Addins installed from .pkg from Fusion Appstore don't show in Fusion (they are put in the wrong place)

[rangorino]

Hi,

I have for some time not been able to see addins downloaded from the Fusion app store and installed using .pkg installers on Mac.

Procedure I've been using:

1. download .pkg addins from App store
2. run package installer
3. Open Fusion 
4. = addins are not showing up. Opening the addins or scripts folders from within Fusion reveals that the installed addins do not show up in this default location.

This is of course rather confusing and limiting, and I suggest we get a fix for this 🙂

Workaround:

I have tracked down where the installers are putting the addin bundles. They go into:

~/Library/Containers/com.autodesk.mas.fusion360/Data/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/ApplicationPlugins/NameOfAddin.bundle

So addins can be made visible to the Fusion installation by moving them manually to
~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/ApplicationPlugins/

I have experienced this with the following addins (and probably some more) :

• Any Shortcut
• Mapboards Pro
• Paramteric Text

Platform: MacOS (M1 Pro) Monterey 12.1

[BrianEkins]

I'm not able to reproduce this. I installed Any Shortcut on my Mac and it loads as expected. I don't know what the difference could be. Is there a chance your Mac OS is set up to be case-dependent?

[rangorino]

Hi Brian!

Thanks for your reply.

Would you care to elaborate what you mean by case-dependency? I don't follow.

Thanks!

[BrianEkins]

Mac supports an option to set your drive so filenames must be case specific. By default, it is not case-specific. Here's a link to a post that discusses how to determine how your machine is set.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/71357/how-to-check-if-my-hd-is-case-sensitive-or-not

I don't know if that's what is causing the problem on your machine. I'm just guessing as to what the difference might be between your machine and mine.

[rangorino]

I can confirm that my system is not set to be case-sensitive.

[BrianEkins]

The App Store typically creates the installers for the applications. Fusion used to support installation from both the Mac App Store and the Autodesk website. Depending on where you installed Fusion from, the add-ins needed to be in different locations because of the sandboxing requirements of the Mac App Store install. To simplify the installation of Fusion Apps, the Autodesk App Store created installer installs the app in the Mac App Store location and then creates an alias in the other location to that one.

Here's the Mac App Store location where the app is installed:

~/Library/Containers/com.autodesk.mas.fusion360/Data/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/ApplicationPlugins/AnyShortcut.bundle

And here's the location for the Autodesk install location where the alias is created by the installer:

~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/ApplicationPlugins/AnyShortcut.bundle

It seems as though the link is not being created when you install the apps. The Autodesk App Store should have updated the tool that they use to create the installer a long time ago when the Mac App Store installer was no longer supported by Fusion and changed it to install directly into the latter folder and not create an alias, but for some reason that hasn't happened. I don't know why the alias isn't being created in your case. Maybe a security setting? I'm running Monterey MacOS on my machine and it's working.