Additions

• Hebrew translation updated by Keren Bell
• Czech translation updated by me

Fixes

• Full Disk Access request on start page not disappearing on Full Disk Access grant (#691)

Adjustments

• None in this release

A few hours ago, I updated all Rikidar servers to the PHP version that fully fixes the CVEs.

Following the announcement of two PHP CVEs, I was quick to apply the recommended steps.

This concerns every Rikidar website, including the one of Cork.

The steps were applied with no downtime thanks to the new custom replication strategy implemented a few weeks ago.

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All Rikidar websites are behind hardened reverse proxies, with additional security mitigations applied (including Crowdsec & Fail2Ban, among others). Moreover, they are running in isolated rootless containers.

After a month of intense work, the next version of Cork is ready!

Additions

• Cork now supports discovering whether an app linked to a Cask is quarantined, and working with such apps
  

  • Cork checks, independently of Homebrew, whether a linked executable is quarantined
  • If it discovers it is quarantined, it shows the warning above
  • The main offered solution is to open the app, which is usually enough to remove the quarantine after you confirm that you want to launch the app. In this case, the warning disappears
  • In case opening the app is not enough, there's an additional option, hidden under the caret, to force the removal of the app from quarantine. As this can be dangerous, there's a hefty warning
    
  • Cork is NOT responsible for what the app does after you force its removal from quarantine

• Full support for user-defined variables

  • Cork now reads and prioritizes your user-defined ENV variables (fixes #685)
  • A new section in Settings for inspecting the environment Cork is using
    
    • In this section, you can filter the following:
      • Variables inherited from the user (whatever you defined outside of Homebrew)
      • Variables inherited from the Cork process (things macOS adds to the process)
      • Mandatory variables added from Cork itself (for making sudo operations work, and suppressing useless Homebrew warnings)
  • Use the button at the bottom to preview the final environment, which opens a new dedicated window
    • You can switch between table and text view, with text being the final string that Cork uses when executing Homebrew commands on your behalf
      
      
    • The window supports searching for both the ENV keys, and their values

• Support for granting system permissions
  In the past, Cork wouldn't be able to update some pages because it was missing the Full disk access accessibility permission. No more.

  • When Cork thinks it doesn't have the required permissions, it will show a dedicated warning under the Issues with Homebrew section on the Start Page
    
  • Clicking the button will show a sheet explaining what you need to do
    
  • What comes next is better than first-party apps at this point: all you need to do is drag the Cork icon into the table in System Settings, and restart. No fiddling around with dialogs:
    
  • There is a pleasant animation that makes it easy to see that Cork is draggable
    

• Downgrading system for Cork, which is independent of Homebrew

  • Accessible through the Menu Bar at Cork → Downgrade Cork
  • Clicking Downgrade Cork opens a dedicated window for downgrading
    
  • You can right-click any of the listed versions to access that release's GitHub page
    
  • To download an older version, select it and click Download… After the download is done, Cork will show you the downloaded older release as a draggable icon
    
  • Drag the app wherever you'd like
    

Fixes

• Install process being stuck on downloading/installing dependencies; now, it properly shows which dependency is being installed
  
• User ENV not being read & prioritized (#685)
• Onboarding is now split into more distinct pages to make it more readable
  
  
  • New animation for switching between the states, as teased before:
    
• The number of unmanaged updates no longer shows up as There are 0 additional packages not managed by Homebrew if you have that feature disabled, it is now hidden
  
• The number of unmanaged updates is no longer added to the number of managed updates

Adjustments

• Some old sheets that still had the old button placement now have the Apple-approved design
  • Licensing:
    
    
  • Onboarding:
    
• Removed the unused SwiftNavigation library

In other news, aside from being the only non-LLM-made GUI for Homebrew, Cork is now also the only one that complies with EU law. Let's go!

Happy Corking!

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As always, no AI is used at any point in the development of Cork, and we stand by that with Cork’s strict no AI policy, which remains among one of the strictest in the space. Read the policy: https://corkmac.app/our-ai-stance/

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Cork Community

Follow Cork:

• Cork on Mastodon
• Cork on BlueSky

Join the Community

• Cork on Discord

See the Code

• Cork on GitHub
• Cork on Rikidar Code
• Cork on Codeberg

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Support me on Pantheon for upcoming exclusive content.

I got a report today about the download endpoints randomly serving the homepage without styling instead of downloading the selected version. There was a misconfiguration of a workflow for syncing the downloads across backup servers, and if the load balancer sent you to one of the broken replicas, you’d get the homepage (which itself is an anti-AI scraping measure).

I fixed the misconfiguration, and now you always get the selected version, no matter which server the load balancer sends you to.

Bug reports are always appreciated. If you see something, say something.

The onboarding workflow is getting pretty old, so I gave it a facelift.

It's now paginated, includes a disclaimer that Cork is not affiliated with Homebrew, and has a cool screen-switching animation.

Check it out: https://drive.tomoserver.eu/f/125eb02b155849f8aa07/

Since some operations (well, probably most of them) require Cork to manipulate data of other apps, it needs Full Disk Access permissions.

Until now, if Cork didn't have these permissions, it would fail the operaiton and the system would sometimes, and sometimes not, prompt you to grant Cork these permissions.

Coming in the next version is a built-in way to grant Cork these permissions.

Check it out: https://drive.tomoserver.eu/f/a59536d1911c4913b07e/

Release 2.0.3 brings support for Goldern Gate, or macOS 27.

It is otherwise identical to version 2.0.1 that came out a few days ago, with one exception:

Additions

None in this release.

Fixes

• Double-clicking packages to open them is fixed.
  A merge conflict disabled that in 2.0.1

Adjustments

None in this release.

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You may ask, what happened to version 2.0.2?

That came out yesterday and was release 2.0.1 recompiled for Golden Gate. But a merge conflict overwrote double-click handling, so I fixed that quickly.

Happy Corking!

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As always: there was absolutely NO AI used in the development of Cork, and we strongly reject AI in any capacity: https://corkmac.app/our-ai-stance/

I just compiled version 2.0.1 on Golden Gate, with a few adjustments needed to resolve build errors. Hopefully just quirks of Xcode 27 still being a beta:

It will be ready on day one of Golden Gate's release, CEST (UTC+2)

If you'd like to try it now, it's on the branch main.golden-gate

Here's a solution to that build error: https://github.com/buresdv/Cork/issues/678

Why is there a build error?

In short, it's because of the order of targets for compiling being incorrect. There's an image in the module CorkTerminalFunctions, and if that module is not compiled before the other modules, the compilation will fail (because it thinks there's that picture missing).

Not even a month after I released Cork 2.0.0, which was the most significant release in the history of Cork (and undoubtedly in the history of Homebrew GUIs that aren’t made by AI... ), a new version is already out.

Additions

• Support for Homebrew warnings
  • Homebrew warnings tell you about something going wrong with Homebrew itself. Because they’re technically errors, they would be incorrectly interpreted by Cork as the process that spawned them failing.
  • They are not related to Cork in any way, they are Homebrew warnings, not Cork warnings.
  • They have a dedicated section on Cork’s new Status Page, which itself received a major overhaul, since it was becoming very cluttered.
  • You can expand the dropdown to see more information about them
• When removing a tap that fails due to a package being installed from it, it now tells you which packages are responsible
  • If there’s more than one package, you can use the included “Open detail for (tap name)“ button to open the tap’s detail
  • If there’s one package, you can also use the included “Open detail for (package name)“ button to additionally open that package’s detail
• You can now double-click a package to open its detail, instead of having to right-click → Open detail
• New Hebrew translation by Keren R. Bell
• Updated Simplified Chinese translation by CheeseCat

Fixes

• Pinned packages can’t be removed anymore (following Homebrew standard). Before, the buton would be available, but you’d get an error, anyway. So now, those buttons are disabled
• Homebrew warnings no longer make it seem like the process that emitted them failed (see Additions section above)
• tap trust warnings incorrectly showing in the UI

Adjustments

• Status Page is now divided into clear sections and cleaned up
  • Each section has a relevant title
  • Adoptable Apps section moved down and grouped with installed package overview
  • Removed Homebrew Analytics status from the Status page, they’re still accassible from settings. Mind you, these are Homebrew’s analytics, not Cork’s.

NO AI USED, EVER

As always, no AI is used at any point in the development of Cork, and we stand by that with Cork’s strict no AI policy, which remains among one of the strictest in the space.

The grind never stops, so I'll be showing off the things coming to version 2.0.1 in this thread

I'm currently working on implementing the new tap trust system, and making it actually bearable to use:

• You will see an easy-to-understand list of your added Taps, clearly separated into a "trusted" and "untrusted" section, instead of them being a weird, cryptic wall of text like Homebrew shows them
• Trusting will happen using drag-and-dropping to make it feel macOS-native. In the video, I have to manually re-open the start page, but this feature is still early in development
• The entire implementation of this is completely custom, not connected to Homebrew in any way, but retains drop-in compatibility with the underlying Homebrew system. It is also almost 2x as fast (not shown in the video, since the UI doesn't update live yet)

Video of the current state of drag-and-dropping

As a bonus, I have accidentally created a drag-and-drop way to back up individual taps, which I may expand to packages as well, and eventually, an entire independent backup system...

I'd like to hear your opinions on the new version - did it make Cork more useful? What do you think about the way it was developed, etc?

Do this:

Everything is described in this article on the wiki:
Getting a Rikidar Authenticator account

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TL;DR
This forum uses SSO (Single Sign-on) through Rikidar Authenticator (which is a self-hosted and encrypted PocketID server). You can then use that account to log in anywhere in the network.

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Other Relevant Articles

If you'd like to read more about Rikidar Authenticator, read this page: Rikidar Authenticator

The whole wiki is useful: Rikidar Wki

Following 6 months of development, the buggest update in Cork's history is now live.

Additions

• Every real-time command has an option to display the raw Homebrew output of the running command #196
• Better package UX:
  • Any package can now be previewed from anywhere inside Cork, not just in select places
    • Consequently, now you can preview even installed packages, so you can see the details for more than one package at a time. This still has some quirks
      
  • Any installed package an have its detail opened from anywhere inside Cork
    • Consequently, if you have Package filtering set to Show only manually installed packages, you can access the hidden dependency by right-clicking it in the Dependencies list, and opening its detail through the context menu action
      
  • The way to preview packages has been unified everywhere to be a right-click, context menu action instead of sometimes being its own dedicated button (like was the case in the package installation dialog)
• New first-party Homebrew tap management:
  • Uses Speakeasy by Graham Hall to further decouple Cork from Homebrew
  • Currently supports two first-party Homebrew taps: homebrew/core and homebrew/cask
  • Loading of tap details is now almost three times as fast
  • Taps that use Speakeasy have a special badge
    
• New screens for processes that included unexpected outputs
  • For example, package installation:
    
  • Differentiates between likely successful processes (those that didn't include errors), and likely failed processes (those that did include errors)
  • Every process supports these
• Much better UI for the Maintenance results report
  
• Unsuccessful partial package updates now list every failed package, and the reason why it failed. In this case, the reasons are too long to be displayed, and can be accessed by the i button
  
• Real-time outputs now include a timestamp
  
• Every package with a bound version (for example, python@3.14) now consistently displays everywhere with a custom lock icon, instead of random places still showing it as python@3.14
  
• Progress bars now follow build-in macOS text conventions, with main text on top of the bar, with supplementary text under
  
• All sheets now follow the macOS sheet titling convention by having a title separated by a divider
  
• You can now open installed Casks through their Detail page by right-clicking on the Installed as icon
  

Fixes

• Migrated packages preventing package loading #613
• Updates on startup failing with a cryptic JSON message #625
  
• Some harmless outputs being incorrectly identified as errors
• Decreased RAM usage by up to 12%
• Fixed almost all stuttering caused by package reloading
• All progress bars have been replaced to fix the various inconsistent behaviors and incorrect progress reporting #331, #329
• Some non-streaming commands randomly not returning any output, for example the information loader for the php package and the majority of third-party taps #622
• brew doctor not reporting results correctly #538, #397
• Updating process showed "errors" in results even though no errors occurred #541, #595
• Modifying services (turning them on and off) didn't reflect in the UI and the service had to be closed and re-opened
• For users that didn’t have the “SF Symbols“ app installed, icons that were parts of other strings are now displayed as the actual icons, instead of question marks inside boxes
• Loading of some tap details didn't work
• Switching from a Cask detail to a Formula detail would show the executable for the last opened Cask as the executable for the currently-opened Formula #655
• Quickly switching between package details would not load the package detail, and a restart would be required
• Fixed flashing text of some sheets when opening
• Text in other languages that is not translated yet now falls back to English, instead of shoring the raw key (like sheet.title)
• Pinned packages can no longer be updated by right-clicking on them

Adjustments

• New Terminal output matcher that is generic, much more robust, and easier to extend and modify
  • Support for reporting unimplemented and unexpected outputs, giving you an overview of what exactly the various workflows did instead of silently failing, or reporting the wrong results
  • Faster matching all across the board
• With the new Terminal output matcher, the whole backend was rewritten from scratch, including:
  • Package installation #599
  • Tap management #598
  • Updating, both complete and incremental #608 #607
• A list of packages in a tap now shows the first few packages, and a complete list can be opened in a new window
  • Searching in the list in the main Cork window still searches through all packages
    
• New icon for “Preview“ & “Open detail“
  
• Increased padding around outlined views for better readability
  
• Custom Tap Hosts can now be specified directly in the tap addition dialog, instead of the process first having to fail to offer the option
  
• New icon for Casks to make it easier to distinguish at smaller sizes (for an upcoming feature in another release…)
  
• Unified subtitle look for outdated and adoptable package sections on the Start Page
  
• The exclamation mark for marking errors in outputs now on the top right of the output line
  
• Select downloading stages include a non-determinate progress bar to make it not seem like long downloads were stuck
  
• New color for the Already installed tag
  
• Dependants are now a fully-fledged dropdown
  

…and probably many more changes, fixes and adjustments I can't remember

Additional fixes:

• On phones, the "Buy Cork" modal now correctly scrolls, the business license disclaimer is visible properly, and the margins are looking better
• Minor rewording of the checkbox to make it easier to understand

Updates to Cork's website are out, including:

• New mandatory checkbox to explicitly declare that you are not a business when buying a user license (legal reasons)
  
• New Cork icon on the payment success page, Mastodon link to Cork's account & this forum
  
• A few other smaller changes mostly to the Umami analytics backend
• Removal of the last Google Analytics script that I forgot about until now, site is now completely Google-free