Steve Troughton-SmithFeb 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

Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 21
Light Mode | Dark Mode
Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 21
Watching Codex recreate in seconds things that took me months, maybe even years, to implement the way I wanted 🥲
Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 21
We are actually deeply cooked
Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 22
Just ploughing through this Windows port, with some pretty complex bespoke UI
Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 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.
Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 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

Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 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
Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 22

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

Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 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)

Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 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

Show threadSteve Troughton-SmithFeb 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 🤪

Show threadJason Terhorst
@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?
Feb 22 at 1:58pmIvory for iOS