iOS developers making leap to the Mac, thanks to Mac App Store
The Mac App Store is, by most accounts, off to a good start. But not all entrenched Mac developers are ready to entrust their entire business to Apple's recently opened digital distribution point due to certain restrictions placed on how apps are packaged and how they access certain system resources. However, several mobile developers—already accustomed to App Store life—have begun to bring their iOS-only apps to the Mac platform thanks to the ease of porting and their comfort with the app store model.
The trend is the reverse of what happened when Apple launched the iOS SDK in 2008. Then, many developers leveraged the underlying development similarities—including the Objective-C language, available frameworks, and Xcode IDE—to build mobile versions of desktop apps. Ars spoke with the developers behind Chopper 2, Crosswords, Mathemagics, and The Incident to find out what was involved in moving from small, fixed-size touchscreens to large, variable-size screens and keyboard-and-mouse input.
