Okay, so, Mastodon. Yay, there’s a web interface! Great, but…do you know anyone who wants to interact with, say, Twitter, via the web interface and not some app that makes it easier to deal with? Right.
Enter Mastonaut, except it got started before SwiftUI was really a thing for macOS, so it’s all AppKit and storyboards and NSManageMemoryBecauseThatsWhatRealProgrammingIsAbout.
And at some point yesterday I saw some yahoo claiming that because he’d never made a complex application with SwiftUI then it couldn’t be done.
And then there’s MastodonKit, which purports to be a library that wraps the Mastodon API, but which is missing stuff and which doesn’t seem to merge pull requests. But that’s okay because you can just fork it and do your own thing, never mind the overhead of tracking any API changes or bug fixes that other people might find.
And what’s really cool is how really well Xcode doesn’t deal with git submodules and Cocoapods and swift packages. Especially when someone changes one of those things and checks it in and then you pull that change.
Mysteriously and for no reason, I can no longer build this app. So…okay, roll my own. Because that’s what open source is all about, isn’t it? Being unable to reproduce someone else’s code so you just ignore it all?
The fact that cocoapods is a de facto thing is just… Apple fail.
You know that moment in Galaxy Quest when Sam Rockwell’s character asks in shock and horror, “Didn’t you ever *watch* the show?” That’s how I feel on a kind of daily basis when I interact with Xcode. I want to grab some Apple engineers, shake them, and ask, “Have you ever tried to *use* this software?”