In the last 10 years, iOS developers spent quite some effort on developing frameworks and tools allowing faster porting of their applications to macOS – but those have their limitations and struggled with Apple’s iOS fast development pace.
At WWDC 2018 Apple announced that they are working on an official toolset – project Marzipan. They showcased the technology in macOS Mojave.
Building the iOS App for MacOS With Catalyst
We were eager to play with the new technology and as soon as it became available in Xcode 11 beta, we used it to build a native Mac app from our iOS client code-base.
We presented it running on macOS Catalina beta at the ownCloud Conference and shared our learnings from this experiment.
You can find the code of the project on GitHub, in the occon/catalyst branch of the new iOS app.
Further Information:
- The slides of the talk: https://cloud.owncloud.com/index.php/s/0i1Wkt3Z4HafI2A
- https://appventure.me/guides/catalyst/complete_book.html
- https://fleetingpixels.com/blog/2019/6/7/customising-nstoolbar-in-uikit-for-mac-marzipancatalyst
- https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/06/04/catalyst/
- https://appspector.com/blog/how-to-convert-you
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/catalyst-deep-dive-the-future-of-mac-software-according-to-apple-and-devs/
- https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/overview/ipad-apps-for-mac/
- https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190607-Beyond-the-Checkbox-with-Catalyst-and-AppKit
WWDC 2019 Talks about the topic
- https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/205/
- https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/809/
- https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/235/
What do you think about these new opportunities? Leave a comment below or share this post on social media!
