Improve Mac User Experience. Especially Setup.

[ryanhamilton]

Mac users have numerous valid complaints, qStudio is not really delivering a friendly user experience I would like.

Congrats on launching!

I haven't gotten very far into it, but here's a little feedback about what it took to get to the point where I could try it out.

1. I'm running MacOS 14.4.1.

2. I downloaded the jar file.

3. I double-clicked the jar file. It wouldn't open. I've seen this before, so I navigated to the jar file, right-clicked it and chose open, and it gave me the option to launch it even though it was unsigned after a warning.

4. Then it told me I needed a java runtime, and I should go to java.com to get one.

5. I went to java.com to get one, downloaded the java 8 runtime things defaulted to, and when I went to install it, I got a scary warning that Oracle might sue me if I used this for commercial use. This is my personal machine, but I didn't know what might count as commercial use, so I noped out and decided to look for an open source runtime.

6. I figured out that `brew install java` seemed like what I want and ran that.

7. Once that completed, I double-clicked the jar again. No luck.

8. Since the SQL editor site advised running from the command line if double-clicking didn't work, I tried that. An error message directed me to java.com.

9. I didn't want to go back there, so I did more web searches. I learned that if I ran `sudo ln -sfn /opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk` things might work. So I tried that and went back to right-click the jar and run it. I again accepted the warning. It launched!

10. It asked me for an email address. I just wanted to try out the software, not sign up for email. I declined to enter one.

11. It asked me for a license code. I declined to enter one.

12. Then it told me I was in a 30 day trial mode once the GUI came up.

I'm still interested, but that's the end of my timebox today. I hope I remember to come back and try it some more.

But what's the deal? Is it a 30 day trial for a paid product? Or is it really free? Or do you need email to make it really free?

You might want to look at how JetBrains bundles the JRE with datagrip on Mac. The level of effort needed to try this was maybe higher than I'd consider ideal.

[richb-hanover]

These are great comments. I noticed almost all of them - you saved me a bunch of typing.

Smoothing off these rough edges will make qStudio a better product. How can I help? Thanks.

[geoffbeier]

That was me on HN. I hadn't spotted the link to the tracker, or I'd have put it here myself. Thanks @ryanhamilton for taking care of that.