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The Case Against Marzipan

WalterBright 8y ago
Fortunately, this isn't about the food. Phew! I love marzipan.
- sbussard 8y ago
  Haha I also thought this was referring to the most delicious ingredient known to man
  - tln 8y ago
    The only reason I clicked was to vigorously defend marzipan in all it's glory
    - em-bee 8y ago
      the only case to be made against marzipan is that there often isn't enough of it.
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  As an antimarzipanner I was hoping to learn that its production harms the oceans or something along those lines.
  - em-bee 8y ago
    i thought maybe it is something about cases of bitter almonds used to produce poisonous marzipan.
- jmull 8y ago
  I was actually thinking about the Homestar Runner character. She is pretty bad.
- _nalply 8y ago
  I thought it was about the hydrogen cyanide that marzipan contains in small amounts...
dmix 8y ago
If the apps are bad then people wont use them, so I don't see what the big deal is. That's why there are reviews on app stores. The benefit could potentially be thousands of very useful apps that are well designed for desktop. Overtime the API and SDK's and libraries and best practices, etc, will mature. Responsive design has been a thing forever in web design. I don't see why MacOS development can't adapt similarly. Ultimately two exclusive 'native' apps might still be ideal, but not always for everyone who can't afford to. So it's a lesser of evils type of situation.
huebnerob 8y ago
Lowering the effort bar for making Mac apps doesn't mean that every developer is going to do the bare minimum, but it does mean that more developers will find it economical to build natively. The point you're arguing is not good apps vs. mediocre apps, it's mediocre apps vs. no app at all. Frankly, there are many cross platform services I use where I would prefer a straight Marzipan port from the iPad app over the electron psuedoapp approach that's so pervasive these days.
- giobox 8y ago
  While Electron is inferior in almost every regard, at least the UI might actually make sense for Mouse and Keyboard manipulation. Seeing touch sized click targets on HiDPI non-touch displays as one does with the Marzipan approach is not great.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > Seeing touch sized click targets on HiDPI non-touch displays ... That's always going to be a thing, as long as desktop environments lack a simple, foolproof way of switching system-wide between a "mouse/pointer input preferred" and a "touch/swipe input preferred" mode. (Windows 10 actually does this fairly well; I don't know of any other systems that offer the same thing, though.) It doesn't have to be a huge issue if the touch-friendly interface is well-designed. See GTK3, which has essentially switched to "touch-friendly" widgets and layouts with the new major release. Some people gripe about it, but at the end of the day it works fairly well - and at the same time, it lays the groundwork for a wholly touch-based interface to the Linux desktop.
    - giobox 8y ago
      > That's always going to be a thing Except that Apple spent a decade telling us it won't be a thing, which is why they never put a touch screen on a Mac. Until 2018 it had never been a thing. Supposedly this is iOS's remit, and designing the entire OS for solely touch (iOS) or solely mouse and keyboard (MacOS), they argue, is the better way forward. Your arguments are perfectly valid for many other computer platforms, where mixed direct/indirect input exists. It has never existed on the Mac, supposedly by design, until now when Marzipan has provided a path for these touch UIs to ship on them. This is why it feels especially wrong on the Mac.
giobox 8y ago
The saddest part for me is that between the HIG (Apple speak for their "Human Interface Guidelines" documentation) and their own apps, Apple used to set a great standard that inspired third party developers to commit to a similar level of UX polish. Apple's design awards handed out at WWDC used to be a real badge of honor, coming from a company as UX focused as they are. The four Marzipan apps Apple themselves have shipped in Mojave are garbage by the past standards of the Mac and I worry this telegraphs that this kind of shovelware is fine. This can establish a kind of "If it's good enough for Apple..." precedent. I also find it pretty hypocritical for Apple to constantly tell us they won't ship a touch screen Mac because you can't make an OS that is good for both touch and indirect input, but here they are providing a framework to dump touch screen UI apps on the Mac for use with a mouse. Instead of a poor unoptimized touch experience, we get left with a poor unoptimized mouse and keyboard experience, precisely the kind of thing Apple have spent years telling us that not putting a touch screen on the Mac would prevent. That said, I can sympathize with the counter-arguments in favor of this. Mac app development is nothing close to what it once was, perhaps this is the best we can hope for.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  Yeah, well Steve Jobs called Galaxy S phones "Hummers," and I can't look around an office without seeing people holding Range Rovers. So, there's that. Turns out even though "you can't get your hand around it", people did buy that. I think the real reason Macs won't have touchscreens is that Jony knows it'll result in disgusting monitors. Can't have that now can we?
petecox 8y ago
> iOS app porting inherently creates bad Mac apps Reassess in a couple of years when app porters have matured with the technology. Gestures and pinch and zoom won't work with a mouse but the key point is interfaces designed for a form factor. UWP on Windows mightn't be a great success but there's no reason a universal toolkit can't serve both. c.f. Qt - a first class citizen on mobile (Sailfish) and on desktop (KDE), while Plasma Active has real potential on postmarketOS. On Android, where I am typing this message, a good number of apps designed for tablet work surprisingly well on a desktop (Outlook, Apple Flinger, Hot Death, Taskbar, iview, SBS on Demand, Supertuxkart to name a few). A bit more polish for mouse in the form of tooltips, contextual menus, scroll wheels and menu bars and it'd be a nice interface.
- jimbo1qaz 8y ago
  Desktop KDE (and native-looking Qt apps) uses Qt Widgets, whereas mobile basically uses Qt Quick. The GUI apis are completely separate (I'm not sure how much is shared internally, or how similar the apis are).
  - petecox 8y ago
    Are you sure? I thought Qt Widgets were deprecated by Plasma 5, which uses QML internally.
    - jimbo1qaz 8y ago
      The system update app, and the system settings left menu probably uses Qt Quick. It has touch scrolling, fuzzily rendered text, terrible keyboard tab support, etc. The rest of KDE 5 looks exactly like PyQt programs written in Qt Widgets.
WalterBright 8y ago
I wish people would stop naming products after common names and letters for other things.
tln 8y ago
I wonder if electron apps brought the same fear in the author; and how he views slack or vscode in the pantheon of Mac apps. Ok not slack. But vscode compares very well to say xcode
- giobox 8y ago
  Comparing VSCode to XCode is pretty unfair. XCode is a vastly more complex application with many, many more features and requirements to support. Conversely, it’s pretty likely an Electron version of XCode would run like garbage, a native version of VSCode would run faster and consume much less resources (memory, battery etc). I don’t think it’s appropriate at all to argue VSCode somehow compares favourably.
  - tln 8y ago
    I dunno, vscode is packed with features, and Xcode has almost always given me a few minutes of beach ball cursor or crashes. But the comparison should be about how mac-like the applications are. if vscode or xcode are outliers, some other electron or Mac apps could be compared.
mrunkel 8y ago
What are the four apple Marzipan apps? Ahh, found the answer: Home, News, Stocks and Voice Memos
mrpippy 8y ago
> macOS Mojave shipped with four native apps that Apple had ported over from iOS. These apps were clearly examples intended to incentivize third-party creators into using the new API. This is not the case at all. 3rd parties can't (officially) use the new APIs at all until next summer. I suspect (and very much hope) that the APIs and these apps will look quite different in 6 months
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lupinglade 8y ago
Have to agree. This is pretty half-assed and seems useful for maybe just a few edge case apps. In all other cases, it will really hurt the Mac user experience.

Fortunately, this isn't about the food. Phew! I love marzipan.

sbussard 8y ago
Haha I also thought this was referring to the most delicious ingredient known to man
- tln 8y ago
  The only reason I clicked was to vigorously defend marzipan in all it's glory
  - em-bee 8y ago
    the only case to be made against marzipan is that there often isn't enough of it.
anothergoogler 8y ago
As an antimarzipanner I was hoping to learn that its production harms the oceans or something along those lines.
- em-bee 8y ago
  i thought maybe it is something about cases of bitter almonds used to produce poisonous marzipan.
jmull 8y ago
I was actually thinking about the Homestar Runner character. She is pretty bad.
_nalply 8y ago
I thought it was about the hydrogen cyanide that marzipan contains in small amounts...

dmix 8y ago

If the apps are bad then people wont use them, so I don't see what the big deal is. That's why there are reviews on app stores. The benefit could potentially be thousands of very useful apps that are well designed for desktop. Overtime the API and SDK's and libraries and best practices, etc, will mature. Responsive design has been a thing forever in web design. I don't see why MacOS development can't adapt similarly. Ultimately two exclusive 'native' apps might still be ideal, but not always for everyone who can't afford to. So it's a lesser of evils type of situation.

huebnerob 8y ago

Lowering the effort bar for making Mac apps doesn't mean that every developer is going to do the bare minimum, but it does mean that more developers will find it economical to build natively. The point you're arguing is not good apps vs. mediocre apps, it's mediocre apps vs. no app at all. Frankly, there are many cross platform services I use where I would prefer a straight Marzipan port from the iPad app over the electron psuedoapp approach that's so pervasive these days.

giobox 8y ago
While Electron is inferior in almost every regard, at least the UI might actually make sense for Mouse and Keyboard manipulation. Seeing touch sized click targets on HiDPI non-touch displays as one does with the Marzipan approach is not great.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > Seeing touch sized click targets on HiDPI non-touch displays ... That's always going to be a thing, as long as desktop environments lack a simple, foolproof way of switching system-wide between a "mouse/pointer input preferred" and a "touch/swipe input preferred" mode. (Windows 10 actually does this fairly well; I don't know of any other systems that offer the same thing, though.) It doesn't have to be a huge issue if the touch-friendly interface is well-designed. See GTK3, which has essentially switched to "touch-friendly" widgets and layouts with the new major release. Some people gripe about it, but at the end of the day it works fairly well - and at the same time, it lays the groundwork for a wholly touch-based interface to the Linux desktop.
  - giobox 8y ago
    > That's always going to be a thing Except that Apple spent a decade telling us it won't be a thing, which is why they never put a touch screen on a Mac. Until 2018 it had never been a thing. Supposedly this is iOS's remit, and designing the entire OS for solely touch (iOS) or solely mouse and keyboard (MacOS), they argue, is the better way forward. Your arguments are perfectly valid for many other computer platforms, where mixed direct/indirect input exists. It has never existed on the Mac, supposedly by design, until now when Marzipan has provided a path for these touch UIs to ship on them. This is why it feels especially wrong on the Mac.

giobox 8y ago

The saddest part for me is that between the HIG (Apple speak for their "Human Interface Guidelines" documentation) and their own apps, Apple used to set a great standard that inspired third party developers to commit to a similar level of UX polish. Apple's design awards handed out at WWDC used to be a real badge of honor, coming from a company as UX focused as they are. The four Marzipan apps Apple themselves have shipped in Mojave are garbage by the past standards of the Mac and I worry this telegraphs that this kind of shovelware is fine. This can establish a kind of "If it's good enough for Apple..." precedent. I also find it pretty hypocritical for Apple to constantly tell us they won't ship a touch screen Mac because you can't make an OS that is good for both touch and indirect input, but here they are providing a framework to dump touch screen UI apps on the Mac for use with a mouse. Instead of a poor unoptimized touch experience, we get left with a poor unoptimized mouse and keyboard experience, precisely the kind of thing Apple have spent years telling us that not putting a touch screen on the Mac would prevent. That said, I can sympathize with the counter-arguments in favor of this. Mac app development is nothing close to what it once was, perhaps this is the best we can hope for.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago
Yeah, well Steve Jobs called Galaxy S phones "Hummers," and I can't look around an office without seeing people holding Range Rovers. So, there's that. Turns out even though "you can't get your hand around it", people did buy that. I think the real reason Macs won't have touchscreens is that Jony knows it'll result in disgusting monitors. Can't have that now can we?

petecox 8y ago

> iOS app porting inherently creates bad Mac apps Reassess in a couple of years when app porters have matured with the technology. Gestures and pinch and zoom won't work with a mouse but the key point is interfaces designed for a form factor. UWP on Windows mightn't be a great success but there's no reason a universal toolkit can't serve both. c.f. Qt - a first class citizen on mobile (Sailfish) and on desktop (KDE), while Plasma Active has real potential on postmarketOS. On Android, where I am typing this message, a good number of apps designed for tablet work surprisingly well on a desktop (Outlook, Apple Flinger, Hot Death, Taskbar, iview, SBS on Demand, Supertuxkart to name a few). A bit more polish for mouse in the form of tooltips, contextual menus, scroll wheels and menu bars and it'd be a nice interface.

jimbo1qaz 8y ago
Desktop KDE (and native-looking Qt apps) uses Qt Widgets, whereas mobile basically uses Qt Quick. The GUI apis are completely separate (I'm not sure how much is shared internally, or how similar the apis are).
- petecox 8y ago
  Are you sure? I thought Qt Widgets were deprecated by Plasma 5, which uses QML internally.
  - jimbo1qaz 8y ago
    The system update app, and the system settings left menu probably uses Qt Quick. It has touch scrolling, fuzzily rendered text, terrible keyboard tab support, etc. The rest of KDE 5 looks exactly like PyQt programs written in Qt Widgets.

WalterBright 8y ago

I wish people would stop naming products after common names and letters for other things.

tln 8y ago

I wonder if electron apps brought the same fear in the author; and how he views slack or vscode in the pantheon of Mac apps. Ok not slack. But vscode compares very well to say xcode

giobox 8y ago
Comparing VSCode to XCode is pretty unfair. XCode is a vastly more complex application with many, many more features and requirements to support. Conversely, it’s pretty likely an Electron version of XCode would run like garbage, a native version of VSCode would run faster and consume much less resources (memory, battery etc). I don’t think it’s appropriate at all to argue VSCode somehow compares favourably.
- tln 8y ago
  I dunno, vscode is packed with features, and Xcode has almost always given me a few minutes of beach ball cursor or crashes. But the comparison should be about how mac-like the applications are. if vscode or xcode are outliers, some other electron or Mac apps could be compared.

mrunkel 8y ago

What are the four apple Marzipan apps? Ahh, found the answer: Home, News, Stocks and Voice Memos

mrpippy 8y ago

> macOS Mojave shipped with four native apps that Apple had ported over from iOS. These apps were clearly examples intended to incentivize third-party creators into using the new API. This is not the case at all. 3rd parties can't (officially) use the new APIs at all until next summer. I suspect (and very much hope) that the APIs and these apps will look quite different in 6 months

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lupinglade 8y ago

Have to agree. This is pretty half-assed and seems useful for maybe just a few edge case apps. In all other cases, it will really hurt the Mac user experience.