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Comment by raydev | Hacker News Reader

As a longtime iOS engineer trying to prototype something on Windows, I did not realize how good I've had it while working with UIKit.

I just want Microsoft to give me the one true Blessed Way to write Windows apps. Instead it seems like there are 5 true Blessed Ways, and if I want something performant I need to use 20 year old APIs?

I was going to dig in to GDI+ for fast text styling performance but saw an offhand comment in some forum today that you can use DirectX for performant text rendering. How do people discover this information under normal circumstances?

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Meanwhile on macOS, Carbon, Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI, each with its own set of issues.

We discover this information like everyone else, conference talks, blog posts, books and developer documentation.

AppKit works perfectly, though. There's no UI control or esoteric tool that becomes inaccessible to you if you choose AppKit. You're not giving anything up by using AppKit unless you love declarative UI.

On Windows it seems like there are so many tradeoffs depending on which framework you pick. AppKit is still 'the' solution on macOS unless you're trying to port your iOS app with the minimal amount of effort.

Win32 is Windows AppKit.

Carbon and Catalyst didn't really overlap. And Catalyst is just for porting iPad apps.

Many educated iOS devs see Catalyst as entry in macOS development instead of learning new frameworks, no porting required.

They complained about lack of guidance from Microsoft. Guidance from Apple is Catalyst is for porting.

Where is this guidance document available?

While you are in the process of pasting it, the guys at ATP Podcast might also appreciate it.

> Native Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst can share code with your iPad apps

https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/

The rest of the sentence is "and you can add more features just for Mac". It implies you have an iPad app already. Even the part you quoted is about sharing code with an iPad app. And the rest of the page is all about porting.

"There’s never been a better time to turn your iPad app into a powerful Mac app."

"Bring your iPad app to Mac"

"Your iPad app can be made into an excellent Mac app. Bring your iPad app to life on Mac using the latest version of Xcode. Begin by selecting the “Mac” checkbox in the project settings of your existing iPad app to create a native Mac app that you can enhance further."

"Learn how to build a native Mac app from the same codebase as your iPad app."

They might be the fanciest or laden with trendy buzzwords, but when it comes to building functional, pleasant to use apps, UIKit and AppKit are still hard to beat. If they became deployable on other platforms (Android and Windows/Linux, respectively) I don’t think I’d ever use anything else.

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