The Apple app ecology gets some greased wheels

          Ever since the launch of the App Store in 2008, developers have been looking for ways to bring some of the cool features they implemented for the iPhone back to the Mac. Then, with the 2010 launch of the Mac App Store, a whole new group of developers began looking for ways to port their iOS apps to the Mac for the first time. Now, two prolific developers have teamed up to create Chameleon, an open source project that aims to make it simpler to bring iOS work over to the Mac.
Pull back the curtain on the Chameleon Project and you’ll find developers Sean Heber and Craig Hockenberry, both of Iconfactory fame. The two say their motivation for creating Chameleon was the latest version of Twitterrific for the Mac, which ended up bringing over many of the popular features from Twitterrific for iOS. According to the project page, Iconfactory faced only being able to use 25 percent of its code from the iOS version on the Mac, but was able to turn that into 90 percent after porting the iOS UIKit into a new framework on the Mac. That new framework is Chameleon.

         One of the great innovations of the Apple ecosystem is that iOS developers have an ability to relatively easily move their apps from mobile devices to desktop ones. Perhaps a month worth of work.

Now we see some developers that are working to make it even easier. Chameleon may actually be able to just be dropped into the iOS app in order to permit the proper shift from a touch-based to a mouse-based system.

They recognized that Apple has other needs and purposes than to develop this themselves so this Open Source project filled the gap.

It would be nice if Apple helped support the effort. It’ll only make its efforts more successful, creating an even stronger ecosystem for developers. Create something for the iOS app economy and then, once it has the buzz and interest, move it to the desktop, where a premium can still be asked.