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Leaving the Mac App Store

blog.sketchapp.com

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Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#351

Post by simoncion »

dreen wrote: post #133
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…

Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway. I realise this is sti…

> [Steam] has a slow load time.

Odd. On my six-year-old potato PC, Steam takes 10 seconds from the time I click on the Steam icon until the time the UI is up and I can interact with it.

> ...if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy?

Probably in the name of downloading and applying the most recent game patch. On the off-chance that you weren't talking about patch downloading, I started a game in my library that was installed, but that I hadn't played in over a year. It loaded just as quickly as any other game in my library.

If patching bothers you, run Steam in Offline Mode.

> ...I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

If you want to go that route, you can probably find any number of methods to spoof the Steam DRM.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#352

Post by simoncion »

kogepathic wrote: post #266
prewett wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam.app is small when you download it, but it seems to download hundreds of megabytes of something after you run it.

What you download is just a stub, when then pulls down the rest of the components required to run Steam. It's the same thing with their Linux installer. Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which w…

> Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me.

In general, I heartily agree with you. However, because Steam's primary purpose is to download and install huge gobs of data from Valve's servers, I feel that Valve's decision to ship just a stub installer is totally justified.

MSFT's stub Office installer, or Google's stub Chrome installer? Inexcusable.

Edit: Ugh. I should caffeinate. Steam's primary purpose is to let you play video games. However, the way it does that is by downloading gobs of data & etc.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#353

Post by simoncion »

dreen wrote: post #262
gknoy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the things you say are true, and I also agree on the "self-inflicted" delays a sibling poster mentions. All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn't played in two years, after a move and a computer crash. I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can't find the discs for. Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands. With Steam, I can open a…

Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is. Just run a thin updater, with a task manager icon as only UI, and a separate app for the store and downloading/installing games. You can probably cram the rights management into the tiny app as well without making sacrificing too much.

> Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is.

Steam uses ~120 MB of RAM on my system. Google Chrome uses 300+ MB of RAM with just the Google home page loaded.

> ...with a task manager icon as only UI,

You can configure Steam to only display a system tray icon when you don't have the Steam window open.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#354

Post by myhf »

ThomPete wrote: post #255
0x4a42 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it supposed to be a joke/sarcasm?

No but perhaps I wasn't being clear what I meant sorry. What I mean is that using web view make it way easier to layout out networked assets. At least thats my experience having worked with both.

WebView can work, but with no loading meters or error displays it's very painful. If a third-party developer released an app using WebViews the way Apple does, they would get a ton of complaints.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#355

Post by ThomPete »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #348
alextgordon wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that’s countered a bit by less of a need for custom widgets. In fact I’d argue that one of the big points of appeal for native Mac apps is that they eschew tons of custom widgets in favor of the standard system kit whenever possible. There’s also a good deal of power that you gain when writing custom Cocoa widgets; drawing is usually done with Core Graphics, which is a blazing fast, extremely capable C API. T…

Yes but the context is the mac app store which is much more a web-layout than a native app layout.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#356

Post by ThomPete »

myhf wrote: post #354
ThomPete wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but perhaps I wasn't being clear what I meant sorry. What I mean is that using web view make it way easier to layout out networked assets. At least thats my experience having worked with both.

WebView can work, but with no loading meters or error displays it's very painful. If a third-party developer released an app using WebViews the way Apple does, they would get a ton of complaints.

Sure I am not saying their implementation is good, just that the reason why they use it is most probably because it's much less painful to layout.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#357

Post by joeblau »

ThomPete wrote: post #294
joeblau wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes but is it as easy to do? For all it's shortcomings very few things are as flexible and powerfull as being able to use web technologies to layout.

If you know what you're doing(which Apple should since they created the constraint system), then it's not that hard especially with the current constraint structure. There really isn't any technical reason why they shouldn't be able to reimplement iTunes natively and use backend API's to just serve content.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#358

Post by kalleboo »

charlesism wrote: post #346
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…

* There's also the 30% cut, which makes no sense when you're talking about a well-known and well-trusted app like Sketch. Nobody fears installing Sketch outside of the MAS, so BC may as well host it themselves. I imagine the average new Sketch user discovers the app via recommendation, or article on the web, so BC will likely make more money away from the MAS. Especially when you factor in the improvements: faster bu…

Also for software more expensive than about $10, a trial is a must, and the Mac App Store doesn't allow for trials. So the user will seek out the trial version on their website, and then why even bother with the App Store?

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#359

Post by kalleboo »

mcphage wrote: post #315
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 think the reason it feels so sluggish is that the servers it pulls data from take so long to respond. I don't think a native view would help with that, but it's absolutely something they need to fix.

Agreed. The iTunes Store has always felt extremely slow to me, even back in the day when it was implemented as native views.

Re: Leaving the Mac App Store

#360

Post by altonzheng »

ThomPete wrote: post #294
joeblau wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes but is it as easy to do? For all it's shortcomings very few things are as flexible and powerfull as being able to use web technologies to layout.

Apple totally has the resources to make a great native app experience, even if it's much more tedious. I don't see why they don't go the extra mile, especially since the app store generates so much revenue...
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