By no stretch of the imagination am I a developer, but with the little understanding I do have, I realize this is a big deal. Iconfactory developers Sean Heber and Craig Hockenberry, the developers of Twitterific fame, developed a new, open source framework called the Chameleon Project, that allows developers to port their code for iOS applications, over to the Mac without changing a thing. For the rest of us, that means that code written for iOS can be made to run on the Mac with little to no extra work.
Here’s an excerpt from the project’s website:
If you’re an iOS developer, you’re already familiar with UIKit, the framework used to create apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Chameleon is a drop in replacement for UIKit that runs on Mac OS X. In many cases, your iOS code doesn’t need to change at all in order to run on a Mac.
This new framework is a clean room implementation of the work done by Apple for iOS. The only thing Chameleon has in common with UIKit are the public class and method names. The code is based on Apple’s documentation and does not use any private APIs or other techniques disallowed by the Mac App Store.
As proof that this framework works, they used it themselves to port the iOS version of Twitterific over to the Mac. So, in essence, the new Mac version of Twitterific is the same as the iOS version on a technical level.
Right now the project is holding a fundraising drive, wherein a $250 donation get’s you an awesome T-shirt with the project’s logo on it (from David Lanham, the same designer that brought you Ollie the Twitterific bird). A $500 donation gets you the T-shirt and anyone of StockIcons.com’s stock icon sets. The framework itself is free to use under a BSD-like open source user license.
Be sure to check out the videos on the site that show two of Iconfactory’s iOS applications running on the Mac.
Even from a non-developer perspective, this is really exciting stuff.
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