Xogot for Mac Beta
Miguel de Icaza and Joseph Hill (tweet):
Xogot was born as a native user interface shell on top of the Godot game engine for iPad devices, and later iPhone devices.
[…]
Because Xogot’s user interface was written in SwiftUI, and because we had already committed to Apple’s design system, bringing Xogot to macOS felt like a natural next step. That does not mean it was automatic. We still had to adapt many parts of the interface, study modern Mac applications, and rethink details so Xogot would feel true to the platform and the modern idioms on the Mac.
[…]
Our goal is for Xogot to feel like a professional creative environment for game developers: a tool for building games with Godot that can sit comfortably alongside the apps in Apple’s Creative Studio, like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and MainStage, as well as the other first-class creative and development tools Mac users rely on.
[…]
Our goal is to make running your game on an Apple target feel as simple as choosing the target you care about and pressing play. Want to share your game with friends on a Mac? You should be able to package it up without needing a PhD in certificates, signing identities, and provisioning profiles. Want to test on an iPhone? Xogot will handle the packaging, signing, deployment, and device connection details so you can get your project running and start debugging without fighting the toolchain.
Via Jamie Birch:
This is the most complex (yet well crafted) native Mac app I’ve seen in years. They say it’s SwiftUI, but didn’t clarify whether it’s targeting UIKit for Mac or AppKit – but either way, it’s amazing to see a team build an app on the scale of Xcode from scratch these days.
Previously:
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It's a SwiftUI alright. Oddly floating toolbar items, menu items changing willy nilly depending on focused window state, settings window changing toolbar style depending on selection, which triggers window corner radius change, which triggers sidebar glass blob corner radius change 🤦♂️
It's a "well crafted" SwiftUI crapola for the "well crafted" macOS garbage era that we live in.
Let me guess, "modern" Mac app, so; single window UI, no tear-off palettes or inspectors, and the Apple developeratti and blogaratti will break their knees in their eagerness to kneel and pay slobbering homage to yet another may-as-well-be-an-iPad-app.
> Let me guess
Why are you guessing? You can download it and see for yourself.
It's actually pretty wild. Right-aligned text boxes, Unix paths in the UI all over the place, misaligned icons, icon panels overlapping sidebar borders (like the Finder, so maybe that broken ugliness is intentional), no tooltips on any of the unlabeled icon-only buttons, no apparent way to rearrange the UI for different tasks, and so on.
As somebody who actually uses Godot, there is no way in hell I'll use this Liquid Glass abomination over the official Godot app. The fact that somebody can look at this and say that "this is the most complex (yet well-crafted) native Mac app I’ve seen in years" is a brutal indictment of everything Mac OS X stands for in 2026.
You know what, it's true that the official Godot app doesn't look like it belongs on the Mac. But that's because it's a thoughtfully designed, clear, usable, professional tool.
To be clear, this is in no way an attack on the people who built this. They built exactly what Apple thinks a Mac app in 2026 should look like. It's just that Apple is completely fucked in the head.
I agree with the comments here, and want to add that one of the things that's so distressing about the state of software design in general and macOS in particular is that now people have an utterly warped and wrongheaded idea of what good UI design is. And Apple carries a lot of the blame.
> Why are you guessing? You can download it and see for yourself.
I can take certain things on faith; crystal methamphetamine is a buzz, genital herpes is painful; I feel no need to actually experience them for myself.
Personally, I think the people who made this SHOULD be criticised for their choices. There's nothing about Mac development which says you CAN'T make good apps, with customisable UIs, with tear-off palettes etc, the way all Mac apps were before "Mac-assed Mac App" became a marketing term for an iPad screen floating on your Mac's display.
Apps SHOULD be designed with multiple displays in mind, with tear-off palettes and inspectors. ALL apps used to do this, and nothing has changed in the way computers are used to justify losing that functionality, or saying an app without it is "good".
> I can take certain things on faith
Yeah, I just wouldn't include this in that. It probably *is* possible to make a nice app for Tahoe. Transmit 6 is quite acceptable.
> Personally, I think the people who made this SHOULD be criticised
> for their choices
Miguel de Icaza once asked me to port some .NET APIs over to Mono, and I politely declined, so I owe him one. Also, Xogot has some nice features, like handling app signing.
> It probably *is* possible to make a nice app for Tahoe.
I'm sure Krita is nice on Tahoe. Of course, it's using Qt, so tear-off palette dockers are a part of the UI toolkit.
