7 ms·

So Apple is trying what Microsoft did years ago: Platform convergence. It's quite ironic because as far as I remember, Apple used to have a strong stance again

So Apple is trying what Microsoft did years ago: Platform convergence. It's quite ironic because as far as I remember, Apple used to have a strong stance against that, showing e.g. by the fact that Macbooks never come with touch screens. Also, there was a loud opposition at least by power users who didn't like that change (sometimes just for the sake of hating change or hating MS IMO). Let's see if it will be different in this case.

shusson 7y ago
> Microsoft did years ago: Platform convergence. What other platforms did Microsoft have? I can only remember windows phone, but that never seemed that popular.
- guardian5x 7y ago
  XBox
- pjc50 7y ago
  Windows CE?
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  UWP targets Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One and HoloLens.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Windows 10 Mobile And all their 5 users?
    - tpush 7y ago
      Are comments like that really necessary?
      - zapzupnz 7y ago
        Sure it is. We must never forget that one of Microsoft's biggest selling points for UWP, and by extension the Microsoft Store, was to port apps to a platform that was, frankly, dead on arrival, at a time when the vast majority of Windows users were using mouses and keyboards.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        Necessary no. Hurtful? I don't think so, if I may say so myself. It's a comment to put into perspective the relative insignificance of the platform -- and thus that the statement of the parent that it supported that too doesn't amount to much. It also shows how MS effort was either badly thought out from the start, or at least failed -- and all those cross-platform touch-first changes of Windows UI where later toned down.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    There really exists no good reason that you would want to have the same UI across all of those platforms, for anything beyond the toy examples that the Windows Store has been plagued with. The display and input device constraints are nearly disjoint, unless you go to an incredibly basic common denominator. I've always been a Windows dev, and I've never seen a compelling reason to take up UWP.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      I disagree. I think UWP has done a really good job technically behind the scenes, but poorly explained publicly of showing how one device's display and input device constraints are another device's accessibility/ease of use guidelines. That the basic "common denominator" made things easier/better to use in general for everyone, even if users/devices were capable of fewer constraints and more guideline breaking. In addition, UWP and Fluent Design System had a hard time coming back from "these are the constraints in all situations" to "here's how you flex when these are the constraints of the current system versus when they are merely guidelines that you can break if your user accepts it". That became a focus in Fluent Design System 2.0, but it certainly does feel like it may have been too late avoid the "worst common denominator" branding that Fluent and UWP got painted with early on. UWP/Fluent did a lot of things right technically that Apple should apply to efforts like Marzipan, they just might not realize it based on the tarnished brand.
arrrg 7y ago
It is similar, but it’s also different. I still think Apple wants to avoid mixed mouse and touch interfaces and also wants to avoid switching on the fly between those two interactions models on the same device. Their goal will be to give developers the tools to use a shared codebase, but still being able to provide the right accommodations for mouse input on the Mac. I don’t think touchscreen Macs are planned. How well they can pull that off is a different question altogether. Mac users feel neglected anyway, so I’m very willing to let them try.
hrktb 7y ago
I don't know how Marzipan will turn out, but Microsoft has a history of trying good ideas way before they are viable and make the whole concept look unhealthy. For instance PDAs and 'smartphones' where tried and got mild commercial viability way ahead of time with Windows Pocket, but they couldn't push it to the point it could be mainstream. Tablets were also tried first. Netbooks. Motion tracking in games. ARM base laptops (we're not there yet, but that should be coming ?) I almost prefer Google's attitude of just launching and roughlessly killing new products, the stigma left is smaller.
- oblio 7y ago
  > Microsoft has a history of trying good ideas way before they are viable and make the whole concept look unhealthy. I think it also had to do with their sheer size. Researching stuff is fine, but in many cases they were pushing out half-baked solution with the force of the herd of elephants that Microsoft is. Had a company 1/100th their size tried the same thing, no big deal, just ignore it. But when a company worth $1tn these days does the same thing, whatever they're promoting is seen everywhere. They really needed something in-between Microsoft Research (research almost nobody sees) and full blown Microsoft. Maybe a Microsoft Skunkworks Startup? :)
  - dominotw 7y ago
    Zune and zune subscription music were not half baked though. I used it for years. It was simply ahead of its time. Even jobs said subscription music would never be a thing because ppl want to own their music.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Jobs saw the train wrecks of previous subscription services like Pressplay that came out in 2001.
    - dangus 7y ago
      It was definitely ahead of its time, because people forget about what makes Spotify/Apple Music/Google Play so much better than purchased music: Persistent Internet Connection. The iPod, Zune, and Creative Nomad existed for something like 7 or more years before smartphones came around. It's great that you could subscribe to a music service and sync with whatever songs you wanted, but that doesn't seem terribly useful compared to purchasing albums if you have no ability to queue up any song on demand. Spotify feels more like unlimited access than those subscription services ever did. As for Jobs' opinion, I think he mostly just held very personal feelings toward albums as a dude who grew up in the classic rock era. Plus, at the time, subscription services existed and just weren't very popular (see above).
ajconway 7y ago
I don’t think convergence is their current goal. UIKit is simply a more “modern” API for writing GUI apps. AppKit hasn’t been evolving much in the past decade.
- pavlov 7y ago
  That’s just not true. AppKit has evolved a lot since 10.6. Big changes in Lion and lots of incremental improvement since. UIKit may be more modern in some specific aspects, but it’s also far more limited. Here’s a good post highlighting some of the most obvious differences: https://pilky.me/appreciating-appkit-part-1/ https://pilky.me/appreciating-appkit-part-1/
saagarjha 7y ago
WWDC2018 had a slide in it addressing this very question, FWIW. It's up to you whether you choose to believe the response Apple gave.
- manuelmagic 7y ago
  What was the response from Apple?
  - Austin_Conlon 7y ago
    Here's the exact moment of the keynote: https://youtu.be/UThGcWBIMpU?t=7470 https://youtu.be/UThGcWBIMpU?t=7470.
brorfred 7y ago
App convergence over different operating systems seems to bigger trend than platform convergence within an ecosystem, and Marzipan seems be Apple's response to that. I would much rather run a version of Slack's iPhone app than the electron version I'm stuck with at the moment.
po 7y ago
The mistake Microsoft made was to stubbornly tie user interface convergence to their platform convergence effort. Everything had to be Windows so everything got start buttons and all kinds of cruft that wasn't needed and lead to bad experience. Making platforms more similar so it easier to target that platform is very nice for developers. If you can do it without losing what makes users want the different devices then there's no downside.
flohofwoe 7y ago
If Marzipan gives me an easy way to debug my iOS Metal apps on macOS (which isn't possible with the simulator), then it's already "good enough" for me. I wouldn't read too much else into the project otherwise. Running iOS apps on a Mac may be useful for apps that are not much more than a glorified webpage (so... hmm, most apps?), but it won't be the way to "unify" the mobile and desktop worlds (which still doesn't make sense anyway).
coldtea 7y ago
>So Apple is trying what Microsoft did years ago: Platform convergence. Mostly API convergence. Which they have been doing for years now (adding UIKit parity to OS X), Marzipan is just the latest and more encompassing version. >It's quite ironic because as far as I remember, Apple used to have a strong stance against that, showing e.g. by the fact that Macbooks never come with touch screens. And they still consider those two as different use cases, better served with different UIs. Marzipan is not about sharing the UI paradigms -- its about making it easier to port common code.
scarface74 7y ago
The toolkit is not meant to just let you port the app directly from iPad to Mac even though you can. Just like you can just press a button and have an “iPad app”, you should make affordances for the Mac just like you do when moving an app from the iPhone to the iPad. That’s the entire point of the article. To get an idea, the developer has been playing with a tool he wrote that lets him take an x86 build of an iOS app - when you run any iOS app in the simulator it creates an x86 build - and “marzanipies” it. For instance he took a binary build of Marco’s Overcast app (with permission) and turned it into a Mac app. https://twitter.com/cultofmac/status/1123962629645656065 https://twitter.com/cultofmac/status/1123962629645656065

shusson 7y ago

> Microsoft did years ago: Platform convergence. What other platforms did Microsoft have? I can only remember windows phone, but that never seemed that popular.

guardian5x 7y ago
XBox
pjc50 7y ago
Windows CE?
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
UWP targets Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One and HoloLens.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Windows 10 Mobile And all their 5 users?
  - tpush 7y ago
    Are comments like that really necessary?
    - zapzupnz 7y ago
      Sure it is. We must never forget that one of Microsoft's biggest selling points for UWP, and by extension the Microsoft Store, was to port apps to a platform that was, frankly, dead on arrival, at a time when the vast majority of Windows users were using mouses and keyboards.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Necessary no. Hurtful? I don't think so, if I may say so myself. It's a comment to put into perspective the relative insignificance of the platform -- and thus that the statement of the parent that it supported that too doesn't amount to much. It also shows how MS effort was either badly thought out from the start, or at least failed -- and all those cross-platform touch-first changes of Windows UI where later toned down.
- thrower123 7y ago
  There really exists no good reason that you would want to have the same UI across all of those platforms, for anything beyond the toy examples that the Windows Store has been plagued with. The display and input device constraints are nearly disjoint, unless you go to an incredibly basic common denominator. I've always been a Windows dev, and I've never seen a compelling reason to take up UWP.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    I disagree. I think UWP has done a really good job technically behind the scenes, but poorly explained publicly of showing how one device's display and input device constraints are another device's accessibility/ease of use guidelines. That the basic "common denominator" made things easier/better to use in general for everyone, even if users/devices were capable of fewer constraints and more guideline breaking. In addition, UWP and Fluent Design System had a hard time coming back from "these are the constraints in all situations" to "here's how you flex when these are the constraints of the current system versus when they are merely guidelines that you can break if your user accepts it". That became a focus in Fluent Design System 2.0, but it certainly does feel like it may have been too late avoid the "worst common denominator" branding that Fluent and UWP got painted with early on. UWP/Fluent did a lot of things right technically that Apple should apply to efforts like Marzipan, they just might not realize it based on the tarnished brand.

arrrg 7y ago

It is similar, but it’s also different. I still think Apple wants to avoid mixed mouse and touch interfaces and also wants to avoid switching on the fly between those two interactions models on the same device. Their goal will be to give developers the tools to use a shared codebase, but still being able to provide the right accommodations for mouse input on the Mac. I don’t think touchscreen Macs are planned. How well they can pull that off is a different question altogether. Mac users feel neglected anyway, so I’m very willing to let them try.

hrktb 7y ago

I don't know how Marzipan will turn out, but Microsoft has a history of trying good ideas way before they are viable and make the whole concept look unhealthy. For instance PDAs and 'smartphones' where tried and got mild commercial viability way ahead of time with Windows Pocket, but they couldn't push it to the point it could be mainstream. Tablets were also tried first. Netbooks. Motion tracking in games. ARM base laptops (we're not there yet, but that should be coming ?) I almost prefer Google's attitude of just launching and roughlessly killing new products, the stigma left is smaller.

oblio 7y ago
> Microsoft has a history of trying good ideas way before they are viable and make the whole concept look unhealthy. I think it also had to do with their sheer size. Researching stuff is fine, but in many cases they were pushing out half-baked solution with the force of the herd of elephants that Microsoft is. Had a company 1/100th their size tried the same thing, no big deal, just ignore it. But when a company worth $1tn these days does the same thing, whatever they're promoting is seen everywhere. They really needed something in-between Microsoft Research (research almost nobody sees) and full blown Microsoft. Maybe a Microsoft Skunkworks Startup? :)
- dominotw 7y ago
  Zune and zune subscription music were not half baked though. I used it for years. It was simply ahead of its time. Even jobs said subscription music would never be a thing because ppl want to own their music.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Jobs saw the train wrecks of previous subscription services like Pressplay that came out in 2001.
  - dangus 7y ago
    It was definitely ahead of its time, because people forget about what makes Spotify/Apple Music/Google Play so much better than purchased music: Persistent Internet Connection. The iPod, Zune, and Creative Nomad existed for something like 7 or more years before smartphones came around. It's great that you could subscribe to a music service and sync with whatever songs you wanted, but that doesn't seem terribly useful compared to purchasing albums if you have no ability to queue up any song on demand. Spotify feels more like unlimited access than those subscription services ever did. As for Jobs' opinion, I think he mostly just held very personal feelings toward albums as a dude who grew up in the classic rock era. Plus, at the time, subscription services existed and just weren't very popular (see above).

ajconway 7y ago

I don’t think convergence is their current goal. UIKit is simply a more “modern” API for writing GUI apps. AppKit hasn’t been evolving much in the past decade.

pavlov 7y ago
That’s just not true. AppKit has evolved a lot since 10.6. Big changes in Lion and lots of incremental improvement since. UIKit may be more modern in some specific aspects, but it’s also far more limited. Here’s a good post highlighting some of the most obvious differences: https://pilky.me/appreciating-appkit-part-1/ https://pilky.me/appreciating-appkit-part-1/

saagarjha 7y ago

WWDC2018 had a slide in it addressing this very question, FWIW. It's up to you whether you choose to believe the response Apple gave.

manuelmagic 7y ago
What was the response from Apple?
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  Here's the exact moment of the keynote: https://youtu.be/UThGcWBIMpU?t=7470 https://youtu.be/UThGcWBIMpU?t=7470.

brorfred 7y ago

App convergence over different operating systems seems to bigger trend than platform convergence within an ecosystem, and Marzipan seems be Apple's response to that. I would much rather run a version of Slack's iPhone app than the electron version I'm stuck with at the moment.

po 7y ago

The mistake Microsoft made was to stubbornly tie user interface convergence to their platform convergence effort. Everything had to be Windows so everything got start buttons and all kinds of cruft that wasn't needed and lead to bad experience. Making platforms more similar so it easier to target that platform is very nice for developers. If you can do it without losing what makes users want the different devices then there's no downside.

flohofwoe 7y ago

If Marzipan gives me an easy way to debug my iOS Metal apps on macOS (which isn't possible with the simulator), then it's already "good enough" for me. I wouldn't read too much else into the project otherwise. Running iOS apps on a Mac may be useful for apps that are not much more than a glorified webpage (so... hmm, most apps?), but it won't be the way to "unify" the mobile and desktop worlds (which still doesn't make sense anyway).

coldtea 7y ago

>So Apple is trying what Microsoft did years ago: Platform convergence. Mostly API convergence. Which they have been doing for years now (adding UIKit parity to OS X), Marzipan is just the latest and more encompassing version. >It's quite ironic because as far as I remember, Apple used to have a strong stance against that, showing e.g. by the fact that Macbooks never come with touch screens. And they still consider those two as different use cases, better served with different UIs. Marzipan is not about sharing the UI paradigms -- its about making it easier to port common code.

scarface74 7y ago

The toolkit is not meant to just let you port the app directly from iPad to Mac even though you can. Just like you can just press a button and have an “iPad app”, you should make affordances for the Mac just like you do when moving an app from the iPhone to the iPad. That’s the entire point of the article. To get an idea, the developer has been playing with a tool he wrote that lets him take an x86 build of an iOS app - when you run any iOS app in the simulator it creates an x86 build - and “marzanipies” it. For instance he took a binary build of Marco’s Overcast app (with permission) and turned it into a Mac app. https://twitter.com/cultofmac/status/1123962629645656065 https://twitter.com/cultofmac/status/1123962629645656065