> Here’s an idea: guess at new features in macOS by using the work of Safari team members as a leading indicator.
Shh, please... we don't want WebKit releases to look like xnu releases
Inspecting Web Views in macOS
61–70 of 147 posts
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#62GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.
What does rust have to do with this?
Its the first language that lends itself to be used both on the desktop fornative GUIs as well as in the browser.
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
As it turns out, React / CSS / the document-object-model are popular for more reasons than “it works on different computers.” Who knew!
who knew? it sneaked up on us. we spent decades wedging compatibility shims into gaping functionality holes, while heroic visionaries of the web as a platform toiled and bargained to bring us the tools we needed for modularity, performance, and a modicum of basic platform services. all while making sure continued to work.
Apple has been using web views for apps for more than a decade - recognizing that such an object is more generally usable than just "a browser" was a motivation for WebView (now WKWebView) existing as a platform API from the earliest days of WebKit being a thing that existed (The logical extreme being the original WebView API exposed an objc interface to the DOM)
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe that Apple Music (nee iTunes) has used web views for a long time; probably over a decade. The entire thing probably isn't a web view, but my recollection is that the store components were.
Apple Music is now using a technology they developed to convert web views back to native - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424 On macOS 12.2 Music consumes much less RAM, and no longer has a webview process.
Still remains quite slow and unresponsive in comparison to Spotify.
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe that Apple Music (nee iTunes) has used web views for a long time; probably over a decade. The entire thing probably isn't a web view, but my recollection is that the store components were.
Apple Music is now using a technology they developed to convert web views back to native - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424 On macOS 12.2 Music consumes much less RAM, and no longer has a webview process.
I think your link is wrong; are you thinking of Catalyst[1]?
I'm not an Apple insider, but Catalyst looks like the thing that was codenamed Marzipan for a while. I think it's more for converting iOS apps than web views.
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which doesn't use React, CSS, or a DOM...? What's your point? ImGUI is imperative UI programming. DOMs are declarative.
ImGui makes UI programming declarative in structure the exact same way React makes UI programming declarative. React brings to the table is the general concept of immediate mode UI programming. So does ImGUI. Reaching for React doesn't mean it's the only thing the programmers knew, it means it's a general pattern that arises in UI programming.
No, it absolutely does not. ImGUI is a completely, totally different model of GUI programming.
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#67Wow. I always thought the argument in favor of using web technologies on the desktop was that cross-platform became easier. And yet here is an example of the most unambiguously single-platform app I can possibly imagine, and under the hood it uses web - and React of all things! Crazy.
As it turns out, React / CSS / the document-object-model are popular for more reasons than “it works on different computers.” Who knew!
I'd bet that the reason they're using React is because it's cheaper and easier to find front-end developers for the task.
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#68Quick. Hide the evidence so the ATP purists can still insist on ideological purity and in the one true belief that the only way to write Mac Applications is to do everything in Swift or Objective-C. After all, If Apple does it....
It is using webview to display some content in an app that is native. That's been common practice in many Mac applications for a decade. WebKit exposes native NSView subclasses to make embedding them trivial enough that for some content they are /better/. Heavily formatted content? Write your own layout engine, or just use html?
The problem with electron apps is that they are entirely a single webview, that poorly implements the vast majority of standard platform affordances (if you read the other comments, you see a lot of people complaining about this specific part of System Preferences). Add to that these applications using absolutely astounding amounts of ram, huge downloads because you're essentially downloading a full copy of chrome for each app, they all have terrible launch times (because there's each is loading its own copy of chrome), the bad and laggy accessibility features, etc and the reason people dislike them becomes fairly clear.
I get that there's very little standard UI or inter app interaction on linux and windows, but historically that has not been the case on Mac - the increasing prevalence of low quality electron apps is making that less reliable.
The only electron app that is actually a good app is VSCode, and even that is always frustrating to use due to a bunch of basic platform behavior that they at best get wrong, but more often just don't even attempt.
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#69Source-available variants of [GNU's Not] Unix have often been on the leading edge of user interfaces, from immitating the Xerox PARC desktop metaphor before Windows did (X11 initial release: June 1984, Windows: November 1985) to adding intrusive ads to the main system menu / search around the time Windows 8 was released. But it’s interesting to see macOS’s proprietary UI now apparently following GNOME’s example of po…
Windows settings use react native
Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS
#70GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.
This post is talking mostly about CSS and it shows a document object model tree. JavaScript is also used, given that he mentions React. Among these options, it seems that Rust is most similar to JavaScript. But this whole article would be the same if React was written with Rust instead. So what is the broken part of GUI development, and why is Rust positioned to fix it? As I see it, not much would change if we used R…
Amusingly, SwiftUI seems much better suited to this use case than any other lower level language, while Elm and Clojure are much more obvious contenders. In any case, the space is crowded with DSLs and the expression-based DSLs are the ones that generally keep gaining traction.