Three Picks Today
Found a few interesting things on Hacker News today. One tackles the pain of iOS development being locked to Xcode, another wants to make "learn anything" real with AI-generated courses, and the third is a pixel-style virtual computer that teaches coding through games.
Sweetpad: Write iOS Apps Without Xcode
If you've done iOS development, you know the feeling: Xcode is heavy. Slow to start, memory-hungry, cluttered interface. But you can't avoid it because the Swift ecosystem is tightly coupled with it.
Sweetpad is a VS Code extension that tries to loosen that coupling. It wraps xcodebuild, sourcekit-lsp, swift-format and other CLI tools into VS Code features: autocomplete works, build and run works, simulator management works, even debugging works. It has over 55,000 installs on the VS Code Marketplace with a perfect 5/5 rating.
To be clear, Sweetpad can't fully replace Xcode. Under the hood it still depends on Xcode's command-line toolchain, so you need Xcode installed on macOS. But if you normally write code in VS Code or Cursor and only switch to Xcode for compiling and debugging, Sweetpad saves you those context switches.
1,800+ stars on GitHub, MIT license, actively maintained.
Zoonk: Tell AI What You Want to Learn, It Builds a Course
Zoonk claims you can "learn anything." You input a topic you want to study, and AI generates an interactive course. It's not just language learning — it covers 16 categories including programming, science, history, engineering, and business.
The tech stack is modern: Next.js 16, React 19, Prisma, Vercel AI SDK, PostgreSQL backend. The whole project is MIT-licensed, mainly maintained by one developer (ceolinwill), but with high commit frequency — last commit was 9 hours ago.
Compared to Duolingo, Zoonk takes a different direction. Duolingo focuses on language learning with human-curated courses; Zoonk goes the AI-generated route. The upside is broad coverage and fast course creation. The downside is quality depends on the AI model, and it's still early days.
115 stars on GitHub, 1,878 commits. Young project, but interesting direction.
Mini Micro: A Pixel-Style Virtual Computer
Mini Micro is a "neo-retro" virtual computer made by Joe Strout. Conceptually similar to PICO-8 — it gives you a constrained but fun environment to write code and make games.
Specs: 960x640 full-color display, sprites and multi-layer tile maps, stereo synthesized sound, keyboard/mouse/gamepad input. Built-in code editor and interactive REPL — you can interrupt any program with Ctrl-C and inspect variables.
The programming language is called MiniScript, designed to be easy to learn with clean syntax. There's an IEEE-published paper backing its design philosophy. Target audience ranges from 12-year-old kids to adult programmers looking for a fun side project.
You can play in the browser or download the desktop app. Completely free, no ads. The underlying MiniScript engine is open source (373 stars on GitHub), though Mini Micro itself is closed source.
If you're into fantasy computers like PICO-8 or TIC-80, or you're looking for a relaxed environment to teach kids programming, Mini Micro is worth a look.
All three tools came from today's Hacker News Show HN and front page. Sweetpad is practical for iOS developers, Zoonk's AI course generation is a fresh idea, and Mini Micro is the kind of thing that makes you want to open it up and play.