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A tiny macOS app that can detect the GUI technologies used in other apps.

License: Apache License 2.0

Swift 100.00%

swiftui electron catalyst appkit uikit

5guis's Introduction

The 5 GUIs Application

... the app for the tweet:

With its eclectic mix of AppKit, Catalyst, iOS, SwiftUI, and web apps, macOS should consider rebranding to “Five GUIs”
— Joe Groff (@jckarter) September 28, 2020

GUI is an abbreviation for Graphical User Interface.

How it works

5 GUIs first grabs some information from the app bundle. It then uses LLVM's objdump to check what libraries the app links, e.g. Electron or UIKit, to figure out what technology is being used.

5 GUIs itself is a SwiftUI 1 macOS application (i.e. it runs on Catalina and macOS BS).

Idea and Implementation

The idea for this kind of app exists for quite some time, but when @jckarter tweeted the proper name for this: “5 GUIs”, it finally had to be done.

This is a quick hack, put together in about 2 days. The source is not “nice” at all, don't use it as a proper example 🙈 PRs with cleanups are warmly welcome.

Help wanted!

All improvements are very welcome, but most of all this app could use better design. SwiftUI gives you something OKayish looking out of the box, but if someone has the time to add some fancy animations, better colors, iconography and styling, that would be very welcome!

Also checkout the Issues page of this repository. It'll have some.

3rd Party Software Used

LLVM objdump: license

Building the Project in Xcode

Before the app can be build, an llvm-objdump binary needs to be put into the LLVM folder (the binary was a little big for inclusion in the repository).

For testing purposes the one included in Xcode should be fine, it should be living over here: /Applications/Xcode.app//Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/llvm-objdump.

For deployment it is probably better to build an own one. To do so:

grab the LLVM source code from the downloads page
Unpack it somewhere, e.g.: cd /tmp; && tar zxf llvm-10.0.1.src.tar.xz
Create a build dir: mkdir /tmp/build-dir && cd /tmp/build-dir
Create the makefiles: cmake ../llvm-10.0.1.src/
Build it: cd tools/llvm-objdump && cmake --build .

Who

5 GUIs is brought to you by ZeeZide. We like feedback, GitHub stars, cool contract work, presumably any form of praise you can think of.

5guis's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

Forkers

kukushechkin maciek-czapnik isghe tualatrix y1024 andylin2004 mkll strogo ian-l themacintoshnerd gryphonclaw

5guis's Issues

Also scan for embedded plugins and apps

Several apps carry additional apps in their Frameworks folder, e.g.:

Zini18:~ helge$ ls -d /Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/*.app
/Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/CptHost.app
/Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/Transcode.app
/Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/ZMScreenshot.app
/Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/ZoomUninstaller.app
/Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/caphost.app

We should scan those as well and incorporate into the result. The ExecutableFileTechnologyInfo is prepared for that already.

More Qt apps failing to be identified as Qt

5GUIs incorrectly identifies these Qt apps as AppKit:

Tableau Desktop
VirtualBox
Blackmagic Desktop Video
Blackmagic RAW Player
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test
DaVinci Resolve

(I am horrified by the realization that DaVinci Resolve is a Qt app. It was supposed to save us from Premiere...)

Acrobat Reader reported as a trustworthy gem

Assuming it actually is an AppKit app, we might need to tone down the praise :-)

Dropbox detected as AppKit ObjC app, it is JavaScript

Tungsten.framework in the "Framework" bundle points to "Tungsten Fabric" as the API

Detect Platypus & Automator & AppleScript apps

Detect Platypus apps that run scripts e.g. at ./Contents/Resources/script
Right now, 5GUIs thinks they're fine (AppKit Objective-C), but that's just the Platypus wrapper for the script.

Detect Automator apps that run scripts e.g. at ./Contents/Resources/Scripts/main.scpt
Right now 5GUIs doesn't know what to do with them.

Catalyst apps are reported as phone apps on macOS BS

Not 100% sure whether Catalyst and plain UIKit apps (i.e. running iPhone/iPad apps natively on a DTK/Apple silicon Mac) are actually the same thing on macOS BS. I would think not, but who knows.

On Catalina Catalyst apps are detected when they link UIKitMacHelper.framework. Maybe the bug is also just a result of Issue #2? (the b0rked dependency traversal due to the shared cache)

Chrome reported w/o AppKit, even though it's being used

What seems to break in this case is that 5 GUIs tries and fails to detect AppKit (“No 👨🏽‍🦳 AppKit usage to be found? 🤔”). That’s probably because of the structure of Chromium. In order to update cleanly, Chromium (and Google Chrome) is separated into an outer bundle and an inner framework, and the only job of the outer bundle is to call into the inner framework. If all that is being analyzed is the outermost binary, you’re not going to find usage of any system framework. All of Chromium’s AppKit usage (it’s an old-school ~2008 AppKit app) is through the inner framework that isn’t ever explicitly linked to any of the .apps.

I’m not sure of an easy, not special-cased way to detect this. The main function uses dlopen to open a hard-coded path to the inner framework, so there are no obvious traces in metadata.

Add more information to Details popover

This should show everything we detect (e.g. all languages etc), and also allow the user to browse the different embedded apps and frameworks individually.

Not available on App Store

I clicked the App Store link but it says it's not available. Has it been removed?

OneDrive detected as AppKit app, it is a Qt GUI app

It has an embedded 'QtGui.framework', which is highly suspicious.

Maybe replace the embedded objdump w/ MacDependency?

Over here, found while stalking @kiliankoe: https://github.com/kwin/macdependency

Not sure whether it makes sense or not.

Crashes on macOS 13?

In an app review, someone mentioned that 5 GUIs crashes on macOS 13 betas. I don't have them installed yet, but should check that.

Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) apps, like Spotify, should be identified as Electron

For all intents and purposes, we use "Electron apps" to refer to apps that wrap Chromium.

5GUIs identifies Spotify appears as an AppKit Objective-C app, which it is not.

Also check for Python Wrappers

Me – again – next idea: Python wrapper apps like Calibre.app

Switch from `objdump` to dlopen on macOS BS to detect nested dependencies

macOS BS has the "dyld shared cache" which breaks running objdump on the dependencies. E.g. this results in BS Safari not having any features detected.

$ otool -L /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari (architecture x86_64):
	/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 610.2.6)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1292.0.0)
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari (architecture arm64e):
	/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 610.2.6)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1292.0.0)

W/ the "dyld shared cache", the /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework doesn't actually exist on disk anymore (hence objdump can't analyse it).

Maybe we can use dlopen to load and open an executable and then somehow traverse the link list (w/o actually executing the binary)?