31–36 of 36 posts
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But a Mac's interface is not an iOS interface. There are different constraints and different best practices, and sometimes completely different widgets. To make a decent UI, you have to understand the native platform.
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of the good. The ability of a stopgap measure such as this is a good way to let established iOS players test the Mac waters without a huge investment.
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What would you consider the essential Cocoa design patterns? I would point at the items listed at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/... . Delegation, notification, target action, the responder chain - these are all shared. The frameworks are not identical, but to say they're not related… they only look wildly different if you're focusing in incredibly closely. If you consider .Net, or Java,…
Nobody is saying that that they're not related. They clearly are (although the presence of other UI libraries does not affect any comparison of that relationship at all. Your examples of delegates, responders, targets etc are concepts - and indeed UIKit and AppKit are both built around the same concepts. The implementations of both is quite different however, to the point that porting something of complexity from UIK…
Right after opening, the app store seemed flooded with programs that had UIs that clearly showed their iOS heritage. And I've yet to see a singly one where this actually is good (no, Twitter for Mac isn't one). Going further along this road doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Yes, you'll save some time. But unless you're making a throwaway, gimmicky application, you'd better invest some time in creating a new GUI th…
There is huge value in "throwaway" applications. The decision to spend considerable time to even test the Mac market is a huge barrier to entry. This would be a good stepping stone to prove that there is an audience there.
Fascinating idea, but as also mentioned in the article: won't Apple do something similar? There are way more iOS developers than there are Mac developers, and many more flock to the iOS platform every day. Surely, Apple has some incentive to make it easy for iOS developers to make software for the Mac. From the article: Apple already has a version of UIKit that runs on the Mac: every time you launch the iOS Simulator…
I know right? You'd think Apple would do this themselves but for some reason they haven't show any interest. Especially weird considering AppKit is so old and crufty.
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There is huge value in "throwaway" applications. The decision to spend considerable time to even test the Mac market is a huge barrier to entry. This would be a good stepping stone to prove that there is an audience there.
Providing a poor quality application doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the audience a proper port would have, it can be significantly damaging to your brand, and is a waste of press attention.
Also, not everything is brand based. For many things, removing the old thing from the store completely obliterates all mention ever made of it (as it wasn't the sort of thing that gets press attention anyhow).
Not everyone is selling apps that make 6-7 figure incomes. Many people are selling multiples that rake in 4-5 and doing quite nicely with that, and with no marketing.