Two months ago, I announced that I was reviving my first Mac app, Coords, and modernizing it for the first time in 11 years. This was a surprisingly challenging project, mainly due to SwiftUI and a back-and-forth App Store review process. The great part, though, even with all the work and rebuilding, I’m happy to see the app released with its new icon and modern features.
In 2015, I had already been developing iOS apps for about 5 or 6 years and was pretty confident with my skill set and ability to build compelling iOS apps for that time. However, on Mac OS X, I was very unsure about how a lot of app development worked. Sure, OS X shared a lot with iOS at a foundational level. AppKit, though, was such a bigger beast to work with compared to UIKit at that time, which made me feel less than confident with my skills for developing for the Mac. Worse so, I vaguely remember it being difficult to find good example code and explanations of AppKit techniques in 2015.
Fast forward, though, and now my own confidence levels have swapped. Many of my day jobs since 2015 have required me to build custom Mac applications for data processing. Over the years, I’ve been slowly building a stronger ability to develop for the Mac, and it has resulted in me being able to confidently re-build Coords. Better yet, this release isn’t just a rebuild and modernization, but includes many features I wanted to include in the original release but didn’t know how to go about developing them at that time.
One last thing. In the day and age of AI/vibe coding of apps, Coords really isn’t anything crazy special as it stands today. Any coding agent would be able to hammer out an app similar to Coords without much intervention by a developer. This is something I struggled with when I was trying to find motivation to work on the project. If I’m being honest, I still feel a bit of that struggle even after releasing it and planning future features or working on other projects. However, something in me still finds great joy in the actual problem-solving of coding without AI assistance. Researching documentation, finding a solution to your problem, even possibly finding other interesting topics in documentation while browsing, and finally writing all the code myself is still as fulfilling as it was back in 2015 when I first wrote Coords.
I’ve been banging my head against the wall with App Store rejections about this “bug” that I couldn’t reproduce where my menu bar actions apparently didn’t work. Turns out they did work, but because the view was hidden at some point during app review, the action looked like it didn’t do anything. So frustrating, but hopefully that is the last of the rejections.
Picked up the recent remaster of Star Wars Dark Forces and found the included behind the scenes information super interesting! Didn’t know LucasArts used AutoCad to layout levels to the game!
One of the things that I’m always rejected for when submitting an app to the Mac App Store is the inability to re-open a window once you close it. I’m so used to just opening it again by clicking the dock icon, so it never crosses my mind to build in support in the menubar. I really wish this was something SwiftUI would do out of the box. They already give you the Close button in the menubar, why not give us a basic Open button as well?
I know plus addresses has been around for a long time for email, but having just learned about it late last year it still amazes me how often I’ve been using it!
11 years ago, I wrote my first Mac app, Coords, and released it on the Mac App Store. It was the first time I had tried to develop for the Mac, having come from the rather straightforward world of iOS development in the 2010s. It was a simple utility app that allowed you to interact with Apple Maps and do some semi-complex tasks, such as adding simple circular overlays to markers and easily see location information such as decimal degrees, minutes, and seconds. While many websites included a lot of this functionality, even to this day I don’t think anything can beat native Mac apps.
After many years, I just abandoned the app to work on other projects. However, every year or so I would think back on the app and get an urge to rewrite it and bring it up to date with the latest in Mac OS features. Every year that idea popped into my head and so did about a dozen other app ideas which I tended to lean towards working on rather than rewriting something I had already built. Plus, somehow over the years I had managed to keep almost every scrap of code and failed project I had ever created with Xcode, except for the source code to this app. I have searched every hard drive, Time Machine backup, and zip of old projects and still haven’t been able to find any code for the project.
All that changed this year when planning some of my yearly goals. I wanted to work on bringing back one of my apps into modern macOS times, utilizing the latest in SwiftUI and some of the new Tahoe-style UI elements. I finally buckled down over the past weekend and started to re-write Coords from the ground up. I had the basic functions of the app rewritten and running smoothly after only a few hours of SwiftUI tinkering!
My goal is to release this app within the next month or two back to the Mac App Store, and for the first time on my own website. It has been great working on this app again, and I can’t wait to share (again) it once it is ready!
This is most certainly not the first Mac App I purchased on the Mac App Store back in 2009…makes me wonder what app sold itself to a random company to just be renamed and taken over?
I remember hearing rumors of Apple making a service bundle of their Pro/Creative apps last year, but it really surprised me when I saw they finally released it today! As someone who uses Final Cut Pro, and wanted to explore the other Pro apps, the low monthly price is really attractive. Especially compared to Adobe CC which feels so expensive for my particular workflows. However, the thing I’m most excited to try out is Pixelmator Pro. I haven’t used Pixelmator since its earlier versions when it was first released, but I remember loving it and some of the new vector and photo editing support looks really solid!
Finally stumbled across the a great reference site for the NSDateFormatter string options. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed this over my years of dealing with both Objective-C and Swift.
