The macOS text diffing app I’ve been working on has started to come to fruition. I’ve also decided to call it SameSame. It comes from a Southeast Asian/English phrase , “Same same but different”. I like the fact that it contains the sound “diff” and I can use the letter S as a logo — It’s a pretty aesthetic letter.

The learning curve hasn’t been too difficult, there’s a lot of overlap between UIKit and AppKit/Cocoa which makes things a lot easier. However, it can definitely make things much difficult because I’ve been used to things working a particular way on iOS and assuming that it should/would be the same on macOS. Good tutorials are incredibly hard to find as well, it appears that almost all the macOS devs stopped writing tutorials once iOS gained popularity. I purchased Big Nerd Ranch’s Cocoa Programming for OSX which is written in Swift, so that should make things slightly easier I hope.

Even though the updates on here are few and far between, I’ve kept a general log on my Twitter feed each time I reach a minor milestone. You can check it out here: @andyyhope “App Update“

The latest milestone I’ve reached has to do with the line:line mapping between the text views. I draw boxes in a middle “gutter” view to make it easier for the user to map how groups have changed between versions — it’s marked in the darker blue below.