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

blog.timac.org

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

#51

Post by mrtksn »

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.

To some degree yes but it has been great to be able to use iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon.

Taps and clicks are completely compatible and the only issues come from multitouch interfaces but even they can work well with substitutions like scroll to zoom instead of pinch to zoom.

Besides, the web has been first-class on both platforms for quite some time now and interfaces that work well on both are pretty much ubiquitous. It comes with added benefit of UI familiarity, be it a Web UI or mobile UI.

Therefore, I think the current issues in some apps are not fundamental but simply bad design choices that can be fixed with better adaptations.

I also don't expect quick and complete re-write of the established apps as re-write with a new UI framework is a common death sentence.

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

#52

Post by clairity »

90minuteAPI wrote: post #6
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.

Supposedly a major justification for the continued separation of Mac and the others (especially iPad) was differing UI interaction patterns. So what are they doing now? Using tools that evolved to serve touch-first interfaces to build desktop applications. The Mac/iPad split grows more confounding with every iteration. Now it feels like familiar desktop features are being reimplemented poorly in both iPadOS _and_ mac…

it’s not that confounding when you consider that iphones dominate apple’s earnings, and so apple wants to unify the platforms under ios (via ipados) rather than under macos where they have no app store lock-in.

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

#53

Post by jarjoura »

The iPodification of the Mac has been so utterly jarring to me. Little nuances in productivity have been reduced to accommodate porting over a platform that was designed for touch.

Microsoft tried for a decade to merge touch design in a desktop space and it was whole-heartedly rejected in the marketplace. Funny that Apple has been trying the same thing long after I get the sense that it no longer matters.

I'm not against the idea of unifying the underlying frameworks, but they went with a lowest common denominator approach. In my mind, that is a failure of execution on their part.

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

#54

Post by linguae »

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…

To be honest, before the release of Apple's M1 Macs in 2020, I thought that the Mac was on its way out, especially around 2017 when we had to endure many years of waiting for new desktop Macs (the Mac Mini had a long period between updates from 2014 to 2018, and the Mac Pro had an even longer period from 2013 to 2019). I still think with the gradual adoption of iOS UI/UX idioms by macOS and the growing adoption of SwiftUI, combined with the fact that Macs now run on Apple Silicon just like iPads, that eventually macOS and iOS will merge despite Apple's repeated claims to the contrary.

Still, I think this will be a major loss for longtime users of macOS who enjoyed roughly two decades of using a well-polished operating system that was unabashedly designed for desktop computing workloads, unlike Windows and some Linux desktops with their confused aims of trying to merge the desktop, mobile, and Web experiences. While iOS's success has been undoubtedly wonderful for Apple, in some ways the success of iOS was the worst thing to happen to the Mac. What hurts in particular is that there is no alternative with the polish of macOS and its ecosystem; it's all ports of Web apps and mobile apps from here on out, with the usability and flexibility issues inherent in these engineering decisions, and all running on platforms that support the moats that Microsoft, Apple, and Google built.

I saw the writing on the wall years ago and my daily drivers are now PCs running Windows 10 and FreeBSD. I don't work for Apple and I'm just one complainer on Hacker News, and so I have little control over the Mac's direction; the best I can do is vote with my dollars. But I'm hoping projects like helloSystem and ravynOS will gain traction and help keep the spirit of Mac OS X alive, and I'm working on my own side project that will explore ideas influenced by the classic Mac OS, OpenDoc, Smalltalk, Lisp machines, and Plan 9; basically, explorations of what could've happened if some of the dreams of early 1990s Apple researchers and engineers had been realized.

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

#55

Post by tmpz22 »

lancesells wrote: post #35
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.

Like most big tech companies I'm sure they find success metrics in every project they do. Especially the ones consumers hate.

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

#56

Post by spike021 »

koinedad wrote: post #33

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.

Same here. Have had to use UIViewRepresentable a few times to make use of UIKit features that SwiftUI doesn't support. Specifically, MapKit is incredibly barebones in SwiftUI, so I couldn't use it at all. Had to use an MKMapView through a UIViewRepresentable instead; this is so I could do things with custom overlays, even as simple as paths between two coordinates.

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

#57

Post by lelandfe »

lancesells wrote: post #35
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.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/155735766117120...

This thread of UI issues with the Ventura System Settings really says it all. Most of this would have been shocking in a different era of Apple.

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

#58

Post by go_prodev »

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.

I get Windows 8 flashbacks

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

#59

Post by CharlesW »

lelandfe wrote: post #57
lancesells wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/155735766117120... This thread of UI issues with the Ventura System Settings really says it all. Most of this would have been shocking in a different era of Apple.

For non-Mac users, Ventura is a forthcoming version of macOS which will be released this fall. Developers are reporting UX issues with beta releases now, and in my experience, many of them will be fixed by release. However, a System Preferences rethink is going to take multiple OS releases to get right.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

bobulous wrote: post #41
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…

Source for Apple Music being an electron app? There is a Apple Music related preference pane that is a webview but that is not the same thing.

[deleted]
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