Not using Xcode is the greatest improvement in quality of life I have known aside from recovering from a debilitating back injury. So good.
Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
161–170 of 248 posts
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#162I've been using agents to develop Mac and iOS apps for over a year now and I would say this post is bad advice, particularly because the excellent Xcode MCP requires Xcode to be running. The MCP tool gives you faster, better access to a number of functions for which xcodebuild is much slower and much chattier and a number of others (like the #Preview generation and rendering) that aren't possible at all while Xcode i…
There’s Xcode-mcp-proxy that proxies Xcode’s mcp and adds clicking dialog and reconnects.
How do you deal with macOS app testing? Do you use Peekaboo or plain screenshotting automation?
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#163One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…
They should’ve expected that using xAI
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#164small issue: xcodebuild will just randomly fail sometimes. And the solution is to... open and close Xcode. I wish this wasn't true, but it is.
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#165small issue: xcodebuild will just randomly fail sometimes. And the solution is to... open and close Xcode. I wish this wasn't true, but it is.
Can LLM do this too? If yes, then it’s annoying but is not a blocker.
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#166I've been using agents to develop Mac and iOS apps for over a year now and I would say this post is bad advice, particularly because the excellent Xcode MCP requires Xcode to be running. The MCP tool gives you faster, better access to a number of functions for which xcodebuild is much slower and much chattier and a number of others (like the #Preview generation and rendering) that aren't possible at all while Xcode i…
I would suggest trying out xcode mcp by Sentry, it’s much more comprehensive and doesn’t need running Xcode
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#167What continues to bother me is just that developers who don’t have the budget are pretty much pushed out of iOS development because they can’t afford a Mac. And every time that Apple increases the price of their products, more people are blocked from being able to develop on them.
People not having access to tech is bothersome, but nowadays Apple offers affordable machines compared to the same/worse specs from competitors. For example a MacBook Air with Apple Silicon and a moderate amount of memory.
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#168React Native + Expo is also a good option if you want to touch the iOS/Android IDEs as little as possible.
You use Xcode and Android studio to install the device sims and then expos tool chain handles the rest, even for deploying to stores.
If you are on a windows computer and can’t install Xcode, you can even run your iOS app directly on an iPhone with their managed app.
Ignite is a great starter using RN and Expo. Some great people maintaining it. https://github.com/infinitered/ignite
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#169I don't see the point of this, if you use Claude or whatever frontier LLM you like, you need Xcode only to start emulators / install app on phones or to upload a binary.
Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
#170[dead]