Mastodawn

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 21

Turns out Codex is just as proficient at writing for the Windows App SDK, so I jumpstarted it with the existing unfinished UWP version of Pastel, and, like before, pointed it at the existing Swift codebase to begin porting it piece by piece to Windows 11. This is by no means a one-shot, I am slowly and methodically recreating the functionality of the Mac app.

Of course, there is no native version of Codex for Windows, so I'm running the Linux version under WSL, and Visual Studio 2022 to compile

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 21

Light Mode | Dark Mode

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 21

Watching Codex recreate in seconds things that took me months, maybe even years, to implement the way I wanted 🥲

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 21

We are actually deeply cooked

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Just ploughing through this Windows port, with some pretty complex bespoke UI

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Editing flow; you don't even have to squint to see how a finished app might work. Something that I would have had to take months to build at the expense of the iOS version, done in a night's free time after a full workday doing more-productive things. I always wanted to finish Pastel on Windows, but I had reluctantly accepted that I could never invest that kind of time — save for some kind of catastrophe that left me excluded from the Apple ecosystem. Now? Trivial.

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

⭐️ Some more shots of all the working aspects of this Pastel for Windows project, using .NET 8.0 and the Windows App SDK (and Community Toolkit), ported from the iOS codebase and my original UWP prototype by OpenAI's Codex 5.3.

It's not a full app yet, but it's dangerously close.

It's hard not to think that agentic programming, or agentic porting, could have outright saved Windows Phone, had this all been possible a decade ago

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

It's only when you start trying to use a UI framework that you realize all the little things that are missing — like Windows' grid view doesn't have a drag-select API, it all has to be done custom. Or like how its alert boxes have no way of indicating a destructive item

Steve Troughton-Smith

When you search for Microsoft's Fluent design docs for Windows apps, you get a 404 on Microsoft's main site 🤡

You have to really know where to look to find them again, and they're buried as the last option (behind Web, iOS, and Android) on their design site

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

I'm pretty familiar with the .NET/XAML app building process; all my apps were ported to Windows Phone 7, then migrated to Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 and UWP, and I know my way around Visual Studio and the publishing system. I've even been through WinObjC for aborted ports of some of my apps. I'm familiar with the APIs, pitfalls, the 3P libs.

I won't pretend that somebody with zero experience would be able to just drop themselves in to Codex and easily build something like Pastel (but I hope so)

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

I updated my copy of Visual Studio and now 'GitHub Copilot Chat' is the first tab in the project explorer, replacing the project file list ('solution explorer') 🤡

Yeah no thanks

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Drag and drop reordering, drag and drop colors into palettes.

This kind of (Mac-like?) behavior is not common to Windows at all. I am pleasantly surprised at how robust the Windows App SDK is, considering nobody in their right mind is building apps this way outside of Microsoft 🤪

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Renaming a new palette, opening it in a new window, adding it to a collection, and navigating around the app

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Codex has no problem going deep into the weeds implementing things I would never have had the faintest idea how to begin, like this eyedropper button that calls into Win32, captures the screen and steals mouse events, and creates a mouse-tracking overlay crosshair window with GDI+, a task far outside the bounds of most WinUI apps. In minutes, without complaint.

This particular behavior is built-in on macOS, but not on Windows, so it all has to be done from scratch

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

This Windows version of Pastel is just under 10K lines of code (C# & XAML) so far. It doesn't yet persist its data model to disk, or sync, it doesn't have the color systems UI, it doesn't import pictures yet, and it doesn't generate wallpapers or widgets. Still plenty to do, but it's rapidly becoming a real app. I'm already very proud of it, and it's been kinda fun trying to pull off a level of polish that Windows apps tend not to see

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

I'm kinda surprised Microsoft, who has been all-in on this stuff for two years with Copilot (and, now, Claude), doesn't have a whole app store full of beautiful first-party native apps already. If *I* (a dummy) can do this in a day, what can a platform expert working full-time at Microsoft do?

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

/cc @shanselman

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Some code to ensure newly-spawned windows are always close to the mouse, with some bonus presentation animations

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

Windows doesn't have an equivalent to TestFlight, but it does allow you to do private, whitelisted store submissions before shipping publicly, so I'm gonna start the ball rolling with this build of Pastel to make sure everything's in order

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

(That's where the Electron version of Broadcasts for Windows has lived since 2020 🙃)

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

And, since the usage stats part is always worth mentioning:

I've used maybe 40% of my weekly Codex credits building this Windows port of Pastel (never hit the five hour limit), I'm on the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus plan, and I've only used 'gpt-5.3-codex medium'

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

In case you ever wondered how long the publishing process is on the Windows Store: that long

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

One of the reasons I picked Pastel for this project was because I had built some initial concepts some years ago and determined that it would look the most native in Microsoft's Fluent Design design language, and would be the easiest bringup. Windows 11 and macOS 11–15 look incredibly similar, and already share many of the same patterns and elements. It would be a great opportunity to do a Windows 11 app right and make a gorgeous app (i'm biased) in the process

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

TIL, the Windows App SDK back-deploys to older versions of Windows 😯

With just a little finagling I was able to remote-deploy* Pastel to a Windows 10 VM, and it appears to be fully-functional.

(*Hey Apple, would it kill you to add remote-deploy tools to Xcode? Or… macOS VMs?)

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

Going back to Windows 10 after not having used it for a while is quite a shock. It's a lot closer to Windows 8 than I remembered 👀

I do not miss this design language at all. Windows 11's Fluent is such an improvement

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

I was using a WinUI TeachingTip to replicate macOS-style popover behavior, but that's an in-window control and just doesn't work at all if the window isn't big enough to fully display it. So now I have a custom color picker window that does all the right things instead

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

WinUI also includes a content unavailable view, one of my favorite recent API additions to UIKit

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

I know Microsoft has had a revolving door of UI frameworks over the years, but I really think the Windows App SDK finally gets it right at a fundamental level. It's just a pity nobody makes native Windows apps anymore. And even more of a pity that there's no phone/tablet platform as part of this effort

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 24

✈️ If you've been following the Pastel for Windows saga with amusement, and have a Windows PC, I've opened up the current test build to the public.

This build is very much a WIP and *will not save changes to the library between launches*. It's really just a demo, for now, but you can check it out anyway

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NTTK03M62KK

Sam Johnson Feb 23

@stroughtonsmith it doesn’t help that most native Windows development is happening on existing applications and Microsoft has burned a lot of goodwill over the years; why would I throw out 10+ years of stable legacy code for a framework that may not be supported in a few years

John Cleary Feb 24

@stroughtonsmith Plenty of Surface Pros out there… but no phones.

Mike Zornek Feb 23

@stroughtonsmith UX question .. should that area have a button to make the noun?

Part of me says yes, since if the users attention / eyes are already there why not give them the affordance to act.

Part of me says mo, since it is a good thing for the user to learn where the forver "new" button is when this view goes away.

Thoughts?

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

@zorn as you say, both options have tradeoffs and benefits. Right now it’s aligned with the iOS version. I’m not sure the iOS version allows for buttons, but I’m curious now

CM Harrington Feb 23

@stroughtonsmith I think WinUI/Fluent was a better take on the whole frosted glass OS theme than Liquid Glass. Sure, it’s still windows, and stuff is wonky, but it’a all readable, at all times*.

*that I’ve noticed.

@stroughtonsmith

Luc Vandal Feb 23

@stroughtonsmith Interesting. I cannot find anything about it in the WinUI 3 Gallery. Can you share more details? Cheers!

Adam Demasi Feb 23

@stroughtonsmith Even Windows 8 was far better designed. It was such a bland era for Microsoft that its official name is “Microsoft Design Language 2”

Mike Cane Feb 25

@stroughtonsmith Welcome to my nightmare world of Win 8.1!

Elías Chao Feb 24

@stroughtonsmith Ohh, this explains why I felt like it was very Apple-like, I thought it was because I’m used to see how Pastel looks on Apple platforms.

Dave Klein Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith oh wow the Microsoft app I designed in 2017 is still there https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p2gmh3s0fzj?hl=en-US&gl=US

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Ian Bradbury Feb 23

@dk @stroughtonsmith - so it’s your fault! 😉

Jack Minehan Feb 23

@stroughtonsmith do you plan to monetize the windows version? or just a fun project to explore the capabilities of codex?

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 23

@jackminehan if I eventually complete it to a shipping standard, then yes. There's no way to share a license with a iOS/Mac version or subscription, so it'll have to do its own thing, so I'll probably lean on platform specifics like OneDrive for sync rather than try to build something that syncs between platforms

Steve Tibbett Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith Product management and other organizational structure doesn't scale the same way, or at least the infrastructure isn't there yet. Imagine if it was.

Martin Höller Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith I‘m currently making @inyourface for Windows as a native app. Coming from the Apple ecosystem, the dev experience on Microsoft is certainly „interesting.“ For example, it took me about 3 months, several calls with support agents and a lot of headaches to get a fully verified developer account.

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

@martinhoeller @inyourface oof. I went through it back in… 2012? …and I think it involved sending faxes

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

@martinhoeller @inyourface (though BlackBerry was the worst; they required me to go to a notary)

Martin Höller Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith @inyourface 😬 no faxing for me. The biggest blockers were: Need to use Edge browser to use MS Partner Center and they require the email address you provide to be of the same domain as the business website you fill into the form. But of course they don't have proper form validation or error messages. This took several rounds with MS support, down to their tech team. In the end I figured it out myself.

QuarterSwede Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith As a side note: You are most certainly NOT a dummy. You have critical thinking in spades. That’s why you figure a lot of crap out so quickly compared to a lot of people around you.

@stroughtonsmith my guess? Meetings, then more meetings.

Mike Cane Feb 25

@stroughtonsmith No one gives even a teeny fuck about Windows anymore. Not even MS. They’re the new IBM. All-in Enterprise.

People deserting to Linux. Do some apps for that!

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 25

@mikecane Windows can make my apps look pretty, good for marketing. Linux… not so much

Mike Cane Feb 25

@stroughtonsmith Good luck. Might not be an audience. Also seeing people dumping Win for Mac.

Frank Rupprecht Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith What Codex thinking modes are you using for work like this?

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

@fuzzyhead 5.3 medium, I've never taken it off the default setting

Michael Israeli Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith @fuzzyhead How are you using Codex for this project, do you have it opened simultaneously in VS Code (for Codex extension) or using command line?

Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 22

@thisisizzy @fuzzyhead I have WSL installed and I’m using codex from the commandline. I’m building and running the solution with VS2022 independently

Jason Terhorst Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith I wonder if this (or the reverse of this process) could bring back “Mac-assed apps”. Would this be easier than keeping an Electron codebase running across platforms?

Dominic Hopton Feb 22

@stroughtonsmith needs some implicit animations on that grid (or maybe it should be an ItemsRepeater to shed the baggage of the GridView et al)

@stroughtonsmith and now we all know why #Windows #Apps look like ass!