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> Just because Marzipan/UIKit today doesn't have good MacOS affordances doesn't mean it won't in the future, especially since it's not even being offered to dev

> Just because Marzipan/UIKit today doesn't have good MacOS affordances doesn't mean it won't in the future, especially since it's not even being offered to developers right now. I don't see why it's difficult to see where the puck is going here. It's not difficult to see where it's going. I just think people are believing it's going where they'd like to see it, where they think it's best for it to go; whereas Apple has their own ideas and always has. What we think is better for the ecosystem, they mightn't see it that way; what we see as the natural course of things, they might see as a passing fad. Plus, we look at Microsoft's attempts at this very task with Windows 8 through 10. Seems to be a bit rough going. Apple famously accused Redmond of starting their photocopiers; I'm not sure Cupertino's Xeroxes are even close to warming up on this front. Plus, it reads just a little too optimistic for me. We are already seeing that sharing user interface code between desktop and mobile results either in crippled experiences on both or each platform requiring its own platform-specific user interface code anyway. Instead of one amazing app on two platform, you get two crappy apps that feel like they belong on the other. In my mind, the poster child for this is Discord - it works well enough until you want to do some basic management, then the desktop version is pretty much mandatory. If you're right about Marzipan having different UX affordances, I think Apple made a huge cock-up by demonstrating apps like Home. On a Mac, Home is an awful mess; the most basic operations are made unnecessarily difficult, what would be a long press or force touch now becomes an irritating secondary click (which is most annoying because I have a Force Touch trackpad not doing anything useful). Even the App Store is missing so many macOS features by virtue of being a Marzipan app. I'm __hoping__ these are just examples of Apple eating their own dogfood, knowing it tastes terrible. But I'm just having terrible flashbacks to when Finder was a Carbon app and performed like a dog --- oh, that's where the dogfood analogy comes in, I guess! That said, I still don't think Marzipan will be a convergence. I believe it's a stopgap. macOS is still the truck compared to iOS devices' cars; you just can't drive a truck using a car engine.

npunt 8y ago
You're right to point out that I'm in the optimistic camp on this issue. I think it's both do-able over the course of several years of refinements, and necessary given that I think we're not done yet with innovation in interaction methods. We've been on a plateau for a while with iDevices and Macs. Meanwhile, foldable screens, touch surfaces replacing keyboards, and gaze tracking are on the horizon, and those will require some fundamental UX work to be done across both iOS and MacOS, making them even more similar than before. Those techs are <10yrs out, possibly much much sooner given we see incremental progress toward them with tech like Samsung's foldable phones, the TouchBar, and FaceID. Even without new interaction methods, this kind of work is not an endeavor I think most companies can undertake, especially not Microsoft. Their failure doesn't reflect on the opportunity or possibility, because they really lack the deep bench of skill and company culture of perfectionism to get the UX right, and they don't have the market leverage or third party developer culture to push developers toward new things (see win32, uwp, etc). Win8 was a half-hearted springboard reskin that was only surface deep, and in no way a re-think of combining touch+mouse, let alone meaningful guidance and tools for developers on how to make apps span both. Users rightly rejected it and Win10 went back to a more incremental approach that's still mired in weird reskin issues, and touch is largely an afterthought on Windows except in specific apps. Re: Mac App Store, it isn't actually a Marzipan app, though it shares some of the questionable UX choices. I'm particularly not fond of the full page modal with 'Done' button rather than the more traditional back/forward design. Totally agree with you on this and the Marzipan quality issues. Discord is sort of representative of an aspect of the problem a combined UIKit is looking to solve - devs are using things like Electron to get cross-platform support but creating crappy anachronistic non-native experiences in the process. If devs can build for UIKit and get some platform-specific graceful enhancements built-in (as they did going from iPhone -> iPad), that changes the calculus on building with Electron or whatever. There's a lot of implementation details regarding Marzipan and UIKit but - saying this as a designer who's had to do a fair share of mixed mobile-desktop work - I don't see any fundamental blockers to the approach that would prevent pro apps on the Mac getting their interaction density on mouse and touch apps getting their lower interaction density touch targets. Just a lot of work and decisions to make around how to progressively enhance and offer platform-specific flexibility. But that's just my take, I can see why others might disagree. We'll see this June. Apparently some more fundamental UX changes were delayed last year to focus on quality, so this year is likely a big year.

npunt 8y ago

You're right to point out that I'm in the optimistic camp on this issue. I think it's both do-able over the course of several years of refinements, and necessary given that I think we're not done yet with innovation in interaction methods. We've been on a plateau for a while with iDevices and Macs. Meanwhile, foldable screens, touch surfaces replacing keyboards, and gaze tracking are on the horizon, and those will require some fundamental UX work to be done across both iOS and MacOS, making them even more similar than before. Those techs are <10yrs out, possibly much much sooner given we see incremental progress toward them with tech like Samsung's foldable phones, the TouchBar, and FaceID. Even without new interaction methods, this kind of work is not an endeavor I think most companies can undertake, especially not Microsoft. Their failure doesn't reflect on the opportunity or possibility, because they really lack the deep bench of skill and company culture of perfectionism to get the UX right, and they don't have the market leverage or third party developer culture to push developers toward new things (see win32, uwp, etc). Win8 was a half-hearted springboard reskin that was only surface deep, and in no way a re-think of combining touch+mouse, let alone meaningful guidance and tools for developers on how to make apps span both. Users rightly rejected it and Win10 went back to a more incremental approach that's still mired in weird reskin issues, and touch is largely an afterthought on Windows except in specific apps. Re: Mac App Store, it isn't actually a Marzipan app, though it shares some of the questionable UX choices. I'm particularly not fond of the full page modal with 'Done' button rather than the more traditional back/forward design. Totally agree with you on this and the Marzipan quality issues. Discord is sort of representative of an aspect of the problem a combined UIKit is looking to solve - devs are using things like Electron to get cross-platform support but creating crappy anachronistic non-native experiences in the process. If devs can build for UIKit and get some platform-specific graceful enhancements built-in (as they did going from iPhone -> iPad), that changes the calculus on building with Electron or whatever. There's a lot of implementation details regarding Marzipan and UIKit but - saying this as a designer who's had to do a fair share of mixed mobile-desktop work - I don't see any fundamental blockers to the approach that would prevent pro apps on the Mac getting their interaction density on mouse and touch apps getting their lower interaction density touch targets. Just a lot of work and decisions to make around how to progressively enhance and offer platform-specific flexibility. But that's just my take, I can see why others might disagree. We'll see this June. Apparently some more fundamental UX changes were delayed last year to focus on quality, so this year is likely a big year.