Show HN: A new native app for 20 year old OS X https://ift.tt/CSJ9g4V

Ads by Eonads

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://ift.tt/XJHR25c [1] - https://ift.tt/tNxRCF3 [2] - https://ift.tt/nMkN1Tz https://ift.tt/tNxRCF3 January 24, 2025 at 06:16AM