Little Snitch and Audio Hijack/Loopback and Sketchapp and iA Writer and Inklet certainly think so. There are no Windows/cross-platform analogues for any of these. No firewall that suspends connections for an interactive prompt, no way to create virtual audio devices or route audio in Windows, no equivalent to Sketch (Figma comes close I guess) and the Windows version of iA Writer is pretty pathetic. And Inklet simply doesn't have a Windows equivalent even when I have an official Apple Magic Trackpad connected to my computer.
There's just a lot of cool stuff that isn't available for other OSes.
There is absolutely a form of hipster-ism about publishing Mac only software. The truth is, it started because Mac users are more likely to pay for apps and app subscriptions.
So the ironic part is that it's not as much about aesthetic or infrastructure or even ease of development as it is about economics.
In fairness, some of those are rather tied to the operating system, to the point where you're really asking for them to develop an entire new application that happens to do the same thing on a different platform. platform. I mean, yes, it should exist, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a firewall to be tied to a specific operating system.
Pure user application software is less reasonable, though.
> I think it's perfectly reasonable for a firewall to be tied to a specific operating system.
Oh, I have no qualms about Little Snitch specifically being tied to macOS. I just find it annoying that this general concept of "a firewall that asks you before blocking a connection" has apparently never been implemented outside of macOS.
I don't want the network request to fail and the application to panic just because I had to be given a prompt with an "allow" button. Suspend the connection instead please.
Windows and Linux firewalls are not yet capable of this, as far as I can tell. If there is one that can, I'd love to replace Windows Firewall with it.
Portmaster is an application firewall similar to Little Snitch that works on Windows and Linux. When prompting, it suspends connections for a short amount of time, which, as far as I remember when implementing it, is configurable. I can check to tell you the details, if interested.
I am so scared of Portmaster's website. Looking at their pricing page, it's talking about some VPN thing, and they absolutely insist that Portmaster itself is free and open source, but they keep emphasizing "free" to such an extent that I can't tell if they're lying. Free free free, free download, free and open source, etc etc.
Could you confirm if Portmaster is actually completely free forever and doesn't lock any crucial features behind a paywall or different "plans" or pricing tiers? Is it actually just a local firewall? Because if so I might switch to it from WFC, it does look like it might actually do the trick. It has great documentation and seems to have a userbase too.
"Many of the features mentioned by GlassWire, such as remote connection monitoring, Wi-Fi network monitor, Virus total scanning, and longer connection history, will cost you $39, $69, or $99 depending on your needs.
Portmaster, on the other hand, is both free in terms of freedom and free in terms of price. Safing makes money by charging a monthly fee for additional privacy features."
They will list every paid feature of Glasswire but only say "additional privacy features" for Portmaster? I am so sketched out right now. Are they trying to hide something or not?
Also, the docs don't mention connection prompts—how did you get them?
In principle it is very simple: The Portmaster software itself is completely free and there is no catch. The only thing we charge for is access to our VPN-alternative, the SPN. This is our business model in two sentences.
So, all local features are free. We are thinking about testing new features with the supporter subscribers in the future, but eventually these features will also become free. However, we will never put previously free features behind a paywall. (The software is open-source, so people will just grab the forks!)
> Is Portmaster actually completely free forever?
Except for the SPN, yes. (additional privacy features == SPN)
> Is it actually just a local firewall?
Not counting SPN, yes.
> Also, the docs don't mention connection prompts—how did you get them?
Okay, so I've actually installed Portmaster and things seem to be going well! It actually does seem to suspend connections like you described, which is infinitely better than WFC just setting block-by-default. That's awesome.
It does have quite a few usability nitpicks, and I don't know if it's appropriate to open GitHub issues over those, but if there's some way I can get them to you other than HN (because this is getting quite off-topic) I'd be glad to send them over.
One of my only non-nitpick gripes so far is the fact that I can't allow a connection to pass once without creating a permanent rule. Well, I can if I get a desktop notification (I can just dismiss the notification), but if the notification doesn't get sent to the desktop for whatever reason I cannot control, it shows up in the Portmaster interface itself which doesn't let me allow a connection once without creating a permanent rule.
Okay, thank you! I had a suspicion it was the SPN but didn't know if anything else was paid. It's very unclear that SPN is the only thing you have to pay for. :/
The whole thing raises big alarms of "there's a catch, there's a catch, they're doing the stupid thing where they put positive reassurances everywhere but don't actually explicitly tell you that there is no catch". It feels so untrustworthy.
I think if I used Linux either that or Lulu would be what I'd go with, but AFAICT OpenSnitch uses wording that suggests it is actually suspending connections for the prompts instead of outright blocking them. I can't find any info on this in the README so I could be wrong but that could probably work yeah.
> No firewall that suspends connections for an interactive prompt
Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the early 2000s. ZoneAlarm had this functionality in 2001, two years before the initial release of Little Snitch.
> no way to create virtual audio devices or route audio in Windows
This has been possible via third-party software since the mid-2000s (Virtual Audio Cable, VB-Cable, etc.).
The other things have equivalents in Windows, too, like Adobe Illustrator for designs, and trackpad vendor-specific software (e.g. Synaptic, Asus) to use it for handwriting.
> Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the early 2000s. ZoneAlarm had this functionality in 2001, two years before the initial release of Little Snitch.
ZoneAlarm is a whole antivirus afaik, not just a firewall. If there's something out there that can replicate WFC[0]'s functionality while suspending connections instead of blocking them, I'm all ears, since that's my biggest gripe with how Windows Firewall works (since WFC is only a front-end to it).
> This has been possible via third-party software since the mid-2000s (Virtual Audio Cable, VB-Cable, etc.).
By installing drivers and rebooting your computer and you get a fixed number of them.
On macOS with Loopback and Audio Hijack, you can create any number of virtual audio devices and route audio between them however you want with switches and filters and etc. in real-time.
> The other things have equivalents in Windows, too, like Adobe Illustrator for designs, and trackpad vendor-specific software (e.g. Synaptic, Asus) to use it for handwriting.
Adobe Illustrator is not the same type of software (this is why Adobe created Adobe XD). It's not usable for the reasons I used Sketch.
As for handwriting, Inklet was more advanced than that, it allowed you to scale and move the working area around the screen with gestures, and actually write into other applications instead of a dedicated signature window (which is what this "vendor-specific software" were designed for).
My point isn't that you can find some solution to create a similar result, my point is that the actual pieces of software that are available are quite unique and don't really exist anywhere else.
There's just something attractive about macOS being a true Unix with a huge userbase of people who will pay for good apps.
Virtual audio cable was the shit and yeah you are correct, it does exactly what the Mac app does (and it was on Windows way before Mac was even a real thing).
Used to use it to stream audio into a ventrillo channel lol
no... it doesn't. sure, there are programs you can install that will add virtual sound devices on Windows, but I can't find any program that will let you manage them dynamically, let alone do half the things that Loopback does.
VAC does actually let you restart the entire driver to change the number of virtual audio devices, if no programs are using any of them.
But another big selling point of Loopback is the ability to capture audio from applications without having to change the output device, which I believe is technically possible on Windows (Discord can do it sometimes) but there isn't a program that exposes it through a virtual input device yet.
Linux does seem good for this audio stuff specifically—there may or may not be pretty Linux GUIs for arbitrary audio mixing/routing—however on Windows there are no good examples of it. or, again, none that I can find. VAC certainly isn't one.
Of course, even on Windows, I use Voicemeeter on a daily basis and I have tried to fool around with VSTHost for real-time filters (like dynamic range compression, which I had used a lot on macOS to watch movies), but there's significant latency and I cba to figure out what the problem is. Voicemeeter is still useful for muting my microphone with a macro key though.
If I wanted to try to make something like Loopback myself I'd probably need to continue my months long search to figure out how to write userspace drivers. Because I still can't figure it out.
I'm not trying to shill Loopback here, I'm just giving it as an example of a Mac-exclusive app that does something that you can't easily get on another OS right now. Maybe it's just cause nobody's put in the time yet, but macOS still seems to have more power-user-esque apps imho.
> Didn't ZoneAlarm do that on Windows in the 2000s?
AFAIK those connections were blocked, not suspended, until you answered the prompt. Does ZoneAlarm still advertise this / is it documented anywhere? I can't find any info on it.
not sure about sketchapp and inklet, but the first examples are extremely platform specific to the point of requiring a rewrite for different platforms
> the first examples are extremely platform specific to the point of requiring a rewrite for different platforms
Oh, I know. Just cause nobody's done it yet doesn't mean it's not fair to say that macOS is the only operating system that has tools like these already made, though.
Except the only thing it has in common with the macOS version is a color scheme. Plus it hasn't been updated in years.
You don't actually get any of the things that made iA Writer for macOS so great, and all the technical issues (such as broken trackpad scrolling) are incredibly distracting, defeating almost the entire point of the app.
It's not power users per se, but these sorts of apps are essentially fashion and all the people making them are long time Mac heads. The fancy software startup space is really faddish and incestuous.
https://arc.net/
Must be a responsibly release, don't want too many powerusers flooding the web at once.