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Leaving the Mac App Store

blog.sketchapp.com

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#281

Post by nailer »

rimantas wrote: post #257
dangero wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The actual MAS store app itself is a horrible piece of garbage wrapping a bunch of web views. Just make it a real native app and rewrite it." Native app is not really a black and white concept when you're talking about an app that mainly just interprets and displays live data it receives. If it's not html, then it's going to be xml/json/some other markup with a custom presentation layer on top. Why would that be bet…

xml/json as uses now is data transfer format, not some UI markup. As for why would it be better — because Cocoa is light years ahead in UI libraries and optimizations compared to web mess.

The app store has never felt slower than native apps for me. Instagram also seems to do pretty well.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#282

Post by vacri »

mrec wrote: post #151
cmdkeen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers. Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even…

I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering . I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, au…

> I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues

The whole point of the discovery queue is to expose you to a variety of options. If you want to search just those things you want, there are already filters you can manually use. These filters don't have all the options (please, no 'early access', I agree), but they give you the filtered lists that it sounds like you want.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#283

Post by jhbadger »

How do apps like "Clozure Common Lisp" get around the sandboxing? The Mac App Store version isn't crippled in any way I can see -- it can read and write outside its directory -- for example it can use the quicklisp package manager which stores files in my home directory?

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#284

Post by janfoeh »

ethbro wrote: post #269
janfoeh wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right. I would still agree with the parent in that they feel like a badly done webview wrapper, because the symptoms are so similar. iTunes Store, App Store, MAS, Apple Music — there is definitely a pattern there, at least on the desktop. I find them all similarly clunky, slow, ugly and unpleasant to use. Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious…

> Apple almost seems to be inherently incapable of creating a decent store front, and I am curious as to why they have that organizational blindspot. Because when you have a captured userbase, there's no incentive to improve / innovate?

Even if you believe that Apple as a whole doesn't have the drive to make stuff as good as they can (fair, although I believe otherwise), and even if you believe they have a captured audience (how?) — do you indeed believe that Apple is happy with 15% (US) market share for desktops and laptops?

Even accepting everything else, that seems like a huge incentive to me not to get complacent.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#285

Post by pkamb »

dperfect wrote: post #263
pkamb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many OS X apps are utilities that help you work with other apps. Running all the time in the background, monitoring, looking at keyboard input, observing folders, etc. These types of apps are fundamentally at odds with the Sandbox. But they're used often by many/most OS X users, even the less technically inclined. Whereas the design and simplicity of iOS has ensured, from the start, that these types of apps cannot ex…

A good point about utility/accessibility apps. For most everything else though, I prefer not to inherently grant all those permissions to every app I install. But again, Apple doesn't require distribution through the MAS (even if the majority of apps can work effectively within the restrictions), so how does the MAS's existence make the OS X ecosystem worse off overall? If Apple is ignorant enough to leave money on t…

It's not the existence of the Mac App Store that hurts, it's the existance of this (theoretically) great marketplace that we can't use to distribute normal, useful OS X apps. Especially if you had a great little app going in the MAS, and now can't update it because it can't be sandboxed.

And hosting, key generation, payments, etc. are a fairly significant roadblock to shipping an app that the MAS formerly allowed you to completely ignore.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#286

Post by joeblau »

ThomPete wrote: post #240
xenadu02 wrote: post #204

The worst part about this is all the problems are easily solved if Apple simply put the resources into it. * The actual MAS store app itself is a horrible piece of garbage wrapping a bunch of web views. Just make it a real native app and rewrite it. * Sandboxing is great, but there will always be things that fall outside the sandbox. Have a "Power User / Developer Tools" category and associated checkbox in iTC that s…

I agree with you on almost everything beside the web view part. In my understanding web view is used because it's a very advanced layout engine and way easier and more flexible to deal with than to set all this up using the native layout engine. Edit: For clarity.

The layout in iTunes and the Mac App store app is something that you can implement with a native constraints based layout.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#287

Post by Splines »

outworlder wrote: post #224
robotresearcher wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a parent of young kids, and fire up steam maybe once a month. Guess what happens to my precious game time nearly every single time.

Yeah, exactly the same thing happens every time. There isn't much of a way around it though, it should really do automatic updates.

It does do automatic updates as long as it's running.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#288

Post by seivan »

91bananas wrote: post #129
seivan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry to hear you had such a bad experience. This game, was it a OSX/iOS exclusive or cross-platform AAA game?

AAA, Call of Duty 4

Ah alright. Yeah that's the impression I get as well. Cross platform games would probably be better bought from Steam than MAS.

While games that might focus on Apple would be better through the App Stores.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#290

Post by alextgordon »

ThomPete wrote: post #265
rimantas wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had some reaaaaally reallly weird experience then. I don't even understand what you mean by "laying out networked assets". With proper architecture your UI won't even know where assets come from.

What I mean is that laying out using xcode isn't as easy as using a web view for the kind of layout that are needed for something like the app store. Not sure why this is such a crazy thing to say that I need to be down voted for it.

100% with you. I love AppKit, but the amount of code required to make a simple custom button is insane. What is 5 seconds of CSS takes a good 30 minutes of wrangling with NSButton/NSButtonCell. The very existence of PaintCode is an indictment.

It doesn't make sense to say that WebViews aren't "native". With a little effort they can be made to blend in perfectly. It's the same CoreGraphics.

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