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The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

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Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#81

Post by leadingthenet »

_bxg1 wrote: post #57
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately Uh, I'm going to hard disagree on that. They take longer to open, they're slower to use, they take up more battery, and they don't behave in a consistent way with the rest of the OS.

In my experience, purely from a UX perspective (both visuals and responsiveness), a hand-crafted macOS app tends to be moderately better than an Electron app, but an Electron app is usually vastly better than a shoddy or cross-compiled native app.

A well-crafted, organic, gluten-free macOS app is generally the best UI and UX experience on any platform, by a mile. Apps that come to mind are Things by Cultured Code and (the as of yet unreleased to the public) Nova editor by Panic.

No Electron app has ever even come close for me, certainly not VSCode that everyone seems to love so much.

Then there's performance...

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#82

Post by leadingthenet »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #70
sdegutis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really I was just thinking of VS Code and a vague memory of some other Electron apps I've used in the past, excepting one in particular which I will not name. But VS Code is just great.

VS Code is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. :) It's kind of frustrating that there seem to be so few Electron apps that live up to its standard.

And frankly, on macOS, VSCode isn't even THAT great. The UI certainly doesn't follow platform conventions, the scrolling is janky, and it just feels out of place.

Additionally, I have yet to encounter a single native Cocoa app that has such a strong effect on battery life.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#83

Post by leadingthenet »

sdegutis wrote: post #67
tomc1985 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree on all points... "Counting seconds" may mean little to you but by proxy you can look at conversion statistics for web stores vs response time and see a pretty clear correlation VSCode's 'performance' is the result of an obscene amount of tuning the base framework, far more than most applications would need. Most other Electron apps do not see anywhere near this level of optimization (and they desperately nee…

First of all Apple does not follow its HIG in many ways. But even aside from that, the HIG itself changes every few years, sometimes drastically such as the iOS 7 departure. And it takes many apps time to catch up. One example is Apple's own new Mac App Store which doesn't even allow selecting or copying text in app descriptions last I checked.

Apple has definitely been shitting the bed on UI in the past few macOS releases.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#85

Post by mrzool »

oefrha wrote: post #5
crabl wrote: post #2

I don't know about that... I think the only conclusion you could draw from this might be that the market for iOS and Mac _RSS readers_ are almost the same size. You might even be able to stretch it to say they are the _same_ market.

I wouldn’t even draw that conclusion. NetNewsWire is very old school with an old fan base, and outside its existing fan base I don’t think it’s particularly relevant today (sorry). I doubt a user new to RSS or new to RSS reader on Apple platforms today would land on NNW. (I’m a longtime Reeder user.)

Being a heavy, long-time RSS user and having tested both the macOS and iOS app of NNW, I think you’re wrong. NNW it’s incredibly well-done, fast and polished, and it’s the best RSS app I’ve ever used, and I’ve used plenty. It’s not unrealistic to think it will become successful and relevant, maybe even contribute to a resurgence of RSS and bring in new users, given enough time.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#86

Post by leadingthenet »

arvinsim wrote: post #64
quesera wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve Jobs would be pissed Discoverability on the App Store has always been horrible. That, and App Store performance (search, page load, etc) are high on the list of things that baffle me most about Apple. These are not hard problems to fix. There is no incentive to not fix them. Customers are suffering. FTFAS.

> There is no incentive to not fix them. I think there is an incentive not to. If you buy Apple hardware, you are stuck with these stores. They know you will complain but ultimately comply and accept.

That makes no sense. Wouldn't Apple want you to download as many apps / spend as much money on new shiny things as possible?

I think it's just incompetence.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#87

Post by burntoutfire »

sdegutis wrote: post #38
coliveira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only documentation is lacking, but Apple has the annoying tendency to change their frameworks every few years. Writing a MacOS app is a fight against the constant changes.

Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately. Look and feel may not be as consistent as the ideal but it generally never was in the first place, even among native Cocoa apps. The web has won on desktop.

The fact that Electron apps try to always fit everything into one window is an antipattern for many kinds of applications. Just try using MS Teams and you'll find yourself constantly switching between different modes (a call mode and a chatroom mode for example), while in Skype for Business (which was admitedly terrible in many other ways) they were just two separate windows.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#88

Post by AsyncAwait »

leokennis wrote: post #80
jolux wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What am I missing about BBEdit? I’ve tried to get into it a few times and it just seems archaic and weird and less capable vs even my emacs setup, let alone something like Visual Studio Code these days.

For code, you’re probably right it isn’t all that great. But as text editor on the Mac it can do anything. What Photoshop is to images, BBEdit is to text.

As far as flexibility goes, I'd be very surprised if anything can touch Emacs.

Re: The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

#89

Post by Fnoord »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #53
leejoramo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same guy. 100% different project. He required the NetNewsWire name well after the start of this new open source RSS reader.

If it does the same thing and has the same name and creator, is it really a different project? Many software releases are actually complete rewrites under the hood. The only reason what became Net News Wire 5 originally had a different name is because NNW was owned by BlackPixel at that point.

In this case, the major version of the software was increased (ie. NetNewsWire 5.0).
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