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Presentation export changes for macOS

Presentation export changes for macOS

releases technology 

Apple are preparing to roll out their new version 10.15 of macOS, dubbed "Catalina". This version of macOS includes a security enhancement designed to protect macOS users from inadvertently running malicious or infected applications on their computer. Through the process of "notarization", all applications must be submitted to Apple prior to distribution for automated security checks. This also means that all applications need to be signed, a process that associates the application with a software developer's certificate so that its origin is traceable.

As a result of these changes we have had to redesign the way Capture exports presentations on macOS. These changes were released yesterday with Capture 2019.2.

Exporting a presentation now creates a zip archive containing two items; a protected version of the project file and a presentation app. The file names of these items match, which is important as this is how the presentation app knows which project file to display.

This new approach to presentations on macOS should also improve their shareability as many users have experienced difficulties sharing presentation files on macOS. (Apps on macOS are actually folders containing both symbolic links and files with special attributes that need to be preserved when zipped, something that many file sharing services do not support well.)

It is also worth mentioning that the protected version of the project file stored in the zip archive can actually be opened in Capture as well, but only by the author of it. This way the author is able to recover project files from presentation files.

At this point we have not made any changes to how presentation files are exported on Windows. It is our ambition to align the behaviours of the macOS version with the Windows version in Capture 2020.