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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

#91

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

It's not Electron, but it does use a fair bit of web views, or at least did in the past (there might have been talks of some of it being moved back to native code). Either way, it feels like an Electron app, and not even a good one. It's a piece of shit.

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

#92

Post by Klonoar »

Nextgrid wrote: post #91
bobulous wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not Electron , but it does use a fair bit of web views, or at least did in the past (there might have been talks of some of it being moved back to native code). Either way, it feels like an Electron app, and not even a good one. It's a piece of shit.

I believe this changed as of Monterey.

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

#93

Post by yazaddaruvala »

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 shouldn’t be confounding. It seems clear:

Apple views the Mac as an iPad with an attached keyboard and optionally cooling.

There will be touch on the Mac very soon and they are preemptively getting the Apps ready. The whole Apple Silicon migration is to facilitate this merge of macOS and iPadOS. As soon as the 3 year migration to Apple Silicon is complete and most developers have stopped relying on Rosetta, Macs will have touch and there will be no longer two OSs.

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

#94

Post by jcampbell1 »

grishka wrote: post #73
yakubin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using macOS with Big Sur (still on it) and I don't understand why Apple would remove the ability to select buttons in dialog windows with the keyboard. I've googled it and it seems you used to be able to do that on macOS, but when I follow the instructions on Big Sur, I can't move the selection from the button active by default to the other one (e.g. "Ok" vs "Cancel"). That means my right hand is making run…

The enter key activates the blue (default) button, the spacebar activates the one with the focus ring around it. You can move the focus ring with tab.

Cmd+the first letter of the button works.

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

#95

Post by rayiner »

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.

It’s really quite remarkable how something as simple as a settings app ends up showing the toolkit isn’t ready for prime time. The new windows settings app was also a disaster.

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

#96

Post by alexashka »

Klonoar wrote: post #92
Nextgrid wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Electron , but it does use a fair bit of web views, or at least did in the past (there might have been talks of some of it being moved back to native code). Either way, it feels like an Electron app, and not even a good one. It's a piece of shit.

I believe this changed as of Monterey.

Why would someone be forced into changing their entire operating system to get an update to an app?

I just checked since I own multiple macs. It's true, they're going away from webviews, but their new native app ui is broken! When you go Browse, click the first big image and then press the back button in the top left corner, the white navigation bar space at the top disappears, causing the content below it to visibly jump up.

Sigh.

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

#97

Post by robertoandred »

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.

Except nothing here has anything to do with touch.

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

#98

Post by lapcat »

alexashka wrote: post #89
trinix912 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I hear you on the downsides of Electron. The upsides are that there is a plethora of ready-made UI and backend integration solutions to choose from and an abundant pool of candidates to hire from, for a reasonable wage. I don't think there are more than 1000 people worldwide who have shipped a moderately complex mac-native app within the past decade. Apple doesn't seem to think it a problem - they're well on their wa…

> I don't think there are more than 1000 people worldwide who have shipped a moderately complex mac-native app within the past decade.

This is grossly mistaken.

The Mac App Store, which is only 11 years old, is by itself empirical refutation of this claim.

Also, I believe your claim is also mistaken that "Apple itself uses webviews for complex UI in their desktop Music app." Where do you get that from? I don't mean to be rude, but your other comment "I've mistakenly conflated Electron with webview use" strongly suggests that you're not technically sophisticated when it comes to analyzing Mac app binaries. No Mac developer would ever make that mistake. (I think we can safely assume that you're not one, considering that you think there are only 1000 worldwide.)

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

#99

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

Apocryphon wrote: post #25
carlycue wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, that’s where things stand today, but the Mac is part of Apples brand. They screw it up enough and iPhone won’t win on its strengths anymore. Design and execution. It used to be but not anymore. The iPhone is Apple's most important product and the majority of iPhone users aren't interested in the Mac.

There's huge amounts of work that can only be done on desktop or on laptops, and not on smartphones, simply because of form factor. Unless we're imagining a future where people plug their phones and tablets into monitor-keyboard setups and type away, all the time .

I think that could be a reality one day, if they get the UI right. An iphone is plenty powerful for most office-style workloads

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

#100

Post by minedwiz »

rayiner wrote: post #95
lelandfe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s really quite remarkable how something as simple as a settings app ends up showing the toolkit isn’t ready for prime time. The new windows settings app was also a disaster.

Settings seems like a good way to test out a Framework. You've got a lot of different areas to cover, with a mix of graphical content, text, buttons, menus, & dropdowns.
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