5 ms·

I expect a lot of franken apps not fitting into the system. As a developer, I would be happy to write a new interface for each platform. If only we had not bott

by zoul 7y ago

I expect a lot of franken apps not fitting into the system. As a developer, I would be happy to write a new interface for each platform. If only we had not bottom-raced software prices to levels that make it hard to create an app, let alone with custom interfaces for different platforms… So are we really solving the most important problem with Marzipan?

jldugger 7y ago
> So are we really solving the most important problem with Marzipan? ... World hunger?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzipan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzipan …so I guess so?
olliej 7y ago
According to the unending stream of devs saying that they just want to ship iOS apps on macos, this is the most important thing. I agree with you entirely: I expect a huge flood of awful software. Marzipan for games seems more reasonable, but only because most games are "create a single window, and go fullscreen".
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Marzipan doesn't seem all that useful for games, since they'd be targeting OpenGL or Metal for their UI anyways (plus I think a lot of games use Unity anyways, which does a lot of the hard work from what I hear).
  - olliej 7y ago
    plenty of games come to iOS before macOS now. Marzipan means (I think?) you get a lot of the the basics: get a window, setup a gl/metal context, start drawing. That's more or less the entirety of a game's output. Input then means adding a mouse/keyboard path in addition to touch events and it seems like that's something that should be easy :D Honestly the effort to setup a GL (and I assume metal) view is kind of annoying on macOS.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Marzipan bridges almost every iOS framework (notably UIKit) to macOS. Games tend to not link against these.
      - olliej 7y ago
        Sorry, what I was trying to say is that basically all games want to do is get pixels to the screen - they're aren't really using the OS to do anything else: no system UI, etc
        saagarjha 7y ago
        That's my point as well: you don't really need Marzipan for this. Putting pixels on the screen using OpenGL is already pretty easy for pretty much every platform.
        olliej 7y ago
        Haha I’m not saying you need this, I suspect for many devs using marzipan and adding mouse+keyboard handlers is probably less work than setting up a real Mac app. But for games I’m not super concerned as they’re not generally heavy on the OS UI.
    - valleyer 7y ago
      > Marzipan means (I think?) you get a lot of the the basics: get a window, setup a gl/metal context, start drawing. That's more or less the entirety of a game's output. There's a template in Xcode to set all of this up for Metal. It takes about five clicks. For OpenGL, it's as simple as adding an NSOpenGLView to a nib.
      - olliej 7y ago
        But compare to just recompiling your IOS app to marzipan - you no longer need to have separate paths to initialize the gl context - all you need is the different event handlers. I like to imagine that a point+click name wouldn’t even need that.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Apple said during their subscription presentation that the games that are part of the subscription service will run on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and AppleTV’s. Speculation is that it’s part of the Marzipan effort.
- novok 7y ago
  What would be worse, marizpan apps or electron apps?
  - olliej 7y ago
    both are terrible, but I might actually lean towards marzipan being worse, because at least electron apps acknowledge they're not running on a phone? But I feel it's quite close
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Marzipan apps use fewer system resources, at least, and they tend to respond to platform conventions better (you know it's a low bar when I'm saying this about Marzipan :/)
      - olliej 7y ago
        true, battery life is probably better, but I'm still super worried by the ui convention and design. But yeah, we're not talking about high bars here :(
      - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
        We can always hope, but the Marzipan apps I have used so far (News and Stocks) are incredibly slow and don't adhere to platform conventions at all. I truly hope (and believe) that they are not representative of what Marzipan will be able to do in the future. I have never used a single Electron app that was nearly as bad. In fact all Electron apps I have used are pretty good (VS Code, Spotify, Exodus). Yes they do use more memory, but not nearly enough to pose a problem for my 2012 Mac mini with 8GB RAM.
        matwood 7y ago
        > but the Marzipan apps I have used so far (News and Stocks) are incredibly slow and don't adhere to platform conventions at all I agree. We do not have much to judge off of yet, so I'm holding out hope these are not final examples. Apple knew people would find out what was being worked on so went ahead and gave a small early preview. What we see at this years WWDC will be telling.
- threeseed 7y ago
  During the original iOS days there was a flood of awful software. And then the developers gained experience and now the quality is overall pretty decent.
  - olliej 7y ago
    The concern isn't necessarily that the software is /bad/, it's that you get a bunch of iOS apps that just get recompiled to macOS with no thought to the different interface being used, etc.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  this is the most important thing To them, not necessarily to Apple nor their customers.
  - olliej 7y ago
    I agree entirely, but nonetheless that's what they feel.
ksec 7y ago
Drifting Off fro the technical discussions. >If only we had not bottom-raced software prices to levels that make it hard to create an app Are there any product or services sold in an open market where its price is not bottom raced? Even Apple products are many times cheaper than they were in the 90s.
- inapis 7y ago
  Apple products might be cheaper compared to 90s but they still incorporate a significant margin. An $800 iPhone can end up having a margin of about $300-400. Even if you incorporate other stuff R&D, marketing etc, you still have $200+ margin on the phone. Compared to that, consumer software has become priced around 5-10 USD. At $5 and 1000 customers, you get $5k in revenue. After Apple/Google's commission, you get $3500. Factor in other stuff for marketing, customer support etc. you barely are left with profit. At 200 hours of work, that is $17.5 per hour. And getting to even the first 1000 users can take a long long time. Another option is to make it free, supported by ads, but then you have to have a much bigger user base or you'll be making pennies. On top of that, people get angry when you charge for upgrade or subscriptions. Checkout twitter threads for Reeder 4 and Tweetbot 4. Plenty of people complained - "why do we have to pay again" Consumer software is currently a terrible space profit/revenue wise. B2B is a much better space to operate in. I'm currently building a pocket/instapaper alternative but all my investigation around revenue/pricing/profitability left me with much less optimism than I expected. I'll complete this project but I'm probably not going to get into B2C again.
- peteretep 7y ago
  Veblen goods, innit
madeofpalk 7y ago
> I expect a lot of franken apps not fitting into the system Developers can already make bad apps, Marzipan doesn't change that. You don't have to use them.
ryandrake 7y ago
The real head scratcher is that it's not really that big a deal to port your iOS app to the Mac, development-wise. You're probably using objective C or Swift already, so no need to switch language or libraries. If you've properly separated your ViewControllers from your business logic, then you can share a huge portion of your existing code base. If you have an iOS app, you're already between 50-75% of the way to having a great Mac app. The most important problem to solve is envisioning the UI of your app in a world of mouse/keyboard input, arbitrarily resizable windows, context menus, and how to properly move from iOS UI conventions to Mac UI conventions. This is critical in order for the app to look like it belongs on the platform. My beef with Marzipan is they're basically saying, "LOL don't bother with that," so yea, I agree the most likely scenario is my future Mac desktop full of Marzipan apps is going to look like a desktop full of little phone windows with neanderthal phone-oriented interfaces because developers can't be bothered to re-think their UI a little.
- adamnemecek 7y ago
  I agree for the most part but up until recently (2016?) I remember that the ViewController life-cycles were actually pretty different. The problem with AppKit vs UIKit is that most of the things seem to be the same until they are not. At that point, you try to hack AppKit to behave like UIKit (probably cause you have some code already written for UIKit) which generally turns out to be a fools errand. For example, I hate the usage of the Flyweight pattern in AppKit. UIKit doesn't suffer from this.

by zoul 7y ago

jldugger 7y ago

> So are we really solving the most important problem with Marzipan? ... World hunger?

saagarjha 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzipan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzipan …so I guess so?

olliej 7y ago

According to the unending stream of devs saying that they just want to ship iOS apps on macos, this is the most important thing. I agree with you entirely: I expect a huge flood of awful software. Marzipan for games seems more reasonable, but only because most games are "create a single window, and go fullscreen".

saagarjha 7y ago
Marzipan doesn't seem all that useful for games, since they'd be targeting OpenGL or Metal for their UI anyways (plus I think a lot of games use Unity anyways, which does a lot of the hard work from what I hear).
- olliej 7y ago
  plenty of games come to iOS before macOS now. Marzipan means (I think?) you get a lot of the the basics: get a window, setup a gl/metal context, start drawing. That's more or less the entirety of a game's output. Input then means adding a mouse/keyboard path in addition to touch events and it seems like that's something that should be easy :D Honestly the effort to setup a GL (and I assume metal) view is kind of annoying on macOS.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Marzipan bridges almost every iOS framework (notably UIKit) to macOS. Games tend to not link against these.
    - olliej 7y ago
      Sorry, what I was trying to say is that basically all games want to do is get pixels to the screen - they're aren't really using the OS to do anything else: no system UI, etc
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        That's my point as well: you don't really need Marzipan for this. Putting pixels on the screen using OpenGL is already pretty easy for pretty much every platform.
        olliej 7y ago
        Haha I’m not saying you need this, I suspect for many devs using marzipan and adding mouse+keyboard handlers is probably less work than setting up a real Mac app. But for games I’m not super concerned as they’re not generally heavy on the OS UI.
  - valleyer 7y ago
    > Marzipan means (I think?) you get a lot of the the basics: get a window, setup a gl/metal context, start drawing. That's more or less the entirety of a game's output. There's a template in Xcode to set all of this up for Metal. It takes about five clicks. For OpenGL, it's as simple as adding an NSOpenGLView to a nib.
    - olliej 7y ago
      But compare to just recompiling your IOS app to marzipan - you no longer need to have separate paths to initialize the gl context - all you need is the different event handlers. I like to imagine that a point+click name wouldn’t even need that.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Apple said during their subscription presentation that the games that are part of the subscription service will run on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and AppleTV’s. Speculation is that it’s part of the Marzipan effort.
novok 7y ago
What would be worse, marizpan apps or electron apps?
- olliej 7y ago
  both are terrible, but I might actually lean towards marzipan being worse, because at least electron apps acknowledge they're not running on a phone? But I feel it's quite close
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Marzipan apps use fewer system resources, at least, and they tend to respond to platform conventions better (you know it's a low bar when I'm saying this about Marzipan :/)
    - olliej 7y ago
      true, battery life is probably better, but I'm still super worried by the ui convention and design. But yeah, we're not talking about high bars here :(
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      We can always hope, but the Marzipan apps I have used so far (News and Stocks) are incredibly slow and don't adhere to platform conventions at all. I truly hope (and believe) that they are not representative of what Marzipan will be able to do in the future. I have never used a single Electron app that was nearly as bad. In fact all Electron apps I have used are pretty good (VS Code, Spotify, Exodus). Yes they do use more memory, but not nearly enough to pose a problem for my 2012 Mac mini with 8GB RAM.
      - matwood 7y ago
        > but the Marzipan apps I have used so far (News and Stocks) are incredibly slow and don't adhere to platform conventions at all I agree. We do not have much to judge off of yet, so I'm holding out hope these are not final examples. Apple knew people would find out what was being worked on so went ahead and gave a small early preview. What we see at this years WWDC will be telling.
threeseed 7y ago
During the original iOS days there was a flood of awful software. And then the developers gained experience and now the quality is overall pretty decent.
- olliej 7y ago
  The concern isn't necessarily that the software is /bad/, it's that you get a bunch of iOS apps that just get recompiled to macOS with no thought to the different interface being used, etc.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
this is the most important thing To them, not necessarily to Apple nor their customers.
- olliej 7y ago
  I agree entirely, but nonetheless that's what they feel.

ksec 7y ago

Drifting Off fro the technical discussions. >If only we had not bottom-raced software prices to levels that make it hard to create an app Are there any product or services sold in an open market where its price is not bottom raced? Even Apple products are many times cheaper than they were in the 90s.

inapis 7y ago
Apple products might be cheaper compared to 90s but they still incorporate a significant margin. An $800 iPhone can end up having a margin of about $300-400. Even if you incorporate other stuff R&D, marketing etc, you still have $200+ margin on the phone. Compared to that, consumer software has become priced around 5-10 USD. At $5 and 1000 customers, you get $5k in revenue. After Apple/Google's commission, you get $3500. Factor in other stuff for marketing, customer support etc. you barely are left with profit. At 200 hours of work, that is $17.5 per hour. And getting to even the first 1000 users can take a long long time. Another option is to make it free, supported by ads, but then you have to have a much bigger user base or you'll be making pennies. On top of that, people get angry when you charge for upgrade or subscriptions. Checkout twitter threads for Reeder 4 and Tweetbot 4. Plenty of people complained - "why do we have to pay again" Consumer software is currently a terrible space profit/revenue wise. B2B is a much better space to operate in. I'm currently building a pocket/instapaper alternative but all my investigation around revenue/pricing/profitability left me with much less optimism than I expected. I'll complete this project but I'm probably not going to get into B2C again.
peteretep 7y ago
Veblen goods, innit

madeofpalk 7y ago

> I expect a lot of franken apps not fitting into the system Developers can already make bad apps, Marzipan doesn't change that. You don't have to use them.

ryandrake 7y ago

The real head scratcher is that it's not really that big a deal to port your iOS app to the Mac, development-wise. You're probably using objective C or Swift already, so no need to switch language or libraries. If you've properly separated your ViewControllers from your business logic, then you can share a huge portion of your existing code base. If you have an iOS app, you're already between 50-75% of the way to having a great Mac app. The most important problem to solve is envisioning the UI of your app in a world of mouse/keyboard input, arbitrarily resizable windows, context menus, and how to properly move from iOS UI conventions to Mac UI conventions. This is critical in order for the app to look like it belongs on the platform. My beef with Marzipan is they're basically saying, "LOL don't bother with that," so yea, I agree the most likely scenario is my future Mac desktop full of Marzipan apps is going to look like a desktop full of little phone windows with neanderthal phone-oriented interfaces because developers can't be bothered to re-think their UI a little.

adamnemecek 7y ago
I agree for the most part but up until recently (2016?) I remember that the ViewController life-cycles were actually pretty different. The problem with AppKit vs UIKit is that most of the things seem to be the same until they are not. At that point, you try to hack AppKit to behave like UIKit (probably cause you have some code already written for UIKit) which generally turns out to be a fools errand. For example, I hate the usage of the Flyweight pattern in AppKit. UIKit doesn't suffer from this.