle should look like this:

That’s really all there is to it, with one caveat: you must repeat this process for each Mac—or different user on the same Mac—that you would like to convert. That’s because the conversion is tied to a license file which is specific to each user on each Mac.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 at 12:27 pm by Rob Griffiths, and is filed under How To, Mac App Store, Products, Witch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “How to: Migrate from App Store Witch to direct Witch”

  1. François Joseph de Kermadec says:
    June 5, 2012 at 3:17 pm

    Such sad news… I am so sorry to hear that Apple’s rules are limiting the growth and development of such a promising application, and I hope this not bode ill for other titles in your portfolio.

    Congratulations on sticking to your guns, keeping up development and providing an easy « out » from the Mac App Store. Go Tricks!

    • Rob Griffiths says:
      June 5, 2012 at 3:19 pm

      It affects nearly all our apps, unfortunately. Only Key Codes, Name Mangler, and Desktop Curtain may be sandboxable (and even then, the odds are good some of them will have to lose some functionality). Hopefully users will become angry enough at Apple’s policies to send enough polite feedback to get the rules changed.

      -rob.

  2. rmf says:
    June 11, 2012 at 2:24 am

    Thanks for the easy migration solution!

  3. Casey4147 says:
    June 11, 2012 at 8:21 am

    Happy user of Moom, reporting in that my transition to the non-App-Store-version went flawlessly. Many thanks for going the extra mile and offering us a way to transition.

  4. Rodrigo Cardoso says:
    June 16, 2012 at 4:14 pm

    Yeah, the sandboxing restrictions sucks a lot! It is affecting my app too.
    I still have some bugfixes and minor stuff to do in my app before being able to implement big features and don’t know how I will handle this… :-/

    Dont know the why they dont just ask for user permission to use apple events ¬¬

    I hope Apple change their mind like they did with the “You can only use C/ObjC/C++/javascript on iOS” bullshit.

    Anyway, I guess Moom is not sandboxable, right? :-(