native-applications
Latest stories covering native-applications, with summaries and links to related coverage.
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Connected topics
Stop Making TUIs
opinion
15 min read
A macOS developer used AI coding agents to generate several private SwiftUI applications, including MDV.app, a Markdown viewer; a SageMath frontend that renders output in LaTeX and exposes mathematical operations through point-and-click controls; DJ Roomba, an Apple Music player with an LLM playlist agent; a self-driving wiki; a GPT-5-backed food macro tracker; a TP-Link sensor monitor; and a menu-bar universal remote for Apple TV, Roku TV, and a Denon receiver. The developer says these programs were built by copying a template directory, describing the desired software to Claude or Codex, and letting agents build and test it with computer-use capabilities. The developer argues that AI agents have made native macOS interfaces practical for people who previously avoided UI work, and urges programmers to favor native graphical interfaces over new terminal user interfaces. They distinguish command-line interfaces, which they consider useful for automation and remote operations, from TUIs, which they characterize as constrained by terminal capabilities. They say SwiftUI supplies standard behavior for scrolling, drag and drop, text selection, windows, images, and accessibility that TUI frameworks must recreate imperfectly. Cross-platform consistency remains, in their view, the strongest case for TUIs. The developer’s macOS workflow uses SwiftUI, a Makefile-driven build process, and skills covering macOS design, typography, SwiftUI, and Swift style.