A few years ago since I started using Macs more often, one annoying thing I dealt with was using my local music library. My usual solution was to just drag files from the file manager to a music player, but this wasn’t as nice on macOS (due to i.e. SMB latency). However, I did have a Subsonic server, which provides a nice music streaming server, complete with an API for clients to use for things like phones. Why not use this on my laptop too?

Of course, if I bought a Mac, I’m not going to put up with bad cross-platform solutions that suck everywhere, when I can instead run bad native software that sucks uniquely for my platform of choice. However, there weren’t too many clients available on Mac. Mostly all of them were unmaintained and had been abandoned in the Snow Leopard era. One of them was Submariner, and it was open-source after the developer (Rafaël Warnault) had stopped working on it. Writing my own seemed a bit daunting with no background, but what if I used the Submariner codebase, and started from there?

Now I’ve been maintaining Submariner for almost two years at this point (it even has a minimal website), adding features and mostly just focusing on modernizing the codebase. It’s been an interesting experience as my first Objective-C/Mac project. A lot of the lessons of modernizing legacy code are universally applicable, but I’ve learned a lot about the specifics of Apple platforms and how they compare. This article aims to be both a retrospective on what I had to learn, what I had to do, and the lessons I took from it, including a comparison of what the development culture is like between platforms.

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