6 ms·

Apple to Target Combining iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps by 2021

45 points by jmsflknr 8y ago

skoopie 8y ago
Now we know why the new keyboards are so awful. They want to delight users by removing it completely for the new touch-only interface.
- arundemeure 8y ago
  Sigh, I really hope you're wrong. I can't stand the new keyboards (sticking to a last-gen Macbook Air) but the only thing worse than those keyboards are the official iPad keyboard folios from Apple. I'd seriously rather use the onscreen keyboard... On the other hand, if we had to rely on keyboard cases, there might be better options than what we have today - e.g. I've heard a lot of good about this Razer mechanical iPad Pro keyboard although it's obviously very bulky: https://www.macworld.com/article/3115739/input-devices/razer-mechanical-keyboard-case-review-luxurious-keys-for-ipad-pro.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3115739/input-devices/razer...
iambateman 8y ago
Why? Has anyone asked for this? I want my desktop apps to be dense and feature rich professional applications. My phone apps are relatively simple tools. I don’t understand why.
- isostatic 8y ago
  I had this discussion with someone yesterday, who was attempting to recreate a final cut pro news editing workflow, but do it on an iphone. I still have no idea why. Just because you can bang a nail in with a screwdriver, it doesn't mean you should when you've got a perfectly good hammer.
  - post_break 8y ago
    People love to take an iPad and force it to replace their ipad and be like "See, I can do all my work on my iPad, you just need 23 apps, and a few cheats and dongles to make it work." I don't understand it. I have a macbook pro, I have an iPad. Trying to force one to replace the other just doesn't work.
- TheCoreh 8y ago
  Personally, I would love if my phone apps were dense and feature rich professional applications, too. A lot of times I want to do something and it feels like the apps are holding me back just for the sake of being excessively simple. I've had this feeling on both Android and iOS
  - MobileVet 8y ago
    Seriously asking, was this sarcasm? I can see feature rich iPad apps... but is the phone meant for more than quick glances?
    - TheCoreh 8y ago
      It was not sarcasm. Sometimes quick glances can involve advanced tasks too. Or sometimes I'm on the go, with no tablet or computer and I still want to do something advanced, even if the phone screen is small. Besides there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to hook up my phone to an external display/mouse and get a full desktop experience. (Samsung is ahead of the pack in this, but the apps are still "mobile" versions that are not as fully fledged as their desktop counterparts)
      - MobileVet 8y ago
        Cool, thanks.
  - laythea 8y ago
    Erm, Unfortunately, I suspect it will be that the professional apps will be (and are being) dumbed down.
  - iambateman 8y ago
    I agree. Snapchat is great news for this desire. Eventually niche, high-use apps will reach degrees of complexity of which we can only dream right now.
- cujo 8y ago
  My hunch is that this isn't intended to just let iOS apps run on the desktop, but to allow developers to slap different UIs on their logic. It likely is more of a win for desktop devs as they'll presumably have an easier way to get their apps to iOS, or perhaps for game devs to have fewer requirements to port games.
- frou_dh 8y ago
  > Why? Has anyone asked for this? [...] I don’t understand why. There has probably been a decline in companies wanting to bother expending the effort to produce a separate AppKit version of their application solely to be able to target macOS. If an AppKit version is off the table, then between: - No app - A web app - An Electron app - A Marzipan app The Marzipan paradigm suddenly seems more appealing to Apple and Cocoa-faithful end users.
- hrktb 8y ago
  This is not just about desktop and phone though. I ask my iPad apps to be as dense and powerful as my desktop apps. In particular, the screen sizes are mostly similar now, processing power is on the same ballpark, and if anything the iPad has more potential than the laptop from a design perspective. So macOS <-> iPad parity. Then there's no technical reason to not have iPhone <-> iPad parity. You end up with the chain desktop <-> iPad <-> iPhone
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Why? Has anyone asked for this? I am asking for this. >I want my desktop apps to be dense and feature rich professional applications. My phone apps are relatively simple tools. No reason not to share the same codebase, with extra tools and UI widgets shown depending on whether they run on Mac or iDevices. Means more apps for Mac and more apps for iOS. And not with the crappy Electron wrappers.
coob 8y ago
What worked and didn't work with Microsoft's attempts to do this with Universal Windows Platform? Was it just lack of active phone / tablet marketshare, or was there a fundamental technical reason it didn't take off?
- bradenb 8y ago
  Speaking for myself (as a huge fan of C# and WPF), I didn't feel like there was enough of a phone/tablet/Store/Xbox market for UWP apps that made it worth restricting myself to UWP. I feel like it was a case of trying to make one tool useful for all jobs instead of choosing the right tool for each job.
- setquk 8y ago
  Microsoft's schitzophrenic management, comedy marketing, internal politics, zero ability to deliver, non existent QA, disrespect for the end user and the migration to a monthly fee wrote it off. A consistent well executed vision is required to pull this off. Apple haven't done it yet because it's that hard to work out how to do it without causing the above.
hokua22 8y ago
Touch and Desktop mouse/keyboard are different enough to each have their own UI...im guessing this just is another universal binary project...
aboutruby 8y ago
More likely to have apps ported from iOS to macOS than the reverse IMHO
- moduspwnens14 8y ago
  Yes, and we are already seeing it. The "Home" app on macOS right now is clearly reusing a lot of iOS UI elements. It works, although it's tough to imagine a more native Mac app wouldn't be a better UX. I think there's probably a case to be made when the app you're building is "mobile first," so you (as the developer) inherently do not want a richer, more feature-filled UI on the desktop. In that case, there's value in having a single UI to maintain and for that UI to be familiar to the user in both places.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    You act as if it is some great conspiracy that the Home app is a port from iOS. They outright said that it was a proof of concept for the cross platform framework they are working on.
    - moduspwnens14 8y ago
      My apologies if that's how it came across. My intention was to support the parent comment's assertion by pointing to a live example supporting his claim. Honestly we already discussed this when Marzipan was announced. I guess the news here is just the years they're targeting? Regardless, a lot of the comments here are worried about what the headline implies, which is much more sinister than "a fast and clean way to make an iOS-focused UI app also work on the Mac." And there are already live examples on macOS that actually work fairly well!
- Stubb 8y ago
  Would be nice if the apps were ported from MacOS to Linux so we could easily escape this mess.
FBISurveillance 8y ago
Assuming of of the reasons for this is to make Mac apps work on ARM.
tarunupaday 8y ago
I have been using an iPad exlusively for 3 years and this makes sense to me. Once they add this (and a mouse to iPad); then we can have the best of both worlds
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Most likely you will get the worst of all worlds. Desktop is driven by a pointer (mouse/trackpad) and keyboard, both with high degrees of fidelity. iPad and iPhone only have touch. (iPad has a keyboard as an afterthought, and the support for it is inconsistent even within the OS itself).
  - tarunupaday 8y ago
    Can you give examples of: “keyboard support is inconsistent within the OS itself” I have used iPad Pro exclusively for last 3 years for python coding and office work and not sure what you mean by it.
    - dmitriid 8y ago
      Unfortunately I've given up on my iPad, so I can't give you precise answer. So, anecdata only. As I tried to work on it the way I work on my laptop, I would continuously run into an impedance mismatch. What I could tab to I now had to touch. What I could reach with my mouse/trackpad, I now had to touch. What I could select with my mouse/trackpad, i now had to touch. Multiple gestures and keyboard shortcuts ingrained into me by my laptop usage failed on the iPad because the software was never built to be controlled via keyboard. MS tried doing combining desktop and mobile twice, and it failed. I have no idea why Apple thinks they can do it with any degree of confidence.
bradenb 8y ago
The article hits on this, but I think it probably makes sense for Apple to do this as they plan to run all their hardware on Apple chips in the near future. That said, I think it will likely result in lazy UX that's "good enough" for multiple device types.
- cytzol 8y ago
  > I think it will likely result in lazy UX that's "good enough" for multiple device types. This is already the case: the Marzipan apps shipping with Mojave are _shockingly_ bad (Home, News, Voice Memos). Standard keyboard shortcuts don’t work, drag-and-drop is inconsistent, and it’s clear that they never considered standard Mac features like multiple windows while designing them. I worry that people will look at these badly-ported, out-of-place apps and say “Apple are doing it, so why can’t we?” rather than “Even Apple could only come up with this, so let’s not.”
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Yes they are bad - but they are also a technical preview. Apple said as much. Would you rather Apple come out with the framework in a year without getting real world feedback?
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      The News app says it's version 4.1.1. It's part of a shipping release version of macOS. I don't know why any regular user should come to the conclusion that this is some sort of technical preview. Why wouldn't they think that it's simply terrible software?
      - scarface74 8y ago
        We aren’t suppose to be regular users. We are suppose to be technical. We discuss technical issues on HN and do stuff like watch the WWDC keynote.
        8y ago
MobileVet 8y ago
I understand the desire to push computation to a single device, but I don’t agree with it. It is very rare for a device that does ‘everything’ to do anything ‘well.’ In software, Eclipse is the perfect counter argument. It does nothing well, imho. Sketch is the opposite, singular focus = quality experience. My phone serves a purpose and I expect apps to be bite sized experiences and quick data points. My computer serves a completely different purpose. The applications should be equally focused on that purpose
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I think it's also a bit (just a bit) due to our need to focus on a single domain. It's rare to have your brain ready to navigate the mathematical realm of all universal abstractions in a single setting (can happen but not common for the mere mortal I suppose). Meanwhile people are doing https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/14/the-spudwrite-single-purpose-user-device-for-creating-writing-made-with-e-paper-mbed-and-stm32f401-cortex-m4/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/14/the-spudwrite-single-pu... in their backyard.. says something
skywhopper 8y ago
This is weird. It’s the sort of thing that management dreams of but which companies like Apple should realize is a bad idea. They definitely need to provide tools for making app families work smoothly across each platform, but even more importantly they need to be segmenting their devices more, not less. The latest iPads are a great example of a device that has enormous potential which is being hamstrung by an OS and dev platform that doesn’t really provide a tablet-focused experience. And then the Mac is losing what should be its primary audience through unwanted innovations and otherwise stagnant hardware, and a failure to recognize the importance of catering to the power users who might want an actual escape key, multiple types of ports, and a keyboard that doesn’t feel like it came off a rejected tablet accessory. I can see an argument for fragmenting the laptop world into Pro/developer hardware and consumer hardware. But Apple seems to have got the needs of those groups mixed up. Do Apple’s own software engineers love the newest Macs I wonder?
- scarface74 8y ago
  And then the Mac is losing what should be its primary audience through unwanted innovations and otherwise stagnant hardware, While I agree with most of the post, the “Mac is losing people” narrative isn’t supported by the numbers. Apple just reported its highest revenue quarter for Macs in its entire history. The industry has spoken, statistically, no one cares about PC software. Writing Mac software even less. I would rather live in a world with cross platform iPad/Mac apps using Apple’s SDKs than Electron apps.
  - scirocco 8y ago
    Mac is losing the HN audience?
    - scarface74 8y ago
      And in the grand scheme of things, this was probably the same audience who in 2001, were posting on Slashdot commenting “Less space than the Nomad, No wireless, Lame”.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
bluedino 8y ago
I hope they've learned from that joke Marzipan.
exabrial 8y ago
This is one of those corporate directives from upper management that was made in a vacuum. Those three devices have different access patterns, user bases, and user abilities.
naspinski 8y ago
Granted they are a different company, but this was a huge failure for Microsoft. Different devices have different strengths and weaknesses.
auggierose 8y ago
This is great. For those here commenting "why? My iPhone is very different from my iMac", an example: I am writing an iPad app for a client that has a lot of custom Metal compute code. It is great that I can basically run that code on my iMac Pro as well, for rapid prototyping, and because having a desktop companion app makes a lot of sense. Right now though I have to be very careful how to share code between the two apps, mainly because UIKit is not available on the Mac. Unification would solve that headache for me.
- sjwright 8y ago
  What people who haven't written Mac apps need to realise is that many of the UI APIs are not even remotely shared between macOS (AppKit) and iOS (UIKit). Even the most basic concepts like colour are not handled uniformly. Having UIKit available on macOS doesn't mean you port over your iPad GUI and call it a day; you would still write a desktop GUI. But by having the same API means that your business logic and glue code doesn't get infected with quite so much platform-specific crap like UIColor vs NSColor.
talkingtab 8y ago
Yesterday there was an article on HN about audio glitches on Macs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19196354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19196354, with comments (including mine) about Apple products going down hill. I think this idea is a glaring example of how Apple has lost their way. They are exploiting a market - Apps - instead of adding value and building good products. I seem to remember Microsoft do exactly this same kind of thing as they were on their downward trajectory?
- snazz 8y ago
  Microsoft managed to turn it around with a new CEO and a new market category. I wonder what Apple’s next venture will be, and if it will be as successful as Microsoft’s cloud and subscription-service products.
dep_b 8y ago
Well it would definitely be nice to have more serious applications for the iPad and perhaps some new mobile productivity apps crossing over to the Mac. But the UX is so fundamentally different that I'm afraid the majority of the applications will be pretty awful on the Mac as mobile is less information and feature dense while having a smaller screen. What could be really great is having feature dense UI's on the larger iPad Pro's since they do have the screen real-estate but often it's underused.
seanalltogether 8y ago
I've been working on an IoT mobile app suite for about 4 years now for a client. While the app has evolved significantly over the years, one thing remains constant, Only one platform is getting top billing, the other is getting the leftovers. All the designs and workflows and copy are solved on the phone first, and tablet gets a cursory glance and some changes if things don't look right. In fact at this point many of our menu views are simply modal popups on tablet so that we don't have to put any mental effort into solving view layouts. I'm sure management would love to know they could get a mac app for free as well, but I wouldn't imagine it would look like a native mac app.
matthew-wegner 8y ago
This is already sort of here, and badly. If you're on Mojave, open up the built-in News.app. Resize the window (it's terribly slow). Mouse hover states aren't even there. Bouncing over-scroll is still present. The speed at which Apple can successfully make this not-awful is probably a good indicator of them trying to make it ship for all developers.
blumomo 8y ago
If Apple continues as in the past they will deliver great APIs, SDKs and User Guidelines which allows developers to build great apps which feel good on both iOS and macOS. I trust them that they this comes true and I'm excited to see the possibilities which their multi-platform app development tools will unleash for the Apple ecosystem.
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  > great APIs...great apps...feel good...I trust them...I'm exited...possibilities...will unleash... That sentence has too many happy adjectives - something which seems to be endemic in the Apple world - and could have been lifted straight from an Apple advertising campaign, the latter in no small part due to the use of the word unleash which thrives in that context.
  - blumomo 8y ago
    Go ahead and compare Apple's Cocoa framework with the MFC or Android framework. Build apps on all these platforms and you'll see what I'm talking about.
oflannabhra 8y ago
A lot of people are focusing on the user experience in their commentary here, which I totally get, and I would argue is the most important part of this initiative. I personally have a lot of open questions about how a user interface will work across different paradigms (touch and cursor). The first Marzipan apps (News, Stocks, and HomeKit) have lots of weird corner cases and sharp edges. Specifically, some of the "elder statesmen" of Apple commentariat see Marzipan as a threat to the old Mac indie app ecosystem. I get that, and I think that there are definitely some aspects of the old paradigm that are at risk (ie, AppleScript integration, etc). However, I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here. 1) Apple is unmatched in their ability to design user interfaces. It is entirely possible that they will come up with a solution for cross-paradigm interface that works, or come up with a system to "translate" an interface for multiple target paradigms. 2) Apple has a history of successfully pulling off large transitions like this. In fact, they might be the only company that has done this successfully multiple times. (That is, architecture change and UI framework migration). On top of that, I think all the doubt and suspicion has to be weighed against the following upsides: 1) The upside for the Mac is enormous. The sheer amount of software that could immediately become available on the desktop would probably be the worlds biggest inflow of software to any operating system, ever. And, it is, for the most part, good software. 2) This is mostly a move on behalf of developers. I get the "but no one asked" responses, but the developer story here is probably one of the major reasons Apple undertook the work (that and ARM). 3) This is Apple's answer to Electron for the Mac. It will undoubtedly be better in user experience, performance, and resource usage. (We will have to wait and see whether it is successful, though). Stephen Troughton Smith [0] has had one of the most refreshing takes on Marzipan that I've seen. He maintains an open source tool [1] that will get your iOS app to run on Marzipan. [0] - https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith [1] - https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/marzipanify https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/marzipanify
tdhz77 8y ago
This can be done using WebAssembly and swift web.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

45 points by jmsflknr 8y ago

Now we know why the new keyboards are so awful. They want to delight users by removing it completely for the new touch-only interface.

arundemeure 8y ago
Sigh, I really hope you're wrong. I can't stand the new keyboards (sticking to a last-gen Macbook Air) but the only thing worse than those keyboards are the official iPad keyboard folios from Apple. I'd seriously rather use the onscreen keyboard... On the other hand, if we had to rely on keyboard cases, there might be better options than what we have today - e.g. I've heard a lot of good about this Razer mechanical iPad Pro keyboard although it's obviously very bulky: https://www.macworld.com/article/3115739/input-devices/razer-mechanical-keyboard-case-review-luxurious-keys-for-ipad-pro.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3115739/input-devices/razer...

iambateman 8y ago

Why? Has anyone asked for this? I want my desktop apps to be dense and feature rich professional applications. My phone apps are relatively simple tools. I don’t understand why.

isostatic 8y ago
I had this discussion with someone yesterday, who was attempting to recreate a final cut pro news editing workflow, but do it on an iphone. I still have no idea why. Just because you can bang a nail in with a screwdriver, it doesn't mean you should when you've got a perfectly good hammer.
- post_break 8y ago
  People love to take an iPad and force it to replace their ipad and be like "See, I can do all my work on my iPad, you just need 23 apps, and a few cheats and dongles to make it work." I don't understand it. I have a macbook pro, I have an iPad. Trying to force one to replace the other just doesn't work.
TheCoreh 8y ago
Personally, I would love if my phone apps were dense and feature rich professional applications, too. A lot of times I want to do something and it feels like the apps are holding me back just for the sake of being excessively simple. I've had this feeling on both Android and iOS
- MobileVet 8y ago
  Seriously asking, was this sarcasm? I can see feature rich iPad apps... but is the phone meant for more than quick glances?
  - TheCoreh 8y ago
    It was not sarcasm. Sometimes quick glances can involve advanced tasks too. Or sometimes I'm on the go, with no tablet or computer and I still want to do something advanced, even if the phone screen is small. Besides there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to hook up my phone to an external display/mouse and get a full desktop experience. (Samsung is ahead of the pack in this, but the apps are still "mobile" versions that are not as fully fledged as their desktop counterparts)
    - MobileVet 8y ago
      Cool, thanks.
- laythea 8y ago
  Erm, Unfortunately, I suspect it will be that the professional apps will be (and are being) dumbed down.
- iambateman 8y ago
  I agree. Snapchat is great news for this desire. Eventually niche, high-use apps will reach degrees of complexity of which we can only dream right now.
cujo 8y ago
My hunch is that this isn't intended to just let iOS apps run on the desktop, but to allow developers to slap different UIs on their logic. It likely is more of a win for desktop devs as they'll presumably have an easier way to get their apps to iOS, or perhaps for game devs to have fewer requirements to port games.
frou_dh 8y ago
> Why? Has anyone asked for this? [...] I don’t understand why. There has probably been a decline in companies wanting to bother expending the effort to produce a separate AppKit version of their application solely to be able to target macOS. If an AppKit version is off the table, then between: - No app - A web app - An Electron app - A Marzipan app The Marzipan paradigm suddenly seems more appealing to Apple and Cocoa-faithful end users.
hrktb 8y ago
This is not just about desktop and phone though. I ask my iPad apps to be as dense and powerful as my desktop apps. In particular, the screen sizes are mostly similar now, processing power is on the same ballpark, and if anything the iPad has more potential than the laptop from a design perspective. So macOS <-> iPad parity. Then there's no technical reason to not have iPhone <-> iPad parity. You end up with the chain desktop <-> iPad <-> iPhone
coldtea 8y ago
>Why? Has anyone asked for this? I am asking for this. >I want my desktop apps to be dense and feature rich professional applications. My phone apps are relatively simple tools. No reason not to share the same codebase, with extra tools and UI widgets shown depending on whether they run on Mac or iDevices. Means more apps for Mac and more apps for iOS. And not with the crappy Electron wrappers.

coob 8y ago

What worked and didn't work with Microsoft's attempts to do this with Universal Windows Platform? Was it just lack of active phone / tablet marketshare, or was there a fundamental technical reason it didn't take off?

bradenb 8y ago
Speaking for myself (as a huge fan of C# and WPF), I didn't feel like there was enough of a phone/tablet/Store/Xbox market for UWP apps that made it worth restricting myself to UWP. I feel like it was a case of trying to make one tool useful for all jobs instead of choosing the right tool for each job.
setquk 8y ago
Microsoft's schitzophrenic management, comedy marketing, internal politics, zero ability to deliver, non existent QA, disrespect for the end user and the migration to a monthly fee wrote it off. A consistent well executed vision is required to pull this off. Apple haven't done it yet because it's that hard to work out how to do it without causing the above.

hokua22 8y ago

Touch and Desktop mouse/keyboard are different enough to each have their own UI...im guessing this just is another universal binary project...

aboutruby 8y ago

More likely to have apps ported from iOS to macOS than the reverse IMHO

moduspwnens14 8y ago
Yes, and we are already seeing it. The "Home" app on macOS right now is clearly reusing a lot of iOS UI elements. It works, although it's tough to imagine a more native Mac app wouldn't be a better UX. I think there's probably a case to be made when the app you're building is "mobile first," so you (as the developer) inherently do not want a richer, more feature-filled UI on the desktop. In that case, there's value in having a single UI to maintain and for that UI to be familiar to the user in both places.
- scarface74 8y ago
  You act as if it is some great conspiracy that the Home app is a port from iOS. They outright said that it was a proof of concept for the cross platform framework they are working on.
  - moduspwnens14 8y ago
    My apologies if that's how it came across. My intention was to support the parent comment's assertion by pointing to a live example supporting his claim. Honestly we already discussed this when Marzipan was announced. I guess the news here is just the years they're targeting? Regardless, a lot of the comments here are worried about what the headline implies, which is much more sinister than "a fast and clean way to make an iOS-focused UI app also work on the Mac." And there are already live examples on macOS that actually work fairly well!
Stubb 8y ago
Would be nice if the apps were ported from MacOS to Linux so we could easily escape this mess.

FBISurveillance 8y ago

Assuming of of the reasons for this is to make Mac apps work on ARM.

tarunupaday 8y ago

I have been using an iPad exlusively for 3 years and this makes sense to me. Once they add this (and a mouse to iPad); then we can have the best of both worlds

dmitriid 8y ago
Most likely you will get the worst of all worlds. Desktop is driven by a pointer (mouse/trackpad) and keyboard, both with high degrees of fidelity. iPad and iPhone only have touch. (iPad has a keyboard as an afterthought, and the support for it is inconsistent even within the OS itself).
- tarunupaday 8y ago
  Can you give examples of: “keyboard support is inconsistent within the OS itself” I have used iPad Pro exclusively for last 3 years for python coding and office work and not sure what you mean by it.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    Unfortunately I've given up on my iPad, so I can't give you precise answer. So, anecdata only. As I tried to work on it the way I work on my laptop, I would continuously run into an impedance mismatch. What I could tab to I now had to touch. What I could reach with my mouse/trackpad, I now had to touch. What I could select with my mouse/trackpad, i now had to touch. Multiple gestures and keyboard shortcuts ingrained into me by my laptop usage failed on the iPad because the software was never built to be controlled via keyboard. MS tried doing combining desktop and mobile twice, and it failed. I have no idea why Apple thinks they can do it with any degree of confidence.

bradenb 8y ago

The article hits on this, but I think it probably makes sense for Apple to do this as they plan to run all their hardware on Apple chips in the near future. That said, I think it will likely result in lazy UX that's "good enough" for multiple device types.

cytzol 8y ago
> I think it will likely result in lazy UX that's "good enough" for multiple device types. This is already the case: the Marzipan apps shipping with Mojave are _shockingly_ bad (Home, News, Voice Memos). Standard keyboard shortcuts don’t work, drag-and-drop is inconsistent, and it’s clear that they never considered standard Mac features like multiple windows while designing them. I worry that people will look at these badly-ported, out-of-place apps and say “Apple are doing it, so why can’t we?” rather than “Even Apple could only come up with this, so let’s not.”
- scarface74 8y ago
  Yes they are bad - but they are also a technical preview. Apple said as much. Would you rather Apple come out with the framework in a year without getting real world feedback?
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    The News app says it's version 4.1.1. It's part of a shipping release version of macOS. I don't know why any regular user should come to the conclusion that this is some sort of technical preview. Why wouldn't they think that it's simply terrible software?
    - scarface74 8y ago
      We aren’t suppose to be regular users. We are suppose to be technical. We discuss technical issues on HN and do stuff like watch the WWDC keynote.
      - 8y ago

MobileVet 8y ago

I understand the desire to push computation to a single device, but I don’t agree with it. It is very rare for a device that does ‘everything’ to do anything ‘well.’ In software, Eclipse is the perfect counter argument. It does nothing well, imho. Sketch is the opposite, singular focus = quality experience. My phone serves a purpose and I expect apps to be bite sized experiences and quick data points. My computer serves a completely different purpose. The applications should be equally focused on that purpose

agumonkey 8y ago
I think it's also a bit (just a bit) due to our need to focus on a single domain. It's rare to have your brain ready to navigate the mathematical realm of all universal abstractions in a single setting (can happen but not common for the mere mortal I suppose). Meanwhile people are doing https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/14/the-spudwrite-single-purpose-user-device-for-creating-writing-made-with-e-paper-mbed-and-stm32f401-cortex-m4/ https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/14/the-spudwrite-single-pu... in their backyard.. says something

skywhopper 8y ago

This is weird. It’s the sort of thing that management dreams of but which companies like Apple should realize is a bad idea. They definitely need to provide tools for making app families work smoothly across each platform, but even more importantly they need to be segmenting their devices more, not less. The latest iPads are a great example of a device that has enormous potential which is being hamstrung by an OS and dev platform that doesn’t really provide a tablet-focused experience. And then the Mac is losing what should be its primary audience through unwanted innovations and otherwise stagnant hardware, and a failure to recognize the importance of catering to the power users who might want an actual escape key, multiple types of ports, and a keyboard that doesn’t feel like it came off a rejected tablet accessory. I can see an argument for fragmenting the laptop world into Pro/developer hardware and consumer hardware. But Apple seems to have got the needs of those groups mixed up. Do Apple’s own software engineers love the newest Macs I wonder?

scarface74 8y ago
And then the Mac is losing what should be its primary audience through unwanted innovations and otherwise stagnant hardware, While I agree with most of the post, the “Mac is losing people” narrative isn’t supported by the numbers. Apple just reported its highest revenue quarter for Macs in its entire history. The industry has spoken, statistically, no one cares about PC software. Writing Mac software even less. I would rather live in a world with cross platform iPad/Mac apps using Apple’s SDKs than Electron apps.
- scirocco 8y ago
  Mac is losing the HN audience?
  - scarface74 8y ago
    And in the grand scheme of things, this was probably the same audience who in 2001, were posting on Slashdot commenting “Less space than the Nomad, No wireless, Lame”.
- arvinsim 8y ago

bluedino 8y ago

I hope they've learned from that joke Marzipan.

exabrial 8y ago

This is one of those corporate directives from upper management that was made in a vacuum. Those three devices have different access patterns, user bases, and user abilities.

naspinski 8y ago

Granted they are a different company, but this was a huge failure for Microsoft. Different devices have different strengths and weaknesses.

auggierose 8y ago

This is great. For those here commenting "why? My iPhone is very different from my iMac", an example: I am writing an iPad app for a client that has a lot of custom Metal compute code. It is great that I can basically run that code on my iMac Pro as well, for rapid prototyping, and because having a desktop companion app makes a lot of sense. Right now though I have to be very careful how to share code between the two apps, mainly because UIKit is not available on the Mac. Unification would solve that headache for me.

sjwright 8y ago
What people who haven't written Mac apps need to realise is that many of the UI APIs are not even remotely shared between macOS (AppKit) and iOS (UIKit). Even the most basic concepts like colour are not handled uniformly. Having UIKit available on macOS doesn't mean you port over your iPad GUI and call it a day; you would still write a desktop GUI. But by having the same API means that your business logic and glue code doesn't get infected with quite so much platform-specific crap like UIColor vs NSColor.

talkingtab 8y ago

Yesterday there was an article on HN about audio glitches on Macs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19196354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19196354, with comments (including mine) about Apple products going down hill. I think this idea is a glaring example of how Apple has lost their way. They are exploiting a market - Apps - instead of adding value and building good products. I seem to remember Microsoft do exactly this same kind of thing as they were on their downward trajectory?

snazz 8y ago
Microsoft managed to turn it around with a new CEO and a new market category. I wonder what Apple’s next venture will be, and if it will be as successful as Microsoft’s cloud and subscription-service products.

dep_b 8y ago

Well it would definitely be nice to have more serious applications for the iPad and perhaps some new mobile productivity apps crossing over to the Mac. But the UX is so fundamentally different that I'm afraid the majority of the applications will be pretty awful on the Mac as mobile is less information and feature dense while having a smaller screen. What could be really great is having feature dense UI's on the larger iPad Pro's since they do have the screen real-estate but often it's underused.

seanalltogether 8y ago

I've been working on an IoT mobile app suite for about 4 years now for a client. While the app has evolved significantly over the years, one thing remains constant, Only one platform is getting top billing, the other is getting the leftovers. All the designs and workflows and copy are solved on the phone first, and tablet gets a cursory glance and some changes if things don't look right. In fact at this point many of our menu views are simply modal popups on tablet so that we don't have to put any mental effort into solving view layouts. I'm sure management would love to know they could get a mac app for free as well, but I wouldn't imagine it would look like a native mac app.

matthew-wegner 8y ago

This is already sort of here, and badly. If you're on Mojave, open up the built-in News.app. Resize the window (it's terribly slow). Mouse hover states aren't even there. Bouncing over-scroll is still present. The speed at which Apple can successfully make this not-awful is probably a good indicator of them trying to make it ship for all developers.

blumomo 8y ago

If Apple continues as in the past they will deliver great APIs, SDKs and User Guidelines which allows developers to build great apps which feel good on both iOS and macOS. I trust them that they this comes true and I'm excited to see the possibilities which their multi-platform app development tools will unleash for the Apple ecosystem.

Yetanfou 8y ago
> great APIs...great apps...feel good...I trust them...I'm exited...possibilities...will unleash... That sentence has too many happy adjectives - something which seems to be endemic in the Apple world - and could have been lifted straight from an Apple advertising campaign, the latter in no small part due to the use of the word unleash which thrives in that context.
- blumomo 8y ago
  Go ahead and compare Apple's Cocoa framework with the MFC or Android framework. Build apps on all these platforms and you'll see what I'm talking about.

oflannabhra 8y ago

A lot of people are focusing on the user experience in their commentary here, which I totally get, and I would argue is the most important part of this initiative. I personally have a lot of open questions about how a user interface will work across different paradigms (touch and cursor). The first Marzipan apps (News, Stocks, and HomeKit) have lots of weird corner cases and sharp edges. Specifically, some of the "elder statesmen" of Apple commentariat see Marzipan as a threat to the old Mac indie app ecosystem. I get that, and I think that there are definitely some aspects of the old paradigm that are at risk (ie, AppleScript integration, etc). However, I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here. 1) Apple is unmatched in their ability to design user interfaces. It is entirely possible that they will come up with a solution for cross-paradigm interface that works, or come up with a system to "translate" an interface for multiple target paradigms. 2) Apple has a history of successfully pulling off large transitions like this. In fact, they might be the only company that has done this successfully multiple times. (That is, architecture change and UI framework migration). On top of that, I think all the doubt and suspicion has to be weighed against the following upsides: 1) The upside for the Mac is enormous. The sheer amount of software that could immediately become available on the desktop would probably be the worlds biggest inflow of software to any operating system, ever. And, it is, for the most part, good software. 2) This is mostly a move on behalf of developers. I get the "but no one asked" responses, but the developer story here is probably one of the major reasons Apple undertook the work (that and ARM). 3) This is Apple's answer to Electron for the Mac. It will undoubtedly be better in user experience, performance, and resource usage. (We will have to wait and see whether it is successful, though). Stephen Troughton Smith [0] has had one of the most refreshing takes on Marzipan that I've seen. He maintains an open source tool [1] that will get your iOS app to run on Marzipan. [0] - https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith [1] - https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/marzipanify https://github.com/steventroughtonsmith/marzipanify

tdhz77 8y ago

This can be done using WebAssembly and swift web.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]