Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hundchenkatze 2223 days ago
This is pretty neat :) I read the blog post[0] about it too, and I definitely feel your multiple chat app pains. I'm curious to hear more about why you avoided Xcode and ViewControllers. In general I know many people dislike Xcode, but I've been doing iOS dev for a while now so I guess I'm used to it (it's a love have situation for me at times)

[0] https://kofi.sexy/blog/multi
1 comments
hkgumbs 2223 days ago
Thanks! Honestly my reasoning for avoiding XCode is fairly thin—I just hadn't used it before and didn't have it installed when I started. I imagine if I took the time to learn it, it would be fine. But I do also feel a bit weird about how developing for certain platforms requires you to use a specific IDE. I thought that was part of the goal of Swift (vs ObjC), but I may be just reflecting my own biases :)
link
hundchenkatze 2223 days ago
Yep the macOS + Xcode dependency is quite annoying. If you want a, kind of, in between solution, the true dependency is on the command-line tools[0]. These can be installed independent of Xcode. You could piece together your own build scripts or use something like Buck[1] to build it. If you still want a full-blown IDE, checkout AppCode[2] from JetBrains. It still depends on the aforementioned commandline-tools though.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ (you'll need an AppleID)

[1] https://buck.build/setup/getting_started.html

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/appcode/

* edit: formatting & it looks like Buck doesn't have macOS targets.

link
macintux 2223 days ago
Make sure you see this comment (I take no blame or credit for its accuracy).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277219

Very cool project, thanks.

link
cerberusss 2223 days ago
Recently I wrote a script in Swift, on macOS. It can be developed and run without Xcode, in plain vi if you so wish. It's pretty great, and I liked it a lot.
link
hkgumbs 2223 days ago
Yup, that was exactly my workflow as well! And for building CLIs it's quite nice. Once I started using AppKit though, it felt like I kept running into things that weren't quite finished.
link
jaflo 2223 days ago
Did you have experience developing for MacOS before?
link
hkgumbs 2223 days ago
I built a few Swift CLIs before, but this was my first time working with AppKit (the macOS GUI framework)
link