651–660 of 665 posts
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So. The most important feature of this new release "designed for pros" that gets top placement on the announcement page is ... dark mode. The second is stacks. The third is the ports of iOS apps (including the long overdue Home). I find it very hard to be excited about a yet another "major" release that doesn't even qualify as a minor version bump.
It looks like dark mode is not a global option like on Linux, but rather needs to be adopted by individual apps. That means when opening old apps at 2AM, my eyes are really gonna be hurt..
Wow, they are DEPRECATING OpenGL from both macOS and iOS: https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/ This is in addition to last year's announcement that "macOS High Sierra is the last version of macOS to run 32bit apps without compromise " I wonder if we will soon see a new lineage of Macbooks fitted with Apple-specific arm64 chips. The most scary thought is if UIKit-on-macOS starts requiring Developer ID entitlem…
"Also, r.i.p. my old macbook air 2011 :-/" macOS performance was already getting so poor on 2010/2011 MacBook Airs, so I think this is the right move. I recently downgraded my old 2GB 2010 MacBook Air back to 10.11 El Capitan and it runs much, much better than it did on High Sierra.
Wow, they are DEPRECATING OpenGL from both macOS and iOS: https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/ This is in addition to last year's announcement that "macOS High Sierra is the last version of macOS to run 32bit apps without compromise " I wonder if we will soon see a new lineage of Macbooks fitted with Apple-specific arm64 chips. The most scary thought is if UIKit-on-macOS starts requiring Developer ID entitlem…
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>at least for as long as the guy is still with Apple. This is nothing new. They've said things on stage that they've literally reversed on a year later.
Aside from Steve Jobs surprising the Facetime team with his open source announcement (and honestly, any Steve Jobs claims in general), what are you referring to?
So how far are away from the macOS iOS merge? A Stocks app as an OS-level feature feels pretty darn close.
"A Stocks app as an OS-level feature feels pretty darn close." A Stocks app is trivial. There's been a Stocks Dashboard widget type thing for years and years. Merging the OSes would mean revamping the macOS UI to be usable with touch screens, removing or drastically changing file access, etc.
It's not like iOS doesn't have a file system, they just don't allow you to access it.
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I don't think they'd ever admit to focussing on stability because that would imply the OS isn't already stable.
But that's exactly how they marketed Snow Leopard (macOS 10.6). They even said it would have "no new features", instead focusing on making it faster and more reliable.
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They said: "Are you merging iOS and macOS?" "No." Then proceeded to detail the port of the iOS APIs to Mac and some apps just using those APIs. Time will tell, but I think a merge is exactly what they are planning long term, and it makes sense to do so (with some differences for user input and larger screens). It's crazy to develop very similar APIs for GUI apps in parallel, and what has become two different OSs with…
> It's crazy to develop very similar APIs for GUI apps in parallel, and what has become two different OSs with slightly different apps and feature sets, but a huge amount of overlap. The savings for Apple and developers of having a consistent set of new APIs and one set of apps to manage (for example their entire office suite) would be huge. Right, and what the announcement seems to show is that UIKit could eventuall…
From a developer perspective, I expect them to arrive at one API, with a few options to allow feedback from various sources (tap or click), and handling multiple screen sizes gracefully, and therefore pretty much one OS, so that you can build one app across devices - this is exactly what they are trying out with their ios app port. Once you do that, it doesn't make sense to have two APIs.
I can't think of many features that would be exclusive - to take your example of energy budgets, saving energy on both is equally important now that laptops are a mainstay and desktops an afterthought. We may well see ARM laptops for this reason. Watches are the one exception that have a budget so tight at present that normal apps just aren't feasible.
So I think a merge is exactly what is on the cards in the long term, particularly as they are now run by an operations person and the money flows in more and more from phones, not computers.