
UIKit for the Mac - adamnemecek
https://github.com/unifiedh/Chameleon-Swift
======
sjmulder
I'm still hoping for API convergence between the Mac and iOS, opening the road
to universal Mac/iOS apps.

People keep bringing up how iOS is designed for touch and the Mac for mouse
and keyboard, and how screen sizes are different and all that, but those
differences can all be accounted for. Microsoft have shown it possible.

Why? Extend the Mac software ecosystem and allow for multi-paradigm devices,
like the iPad Pro should have been.

~~~
LeoNatan25
Possible? Maybe. Desirable? No, not all. Don't get me wrong, AppKit is very
much in need of a modernization, and it definitely is not as actively improved
upon as UIKit is, but the two have very little in common from a design UI/UX
standpoint. What has Microsoft shown with their multi-paradigm direction? That
lowest common denominator is bad. And same would be for a possible "UXKit".

~~~
sdegutis
AppKit is dead. Apple is using WebKit for all their UI needs, these days.
Goodbye AppKit, you were never that great, but you served your purpose, and
had a relatively long and fulfilling life. RIP.

~~~
CountSessine
I don't think that this is true...

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a-priori
If you want something that works now, there is Chameleon, the project this is
based on:

[http://chameleonproject.org/](http://chameleonproject.org/)

Unfortunately, it seems the project's maintainers have mostly lost interest in
the project (last push to Github in May 2014), but there's a few forks that
have kept on. I maintained this one for a few years for our own uses:

[https://github.com/toushay/Chameleon](https://github.com/toushay/Chameleon)

Unfortunately, the company behind that fork, Toushay, went out of business
last year so there won't be any further work done on that fork. There may be
others out there that are still maintained.

~~~
LeoNatan25
Or, instead of debugging and maintaining over-ambitious lowest common
denominator projects, which will limit you any way you look at them, just re-
write the UI portion of your software with proper Mac design in mind, in
AppKit.

~~~
a-priori
Using something like Chameleon can get you up and running in a very short
time. Literally, it took one afternoon for me to get our app running on
Chameleon. True story. I actually did it without management approval on the
day they said "we should have an OS X app" and demoed it to them at the end of
the day. It wasn't perfect, and took another week or two to iron out a few
bugs in Chameleon we ran into. That was the start of our fork, actually.

But it worked, and it would have taken two to three months to get to that
point from scratch. I should know, because I did from-scratch ports to other
platforms and that's how long it took each time.

You can mix and match Chameleon (UIKit) and AppKit in the same application, so
you can incrementally replace Chameleon with a "proper" solution. If you find
that's important to you.

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seivan
Unless Apple are activly working on UXKit a better bet would be an
implementation of UIKit with SpriteKit, with sane 'defaults' for Mac OS. I've
missed something like CollectionView on Mac OS with same API as UIKit.

By sane default I mean something like: Tab Bar on IOS, Slidable Side Menu on
iPad and regular side-panelMac OS.

UXKit has some issues, e.g you can't swipe back with the touchpad. So I take
it has some work left before being a complete replacement of AppKit.

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kennydude
Hopefully this will take off!

Could use something like this as using OSX's frameworks is so painful
(creating list views with items of various heights is overly complicated)

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ttflee
Twitter tried once upon a time:

[https://github.com/twitter/twui](https://github.com/twitter/twui)

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liviu
I thought that the Chameleon project is dead. I studied the source code a few
years ago.

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Aleman360
Seems risky to go for this when it's very likely something Apple is working
on.

~~~
LeoNatan25
Is it really? UXKit has not moved at all. It has remained relatively static in
the Photos app. It's a serviceable patch-work that Apple has done for their
specific purpose, but I don't think it's actively being pushed forward for a
possible AppKit replacement.

~~~
mdw
> UXKit has not moved at all.

This is speculation, unless you have inside information, UXKit could well be
under active development - we don't know.

