Developers Can Now Make Android Apps With Apple's Swift

[Big_D]

I don't think they ever supported Java in Xcode directly. At the risk of severely aging myself, I've been using Java since it came out ~1995 and would have moved to a Mac much earlier had Apple offered a decent "native" IDE for Java. The first IDE I used was VisualCafe - only available on Windows, which was somewhat ironic since Sun was competing with Microsoft back then and then Netbeans (which I've used ever since, with a detour to Eclipse and IntelliJ). Anyway, if OSX did support Java at the time, I think I would have known as I was an avid Windows hater then. My first chance at full-time Java development didn't come until around 2007 and I used Netbeans IDE. I think at the time Apple did bundle the JDK or JRE but, again, I don't remember Xcode letting you build Java apps.

Me too and I did try using Visual J++ on Windows (Microsoft's interpretation of Java), it was a hot mess and led to the only time I submitted an official bug report to Microsoft...

I wrote a simple graphics demo that drew lines across the screen like the classic "Mystify" Windows screensaver. It used an x and y increment variable to increment/decrement the variable.

Basically
xinc = 1;
do
x+=xinc;
if x >= width; xinc=-1;
if x <= 0; xinc=1;
...same for y
draw
while true

(It is too long since I've done any Java, so just a bit of pseudocode, so you get the idea)

The bug? x += xinc always added +1 to x, even if xinc was negative. Changing it to x = x + xinc didn't help, J++, or rather the MS Java runtime couldn't do basic math! The code ran fine when converted to VisualBasic or VC++ or under Sun Java, just not in J++.

I had to do a workaround with if xinc > 0; x += xinc; x -= Math.abs(xinc);

That was 1.0, it wasn't fixed in 1.1 or 2.0, I never saw any updates after that...

 

[CATiNTHESTORE]

First Halo on PS5 and now this. Next thing you're going to tell me is that cats and dogs have made peace.

Oh man, Forza Horizon 6 also will be on PS

 

[bgillander]

I don't think they ever supported Java in Xcode directly. At the risk of severely aging myself, I've been using Java since it came out ~1995 and would have moved to a Mac much earlier had Apple offered a decent "native" IDE for Java. The first IDE I used was VisualCafe - only available on Windows, which was somewhat ironic since Sun was competing with Microsoft back then and then Netbeans (which I've used ever since, with a detour to Eclipse and IntelliJ). Anyway, if OSX did support Java at the time, I think I would have known as I was an avid Windows hater then. My first chance at full-time Java development didn't come until around 2007 and I used Netbeans IDE. I think at the time Apple did bundle the JDK or JRE but, again, I don't remember Xcode letting you build Java apps.

At the risk of also severely aging myself, I seem to recall that Symantec also offered Visual Cafe on the Mac. I don't feel like digging through boxes in my basement, but an internet search did find this:

Symantec Visual Café - Macintosh Repository

Visual Café was the RealBasic of Java on Mac. It brought structured and visual Java RAD (Rapid Application Development) to Mac and PC...

www.macintoshrepository.org

 

[wanha]

Bootcamp for iPhone coming soon.

hmmmm.... that's so crazy it might actual be genius, because it would solve EVERY antitrust case ever raised against Apple and iOS.

Apple could simply point to iPhones being platform agnostic devices, meaning iOS and the App Store would no longer be the monopolistic "gatekeeper" of the device because users could boot Android or anything else onto it and access alternative stores through

Of course, in practice 99.8% of users would never do this, meaning it would essentially be a get out jail free card for Apple with regulators.

 

[twolf2919]

At the risk of also severely aging myself, I seem to recall that Symantec also offered Visual Cafe on the Mac. I don't feel like digging through boxes in my basement, but an internet search did find this:

Symantec Visual Café - Macintosh Repository

Visual Café was the RealBasic of Java on Mac. It brought structured and visual Java RAD (Rapid Application Development) to Mac and PC...

www.macintoshrepository.org

Thanks for that info. I let ChatGPT do some searching for me and I guess the reason I never used VisualCafe on Mac was that the Mac, before OS X, wasn't really a good development environment for us at Bell Labs (mostly UNIX guys) at the time. As soon as Netbeans came around in 1998, I ditched Windows and went to Solaris and Linux
I didn't have a chance to use Java on Mac until ~2007 when it had moved to OSX and provided a very nice UNIX environment.

 

[MisterSavage]

This exists, Vapor is the biggest Swift for server API but there are other projects as well, a fellow swift dev friend of mine made a website using just Swift and Xcode, I forgot what tool he used.

Exactly. The yearly Server Side Swift conference just happened also and they've started posting the videos online.

SwiftServerConf

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

www.youtube.com

 

[Spock]

hmmmm.... that's so crazy it might actual be genius, because it would solve EVERY antitrust case ever raised against Apple and iOS.

Apple could simply point to iPhones being platform agnostic devices, meaning iOS and the App Store would no longer be the monopolistic "gatekeeper" of the device because users could boot Android or anything else onto it and access alternative stores through

Of course, in practice 99.8% of users would never do this, meaning it would essentially be a get out jail free card for Apple with regulators.

Android was ported to jailbroken iPhones years ago so it is possible. Would definitely be an interesting thing to see, it will never happen but it would be interesting.

 

[longofest]

Just for clarification, Swift is open. But when developing to Apple eco system you interact with OS libraries.
For example, SwiftUI is an Apple library. So it’s not that simple making a SwiftUI app suddenly work on android.

However, Swift by itself allows making the logic of an app cross platform.

Yes, in much the same way that Xamarin did with C# for both platforms, and now React Native and others do now.

The trouble is always in the details and the issues with the platform interop. I've sworn off anything but native code development due to the numerous "gotchas" that inevitably come up that you waste a ton of time debugging that just aren't present when you run native code.

 

[Astuces iOS]

Still no SwiftUI

 

[bgillander]

Thanks for that info. I let ChatGPT do some searching for me and I guess the reason I never used VisualCafe on Mac was that the Mac, before OS X, wasn't really a good development environment for us at Bell Labs (mostly UNIX guys) at the time. As soon as Netbeans came around in 1998, I ditched Windows and went to Solaris and Linux
I didn't have a chance to use Java on Mac until ~2007 when it had moved to OSX and provided a very nice UNIX environment.

I guess you might have been one of the candidates for A/UX, but it went away in the mid 90s, so Visual Cafe fell right in the gap years between it and OS X when I don't believe Apple sold a version of UNIX.

 

[chelsel]

In case anyone thought this looked anything like KMM/KMP or even Swift on Apple platforms, take a look at their examples. Here's a function they use to return a value to display in the Android MainActivity, which is still written in Kotlin (I'm looking at the data types, not the logic, which could have been simplified a bit if they weren't, I assume, out to show that you can do things like this with Swift):

import Android

@_cdecl("Java_org_example_helloswift_MainActivity_stringFromSwift")
public func MainActivity_stringFromSwift(env: UnsafeMutablePointer<JNIEnv?>, clazz: jclass) -> jstring {
    let hello = ["Hello", "from", "Swift", "❤️"].joined(separator: " ")
    return hello.withCString { ptr in
        env.pointee!.pointee.NewStringUTF(env, ptr)!
    }
}

This is about what I'd expect at this point, and it's great to see a start -- I want to be clear that this is not a comment on the work or workgroup. I just don't want people to assume more from the headlines than there is, at least right now.

this makes Flutter look beautiful lol

 

[Enlightened Doggo]

If your developer tries to incorporate Swift into your Android app, fire them.

 

[jtdx99]

Not sure many people are going to use Swift for cross-platform development as long as Flutter exists.

 

[zogzog]

I guess you might have been one of the candidates for A/UX, but it went away in the mid 90s, so Visual Cafe fell right in the gap years between it and OS X when I don't believe Apple sold a version of UNIX.

*ahem**ahem**ahem*MkLinux*ahem**ahem*

(Yes, yes, I know, MkLinux never did become well-supported enough to use for production work. But it was the one Linux project that was actually sponsored by Apple, and I understand the lessons they learned about the Mach kernel were useful for their work on Mac OS X.)

 

[bgillander]

*ahem**ahem**ahem*MkLinux*ahem**ahem*

(Yes, yes, I know, MkLinux never did become well-supported enough to use for production work. But it was the one Linux project that was actually sponsored by Apple, and I understand the lessons they learned about the Mach kernel were useful for their work on Mac OS X.)

Thanks! I don't recall even hearing about that one.

I did put the "don't believe" disclaimer in since I was just going by my minimal Apple UNIX memories, and added the bonus "Apple sold" part for additional butt coverage just in case there was a Linux, but cool to find out Apple actually sponsored that one!

Another old project to read about and regret missing at the time. No doubt I will waste far too much time going down another old rabbit hole on the internet tonight, when I should instead be trying to get something done now!

 

[zogzog]

Thanks! I don't recall even hearing about that one.

I did put the "don't believe" disclaimer in since I was just going by my minimal Apple UNIX memories, and added the bonus "Apple sold" part for additional butt coverage just in case there was a Linux, but cool to find out Apple actually sponsored that one!

Another old project to read about and regret missing at the time. No doubt I will waste far too much time going down another old rabbit hole on the internet tonight, when I should instead be trying to get something done now!

MkLinux was a bizarre project that ported Linux to run on a Mach 3.0 microkernel, and Mach to run on PowerMacs. TBH it was never clear what advantage this brought to the end user. However, when monolithic Linux and also NetBSD/macppc ports appeared the following year, they required PCI PowerMacs, which means MkLinux was the only choice if you wanted to run Linux on the first-gen PowerMacs which were NuBus-based.

I installed it on release day on a PowerMac 6100/60, and used it for a couple of years to run C simulation code I had been writing for Solaris and Linux machines in the university lab. Before MkLinux, I was doing my home development with CodeWarrior, but the same code ran noticeably faster on MkLinux; and I could multitask without making any accommodations for cooperative multitasking in the code base—in fact, I didn’t need to make any change to the code at all! It was always kinda rough around the edges, but I didn’t mind since it was perfectly capable of running emacs and my C code. Ah, the memories.