12 ms·

MacOS Marzipan

233 points by adrian_mrd 8y ago

sooheon 8y ago
Writing was on the wall as soon as mobile overtook laptops/desktops as Apple's cash cow, but it is still disappointing. Dumbed down, lowest common denominator UI will eat the Apple ecosystem.
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
For those of us that aren't keeping track: "Marzipan is the code name for the technology that will allow iOS developers, with just a handful of modifications, to port the iOS versions of their apps over to the Mac." [0] At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. But I guess getting a bad version of an app is better than nothing at all. I hate the whole mobile-first trend, since it usually means fucking over desktop users. Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window. [0] https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-the-ars-technica-review/7/#h1 https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...
- scarface74 8y ago
  At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS The entire purpose of porting these apps to the Mac was to dog food Marzipan. If they had made “proper Mac apps” that would have defeated the purpose.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    IMO that's a poor excuse; that's just tantamount to shipping your org chart. You ship the best product for your customers, and if the technology you've pre-selected as a vehicle actively precludes you from doing so, STOP, and re-consider what you're up to. Focus on the user, not management needs, not artificial technology limitations. Otherwise, you won't have users.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      It was never about the apps. It’s about getting feedback from customers and developers and iterating. Google has been shipping “beta” software for years. It’s not like any of the apps they chose are core parts of the OS.
      - eloisant 8y ago
        Apple is not Google.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      In the long term, it's better if Marzipan gets real-world usage from some less-critical apps than Apple shipping a half-baked SDK to developers next year with a great, native Home app.
  - lloeki 8y ago
    I suppose what the GP meant is that Apple, even if using Marzipan, was in power to do the job properly, from menubar to titlebar to modals and set a standard for developers to follow, instead of going the lazy route and have what appears to be mere containers of an iOS experience with only slight touches of macOS. It really does make me think of Electron, with foreign conventions held within a window and tentacles reaching out to some APIs like menubar and notifications.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      They basically said at WWDC that Marzipan is still a work in progress. They haven’t even promised a date when it would be released. Isn’t it better to release early and often and get feedback? It’s basically a “technology preview”. It would be much worse if they thought they were releasing a fully baked framework in a year, tied down the APIs and be stuck with something that got negative feedback. It’s strange that a forum that usually supports “development in the open” is now criticizing Apple for doing just that.
- raydev 8y ago
  > At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Apple sees this and I think it's pretty clear their intent is for UIKit to supersede AppKit on macOS. One day. Apple unfortunately shipped what is effectively the alpha version to the public.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Debatable. AppKit might have a bunch of legacy cruft, but it also has some truly beautiful things like bindings, or how certain interface controls work. It's a much more mature framework.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Bindings (and KVO/KVC that support them) are magic-oriented programming that make me sad. One has to assume they very specifically didn't make the cut when iOS and UIKit were designed :P
    - therockhead 8y ago
      Interesting, i found bindings only useful for the most basic of UI and not really worth the effort.
  - TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
    > From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Can you expand on this? I haven't done iOS development, so I'd be interested in what ways people consider UIKit superior. Although it wouldn't surprise me, since it came much later than AppKit and they had hindsight when designing it.
    - GeekyBear 8y ago
      The topic of making UIKit available to developers on the Mac comes up from time to time. People seem to go back and forth on it, as in this post from a couple of years ago. >The thing is, UIKit "just works" (most of the time at least). AppKit has so much historical garbage that it's become a pain to work with for modern macOS apps. It's still really hard to make simple things like customizing system controls and Core Animation doesn't work as well on it as it does on UIKit. https://medium.com/@guilhermerambo/why-uikit-for-macos-is-important-ff4e74a82cf0 https://medium.com/@guilhermerambo/why-uikit-for-macos-is-im...
- coldtea 8y ago
  >At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. It's not about putting resources for their own apps or not. It's about enabling this route to macOS for iOS developers. They're just eating their own dogfood. >Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window. That's what most people want anyway. Not to have to manage 5 panels and sub-windows for each app on top of managing their apps. Microsoft did the same, Adobe, etc.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. I'm confused. The resources already exist, it's called "implementing applications on macOS". Marzipan is for iOS devs who want their existing application quickly running on macOS without actually porting it, either because there's some demand and they don't want to do macOS development or as a prelude to a proper port/cross-platform implementation. Apple can't magick the void into the not-void, an iOS application works on different principles than a macOS one.
bradgessler 8y ago
I welcome Marzipan. It’s not perfect at the moment, but lately I feel like when I’m in macOS I’m running a browser and awkwardly trying to switch between tabs without Cmd + Tab. It’s not fun. Over the last year I’ve been using an iPad with a hardware keyboard for productivity apps and it’s great. There’s apps for everything, even G-Suite, that I can Cmd + Tab through without any problems. I really hope that the rough edges get worked out and Marizipan works; otherwise macOS will become even more stale. The real abomination in Mojave is the Screenshot annotation tool. Good luck figuring out how to add and arrow with some text. — Edit: Changed Alt Tab to Cmd Tab
- binomialxenon 8y ago
  > awkwardly trying to switch between tabs without Alt + Tab. Ctrl+Tab? (is it Cmd+Tab on the Mac?) Shortcuts like that are a big part of how I use the browser.
  - bradgessler 8y ago
    Yeah oops. Edited original message.
    - teknologist 8y ago
      It's ctrl + tab in Chrome. You can also use option + command and the left/right arrows to flick between tabs.
- brazzledazzle 8y ago
  There’s a different shortcut for switching between tabs in a single application. I don’t know if I customized mine but it’s something like cmd+Ctrl+arrow. Cmd+tilde switches between an application’s Windows.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I believe the default one is ⇧⌘[ or ⇧⌘].
CharlesW 8y ago
> I debated calling this post ‘Home, News, Stocks and Voice Memos for Mac’ because it’s not really a comment on the Marzipan project initiative. I would've been a lot less disappointed with the article if it had the alternate title.
codazoda 8y ago
I suspect MacOS will slowly begin to look more like iOS. These apps might be the beginning of the trend.
- hazz99 8y ago
  I hope they don't ruin the dev experience. I love my Macbook Pro.
wvenable 8y ago
I feel the same way about Windows 10 Store apps. They don't have the performance issues mentioned in the article but they otherwise feel alien to the rest of the OS. Even web applications feel more integrated.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  ChromeOS's support for Android apps almost feels similarly alien, except that everything in ChromeOS is already a webapp so it's not too jarring.
jhack 8y ago
It has a lot of potential but the apps included with Mojave feel way too iOS-like and out of place in macOS. Hopefully it gets better integration before they open this up to developers.
chungy 8y ago
This sounds equally applicable to pgAdmin 4, or indeed any Electron app on a Linux desktop.
walterbell 8y ago
If there is going to be an Apple Arm laptop, it would likely run an iOS derivative and would need both keyboard and mouse awareness. Would Marzipan make it easier to go in the other direction, e.g. run iOS apps in tiled windows on an iOS laptop, alongside "CLI/terminal" windows?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > If there is going to be an Apple Arm laptop, it would likely run an iOS derivative Why do you think this?
  - walterbell 8y ago
    An Apple Arm laptop would compete with Chromebook & Surface Go, both of which are "locked down" and optimized for Arm, similar to iPads. - iOS is Apple's primary revenue focus - iOS is already optimized for Arm - iOS itself was derived from MacOS - iOS new derivative can support KB/mouse - Arm + macOS = no 3rd-party apps compiled for Arm - Arm + iOS = million existing apps - Arm + iOS does not conflict with expensive MacBook Pros
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > iOS is Apple's primary revenue focus > iOS is already optimized for Arm > iOS itself was derived from MacOS All true… > iOS new derivative can support KB/mouse iOS can support the keyboard currently, but not very well. And it can't support the mouse at all. > Arm + macOS = no 3rd-party apps compiled for Arm That's what an emulation layer is for. > Arm + iOS = million existing apps That's a nice bonus. > Arm + iOS does not conflict with expensive MacBook Pros Apple is no stranger to cannibalizing itself. So, overall, I'm still not sold that they won't just make a ARM MacBook that runs macOS, rather than iOS.
      - walterbell 8y ago
        Apple controls MacOS and iOS. They can make iOS support kb & mouse, even if initially focused on Apple apps like Terminal, Mail & office. Windows on Arm is forced to use an emulation layer because the majority of Windows apps are x86. The majority of Apple apps are already on Arm. Cannibalization is done to a smaller market in order to reach a larger market. Which market is larger for Apple? Apple can do both: low-cost 2018 Arm iOS laptop and premium 2019 Arm MacOS Macbook (when Marzipan is ready to bring iOS apps to x86).
tolmasky 8y ago
After so many years of Apple fans telling everyone that any cross platform technology demonstrated absolute laziness on the part of developers that resulted in unacceptable un-native feel, how fitting it is that now Apple, the largest company on Earth, and home to the makers of AppKit no less, can no longer be burdened to take the time to write real Mac apps anymore. I know that people will say that this is Apple working hard to make the Mac viable again, but especially when considered in the context of the poor Mac hardware in the past two years, I think it’s clear that’s not the case. Not mentioned in this article is that these apps look weird because they’re using 1.3x scaling from iOS too. Apple barely takes the time to differentiate iOS on the iPad, or even the XS Max. Owning either of these two devices constantly feels like there would be obvious places to make the experience feel better than just a big iPhone. Do we really think Apple is going to work that hard on making iOS software feel good in the Mac? Remember, when the iPad first came out, everyone said “oh it’s new, I’m sure they’ll really make the software different soon”. It took 7 years to get multi-tasking in there. And this was the star product for a while. iOS still doesn’t really feel like iPad is it’s home.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Apple … can no longer be burdened to take the time to write real Mac apps anymore I have no doubt that Apple could have written these from scratch and they'd be fantastic. They're just testing out the new Marzipan platform so that they can work out the kinks in it before launching it next year.
  - ixtli 8y ago
    I agree. I'm usually the first to jump on lazy design or the near complete sacrifice of form and function just to release a few hours earlier to save more of daddy's precious investment capital ... but these are clearly just toys. It's a demo of the underlying tech. I think the better argument is that giving such tech to 3rd part devs will encourage them to be lazy.
  - tolmasky 8y ago
    I am 100% certain these apps will not be fantastic in 1 year. Or 2, or 3. Let’s look at another cross-platform app that Apple has had years to perfect, iTunes: terrible since they’ve had to make it work on Mac and Windows. Apple Music being the latest proof point that they cannot make a nice experience. The track record isn’t good. But honestly, what’s the latest fantastic new Mac app you’ve used? I can’t think of any. The days of something like Keynote being released are behind us.
saagarjha 8y ago
> In this case, I suspect the Marzipan system houses apps in a window with a titlebar, and it automatically populates the window with the display name of the bundle. It creates a window for each app, and the titlebar is set to the app name pulled from Launch Services.
thought_alarm 8y ago
Some people have been clamouring for a way to run iOS apps on an Mac for a long time, and now here it is. When Marzipan was first announced, Apple was very careful to temper people's expectations. Marzipan is not about some grand new cross-platform development framework. It's not about merging Mac and iOS. It's about allowing iOS developers to port certain iOS apps to the Mac with as little friction as possible. And in that sense it's a complete success. Many 3rd-party apps can already run inside of Marzipan with little or no code changes. That's a huge win. There are some very obvious downsides. Most iOS apps are a poor fit on the desktop and won't conform to the expected Mac desktop expectations. I suppose Apple could have gone the Windows 8 route and put these iOS apps in a completely separate environment, but we all know how that turned out on Windows. At least these apps attempt to mesh with the regular desktop environment. Another downside is that it's a hack. These are pure iOS apps running inside of an iOS simulator designed to look like a Mac app. These apps have no access to the world outside of iOS. If you're looking to make a great modern Mac app, Marzipan isn't for you. If you're looking for an easier way to share UI code between your AppKit and UIKit apps, Marzipan has nothing for you. If you have a relatively simple iOS app that you think might be useful on a Mac, Marzipan is exactly what you've been waiting for. If you want a peek into what a grand new cross-platform development framework might be, take a look at the JetEngine.framework embedded in the Mac App Store app. It appears to be a separate UI framework that is neither AppKit nor UIKit, but can run on top of either. However, it's full of App Store-specific UI components and I would expect that it was developed only for internal use at Apple.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  The App Store app isn't particularly great, either. There are many UI paradigms it ends up breaking, and of course, it still goes for that sidebar/main window layout that all the Marzipan apps use.
  - sephoric 8y ago
    Apples been trying to push the sidebar thing for a few years now on general Mac apps. It started as an evolution of the Finder sidebar and was named “source lists” for a short while and now it’s just called Sidebar in the default View too menu for new apps. Every time I go to use Notes on Mac I get confused by the two sidebars. Hopefully they calm down on their sidebar mania a bit soon. The web is a great proving ground for hierarchical organization of widgets and information, and I hope Apple can be humble and take notes from conventions that are popping up and sticking around about how to do “multiple sidebars” a little smarter.
nodamage 8y ago
Is anyone else concerned that the influx of cheap, low-quality iOS apps ported to Mac via Marzipan is going to effectively poison the well for existing Mac apps? Software prices have already been pushed to rock bottom on mobile but things are more sustainable on Mac, for now anyway...
- sephoric 8y ago
  Nah. Mac users who pay for software are a different demographic than their iOS counterparts in my experience. Such Mac users are usually professionals who pay a little extra for the reliability and quality and attention to detail that Mac apps have been know for for a while now.
- carlesfe 8y ago
  Fair point. However, we already have an influx of cheap, low-quality web apps ported to Mac via Electron. I think in this case Marzipan is a better solution, as it will allow willing developers to port native iOS apps to the Mac without much effort. It won't help with webapp juggernauts like Slack or Skype, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
  - teknologist 8y ago
    I actually wouldn't mind having the iOS Skype app running on my Mac. It has a nice dark mode.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      So would the old Skype desktop app, had they kept it around and linked it against a recent SDK. But no, they threw it out, replaced it with some sort of Electron mess, and now have to pay the price of not having proper dark mode support.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  The long term trend for software prices is towards zero, I'm not sure this will have much influence on that.
dirtylowprofile 8y ago
Any one experienced the News app not syncing between Mojave and iOS 12?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It did that for me for a while, but eventually it came around to syncing.
arcticbull 8y ago
As I've learned so often to do with Apple experiments, I'm going to ignore this one and it's probably going to get better or go away, I seriously doubt it'll stay objectively bad like this. Apple does this from time to time. Remember when iCal looked liked, to quote a Gizmodo writeup, "a lone cattleman's notebook" missing only "animated beaded tassels"? Or when Game Center on iOS looked like "an evening of backgammon at the nursing home" that "smelled like plastic bottle whiskey"? [1] Because they absolutely did. Let's see where this thing goes. Seeing them remedy their many flagrant mistakes over the years has given me, oddly, hope. [1] https://gizmodo.com/5849940/ugh-god-why-apple-is-making-everything-look-like-an-ugly-wild-west https://gizmodo.com/5849940/ugh-god-why-apple-is-making-ever...
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Remember when iCal looked liked, to quote a Gizmodo writeup, "a lone cattleman's notebook" And that was bad because? Enough things look like "a pretentious hipster notebook" already!
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I don't think they were denigrating farm workers nor pushing the hipster aesthetic. It was a problem with not following Apple's own guidelines and making something that clashed so much with the rest of the system.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Yes it's not about what they made it look like - and to be clear, my understand was the intent was to replicate the rich leather feel of Steve's private jet. It's that they insistent on making it look like something at all, and that clashed with the entire aesthetic. Stuck out like a sore thumb.
mankash666 8y ago
Here's the thing: most users don't really care. The evidence is in the author's own disapproval of the slack app - about it just being a wrapper around a website disguised as an app. Guess what, slack desktop has a LOT of traction, and paying customers! If an app is sufficiently good on Marzipan, then the users will steer it towards becoming better if they care.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  >Here's the thing: most users don't really care. It was that attitude at Microsoft that opened the door for Apple to revive its fortunes.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    What do you mean? Apple didn't really take a substantial market share from Microsoft. Apple was successful in a market that Microsoft chose to not compete in until it was too late.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      >What do you mean? I mean exactly what I said, Microsoft was complacent and it allowed Apple to cream off the most valuable segment of the market. Microsoft may still have the largest market share (in Desktop) but it was Apple that became the first Trillion dollar company.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        Yes, but Apple didn't take away anything from Microsoft, so where's the connection? Their "users don't care" attitude on software worked out. Pretty much nobody in business is switching over to Mac OS (or iOS) and Numbers. Both companies are barely even competing in the same markets.
        tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        What do you think all the Mac users were using before they switched to the Mac. Apple had a huge switching campaign over many years. They might not be competing much now but MS didn't want to give up that segment. That's before we get on to what the iPhone did to Windows mobile.
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
I wonder what’s exactly preventing them from implementing UIKit on macOS, that necessitates running the app in a simulated iOS environment... The biggest pain point on macOS is the crappy AppKit framework which has so many awful quirks due to legacy reasons (e.g. layer-backed vs non-layer-backed views, no standard collectionview, etc.).
- manmal 8y ago
  My understanding was that they did implement UIKit on macOS, but that there are still limiting factors that force them to wrap them up in a VM (which will most likely change until next year).
  - scarface74 8y ago
    There is no VM. Even the iOS simulator for iOS development is not a VM. When you run your code in the simulator, it’s compiled for x86 and linked against an x86 version of the iOS framework.
    - manmal 8y ago
      I know, I‘m a iOS dev. Some Marzipan apps reportedly are wrapped in a VM now. Haven’t checked myself.
- dbbk 8y ago
  There is no simulated iOS environment here.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > layer-backed vs non-layer-backed views Most views are layer-backed by default these days. The newer APIs tend to "force" this decision on you by doing things like making your entire view hierarchy implicitly layer-backed in many cases to encourage layer-backing. > no standard collectionview NSCollectionView?
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
I still think this is less about running iOS apps on Mac and more about pushing Mac developers to build their pro-tier apps as something that runs on Macs and iPads. Mac has no shortage of apps. But the iPad Pro has a shortage of the sort of apps people use Macs for.
pavlov 8y ago
> You get the standard rainbow close/minimise/full-screen widgets and they work fine. Window resizing using mouse drags — not so much. The performance is just poor. It’s ironic that this is an issue again. Poor window resizing performance was probably the #1 complaint in Mac OS X 10.0 back in 2001 — resizing exposed the sometimes very slow rendering behind the beautiful new Aqua façade. Apple spent a few years tweaking resize performance, even adding AppKit APIs so apps can adjust their rendering when in live resize. Doing layout updates in a rapid mouse tracking loop is hard. The iOS window resizing system was designed primarily around screen size classes which change on events (e.g. portrait to landscape), so there’s lots of fudge room to hide rendering updates while the entire screen is being animated. The desktop doesn’t have that luxury.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Why was this changed to a less descriptive title? Seems more "clickbaity" now.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Not to mention that it should be "Marzipan on macOS" or similar; "MacOS Marzipan" just plain doesn't make sense. This makes it should like a version of macOS.
  - jakebellacera 8y ago
    That's what I thought it was initially. I kind of forgot that Marzipan was included in Mojave and thought that this was some details about the _next_ incarnation of macOS.
calferreira 8y ago
One thing i don't understand is, since most apps have a web version why would anyone prefer run a ios version on the desktop. I don't understand why apple would invest time in making this possible.
- calferreira 8y ago
  Instead of down voting, be useful and show your arguments. I really don't understand why.
jammi 8y ago
I feel like it's similar to the skeumorphism of the past coming back with a revenge.
dep_b 8y ago
They should give you a native macOS storyboard that works with your iOS code. iPad apps used to have separate storyboards too, I think that lead to a lot of rethought applications instead of just stretched up. Working with different size classes in one storyboard becomes a nightmare quickly with a lot of differences.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ppeetteerr 8y ago
I wonder if people complaining about Marzipan are the same praising React Native...
tcfunk 8y ago
If I can run my baby monitor app from my laptop instead of my phone (with any degree of usability), I will consider Marzipan to be a huge win.

233 points by adrian_mrd 8y ago

Writing was on the wall as soon as mobile overtook laptops/desktops as Apple's cash cow, but it is still disappointing. Dumbed down, lowest common denominator UI will eat the Apple ecosystem.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

For those of us that aren't keeping track: "Marzipan is the code name for the technology that will allow iOS developers, with just a handful of modifications, to port the iOS versions of their apps over to the Mac." [0] At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. But I guess getting a bad version of an app is better than nothing at all. I hate the whole mobile-first trend, since it usually means fucking over desktop users. Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window. [0] https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-the-ars-technica-review/7/#h1 https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...

scarface74 8y ago
At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS The entire purpose of porting these apps to the Mac was to dog food Marzipan. If they had made “proper Mac apps” that would have defeated the purpose.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  IMO that's a poor excuse; that's just tantamount to shipping your org chart. You ship the best product for your customers, and if the technology you've pre-selected as a vehicle actively precludes you from doing so, STOP, and re-consider what you're up to. Focus on the user, not management needs, not artificial technology limitations. Otherwise, you won't have users.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    It was never about the apps. It’s about getting feedback from customers and developers and iterating. Google has been shipping “beta” software for years. It’s not like any of the apps they chose are core parts of the OS.
    - eloisant 8y ago
      Apple is not Google.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    In the long term, it's better if Marzipan gets real-world usage from some less-critical apps than Apple shipping a half-baked SDK to developers next year with a great, native Home app.
- lloeki 8y ago
  I suppose what the GP meant is that Apple, even if using Marzipan, was in power to do the job properly, from menubar to titlebar to modals and set a standard for developers to follow, instead of going the lazy route and have what appears to be mere containers of an iOS experience with only slight touches of macOS. It really does make me think of Electron, with foreign conventions held within a window and tentacles reaching out to some APIs like menubar and notifications.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    They basically said at WWDC that Marzipan is still a work in progress. They haven’t even promised a date when it would be released. Isn’t it better to release early and often and get feedback? It’s basically a “technology preview”. It would be much worse if they thought they were releasing a fully baked framework in a year, tied down the APIs and be stuck with something that got negative feedback. It’s strange that a forum that usually supports “development in the open” is now criticizing Apple for doing just that.
raydev 8y ago
> At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Apple sees this and I think it's pretty clear their intent is for UIKit to supersede AppKit on macOS. One day. Apple unfortunately shipped what is effectively the alpha version to the public.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Debatable. AppKit might have a bunch of legacy cruft, but it also has some truly beautiful things like bindings, or how certain interface controls work. It's a much more mature framework.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Bindings (and KVO/KVC that support them) are magic-oriented programming that make me sad. One has to assume they very specifically didn't make the cut when iOS and UIKit were designed :P
  - therockhead 8y ago
    Interesting, i found bindings only useful for the most basic of UI and not really worth the effort.
- TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
  > From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Can you expand on this? I haven't done iOS development, so I'd be interested in what ways people consider UIKit superior. Although it wouldn't surprise me, since it came much later than AppKit and they had hindsight when designing it.
  - GeekyBear 8y ago
    The topic of making UIKit available to developers on the Mac comes up from time to time. People seem to go back and forth on it, as in this post from a couple of years ago. >The thing is, UIKit "just works" (most of the time at least). AppKit has so much historical garbage that it's become a pain to work with for modern macOS apps. It's still really hard to make simple things like customizing system controls and Core Animation doesn't work as well on it as it does on UIKit. https://medium.com/@guilhermerambo/why-uikit-for-macos-is-important-ff4e74a82cf0 https://medium.com/@guilhermerambo/why-uikit-for-macos-is-im...
coldtea 8y ago
>At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. It's not about putting resources for their own apps or not. It's about enabling this route to macOS for iOS developers. They're just eating their own dogfood. >Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window. That's what most people want anyway. Not to have to manage 5 panels and sub-windows for each app on top of managing their apps. Microsoft did the same, Adobe, etc.
masklinn 8y ago
> At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. I'm confused. The resources already exist, it's called "implementing applications on macOS". Marzipan is for iOS devs who want their existing application quickly running on macOS without actually porting it, either because there's some demand and they don't want to do macOS development or as a prelude to a proper port/cross-platform implementation. Apple can't magick the void into the not-void, an iOS application works on different principles than a macOS one.

bradgessler 8y ago

I welcome Marzipan. It’s not perfect at the moment, but lately I feel like when I’m in macOS I’m running a browser and awkwardly trying to switch between tabs without Cmd + Tab. It’s not fun. Over the last year I’ve been using an iPad with a hardware keyboard for productivity apps and it’s great. There’s apps for everything, even G-Suite, that I can Cmd + Tab through without any problems. I really hope that the rough edges get worked out and Marizipan works; otherwise macOS will become even more stale. The real abomination in Mojave is the Screenshot annotation tool. Good luck figuring out how to add and arrow with some text. — Edit: Changed Alt Tab to Cmd Tab

binomialxenon 8y ago
> awkwardly trying to switch between tabs without Alt + Tab. Ctrl+Tab? (is it Cmd+Tab on the Mac?) Shortcuts like that are a big part of how I use the browser.
- bradgessler 8y ago
  Yeah oops. Edited original message.
  - teknologist 8y ago
    It's ctrl + tab in Chrome. You can also use option + command and the left/right arrows to flick between tabs.
brazzledazzle 8y ago
There’s a different shortcut for switching between tabs in a single application. I don’t know if I customized mine but it’s something like cmd+Ctrl+arrow. Cmd+tilde switches between an application’s Windows.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I believe the default one is ⇧⌘[ or ⇧⌘].

CharlesW 8y ago

> I debated calling this post ‘Home, News, Stocks and Voice Memos for Mac’ because it’s not really a comment on the Marzipan project initiative. I would've been a lot less disappointed with the article if it had the alternate title.

codazoda 8y ago

I suspect MacOS will slowly begin to look more like iOS. These apps might be the beginning of the trend.

hazz99 8y ago
I hope they don't ruin the dev experience. I love my Macbook Pro.

wvenable 8y ago

I feel the same way about Windows 10 Store apps. They don't have the performance issues mentioned in the article but they otherwise feel alien to the rest of the OS. Even web applications feel more integrated.

yellowapple 8y ago
ChromeOS's support for Android apps almost feels similarly alien, except that everything in ChromeOS is already a webapp so it's not too jarring.

jhack 8y ago

It has a lot of potential but the apps included with Mojave feel way too iOS-like and out of place in macOS. Hopefully it gets better integration before they open this up to developers.

chungy 8y ago

This sounds equally applicable to pgAdmin 4, or indeed any Electron app on a Linux desktop.

walterbell 8y ago

If there is going to be an Apple Arm laptop, it would likely run an iOS derivative and would need both keyboard and mouse awareness. Would Marzipan make it easier to go in the other direction, e.g. run iOS apps in tiled windows on an iOS laptop, alongside "CLI/terminal" windows?

saagarjha 8y ago
> If there is going to be an Apple Arm laptop, it would likely run an iOS derivative Why do you think this?
- walterbell 8y ago
  An Apple Arm laptop would compete with Chromebook & Surface Go, both of which are "locked down" and optimized for Arm, similar to iPads. - iOS is Apple's primary revenue focus - iOS is already optimized for Arm - iOS itself was derived from MacOS - iOS new derivative can support KB/mouse - Arm + macOS = no 3rd-party apps compiled for Arm - Arm + iOS = million existing apps - Arm + iOS does not conflict with expensive MacBook Pros
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > iOS is Apple's primary revenue focus > iOS is already optimized for Arm > iOS itself was derived from MacOS All true… > iOS new derivative can support KB/mouse iOS can support the keyboard currently, but not very well. And it can't support the mouse at all. > Arm + macOS = no 3rd-party apps compiled for Arm That's what an emulation layer is for. > Arm + iOS = million existing apps That's a nice bonus. > Arm + iOS does not conflict with expensive MacBook Pros Apple is no stranger to cannibalizing itself. So, overall, I'm still not sold that they won't just make a ARM MacBook that runs macOS, rather than iOS.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      Apple controls MacOS and iOS. They can make iOS support kb & mouse, even if initially focused on Apple apps like Terminal, Mail & office. Windows on Arm is forced to use an emulation layer because the majority of Windows apps are x86. The majority of Apple apps are already on Arm. Cannibalization is done to a smaller market in order to reach a larger market. Which market is larger for Apple? Apple can do both: low-cost 2018 Arm iOS laptop and premium 2019 Arm MacOS Macbook (when Marzipan is ready to bring iOS apps to x86).

tolmasky 8y ago

After so many years of Apple fans telling everyone that any cross platform technology demonstrated absolute laziness on the part of developers that resulted in unacceptable un-native feel, how fitting it is that now Apple, the largest company on Earth, and home to the makers of AppKit no less, can no longer be burdened to take the time to write real Mac apps anymore. I know that people will say that this is Apple working hard to make the Mac viable again, but especially when considered in the context of the poor Mac hardware in the past two years, I think it’s clear that’s not the case. Not mentioned in this article is that these apps look weird because they’re using 1.3x scaling from iOS too. Apple barely takes the time to differentiate iOS on the iPad, or even the XS Max. Owning either of these two devices constantly feels like there would be obvious places to make the experience feel better than just a big iPhone. Do we really think Apple is going to work that hard on making iOS software feel good in the Mac? Remember, when the iPad first came out, everyone said “oh it’s new, I’m sure they’ll really make the software different soon”. It took 7 years to get multi-tasking in there. And this was the star product for a while. iOS still doesn’t really feel like iPad is it’s home.

saagarjha 8y ago
> Apple … can no longer be burdened to take the time to write real Mac apps anymore I have no doubt that Apple could have written these from scratch and they'd be fantastic. They're just testing out the new Marzipan platform so that they can work out the kinks in it before launching it next year.
- ixtli 8y ago
  I agree. I'm usually the first to jump on lazy design or the near complete sacrifice of form and function just to release a few hours earlier to save more of daddy's precious investment capital ... but these are clearly just toys. It's a demo of the underlying tech. I think the better argument is that giving such tech to 3rd part devs will encourage them to be lazy.
- tolmasky 8y ago
  I am 100% certain these apps will not be fantastic in 1 year. Or 2, or 3. Let’s look at another cross-platform app that Apple has had years to perfect, iTunes: terrible since they’ve had to make it work on Mac and Windows. Apple Music being the latest proof point that they cannot make a nice experience. The track record isn’t good. But honestly, what’s the latest fantastic new Mac app you’ve used? I can’t think of any. The days of something like Keynote being released are behind us.

saagarjha 8y ago

> In this case, I suspect the Marzipan system houses apps in a window with a titlebar, and it automatically populates the window with the display name of the bundle. It creates a window for each app, and the titlebar is set to the app name pulled from Launch Services.

thought_alarm 8y ago

Some people have been clamouring for a way to run iOS apps on an Mac for a long time, and now here it is. When Marzipan was first announced, Apple was very careful to temper people's expectations. Marzipan is not about some grand new cross-platform development framework. It's not about merging Mac and iOS. It's about allowing iOS developers to port certain iOS apps to the Mac with as little friction as possible. And in that sense it's a complete success. Many 3rd-party apps can already run inside of Marzipan with little or no code changes. That's a huge win. There are some very obvious downsides. Most iOS apps are a poor fit on the desktop and won't conform to the expected Mac desktop expectations. I suppose Apple could have gone the Windows 8 route and put these iOS apps in a completely separate environment, but we all know how that turned out on Windows. At least these apps attempt to mesh with the regular desktop environment. Another downside is that it's a hack. These are pure iOS apps running inside of an iOS simulator designed to look like a Mac app. These apps have no access to the world outside of iOS. If you're looking to make a great modern Mac app, Marzipan isn't for you. If you're looking for an easier way to share UI code between your AppKit and UIKit apps, Marzipan has nothing for you. If you have a relatively simple iOS app that you think might be useful on a Mac, Marzipan is exactly what you've been waiting for. If you want a peek into what a grand new cross-platform development framework might be, take a look at the JetEngine.framework embedded in the Mac App Store app. It appears to be a separate UI framework that is neither AppKit nor UIKit, but can run on top of either. However, it's full of App Store-specific UI components and I would expect that it was developed only for internal use at Apple.

saagarjha 8y ago
The App Store app isn't particularly great, either. There are many UI paradigms it ends up breaking, and of course, it still goes for that sidebar/main window layout that all the Marzipan apps use.
- sephoric 8y ago
  Apples been trying to push the sidebar thing for a few years now on general Mac apps. It started as an evolution of the Finder sidebar and was named “source lists” for a short while and now it’s just called Sidebar in the default View too menu for new apps. Every time I go to use Notes on Mac I get confused by the two sidebars. Hopefully they calm down on their sidebar mania a bit soon. The web is a great proving ground for hierarchical organization of widgets and information, and I hope Apple can be humble and take notes from conventions that are popping up and sticking around about how to do “multiple sidebars” a little smarter.

nodamage 8y ago

Is anyone else concerned that the influx of cheap, low-quality iOS apps ported to Mac via Marzipan is going to effectively poison the well for existing Mac apps? Software prices have already been pushed to rock bottom on mobile but things are more sustainable on Mac, for now anyway...

sephoric 8y ago
Nah. Mac users who pay for software are a different demographic than their iOS counterparts in my experience. Such Mac users are usually professionals who pay a little extra for the reliability and quality and attention to detail that Mac apps have been know for for a while now.
carlesfe 8y ago
Fair point. However, we already have an influx of cheap, low-quality web apps ported to Mac via Electron. I think in this case Marzipan is a better solution, as it will allow willing developers to port native iOS apps to the Mac without much effort. It won't help with webapp juggernauts like Slack or Skype, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
- teknologist 8y ago
  I actually wouldn't mind having the iOS Skype app running on my Mac. It has a nice dark mode.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    So would the old Skype desktop app, had they kept it around and linked it against a recent SDK. But no, they threw it out, replaced it with some sort of Electron mess, and now have to pay the price of not having proper dark mode support.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
The long term trend for software prices is towards zero, I'm not sure this will have much influence on that.

dirtylowprofile 8y ago

Any one experienced the News app not syncing between Mojave and iOS 12?

saagarjha 8y ago
It did that for me for a while, but eventually it came around to syncing.

arcticbull 8y ago

As I've learned so often to do with Apple experiments, I'm going to ignore this one and it's probably going to get better or go away, I seriously doubt it'll stay objectively bad like this. Apple does this from time to time. Remember when iCal looked liked, to quote a Gizmodo writeup, "a lone cattleman's notebook" missing only "animated beaded tassels"? Or when Game Center on iOS looked like "an evening of backgammon at the nursing home" that "smelled like plastic bottle whiskey"? [1] Because they absolutely did. Let's see where this thing goes. Seeing them remedy their many flagrant mistakes over the years has given me, oddly, hope. [1] https://gizmodo.com/5849940/ugh-god-why-apple-is-making-everything-look-like-an-ugly-wild-west https://gizmodo.com/5849940/ugh-god-why-apple-is-making-ever...

coldtea 8y ago
>Remember when iCal looked liked, to quote a Gizmodo writeup, "a lone cattleman's notebook" And that was bad because? Enough things look like "a pretentious hipster notebook" already!
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I don't think they were denigrating farm workers nor pushing the hipster aesthetic. It was a problem with not following Apple's own guidelines and making something that clashed so much with the rest of the system.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    Yes it's not about what they made it look like - and to be clear, my understand was the intent was to replicate the rich leather feel of Steve's private jet. It's that they insistent on making it look like something at all, and that clashed with the entire aesthetic. Stuck out like a sore thumb.

mankash666 8y ago

Here's the thing: most users don't really care. The evidence is in the author's own disapproval of the slack app - about it just being a wrapper around a website disguised as an app. Guess what, slack desktop has a LOT of traction, and paying customers! If an app is sufficiently good on Marzipan, then the users will steer it towards becoming better if they care.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
>Here's the thing: most users don't really care. It was that attitude at Microsoft that opened the door for Apple to revive its fortunes.
- zeroname 8y ago
  What do you mean? Apple didn't really take a substantial market share from Microsoft. Apple was successful in a market that Microsoft chose to not compete in until it was too late.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    >What do you mean? I mean exactly what I said, Microsoft was complacent and it allowed Apple to cream off the most valuable segment of the market. Microsoft may still have the largest market share (in Desktop) but it was Apple that became the first Trillion dollar company.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      Yes, but Apple didn't take away anything from Microsoft, so where's the connection? Their "users don't care" attitude on software worked out. Pretty much nobody in business is switching over to Mac OS (or iOS) and Numbers. Both companies are barely even competing in the same markets.
      - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        What do you think all the Mac users were using before they switched to the Mac. Apple had a huge switching campaign over many years. They might not be competing much now but MS didn't want to give up that segment. That's before we get on to what the iPhone did to Windows mobile.

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

I wonder what’s exactly preventing them from implementing UIKit on macOS, that necessitates running the app in a simulated iOS environment... The biggest pain point on macOS is the crappy AppKit framework which has so many awful quirks due to legacy reasons (e.g. layer-backed vs non-layer-backed views, no standard collectionview, etc.).

manmal 8y ago
My understanding was that they did implement UIKit on macOS, but that there are still limiting factors that force them to wrap them up in a VM (which will most likely change until next year).
- scarface74 8y ago
  There is no VM. Even the iOS simulator for iOS development is not a VM. When you run your code in the simulator, it’s compiled for x86 and linked against an x86 version of the iOS framework.
  - manmal 8y ago
    I know, I‘m a iOS dev. Some Marzipan apps reportedly are wrapped in a VM now. Haven’t checked myself.
dbbk 8y ago
There is no simulated iOS environment here.
saagarjha 8y ago
> layer-backed vs non-layer-backed views Most views are layer-backed by default these days. The newer APIs tend to "force" this decision on you by doing things like making your entire view hierarchy implicitly layer-backed in many cases to encourage layer-backing. > no standard collectionview NSCollectionView?
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

whywhywhywhy 8y ago

I still think this is less about running iOS apps on Mac and more about pushing Mac developers to build their pro-tier apps as something that runs on Macs and iPads. Mac has no shortage of apps. But the iPad Pro has a shortage of the sort of apps people use Macs for.

pavlov 8y ago

> You get the standard rainbow close/minimise/full-screen widgets and they work fine. Window resizing using mouse drags — not so much. The performance is just poor. It’s ironic that this is an issue again. Poor window resizing performance was probably the #1 complaint in Mac OS X 10.0 back in 2001 — resizing exposed the sometimes very slow rendering behind the beautiful new Aqua façade. Apple spent a few years tweaking resize performance, even adding AppKit APIs so apps can adjust their rendering when in live resize. Doing layout updates in a rapid mouse tracking loop is hard. The iOS window resizing system was designed primarily around screen size classes which change on events (e.g. portrait to landscape), so there’s lots of fudge room to hide rendering updates while the entire screen is being animated. The desktop doesn’t have that luxury.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

Why was this changed to a less descriptive title? Seems more "clickbaity" now.

saagarjha 8y ago
Not to mention that it should be "Marzipan on macOS" or similar; "MacOS Marzipan" just plain doesn't make sense. This makes it should like a version of macOS.
- jakebellacera 8y ago
  That's what I thought it was initially. I kind of forgot that Marzipan was included in Mojave and thought that this was some details about the _next_ incarnation of macOS.

calferreira 8y ago

One thing i don't understand is, since most apps have a web version why would anyone prefer run a ios version on the desktop. I don't understand why apple would invest time in making this possible.

calferreira 8y ago
Instead of down voting, be useful and show your arguments. I really don't understand why.

jammi 8y ago

I feel like it's similar to the skeumorphism of the past coming back with a revenge.

dep_b 8y ago

They should give you a native macOS storyboard that works with your iOS code. iPad apps used to have separate storyboards too, I think that lead to a lot of rethought applications instead of just stretched up. Working with different size classes in one storyboard becomes a nightmare quickly with a lot of differences.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ppeetteerr 8y ago

I wonder if people complaining about Marzipan are the same praising React Native...

tcfunk 8y ago

If I can run my baby monitor app from my laptop instead of my phone (with any degree of usability), I will consider Marzipan to be a huge win.