Building the Mac App & Call w/ Apple | Startup Vlog #13

In this video I discuss the journey of converting the existing iPad app into a separate Mac app with the goal of being multi-platform. The Mac app started out rough but now it's looking pretty good. I talk about the issues I ran into and how I overcame them in my first adventure into app development for macOS. I also tell the story of how a tweet about this process led to a call with some members of the SwiftUI team at Apple to discuss my experience.

This is part of a running series where I document the journey of Creator View covering the development, pricing, launch, income, customer feedback and more. Check out the playlist to watch the whole series.

Download Creator View:

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Link to my book - How I Became an iOS Developer:

Timestamps:
0:00 - Mac App Intro
0:37 - Initial Run - Looks Horrible
2:06 - The Process - File & Target Organization
4:16 - Sharing Files w/ iOS & macOS
6:07 - Process Summary
6:30 - Apple’s SwiftUI Team Call
7:21 - Handling Colors
8:20 - Mac App - Current State
13:35 - Mac App - Launch Date

Book and learning recommendations that help out the channel if you decide to purchase (Affiliate Links):

Paul Hudson's Hacking With Swift:

Donny Wals - Combine:

Mark Moeyken’s SwiftUI Books:

Ray Wenderlich Books:

Links to my iOS Dev Setup & iOS Dev Book Recommendations

#swift #softwaredeveloper #iosdeveloper

[KimbrellBrad]

So happy to see you making time to get YOUR business up and going! I have followed you from my Swift beginnings...only a year and a half so far but one of your videos is what informed me about Swift. I had looked at Obj C about 5 years ago and I ran away from that very quickly! At the time I was president of a small software firm that grew out of my original company back in the 80's. I retired 2 years ago at 59 and got back to programming / designing - my favorite time in my career!

And that's all thanks to you and your videos! So wishing you all the best and I plan to keep learning and creating right along side you. Best of luck Sean! Well deserved!

[michaelyoung]

Thanks for sharing an update. Very cool to see and also hear about your call with Apple. Good luck with the mac launch and the product overall!

[nitesh-maharaj]

Hey Sean, as someone who's building a cross platform SwiftUI application, some of the issues that I found on Mac are as follows:
- Customizing the menu for things like deleting a record using a shortcut like Cmd+Backspace doesn't work.
- You have to support multiple instances of a window, even if you don't want to.
- Navigation between views only works with a sidebar, which I find quite restrictive.
- Creating a multi-window app is an issue, because you can create multiple instances of each window and you don't have much control.
- Preventing resizing of a window is possible, but feels hacky and using the expand button to change the window size, like in the calculator app doesn't appear to be possible.
- Documentation on building help for a macOS application is lacking.

Essentially (what I'm calling Apple's first swing) at a SwiftUI Mac app is a loose translation of an iPadOS app and it just doesn't lead to a very Mac experience. I'm really hoping that the team that spoke to you did so because they realize the issues and we'll see solutions to these problems at this year's WWDC.
If you're able to share any contact information for anyone on the Mac SwiftUI team, like a Twitter handle, I'd appreciate it.

[christostsangaris]

Keep up the great work Sean! So nice of you to share your experiences!! Best of luck!!

[abdulrapidz]

You should be able to download the cocoapod library and manually drag in the framework file into your project if you want to unblock that feature for macos

[legato]

Thanks for the update Sean !

What is your dev setup nowadays ? still on your imac pro ?

[SuperDr]

Cool stuff Sean. May i ask what library you used for those pie charts and graphs? Or if it is a custom thing could you possible do some tutorial on how to do it?

[AustinConlon]

Interesting that the team got you on a call! I've had something kind of like that but it was only over email for the iMovie user experience.

[MoAdel]

can you share some extra general dull data regarding Tech stack of this Project, Thanks

[kalmicka]

Don’t know if I missed it but did you happen to mention what framework you used for in-app purchases. Did you use StoreKit1/2 or did you choose a framework to make it “easier”. Just wondering if you also implemented server To server AppStore notification.

[JasonMitchellAZ]

Great seeing the progress, Sean. Thanks for sharing!

[anthonygallo]

Any plans to finalize and then do android with jetpack compose?

[theyogabios]

Congratulations Sean, keep the foot on the gas young Sir. I'm still playing with Apple TV stuff for now, I did launch my TVOS App last year(Sept), and will work on the 2nd version once I finished converting the same App on Roku(they just have a bigger footPrint for now). You inspire us/Me brother, cont to RockSteady.

[imminhx]

hello Mr. Allen, I really like what you did, really want to buy your courses. So I went to your website to see the courses you are doing and what I wonder is the videos on there don't have subs or i've not turn it on because my English is quite poor. So what i want to ask is will those videos have subs in the future? Thanks for reply me.

[jhoughjr]

Good luck. MacOS basically doesnt exist as far as apple is concerned. Mac development has been a mess for at least 5 years. So many things in swift work fine on iOS with zero thought on what makes sense on Mac.