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It sounds ideal in a developer POV, but this is not open source territory.
Imagine if we were all building upon the state of the art at all times and upgrades were free and things don't break between upgrades.
Huh? Apple and Android (google) are for profit companies and are literally competing against each other. One of the iPhone’s biggest selling points is iOS. Why does the author think Apple would want to share a single, unified interface with its competitor? It sounds ideal in a developer POV, but this is not open source territory.
This short essay is a lament about how close we are to creating really good cross-platform solutions, but how we always fall short because of closing off our ecosystems to each other. I hope to spark a bit of conversation with this about how we can do better moving forwards!
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> So basically, you're denying that it's possible to do excellent cross-platform apps at all. OK. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's a position. Can you name a single cross-platform application that is indistinguishable from a native application?
I don't even know that this question means. Is Photoshop a cross-platform application? Protools? Chrome?
And do you really want to bring up the battery killing Chrome as a great cross platform app?
Safari is much more efficient and ironically from reports, so is Microsoft’s Chromium based browser.
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Look at WebGPU. Still a WIP, but it shows that you really CAN provide a performant cross-platform... platform if you're really thoughtful about performance
And will it look and act like a native app? Will it support all of Apple’s built in accessibility affordances that a developer can get for free by using Apple’s native toolkits (and Microsoft’s)?
If the Apple and MS a11y frameworks were not so distinct from one another, wrapping them in a cross-platform layer would be much easier. But they couldn't be bothered, largely because they both have enough users whose priorities match your own: are the apps on the platform good enough for them. The incentives to standardize a11y at the API level across OS platforms is a tiny fraction of the incentive to standardize e.g. WebGPU.
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Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed. It was not set in stone that people would be by design dumbed down progressively as computing caught on, rather than assimilated into the computing world as 1st class citizens. In a parallel universe something like the Smalltalk, LISP or Forth machines were widely adopted and the dichoto…
Yes and I’m sure that car mechanics are also tsk tsking about everyone that drives a car doesn’t know how to fix one. I’m sure they also thing that cars have been “dumbed down”. I’ve been programming for a long time (since doing assembly in the 80s). My second job out of college was for a small company where I was a developer and also had to manage a SAN, a dozen computers that ran jobs, mail servers, ftp servers, My…
Granted, it's not for everything. But by losing computing we lost a lot more, too.
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At least two of the final three you mentioned run on Windows and macOS, meaning that somewhere there's a cross-platform layer for the GUI. And yet apparently, that works. There's a lesson there, though I'm not sure what it is.
Adobe and Microsoft both have spent 30 years optimizing their development around supporting both Macs and Windows. But how much of the GUI is actually cross platform? Adobe famously used Apple’s Carbon API and was very upset that it wasn’t ported to 64 bit. There is a lot of Cocoa in both products. Microsoft use to brag that they had more Mac developers than Apple did.
I find the idea that when Photoshop or Protools wants to open a dialog with a button, the developer creates two functions, one for Windows and one for macOS, completely unbelievable.
There is almost without doubt some level of in-house cross-platform toolkit in place. It may not go as far as, say, Qt tries to, and it may differ in design philosophy from other similar toolkits, but they are not writing twice the code every time they have do something in the GUI.
If I'm wrong, HN is the place to find out.