Must I pay $99 each year to develop for Mac?
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I was setting up all that is required to start coding a C++ plugin for Cinema4D.
I installed the SDK, the Project Tool, XCode 12.4 (I'm still in Catalina) and generated the Solution with Project Tool.
I'm following all the steps stated in the Development for macOS page on Maxon. And... must I pay $99 per year, just to create a plugin that I may just want to use for myself? I mean... I don't even know if I will be able to code it in C++ (it has been a long time since I code in C++, as I develop mainly in PYTHON now).
Or, is it possible to create the plugin just for testing and only pay the $99 if I managed to make it work and decide to release the plugin?
Can anyone fill me in on the details? -
Hey @rui_mac,
Thank you for reaching out to us. You must pay the subscription to Apple Developers, so that you can sign your plugin. The same applies to for executables under Windows, they must also be code signed, the difference is just that Microsoft is currently less forceful than Apple in enforcing these rules.
I would recommend having a look at About the Necessity of Code Signing C++ Plugins. For personal development you can more or less ignore this and just run plugins with the temporary development license (as long as you run the plugins on your development machine). You can technically also abuse development licenses to ship your plugins to customers but we strongly advise against it.
For details, please follow the links I provided in the article about the necessity of code signing.
Cheers,
Ferdinand -
I will look into it.
But, at least, I can code and build the plugins and test them, without signing, right? -
You can compile your plugins that have been signed with the Xcode debug license in debug or release mode and run them as much as you want. You can even do this on a different machine, when you are okay with a warning here and there. When you want to get up to speed with the C++ SDK again, I would recommend having a look at Getting Started: First Steps, it guides you through all the steps necessary to compile the SDK on Windows and MacOS, and do simple things like adding your first plugin and debugging code.
