Twitter releases TwUI framework for Mac

An example of an Xcode project working with TwUI
Source: Twitter

Twitter has released TwUI as an open source framework for developing Mac user interfaces. According to the announcement, the developers have brought the philosophy of UIKit, the iOS (iPhone/iPad) UI framework, to the Mac – building an application framework on top of Core Animation which allows drawing work to be handed to the GPU, freeing up the CPU.

Though inspired by UIKit, TwUI has Mac UI features such as drag&drop, mouse events, tooltips and Mac style text selection. TwUI is the basis for Twitter's own Mac client and the company is hoping to "stress test it in several implementations" while developing additional features and improvements. TwUI is available from a GitHub repository and is licensed under the Apache License 2.

TwUI isn't the first open source framework for the Mac inspired by iOS's UIKit. In March, the Iconfactory developers announced Chameleon, a clean room implementation of around 60 per cent of UIKit for Mac, and released it on GitHub as BSD licensed open source. The developers created that framework as part of the development of their Twitter client, Twitterific, on the Mac. GitHub's own Mac OS X client, GitHub for Mac, uses Chameleon for its UI.

(djwm)