Porting Ios App To Mac

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  • Overview; Port your Mac app to Apple Silicon. Your porting questions, answered: Learn how to recompile your macOS app for Apple Silicon Macs and build universal apps that launch faster, have better performance, and support the future of the platform.
  • Apple's efforts to bring iOS apps to the Mac have been underway for two years, and the porting process for third-party developers won't be completely automatic, software engineering head Craig.

May 04, 2016  The App Anatomy. A Mac app has a lot of different, more complex user interface elements than what you might find on an iOS app during normal development. Let’s look at each of the different types of interfaces and their nomenclatures. The most basic interface on the Mac.

Native Mac apps built with Mac Catalyst can share code with your iPad apps, and you can add more features just for Mac. In macOS Big Sur, you can create even more powerful versions of your apps and take advantage of every pixel on the screen by running them at native Mac resolution. Apps built with Mac Catalyst can now be fully controlled using just the keyboard, access more iOS frameworks, and take advantage of the all-new look of macOS Big Sur. There’s never been a better time to turn your iPad app into a powerful Mac app.

Designed for macOS Big Sur.

When an app built with Mac Catalyst runs on macOS Big Sur, it automatically adopts the new design. The new Maps and Messages apps were built with the latest version of Mac Catalyst.

Get a head start on your native Mac app.

Your iPad app can be made into an excellent Mac app. Now’s the perfect time to bring your app to life on Mac. The latest version of Xcode 12 is all you need. Begin by selecting the “Mac” checkbox in the project settings of your existing iPad app to create a native Mac app that you can enhance further. Your Mac and iPad apps share the same project and source code, making it easy to make changes in one place.

Optimize your interface for Mac.

Your newly created Mac app runs natively, utilizing the same frameworks, resources, and runtime environment as apps built just for Mac. Fundamental Mac desktop and windowing features are added, and touch controls are adapted to the keyboard and mouse. By default, your app will scale to match the iPad’s resolution. On macOS Big Sur, you can choose “Optimize interface for Mac” to use the Mac idiom, running your app using the native resolution on Mac. This gives you full control of every pixel on the screen and allows your app to adopt more controls specific to Mac, such as pull-down menus and checkboxes.

Even more powerful.

The new APIs and behaviors in macOS Big Sur let you create even more powerful Mac apps. Apps can now be fully controlled using just the keyboard. You can create out-of-window and detachable popovers, control window tabbing using new window APIs, and make it easier for users to select photos in your app by using the updated Photos picker. iOS Photos editing extensions can now be built to run on Mac. And your app is even easier to manage when it’s running in the background with improved app lifecycle APIs.

New and updated frameworks.

Mac Catalyst adds support for new and updated frameworks to extend what your apps can do on Mac. HomeKit support means home automation apps can run alongside the Home app on Mac. The addition of the ClassKit framework lets Mac apps track assignments and share progress with teachers and students. Plus, there are updates to many existing frameworks, including Accounts, Contacts, Core Audio, GameKit, MediaPlayer, PassKit, and StoreKit.

Tools and resources.

Download Xcode 12 beta and use these resources to build native Mac apps with Mac Catalyst.

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Most application code can be categorized into one of the following areas:

  • User interface code (eg. windows and buttons)
  • 3rd party controls (eg. charts)
  • Business logic (eg. validation rules)
  • Local data storage and access
  • Web services and remote data access

For Windows Forms and WPF applications written with C# (or Visual Basic.NET)a surprising amount of the business logic, local data access, and web servicescode can be shared across platforms.

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.NET Portability Analyzer

Visual Studio 2017 and later support the .NET Portability Analyzer (download for Windows) which can examine your existing applications and tell you how much code can be ported 'as is' to other platforms. You can learn more about it from this Channel 9 video.

There is also a command-line tool can be downloaded from Portability Analyzer on GitHub and used to provide the same reports.

'x% of my code is portable. What next?'

Hopefully the analyzer shows a large portion of your code is portable, but there's certainly going to be some parts of every app that cannot be moved to other platforms.

Different chunks of code will probably fall into one of these buckets, explained in more detail below:

  • Re-useable portable code
  • Code that requires changes
  • Code that isn't portable and requires a re-write

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Re-useable portable code

.NET code that is written against APIs available on all platforms can betaken cross-platform unchanged. Ideally, you'll be able to move allthis code into a Portable Class Library, Shared Library, or .NET StandardLibrary and then test it within your existing app.

That shared library can then be added to application projects forother platforms (such as Android, iOS, macOS).

Code that requires changes

Some .NET APIs may not be available on all platforms. If these APIs exist in your code,you'll need to re-write those sections to use cross-platform APIs.

Examples of this include use of Reflection APIs that are available in.NET 4.6, but are not available on across all platforms.

After you've re-written the code using portable APIs, you should be ableto package that code in a shared library and test it within your existing app.

Code that isn't portable and requires a re-write

Examples of code that isn't likely to be cross-platform include:

Porting Ios App To Macos

  • User Interface – Windows Forms or WPF screens cannot be used inprojects on Android or iOS, for example. Your user-interface will need to bere-written, using this Controls Comparison as a reference.

  • Platform-specific storage - Code that relies on a platform-specifictechnology (such as a local SQL Server Express database). You'll need tore-write this using a cross-platform alternative (such as SQLite for the database engine).Some file system operations may also need to be adjusted, since UWPhas slightly different APIs to Android and iOS (eg. some filesystems are case-sensitive and others aren't).

  • 3rd party components – Check whether 3rd party components in yourapplications are available on other platforms. Some, such as non-visualNuGet packages, might be available but others (especially visual controls like chartsor media players)

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Tips for making code portable

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  • Dependency Injection – Provide different implementations foreach platform, and

  • Layered approach – Whether MVVM, MVC, MVP, or some other pattern that helpsyou separate the portable code from the platform-specific code.

  • Messaging – You can use message passing in your code to de-couple interactionsbetween different parts of the application.