macOS Development
Today marks the first full month since I began work on a new app. I started it off last week (after 3 weeks of designing layouts for iOS and macOS) using the multi-platform app template in Xcode. I quickly realised the limitation, a pure SwiftUI view architecture would bring, so I switched it out for a traditional AppDelegate based system on both platforms.
I decided to do something different time this. I had made a prototype app two years ago in my free time to test out the idea. I personally found it useful, showed it to a few friends & family and got feedback from them. So instead of starting off with the iOS app, I decided to first work on the Mac app instead.
I wish I had known before how easy it was to get going. A lot of things I’ve learnt over the years with developing with UIKit obviously apply here, but some interesting bits like NSGridView, Bindings and representedObject on Windows and ViewControllers make life so much simpler. Why aren’t any of these things present in UIKit land? Especially bindings!
representedObject is definitely something I plan to bring over to the iOS app vide a simple category on UIViewController. But NSGridView and Bindings are not things I plan to implement myself. I don’t think there is a potential use-case for the grid view either, but I would love to have bindings. And before any one says it, Combine is not the same thing.
A footnote I wanted to include is how much simpler things are for me with Swift. I still love using Objective-C where ever it makes sense now, but this project so far is all Swift. Elytra is a healthy mix of both and I don’t see myself fully replacing ObjC in it anytime soon.
This post is absolutely not in response to the recent “Electron apps” thing going on on Twitter. Things just happened to coincide and that’s it. I think. ☺️