Last month, I analyzed the programming languages and UI frameworks used to create iOS 17. This month, let’s analyze macOS from OS X El Capitan 10.11 to the latest macOS Sonoma 14 and answer a few questions:
What is the total count of binaries within macOS Sonoma? Which programming languages are used to develop these apps? How many apps are written with Swift? How many apps are using Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI versus AppKit?
The WWDC 2019 had a major impact on the UI toolkit landscape: while the venerable AppKit APIs remained available, Apple removed the old Carbon APIs and introduced 2 brand new frameworks: Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.
Apple sporadically mentioned some apps built with these new UI toolkits. In this article, I try to bring a better overview of Apple’s use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in the different versions of macOS, from macOS Mojave to macOS Ventura.
A couple of months ago, I released a new app called Dependencies on the Mac App Store. You can download and try it for free at https://apps.apple.com/app/dependencies/id1538972026.
In this article, I explain how I built the command line support and released it in the Mac App Store. Implementing this feature turned out to be tricky, mostly due to the lack of documentation on this specific subject. This post might be of interest if you are planning to add a Command Line tool to your app distributed on the Mac App Store.
A year ago I analyzed how many built-in apps in iOS 10.1 and macOS 10.12 were using Swift: Apple’s use of Swift in iOS 10.1 and macOS 10.12.
How many built-in apps are using Swift in iOS 11.1 and macOS 10.13.1? Let’s find it out!
Swift has been announced at the WWDC 2014, more than 2 years ago. Most of the sample code projects from Apple are now written in Swift. But does Apple use Swift in iOS 10.1 and macOS 10.12.1?
Mail.app in macOS 10.11 and earlier used to check the plugins compatibility using the SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs key in the plugin’s Info.plist. For example a Mail plugin would only be compatible with macOS 10.11.6 if its Info.plist contained the following:
It might be useful in some cases to know if the MacOS kernel is running in the 32-bit or 64-bit (K64) mode. This is useful for example if you write an application like ‘System Profiler’ that displays the details of the currently running system: