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inessential: Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult

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In the ’90s and early 2000s I worked for UserLand Software — Dave Winer was founder and CEO — on a Mac app called UserLand Frontier. The app was a scripting system and hash-table-oriented database that powered the early blogging and podcasting worlds. (That sounds grand, but it’s probably an understatement — but this post isn’t all about Frontier’s impact on the web, so I won’t go into details.) The app was implemented in two pieces: Since it was an app, it had plenty of UI — menus, contextual menus, buttons, larger UI components, and so on. What was brilliant was that you could, for instance, add and edit menus, and when you chose a menu command it would run your script. (Or when you clicked a toolbar button, etc.) You could write an entire static blog publishing system and the UI to go with it without ever restarting the app. Click a thing, then see what happens in the app — and if it’s not right you’d edit the script, which would be automatically recompiled when called the next time

28 Aug 2025 Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult In the ’90s and early 2000s I worked for UserLand Software — Dave Winer was founder and CEO — on a Mac app called UserLand Frontier. The app was a scripting system and hash-table-oriented database that powered the early blogging and podcasting worlds. (That sounds grand, but it’s probably an understatement — but this post isn’t all about Frontier’s impact on the web, so I won’t go into details.) The app was implemented in two pieces: The kernel , written in C, implemented the database, networking, inter-application communication, v

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