UIKit for Mac development using Chameleon

If you’re an iOS developer, you’re already familiar with UIKit, the framework used to create apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Chameleon is a drop in replacement for UIKit that runs on Mac OS X. In many cases, your iOS code doesn’t need to change at all in order to run on a Mac.

This new framework is a clean room implementation of the work done by Apple for iOS. The only thing Chameleon has in common with UIKit are the public class and method names. The code is based on Apple’s documentation and does not use any private APIs or other techniques disallowed by the Mac App Store.

Since Chameleon relies heavily on Core Animation, a proprietary technology owned by Apple, it can not be used on other platforms such as Android or Windows. It only allows iOS apps to be ported to the Mac.

Chameleon is a work in progress. The framework currently implements about 60% of UIKit after nine months of work.

To see what is possible with this framework, we suggest that you download Twitterrific from the Mac App Store. This product was created with Chameleon.