Show HN: A new native app for 20 year old OS X

A few of us here are probably familiar with the original Xbox modding scene and the iconic xbins FTP server. Recently, I came across an amazing tool called Pandora by Team Resurgent [0], which got me thinking about how incredible something like this would have been 20 years ago. Just to clarify, I had no involvement in creating Pandora—I’m just inspired by their work.

For those who aren’t familiar, getting access to xbins involves a rather dated process. You need to connect to a channel on an EFnet IRC server, message a bot for temporary credentials, then plug those credentials into your FTP client to access xbins. Pandora (and my app) simplifies this entire workflow into a single click.

Inspired by Pandora, I decided to build my own take on what this dream tool might have looked like back in the day. I wrote a native Mac app on original hardware—an Intel iMac (20-inch, 2007)—running a 20-year-old operating system, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

This was my first foray into native Mac app development, though I’ve done some iOS development in the past. The result is Uppercut [1], and the source is available on GitHub [2].

For the development process, I used Claude to help with a lot of the coding, especially since I was constrained to Xcode 2.5 and the pre-“Objective-C 2.0” features available at the time. I had to be very specific in prompting Claude to avoid newer features that didn’t exist back then. Since the majority of Objective-C code out there comes from the era of iOS development (which relied heavily on Objective-C 2.0 until the arrival of Swift), this was a unique and challenging exercise in retro development.

[0] - https://github.com/Team-Resurgent/Pandora

[1] - https://uppercut.chadbibler.com

[2] - https://github.com/chadkeck/Uppercut

Show HN: A new native app for 20 year old OS X
uppercut.chadbibler.com

I so miss this look and feel.

Cool project! I remember back in the day having to poke my friends with xbins upload access to drop things for me. It wasn’t super clear who anyone involved with the service was in that capacity. I’m surprised xbins is still kicking and with the same model it used to have, but it’s kinda cool at the same time.

i love you this is amazing

A labor of love!

Thanks for sharing it!

I probably won't use it, though.

On a practical note, when I release apps, I generally try to support as far back as possible (usually a couple of major releases). Supporting these can be challenging. I can only imagine what this was like.