Wednesday, July 15, 2015

MAIKit: Framework for Sharing Code Between iOS and OS X

Michael Donald Buckley:

Third-party frameworks like Chameleon exist, but because UIKit lacks APIs for some features of OS X, apps built with UIKit feel limited on OS X. However, since UIKit and Appkit are very similar, many developers alias UIKit and Appkit classes and use methods common to both frameworks.

For the past few months, I've been experimenting with automating this technique by parsing the UIKit and AppKit headers to extract the interfaces common to both, and the result is MAIKit. I thought that even if this wasn't an ideal way to develop cross-platform code, if this is something a lot of developers are doing, we could all benefit by automating the process.

“MAI” stands for “Mac and iOS.”

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