513: Catalyst Apps on the Mac, with John Voorhees

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John has become a bit of a Catalyst expert and it was good to hear from him about what it means for Mac apps, present and future.

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MusicHarbor is the music app mentioned that got missed in the show it’s, by the way.

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It seems a lot of us use Karabiner to Remap Caps Lock to something more useful (e.g. hyper key). It’s invaluable to me, at least.

The Logitech Craft Keyboard mentioned in 513 doesn’t play well with Karabiner in my experience, though. You can successfully remap Caps Lock using Karabiner but then it’s media keys become scrambled. There are some unresolved issues posted on Karabiner’s github repo but doesn’t look like anyone’s cracked it. Logitech Options software doesn’t let you remap the Caps Lock key so you have to choose hyper key or media keys. :frowning_face:

It was very interesting listening to this, with a good (fair) rundown of the issues.
It coincided with me having time to try putting my app on the Mac… with the result being something that is useful to me but not to anyone else.

The first stumbling block was getting the notification that Messages is not supported on the Mac (maybe when Apple rebuilds it into a unified app using Catalyst or whatever it will be).
After circumventing that, I found that in-app-purchases aren’t supported.
Lastly, copying GIFs to the pasteboard only seems to copy the first frame on Mac, so I fell back to static images.

Considering the fact that I’m a hobbyist and haven’t had time to do any programming for about 11 months and haven’t watched the WWDC presentations, the fact I could do this within 2 hours is a credit to Apple.

There’s lots to do still though, with SwiftUI maybe being an important step in the unification of frameworks so apps can function similarly on all platforms with the ticking of a check box.