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Comment by goranmoomin | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I’m the developer. Didn’t expect a Show HN post to go into a second—chance pool — I woke up an hour ago to find that my app was trending on HN.

I developed this b.c. I found that I didn’t like HN mixed with other work/school related tabs, and realized that a separate app would be great for me. I believe that apps should use the most native-like UI possible — especially Cocoa on macOS, so I aimed to be the most ‘Mac-assed’ HN client possible.

Unfortunately the current app is in fact pretty unpolished — it’s in a usable state, but there’s a lot of missing features that one would expect from a ‘full-featured’ HN client. Probably a bunch of unknown bugs as well :-(. I would very appreciate any suggestions on feature additions or simple bug reports. Thanks!

View on HN

Look forward to trying it out, thanks!

If you find yourself in a position of not wanting a specific website mixed in with your browser tabs again but not caring enough to make another native app, check out nativefier. Quickly makes an electron wrapper for any website.

https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier

Unfortunately I don’t like Electron, and I did try out some solutions (e.g. Fluid[0]) that don’t use Electron, but it felt best to create a native Mac app with Cocoa.

[0]: https://fluidapp.com

Looks neat. Would you consider putting an open source license on it, such as for example the ISC license?

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/isc/

Yup, just added the MIT license. Thanks for reminding!

Excellent :)

Thanks for putting it together. I've been curious about modern macos development for a while, but haven't found many good resources on what that entails. In the past, I used BigNerdRanch's Cocoa book to put together a small UI that accessed an external service in ObjC, but that book hasn't received updates in a hell of a long time.

I also started studying Cocoa with Big Nerd Ranch’s book.

Unfortunately, I found that resources on Cocoa are very lacking, you have to search all day to get some trivial thing to do. The best resources you have would be WWDC videos and transcripts[0]. If the subject you’re looking for is older than a few years, the documentation archive[1] might have detailed, good documentation with concepts and sample code. Some more obscure features will require you search all day, find a few blog posts from ~10 years ago, and munge them enough to make something workable.

The best resource of all was the help of more experienced Cocoa devs – the AppKit Abusers Slack [2] was very helpful and pointed out problems when I had problems. Very grateful for them.

[0]: https://asciiwwdc.com

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/

[2]: https://appkit-abusers.herokuapp.com

Are you planning to charge for this in the future? Seems to be getting really high traction.

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