Lessons Learned
In 2024 I developed MathEdit for OpenStep. This app was a proof of concept to see if I could develop a Cocoa application for OpenStep and then upgrade it to work on every version of Mac OS X. The application was a success, but even though it was a simple app, it took me exactly one year of spare-time programming to develop and then to upgrade through 20 years of Mac OS X history. The primary reasons for this were that Objective-C from 1996 was pretty painful to write, and I was writing it all in real OpenStep and vintage Mac OS X virtual machines with ancient tooling.
In the age of AI, this solution was not going to suit me anymore. I needed a modern environment that could run on any computer and still create apps for my favorite retro platforms. I needed this platform to support AI because it reduces the pain of writing Objective-C 1.0 code that lacks:
- Automatic Reference Counting
- Fucking Block Syntax
- Property Syntax
- Dot Syntax
- Grand Central Dispatch
- Collection Literals
Altivec Intelligence
Altivec Intelligence is an all-in-one integrated development Docker container that has everything I need to develop Cocoa and Cocoa Touch applications that run on PowerPC Macs with Mac OS X Tiger or later and iPhones running iOS 4.3 and later. And before you ask, yes, the Mac apps are universal binaries with four slices: PowerPC, x86, x64, and arm64 .
On top of that, Altivec Intelligence includes tooling for web development, image manipulation, and FFmpeg. Most importantly, all of the AI agent CLIs are baked into the container.
Why is this important? Well, these agents are incredibly powerful and help me to unenshittify my life. But they cannot be sandboxed and cannot be trusted as long as they have Bash access. By running them in a Docker container, I can safely run them in YOLO mode with no risk to my own Mac. They have all the tools they need to create great apps, all without ever changing my development environment or editing files outside of my repositories.
Libraries
A modern retro toolchain wouldn’t be complete without modern libraries to help these retro systems do modern tasks. Altivec Intelligence includes critical libraries bundled into dynamic frameworks and static libraries.
- AltivecCocoa: Includes Font Awesome and other helper classes that make it easy to build applications that run across 20+ years of Apple history
- AltivecCore: Includes modern networking and database tooling to interact with modern web APIs
- SQLite 3.43.2
- libcurl 7.88.1
- OpenSSL 1.1.1w
- zlib 1.2.13
- cJSON 1.7.19
Tooling
I will not go into all the details because you can view them on GitHub. But
Altivec Intelligence includes a lot of basic tooling to make it easy to
build, deploy, and debug apps to retro devices. This all relies on SSH key
authentication, which can also be customized because the container mounts the
home folder in ~/.altivec. This way you can always control which keys the
container (and the agents) have access to. altivec-deploy is an included
script that can deploy your apps to Macs and to
jailbroken iPhones to start
debugging sessions with GDB or LLDB.
altivec-release automatically bumps
the versions of the apps in the Info.plist files.
Caveats
Altivec Intelligence is offered as a prebuilt Docker container for arm64 and x64 devices. It supports arm64 and x86-64 computers capable of running Docker.
It does not include Apple-proprietary tooling, so there is no support for NIBs, for example. Deploying to an iPhone requires a jailbroken iPhone with SSH installed. Supporting Mac OS X Tiger requires using a lowest common denominator of Mac OS X APIs. The AI will help you do the runtime introspection, but it can be a pain.
For usage instructions and example apps, see the project on GitHub.