NASA Insignia
Site Title

Building arm64-native apps for macOS

This page offers newly precompiled binaries for multiple applications for which the developers themselve have not made Apple Silicon-native versions available. In each case below, one can download the actual application (as a zip file) and/or instructions for how to build it.

Background

Apple has done a remarkable job through its history of migrating to new computer hardware architectures while allowing old applications to still run, certainly for a multi-year overlap period. This covers the 68000 to 68030, PowerPC to Intel 32-bit (i386), and (as of 2020) Intel 64-bit (x86_64)to Apple Silicon (arm64) for their M-series Macs. Without such software tools, many customers would have balked in moving to the new hardware, as none of their existing applications would run!

For the x86 to arm64 transition, Apple made available Rosetta (v2), a transparent-to-the-user translation engine that allowed nearly all x86 applications to run, sometimes faster than on real Intel machines! [The original Rosetta was released by Apple in 2006 for the PowerPC changeover to i386 Intel.] In the summer of 2026, Apple announced that macOS 28 (as yet unnamed) to be released in Fall 2027 would not include general access Rosetta. (Some elements related to Apple's Game Porting Toolkit may survive.) Thus macOS 27 Golden Gate is the last to include Rosetta.

Most applications we provide to users are already arm64-native, so this switch a year from this writing will not matter to people.

Nonetheless, we are trying to gplan ahead and solve issues before they become crises.

How to determine the status of an application

Select (single-click) an application icon in a Finder window and do ⌘-I ("Get Info"). In the window that appears, look at the top entry in the window ("Kind"). It will most likely give you one of three answers: "Intel", "Apple Silicon", or "Universal". (The latter has native code for both platforms in the single application bundle.)

For command-line tools, use the UNIX file command to show the architecture, e.g., file my_binary or file `which my_binary`.

Building Apple Silicon arm64-native versions of several applications

The following tools are mostly from my "ASD Standard Apps" collection given to new users. It is unlikely that any individual will need all four!

In general I recommend downloading the precompiled (by me!) binary but I include the instructions for transparency and so you can reproduce this if you wish.

Removing the "quarantine bit"

Because of Apple's restrictions on applications not cryptographically signed by them, simply downloading and running some of these tools below may generate an error dialog box in the Finder about it being "damaged" and offering to trash it for you. You don't need to do that! You can see the issue with the quarantine extended attribute with: 

/bin/ls -lae@ /path/to/ThisAppInQuestion.app
and can fix it with: 
/usr/bin/xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/TokenShow.app
(or you can simply leave a space after the word "quarantine" and drop-and-drop the new application into the Terminal window.)

Confirming checksums

If you want to ensure the zip file you download has not been tampered with, you can run: 

openssl sha256 name_of_zip_file.zip
and compare that against the number next to the download, below.

TokenShow

TokenShow (gitlab) is a small application that can read the certificates on a user's PIV card and display them in a nice graphical window. (This app was originally provided from the NASA MOSM II Jamf Self Service.app tool.)

You can get a zip file of the arm64 version or read the instructions if you wish to do this yourself. This one requires the full Xcode.app (not just the Xcode Command Line Tools). This is signed by my own NASA Apple Developer account certificate, but you may still have to remove the "quarantine" extended attribute as described above.

Zip file link: TokenShow-universal.zip (3.9MB) SHA256 checksum:
ae91b7253fb8f5c728196642a02e029b0123ed52104da599957b9be66f0546b4
Instructions to build

Engauge Digitizer

Engauge Digitizer is a tool for digitizing the data in a JPG, PNG or similar graphic. (One scales the X and Y axes and then clicks on the data points to create a table.) This is useful if you have an image of a plot from a deacdes-old paper and you want to overlay their data with yours.

The last Intel version is 12.1 and this arm64 version is 12.9. (Despite what their own web site says, it is not available through MacPorts presently.)
Original web site
Zip file link (SHA256 checksum: )
Instructions to build

 

 

Nonpareil

Nonpareil (github) is a set of tools that reproduce the behavior and performance of Hewlett Packard RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculators from the 1980s (± 10 years or so). These are X11 versions of these tools, built by modifying a MacPorts package.


Instructions to build

 

 

 

 

Alpha text editor

Alpha (sometimes seen as AlphaCocoa) is a venerable Mac color syntax highlighting editor whose roots go back to the 1980s. This was by far the most complicated one here to port to arm64, but it builds in less than 2-3 minutes on modern Mac hardware.

Also, the available download at the above link is v9.2.3 (x86), while the link below is part of the newer 9.4 series.

Zip file link: Alpha_v9.2.4-arm64.zip (28.7MB) SHA256 checksum: 57a6bb682faeb6a18a83fd162923d850f65ad880002de960ca50cd5fa65d1f7b
Instructions to build

Hope you find these useful!

David Friedlander
14 October 2026