Saturday, April 18, 2026

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.

You can find Coords in the Mac App Store, and I’m working on releasing it here on my site as well!