Geoff HackworthFeb 9, 2023

I’ve been having a lot of health problems recently which make it difficult to do development work, on both client or personal apps. My last client who provided occasional work has just dropped me. I can’t really take on any big client work due to my health. I am screwed unless I can sell a lot more of my own apps. Can you help me? And boost this thread?

I will reply to this post with links to some of my apps that I think some people might find useful. iOS developers should love some of them.

Show threadGeoff HackworthFeb 9, 2023

Do you have a lot of Xcode projects/workspaces/swift packages that you need to access often? XcLauncher is a super fast way to open your favourite #xcode projects.

By design (and sandbox restrictions 😉), it only shows the projects you configure as bookmarks. Unlike Xcode's Recent Files menu, this means the order remains fixed, you can create folders and it isn't polluted with experiments or sample projects. #iosdev

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1234625785
More Info: https://hacknicity.com/xclauncher

‎XcLauncher

‎Working with multiple Xcode projects can be frustrating. The Open Recent menu shows all file types and in time order, making it difficult to find the project you want. Project file names on disk are not always human-friendly or can't be found quickly with Spotlight. XcLauncher is a menu bar app that…

Mac App Store
Show threadAbhi Beckert 🇺🇦Feb 10, 2023
@geoffhackworth any chance this could be used (or easily modified) to open a project directory in Visual Studio Code? Consulting firm I work for has _thousands_ of projects. I don't work on many or them but enough for "open recent" to be useless.
Show threadAbhi Beckert 🇺🇦Feb 10, 2023
@geoffhackworth my general technique is cd ~/projects/foo; code .
Show threadGeoff HackworthFeb 10, 2023
@abhibeckert It looks like VSCode has the concept of a workspace (with a .code-workspace file extension). I could add support for using that file extension for a Bookmark, but I don't think I could just add a generic folder. A folder has no associated app (other than Finder, I suppose) so XcLauncher wouldn't be able to open it. It looks like workspaces are only required when you have multiple project root folders, but they can be used if you only have one. So maybe I could do this?
Show threadGeoff Hackworth
@abhibeckert I experimented with this and I can easily add support for .code-workspace files as bookmarks. But it gets really, really messy with the recent files feature of XcLauncher. That requires one time access to a special file that Xcode uses to store its recent files. If I were to support VS Code too, that would either only work with Xcode or require two menus, or somehow combining both apps. It’s really way out of scope for the purpose of the app so I think I will have to abandon this.
Feb 10, 2023 at 12:53pmWeb
Show threadAbhi Beckert 🇺🇦Feb 10, 2023
@geoffhackworth That's a shame but thanks for looking into it. Almost nobody uses .code-workspace files - the're for unusual situations where the normal process doesn't work. Normally VSCode just opens any directory. And if you have user settings/etc those are saved to a hidden child directory (similar to git)
Show threadGeoff HackworthFeb 10, 2023
@abhibeckert Yeah, that’s why it isn’t really compatible with the way XcLauncher works. It needs to open a file that is associated with a particular application.