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I have a native objective c ios application that I would like to convert to run on my Mac. How could I begin such a journey? Is there a way to run a native objective c ios app on a mac without ios simulator? Or some sort of in place framework I can use?

Steven
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  • I would think the hardest part would be multi-touch. How would you implement that on a mac? – NJones Oct 25 '11 at 01:36
  • Luckily its a rather simple app, and all it is is a bunch of table views with a single touch event attached. – Steven Oct 25 '11 at 01:36
  • Seems like it should be possible. I'm hoping there's a good, ie YES, answer out there. – NJones Oct 25 '11 at 01:40
  • possible duplicate: [Port an iOS app to Mac](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4579849/port-an-ios-iphone-app-to-mac) – jscs Oct 25 '11 at 04:10

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Although your logic code will be fairly portable, there is no quick way to port an app from iOS to OS X. The only way to do this is to create a new app from the Xcode template and move your code accordingly.

Remember, the View paradigm in OS X is completely different than iOS (i.e. UITableView vs. NSTableView). How will you handle user input? Is a series of tableviews the best way or would an NSBrowser work better?

There are many things to consider and at the end of the day you'll need to account for that when creating your new app.

sosborn
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You are going to have to re-implement the GUI in App kit, App Kit uses a lot of the same design patterns as UIKit, delegation, datasources, view controllers, View hierarchy with views having a bounds and a frame, responder chain, Nib files, if you are competent with iOS programming you will pick up Mac OS X very quickly. If your application is structured with good business logic separation from your GUI, you will be able to use all your model classes with little or no modification. Foundation Kit, Core Data and others are on both platforms and they are very similar, it is usually the case that the iOS versions have reduced API and so going other direction, Mac OS X to iOS, can require some work, for example iOS does not have NSXMLDocument classes.

Nathan Day
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