Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

blog.timac.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 145 posts

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#31

Post by filoleg »

carlycue wrote: post #4

In 2021, the Mac grossed $30B. iPad ($30B) and iPhone ($196B) together grossed $226B. Mac users might think they're still the most important part of Apple but it turns out, the Mac is quite insignificant compared to Apple's mobile OS's when you put things in perspective. I am still surprised that Apple is pouring resources into the Mac. Nowadays, smartphones and tablets are the main computer for 90% of people. The so…

Don't get me wrong, I definitely like my iPad pro a lot, and use it on regular. And I also think that having some functionally useful version of Xcode on it would be amazing.

However, that wouldn't replace macOS for me at all. I see a lot of value in iPad as a device I use on a regular basis, but even with all those features, I still need a general purpose computing machine for plenty of reasons. No matter what features iPad might end up having in the future, it wont replace macOS for me.

Killing Mac not only hurts Mac itself, it also hurts all the adjacent products. Two features I personally really like on iPad are universal control over mac+ipad screens (one keyboard+trackpad controls both devices at the same time, but keeping the OS and everything else entirely separate) and the extended screen (where ipad can act as a simple external screen for a mac, either as wired or wireless). That class of features straight up wouldn't exist without mac existing. Hell, part of the reason i even use an iPhone is because of how smoothly it interacts with macOS (shared clipboard+imessage ftw).

Sure, the general public needs might change, and they might swing towards ipads over similar form factor general purpose computing devices (aka laptops). I don't see it happening, however. The people who would be the ones to do it, they had already done it by switching from laptops to smartphones over the past decade with the rise of iOS and Android. And i just don't see them switching away from smartphones to iPads (or tablets in general, for that matter).

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#32

Post by trinix912 »

alexashka wrote: post #28

Meh. Apple has near infinite resources, it can do whatever it wants. The rest of industry has moved on to Electron and keeps bucking, trying to get react native or some other cross platform thing to work well enough on mobile. Apple itself uses webviews for complex UI in their desktop Music app. Are there any non-trivial apps Apple has created from scratch in the past decade using its own libraries and frameworks? No…

Electron is not a good option either. It defeats the entire point of making a desktop app in first place. It's slow, wasteful, abstracts too much of the filesystem away for a desktop app, doesn't integrate into the OS, doesn't use the OS-provided UI widgets, etc. etc.

It also depends on what you mean by "non-trivial". For me, something like Final Cut Pro is non-trivial. I'm yet to see that kind of thing (one that's actually used, not just a PoC) done in either Electron or Apple's Swift framework-of-the-year.

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#33

Post by koinedad »

SwiftUI has been a pain to learn because it’s young and you still need to learn UIKit or another framework to get unsupported tasks done. So basically need to learn the old frame and the new just to use the new. At least that’s been my experience not knowing the older frameworks myself.

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#34

Post by Apocryphon »

alexashka wrote: post #28

Meh. Apple has near infinite resources, it can do whatever it wants. The rest of industry has moved on to Electron and keeps bucking, trying to get react native or some other cross platform thing to work well enough on mobile. Apple itself uses webviews for complex UI in their desktop Music app. Are there any non-trivial apps Apple has created from scratch in the past decade using its own libraries and frameworks? No…

I'm not sure if Apple is planning on building huge non-trivial apps anymore. This isn't a knock against the amount of work that goes into creating new versions of their macOS apps. But I don't think any of them are creating new transformative experiences for use cases that consumers were missing on before. Stocks and News are just delivering more content and services. This very much reflects Apple's continued focus in becoming a services company.

It mirrors what Valve is like these days. It's the Steam platform company. They do make a few new games (Artifact, Half-Life: Alyx), but nothing transformative like their previous new franchises or even sequels were like. So many companies are in the platform businesses these days, because it's good to be a rentier. So it goes.

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#35

Post by lancesells »

hbn wrote: post #3

I hate this consolidation of mobile and desktop apps and I hoped Apple would have had the design sense to keep them separate like they should be. Mobile and desktop UIs are two different worlds with different interaction paradigms. Trying to combine them makes an awkward UI that feels good nowhere.

Most new macOS apps from Apple seem to be pretty awful and don't feel like an actual mac app. Home, TV, and Music have some really horrible ux/ui. Music is slightly better than the others but you would think they would have the resources to make these right. TV and Music are subscription-based in a way which seems like a no-brainer to add resources to make a proper app.

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#36

Post by Apocryphon »

conradev wrote: post #18
WoodenChair wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would they rewrite Final Cut Pro in SwiftUI? Rewriting code is a large effort and a waste of time without proper justification – new developer tooling for UI is not usually a good enough justification to rewrite the entire UI It's not about Final Cut Pro specifically. It could be a new app. It's about having a single showcase complex app that says to developers—look hey we can build something really performance…

Absolutely! So you need to align that goal with a project that is actually going to provide value to the end user. There aren’t enough new features each year to (re)write large portions of macOS UI. The Shortcuts app in macOS 12 and the Settings app in macOS 13 are almost entirely SwiftUI and the most substantial projects in this regard

Even John Gruber has been down on the Settings app, courtesy of Niki Tonsky's preview

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/08/15/ventura-system-...

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#37

Post by mch82 »

filoleg wrote: post #31
carlycue wrote: post #4

In 2021, the Mac grossed $30B. iPad ($30B) and iPhone ($196B) together grossed $226B. Mac users might think they're still the most important part of Apple but it turns out, the Mac is quite insignificant compared to Apple's mobile OS's when you put things in perspective. I am still surprised that Apple is pouring resources into the Mac. Nowadays, smartphones and tablets are the main computer for 90% of people. The so…

Don't get me wrong, I definitely like my iPad pro a lot, and use it on regular. And I also think that having some functionally useful version of Xcode on it would be amazing. However, that wouldn't replace macOS for me at all. I see a lot of value in iPad as a device I use on a regular basis, but even with all those features, I still need a general purpose computing machine for plenty of reasons. No matter what featu…

Out of curiosity, do you use a lot of windows?

I’ve used a Mac my whole life. Recently, I’m using 4-finger swipe to switch full screen apps. I’m also choosing the “snap” layouts over dragging windows around. It’s useful to have 2 folders on screen to be able to move files between them, but I don’t stack windows like I used to.

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#38

Post by dangelov »

I recently took to rewriting what should be a very simple app from Obj-C to Swift with SwiftUI - because it's the future. The CPU usage was at 5% while idle, just for having a simple tiny pie chart that updates. Not to mention that for some seemingly basic things I still had to use AppKit anyway.

Wrote basically the exact same thing 1 day later in Swift with AppKit and NO SwiftUI and it sits at 0% CPU usage with less code complexity. Maybe in a few years I will give SwiftUI another try.

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#39

Post by jbverschoor »

Apocryphon wrote: post #30
rvanmil wrote: post #7

I remember making fun of Microsoft trying to combine mouse and touch in a single UI. And yet here we are, Apple doing the same thing to macOS, resulting in the same shit desktop/mouse experience that macOS has become. I understand the reasons but it seems so incredibly un-Apple to sacrifice UX for this.

Eh, it's not that crazy unless they put a touchscreen on MacBooks.

Still crazy.. I want to use my keyboard. My shortcuts, and do proper bulk operations. It's just pure laziness from their devs. They don't know, they don't care..

Re: Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

#40

Post by mjmsmith »

alexashka wrote: post #28

Meh. Apple has near infinite resources, it can do whatever it wants. The rest of industry has moved on to Electron and keeps bucking, trying to get react native or some other cross platform thing to work well enough on mobile. Apple itself uses webviews for complex UI in their desktop Music app. Are there any non-trivial apps Apple has created from scratch in the past decade using its own libraries and frameworks? No…

Apple itself uses electron for their desktop Music app.

Really? Do you have a source for this?

Post reply on HN