14 ms·

DefaultApp

355 points by Amorymeltzer 7y ago

gregoriol 7y ago
Nice! A lot of the things included are helpful. Title should mention that it's about macOS though.
worldsayshi 7y ago
There's no mention about how it is licensed?
- micael_dias 7y ago
  It's probably MIT if his PHP project is anything to go by. Open an issue on github letting him know he forgot to include it I guess?
- tylerhall 7y ago
  OP here. Thanks for pointing out that omission. It's MIT like all my other stuff. I've updated it.
Jaruzel 7y ago
I have something similar I use in Visual Studio - it's a module file full of useful functions, that saves me rewriting the same code over and over again for each new app. For example, I have GetFile() and SaveFile() functions which I use ALL the time, also as I'm on windows, I've wrapped up a bunch of Registry code into nice 'SaveRegValue' and 'GetRegValue' functions. All in all there's about 50 or so functions in the module. Personally, I thought every coder did this? Edit: I'm not dissing the OP, just surprised that there's value in sharing these things.
- masklinn 7y ago
  That seems to be a very different thing. You’re talking about a utils file / module you’re carrying around, OP is about a ready-made application template (à la cookicutter).
  - close04 7y ago
    Conceptually they feel like the same thing. They are a reusable foundation on which to build more.
  - tasogare 7y ago
    Did you read the article? It mentions "Two helper classes that make building a typical macOS source list easy." which is exactly what OP is talking about. So helpers classes, while not being all the project presented here, are an important part of it.
    - masklinn 7y ago
      > Did you read the article? I'm wondering if you did. > It mentions "Two helper classes that make building a typical macOS source list easy." TFA goes much further than that, it's an actual working application in a box. You can copy the template, build it, and it runs. A template can include utilities, not the other way around. > So helpers classes, while not being all the project presented here, are an important part of it. They're an important but relatively minor sub-set of the whole.
ashishb 7y ago
Great idea. I created a similar template for my personal projects which use `Go + Docker + Google Cloud run` stack - https://github.com/ashishb/golang-template-repo https://github.com/ashishb/golang-template-repo
uk_programmer 7y ago
I do the same. I have my own for flask website setup with SQLite with user signups etc all configured. I also have some JavaScript SPA projects configured. I can clone the git repo and start doing something useful in a few minutes and all my scaffolding work is done. While there are scaffolding tools already available sometimes those scaffolds are a bit too bare bones and you need to add some other common bits and pieces.
Alex_P13 7y ago
Top 20 Free PSD File. Now here, I will go to share some top free PSD templates for you along with the download links in different categories like blogging, eCommerce business, any type agencies, small startups and much more. This list can ensure you find actually what you are looking for. https://www.electronthemes.com/free-psd/ https://www.electronthemes.com/free-psd/
spxcxlxxs 7y ago
I created something similar for front end js applications https://github.com/spicalous/webpack-scaffold https://github.com/spicalous/webpack-scaffold using: webpack, babel, sass, auto-prefixer, eslint, chai, karma, mocha
h4il_s4t4n 7y ago
> Native Mac apps feel like a dying breed that are succumbing to janky web views Yeeaaahhhh, not really. I was a diehard "native" person until recently and I can't believe just how much better developing for web technologies is than writing native Mac. If you're experienced enough to write a polished Mac app (and that is a non-trivial undertaking) you're experienced enough to write a polished front end in Electron. Use a lightweight framework (e.g., Vue), be sensible about what you're asking Chromium to draw for you and unless you're doing something really simple -- be ready to write a backend in C++ or equiv. I'm not saying that is easy, but in terms of complexity it's a wash. The upsides are substantial: 1. Multi-platform with very little additional work 2. Modern web standards + a good IDE are so much fucking better to work with, really 3. Easy to drop into WebGL if you need it 4. Less vendor lock-in The only place I see it making sense is if you're only working with a single platform -- of course, you have to ask yourself how good of a business decision that is.
- ojame 7y ago
  There’s a difference between development and usability - the “janky” here refers to the end user experience, not yours a developer.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    He said polished, like VS Code. That's the only Electron application I run so it's my only example, but it's totally possible to make the end result good.
    - vintagedave 7y ago
      Even VSCode does not feel like a native Mac app. It's a good app - but it does not feel like one written with the platform in mind.
      - apatheticonion 7y ago
        What makes you say that?
simon1573 7y ago
Does something similar exist for, lets say, iOS or Android? A good foundation to build upon.
mrunkel 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. For me getting started is always the hardest thing, so something like this helps a great deal.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
me551ah 7y ago
Native apps beat Electron/Web Apps anyday. There are many areas where Native apps have the upper hand w.r.t Electron. Memory Usage A few years ago while trying to figure out why I was running out of RAM, I stumbled upon chrome’s task manager. Gmail was using up 700MB of RAM and all I had open was the Inbox. No fancy search box or Compose, the Inbox was taking up 700MB of RAM to display lines of text in a Tabular format. I’ve been a heavy user of Email clients and if you pick any of the native clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) and open a bunch of searches and compose windows the memory usage will still stay below 100MB. I used mIRC a few decades ago to connect to multiple chat servers, run my own bots, serve files over DCC and run scripts all while staying under 20MB of Ram. These days to send a text message over Slack I need over 1GB of RAM. Even basic apps with all of their trackers, external javascript scripts and doms take up 100s of MBs in memory. And the most common solution to running out of memory is to close chrome windows. Battery/CPU Usage DOM is slow. Updating layout and repainting is even slow. Javascript being a dynamic language is slow. Web apps are anything but simple these days and since they have to work under the limitations of all the slow components, the CPU ends up making up for it. Chrome is almost always present in my Macbook’s ‘Using significant energy’ tab. On the other hand, I rarely if ever see native apps in the battery bar unless I’m doing something which should actually consume a lot of CPU cycles like running multiple synths in Ableton or Compiling. When apps are built for mobile, battery usage is a major area to optimize on. But nobody even gives it a thought for web apps 60 FPS Mobile apps run on 60fps, Native desktop apps run at 60fps, Games run ( or at least are designed to) run at 60fps. Instagram on chrome starts at 2-3 fps and usually hovers around 30fps. My laptop which is supposed to be more powerful than my mobile phone is only able to churn out half the frame rate even though they are both running at the same resolution! Web apps are not buttery smooth and can be jerky at times. Sure somebody can work really hard and optimize a website to run at 60fps at all times, but it needs a lot of effort. Mobile apps run at 60fps out of the box without much effort. Mobile and native apps use the GPU a lot more efficiently. Since they have a lot more information about which controls are being used, they can recycle items a lot better and do a much better job at hardware acceleration via the GPU. Not to mention that you have access to raw graphics APIs in case you want to push UI performance even further. Runtime Environment You can build desktop apps in a plethora of languages and even for mobile apps you have many cross-platform frameworks. But building for the web(and electron) forces you to HTML/Javascript(and derivates). Javascript is a dynamic prototypical language that was not designed for the scale of apps that are being built in it today. It has no type safety, memory leaks are common and it’s slow due to its dynamic nature. While there have been many efforts to improve performance like V8s JIT, it still lags behind a lot of major languages. WASM seems promising, but it’s still has a long way to go. And it’s laughable how weak the browser platform itself is. SQLite is available on raspberry pi, embeddable systems, mobile platforms and just about every other platform on the planet. You can store data, run complex relational queries and do more with so less. But it is not available on the most widely used platform on the planet, the browser. With the rise of electron apps, big and bulky web apps have started making their way onto the Desktop. There are some who are even trying to get the same apps on mobile via PWAs. While the web has the advantage of easy accessibility, IMO we have sacrificed too much in terms of user experience for that one convenience. If you built an app with the same UI and functionality in a native language and as a web app, the native app will run circles around it.
julius_set 7y ago
I’m sorry to knock down OP here but I’ve been doing Mac development for a long long time. A default app to me as a bare minimum involves: • Custom Application class • URI specifications • Custom NSDocument • Custom window controller • Customized NSToolbar • CoreData support • “Feature” targets / I.e. Todo target I’ve written a script which sets and generates all this for me: macapp new —with-ui —styles
- tylerhall 7y ago
  OP here. I think we're aiming for the same thing - though with slightly different priorities. Of your list of minimums that DefaultApp omits: Not every app adheres to a Document-based pattern. The apps I personally build typically fall into a "shoebox" style where explicit documents aren't used. And there are other data layers than CoreData, which is why I didn't add that - especially since even with CoreData everyone has their own favorite library/framework. So that's easy enough to drop-in for those who want it. (That said: probably 95% of the apps I write use CoreData, so ) A customized NSToolbar would be great, but, again, there are so many implementations out there, which one would you pick that would satisfy the majority of apps/developers? Anyway, like the accompanying blog post says, this project is "highly opinionated". It's just what I've cobbled together over the years. I'm not going to die on a hill for any of my particular choices. Do what works best for you.
Timpy 7y ago
I've never worked in macOS before, is there something exceptionally difficult about decent boilerplate code?
s3cur3 7y ago
I've been toying around with a macOS app idea for awhile. This looks like a great starting point for someone like me with no macOS native dev experience. Thanks!
tbergeron 7y ago
The fact that we need such boilerplate solution to start building a simple Mac app without having XCode in the way in 2020 means a lot about the current state of native app development.
- Klonoar 7y ago
  Eeehhh, this kind of comment erases a lot of the default things you get with Cocoa/AppKit (document handling, system integration, etc). These concepts aren't as widely understood as the concepts in web-dev-land because they're implementation specific, but they're pretty well designed and genuinely very powerful once you use them. Xcode just hides them away from you, is all.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- saagarjha 7y ago
  But the author literally took inspiration from web frameworks…
- dmix 7y ago
  Most web starter kits are about the same as this these days...
jeffkeen 7y ago
Tyler! I knew I recognized that name/company. I bought VirtualHostX eons ago and it helped me out a lot. This sounds like a great project, this guy makes good stuff.
alxlaz 7y ago
Reading the comments here, I find it very distressing that people in our industry can simultaneously say the following two things: 1. Consistency is extremely important for UX and one of the cornerstones of user-friendliness 2. Users who aren't developers probably don't care too much about "native look and fell". If users, indeed, don't care if some applications don't look and can't be handled like other applications, maybe it's time we judged designs more in terms of innovation and usability, and less in terms of compliance. I haven't seen a new icon set, application theme or website that didn't look like any other icon set, application theme or website in years. If they do actually care, then maybe let's admit that. I'm not advocating for burning all JavaScript to the ground, but it would certainly help if we'd treat inconsistencies as bugs, so that we could use frameworks like Electron to write better (i.e. more consistent) applications, rather than hand-waving them as unimportant, except in topics about UX rather than Electron, in which case they're totally important.
- _fat_santa 7y ago
  I think that there is a way these two points can live in the same universe. One the one hand users expect a consistent UI, especially on mobile. While apps are free to define their own user interface and style, they should follow certain patterns that other apps in the past have established. When I hear the other point that users dont care about UX what that boils down for me is they don't see all the little things that we see. They still expect a consistent user interface but seeing a menu not render exactly where it should, an animation that stutters for one frame or other small things. These are all things that we as developers scrutinize but the user doesn't notice all that often. Now we should still scrutinize those little things. I feel like the thing that makes some apps feel more "magical" than others is how polished those little details are.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    I think that makes a lot of sense. When people say users don't care about UI - that always leaves me wondering - have they tried releasing a little toy website or something to their friends that didn't have a hamburger menu on mobile? Even with all the blog posts I remember a while back about how those are suboptimal - I got question after question of "how do you navigate?" And this isn't like a rhetorical question by the way, not am I saying everyone would be like that for every app, I'm just curious if there are different social circles that react differently. My sor of laypersons intuition about UX has been that it's just about reducing cognitive effort for new adopters. For things that don't really matter to functionality, make it consistent with what they'd expect given their context so they don't have to think about it. Hamburger menus aren't "intuitive," give them to a tech naive person and they'll be confused, but they sure feel that way today because of how everyone has been thoroughly trained in how to use them to navigate them, so why not take advantage of that social training to lower the adoption activation energy? I would think that I would rather people spend effort figuring out the parts that have to be different for the new functionality. I'm curious to hear from someone with actual design training if that's a reasonable approach, or if there might actually be some reason that the opposite is actually empirically true (like a unique UX makes people feel like power users and locks then into the platform or something?)
weiming 7y ago
Tangential: we've been using xcodegen (https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen) to generate our projects from a simple yaml file. Don't need to muck around with Xcode toggles, easily repeatable, and .xcodeproj literally stays in .gitignore. Never know why Apple consistently shyes away from more programmatic generation of stuff.
eximius 7y ago
I think the real sentiment I see in the comments about "using web tech instead of native is selfish/unethical/etc" is: why isn't there a desktop technology that can compete with the ease of development as using web technology? I feel this very much. I'm building a reeealy simple app and I'm looking at Svelte Native (Svelte + Nativescript) to get things going. But even that's not quite native. But Android and iOS development are also a mess.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Qt and wxWidgets come to mind. Definelty easier than making divs pretty with CSS spaghetti.
tptacek 7y ago
While it certainly works for me and serves as the basis for all of my apps, I don’t know yet if it will work well for others the way my PHP framework has over the years. It will definitely work better for people if the source code isn't all tagged "All rights reserved", in conflict with the MIT license. :)
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  While it's confusing, "All rights reserved" isn't actually a license and doesn't conflict with MIT; it's effectively just a (now-redundant) part of the copyright notice. It's been redundant for a long time (since the Berne convention), but doesn't strictly speaking do any harm.
  - antoncohen 7y ago
    This is correct. "All rights reserved" was a way of claiming copyright, similar to the © symbol. Open source non-public domain code still has a copyright, it is just licensed for use under an open source license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved
  - tptacek 7y ago
    TIL! Thanks!
- tylerhall 7y ago
  Yeah, sorry. That's just Xcode's default header. Feel free to open a PR or issue.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  Copyright and software licensing are not the same thing, and there are many open source projects, some very high profile, that retain a copyright.
debt 7y ago
Should add support and all the boilerplate for NSDocument and CoreData. That's a bit more robust DefaultApp. Love this though.
yingw787 7y ago
Is there anything like this default app framework maintained for GTK or TCL or whatever the native KDE / GNOME framework is available for desktop Linux? I exclusively use Ubuntu as my OS for three computers, and I'm building out some front-ends for myself, and native desktop clients aren't cheap to make (in time and effort).
andymatuschak 7y ago
There's a lot of discussion in the comments here about Electron vs. native apps. But last year's Catalyst project, which allows you to ship iOS-based projects on the Mac, opens an important new path. I've been surprised not to see many people discuss it! In particular, this means that you can use React Native to build native macOS apps. You still get live reloading, hot code push, pleasant abstractions, etc. Most importantly, though, these apps can use straight-up AppKit controls on macOS and straight-up UIKit controls on iOS. Better still, you can use react-native-web to ship such projects on the web too. You will+should, of course, have many platform-specific branches. But I find that the vast majority of my code is shared, and there's a _world_ of difference in being able to use the same development tools to ship polished software on desktop, mobile, and web. My most recent project builds to macOS, iOS, Android, and web out of the same Typescript project. There was certainly some toolchain chicanery involved in this, but now that it's set up, it's delightful. Many of the companies shipping Electron apps on desktop are shipping React Native apps on mobile. I would very much like to see React Native-based desktop apps replace Electron apps.
- ViViDboarder 7y ago
  So what would you suggest then for the non-Mac desktops? Are there React Native based solutions for Windows and Linux?
  - scarlac 7y ago
    Yes, at least officially for Windows. The official fork: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows
  - andymatuschak 7y ago
    I can't suggest anything, I'm afraid—I haven't worked with Windows and Linux targets using React Native. But it appears that there are React Native rendering targets for Windows and Linux (https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows and https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop). I'd probably start by looking there. And of course, because React Native can build to web, one could ship Electron apps for platforms with lower priority for your business.
nerder92 7y ago
My 2 cents, Flutter for the desktop will disrupt this market in the near future.
Klonoar 7y ago
Welp, if we're gonna do the same tired arguments (Electron, etc), I guess I'll go ahead and inject another HN-meme into this thread. Let's talk about Rust. I, like many, want to write the same code across platforms. I do not want to use the JS toolchain (the modern one, Webpack & co). I don't want to use C, because writing C feels contrarian outside of certain cases given the options available today. I want something that's fast, safe and mostly cross-platform. So I started porting AppKit to Rust. There's an example you can see here - it's meant to feel similar to writing native UI in Swift. https://twitter.com/ryanmcgrath/status/1238285152771440640 https://twitter.com/ryanmcgrath/status/1238285152771440640 I plan to put this in a longer blog post, but effectively I don't think write-once-run-anywhere UI works for the class of products I want to build. I don't mind rebuilding the app UI using GTK, AppKit, or what have you... provided I'm not running some ridiculous setup just to get code shared across platforms. Rust and Cargo do incredibly well with this. I'm building my next product in this as a way to dogofood and force the functionality in. If you're interested in following along, you can check out the repo below - note that it's still experimental, the example app (Subatomic) has not been updated for recent changes yet, and the main repo doesn't have docs being built just yet (though I'll probably have this later this week). Anyway, that's my bit - wondering if there's a better way to achieve cross platform code without the headache, so consider this another foray into getting there. https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/appkit-rs https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/appkit-rs
karakanb 7y ago
Shameless plug: I did a similar thing for browser extensions to have a fully functional browser extension with Vue and Tailwind in under 30 seconds: https://gumroad.com/l/XUPxA https://gumroad.com/l/XUPxA I actually like the idea of opinionated starter kits a lot, especially when built out of experience over multiple projects they show a lot of maturity, tailored for a specific workflow. Depending on the developers, these kinds of kits are mostly made for specific use-cases, and they pick the technologies already so that once the project is kicked off most of the non-crucial decisions are already made. Most of the time I have found myself thinking about which database library to use, what Docker image to deploy, which UI framework to use and all these kinds of decisions that have not much value add if all the other alternatives are getting the job done as well. If I were to start building a native macOS app, I'd definitely go for something like this because I just want to get to the core of the thing, not spending time on choosing libraries or thinking about where to put files. Great job!
- misiti3780 7y ago
  What do you think of Tailwind - about to pull the trigger and buy it
  - karakanb 7y ago
    Overall I enjoy it a lot, it gave me a big productivity boost. Everytime someone talks about Tailwind there is a huge discussion going on here, but I just gave it a try a couple months ago and I really enjoyed it. The thing I love the most is, I can get something going without thinking about what padding to use, how to align things, what color palette to use and all that kind of stuff, while also having all the flexibility to change things at the end. YMMV, but I think you wouldn't lose much by trying that out, the worst case is you spend couple of hours and you don't like it, but a better outcome is you spend couple of hours to save yourself tens of hours, so I think it's a good bet.
    - misiti3780 7y ago
      thanks, i just bought tailwindui!
fulldecent2 7y ago
In a similar effort, here is a minimal Swift module (i.e. a reusable code package) which can be used a starting point for new projects: https://github.com/fulldecent/swift5-module-template https://github.com/fulldecent/swift5-module-template
sgt 7y ago
This is very useful - definitely bookmarking this to remember for the next time I write a macOS app.

DefaultApp

355 points by Amorymeltzer 7y ago

gregoriol 7y ago

Nice! A lot of the things included are helpful. Title should mention that it's about macOS though.

worldsayshi 7y ago

There's no mention about how it is licensed?

micael_dias 7y ago
It's probably MIT if his PHP project is anything to go by. Open an issue on github letting him know he forgot to include it I guess?
tylerhall 7y ago
OP here. Thanks for pointing out that omission. It's MIT like all my other stuff. I've updated it.

Jaruzel 7y ago

I have something similar I use in Visual Studio - it's a module file full of useful functions, that saves me rewriting the same code over and over again for each new app. For example, I have GetFile() and SaveFile() functions which I use ALL the time, also as I'm on windows, I've wrapped up a bunch of Registry code into nice 'SaveRegValue' and 'GetRegValue' functions. All in all there's about 50 or so functions in the module. Personally, I thought every coder did this? Edit: I'm not dissing the OP, just surprised that there's value in sharing these things.

masklinn 7y ago
That seems to be a very different thing. You’re talking about a utils file / module you’re carrying around, OP is about a ready-made application template (à la cookicutter).
- close04 7y ago
  Conceptually they feel like the same thing. They are a reusable foundation on which to build more.
- tasogare 7y ago
  Did you read the article? It mentions "Two helper classes that make building a typical macOS source list easy." which is exactly what OP is talking about. So helpers classes, while not being all the project presented here, are an important part of it.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    > Did you read the article? I'm wondering if you did. > It mentions "Two helper classes that make building a typical macOS source list easy." TFA goes much further than that, it's an actual working application in a box. You can copy the template, build it, and it runs. A template can include utilities, not the other way around. > So helpers classes, while not being all the project presented here, are an important part of it. They're an important but relatively minor sub-set of the whole.

ashishb 7y ago

Great idea. I created a similar template for my personal projects which use `Go + Docker + Google Cloud run` stack - https://github.com/ashishb/golang-template-repo https://github.com/ashishb/golang-template-repo

uk_programmer 7y ago

I do the same. I have my own for flask website setup with SQLite with user signups etc all configured. I also have some JavaScript SPA projects configured. I can clone the git repo and start doing something useful in a few minutes and all my scaffolding work is done. While there are scaffolding tools already available sometimes those scaffolds are a bit too bare bones and you need to add some other common bits and pieces.

Alex_P13 7y ago

Top 20 Free PSD File. Now here, I will go to share some top free PSD templates for you along with the download links in different categories like blogging, eCommerce business, any type agencies, small startups and much more. This list can ensure you find actually what you are looking for. https://www.electronthemes.com/free-psd/ https://www.electronthemes.com/free-psd/

spxcxlxxs 7y ago

I created something similar for front end js applications https://github.com/spicalous/webpack-scaffold https://github.com/spicalous/webpack-scaffold using: webpack, babel, sass, auto-prefixer, eslint, chai, karma, mocha

h4il_s4t4n 7y ago

> Native Mac apps feel like a dying breed that are succumbing to janky web views Yeeaaahhhh, not really. I was a diehard "native" person until recently and I can't believe just how much better developing for web technologies is than writing native Mac. If you're experienced enough to write a polished Mac app (and that is a non-trivial undertaking) you're experienced enough to write a polished front end in Electron. Use a lightweight framework (e.g., Vue), be sensible about what you're asking Chromium to draw for you and unless you're doing something really simple -- be ready to write a backend in C++ or equiv. I'm not saying that is easy, but in terms of complexity it's a wash. The upsides are substantial: 1. Multi-platform with very little additional work 2. Modern web standards + a good IDE are so much fucking better to work with, really 3. Easy to drop into WebGL if you need it 4. Less vendor lock-in The only place I see it making sense is if you're only working with a single platform -- of course, you have to ask yourself how good of a business decision that is.

ojame 7y ago
There’s a difference between development and usability - the “janky” here refers to the end user experience, not yours a developer.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  He said polished, like VS Code. That's the only Electron application I run so it's my only example, but it's totally possible to make the end result good.
  - vintagedave 7y ago
    Even VSCode does not feel like a native Mac app. It's a good app - but it does not feel like one written with the platform in mind.
    - apatheticonion 7y ago
      What makes you say that?

simon1573 7y ago

Does something similar exist for, lets say, iOS or Android? A good foundation to build upon.

mrunkel 7y ago

Thanks for sharing. For me getting started is always the hardest thing, so something like this helps a great deal.

deleted 7y ago

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me551ah 7y ago

Native apps beat Electron/Web Apps anyday. There are many areas where Native apps have the upper hand w.r.t Electron. Memory Usage A few years ago while trying to figure out why I was running out of RAM, I stumbled upon chrome’s task manager. Gmail was using up 700MB of RAM and all I had open was the Inbox. No fancy search box or Compose, the Inbox was taking up 700MB of RAM to display lines of text in a Tabular format. I’ve been a heavy user of Email clients and if you pick any of the native clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) and open a bunch of searches and compose windows the memory usage will still stay below 100MB. I used mIRC a few decades ago to connect to multiple chat servers, run my own bots, serve files over DCC and run scripts all while staying under 20MB of Ram. These days to send a text message over Slack I need over 1GB of RAM. Even basic apps with all of their trackers, external javascript scripts and doms take up 100s of MBs in memory. And the most common solution to running out of memory is to close chrome windows. Battery/CPU Usage DOM is slow. Updating layout and repainting is even slow. Javascript being a dynamic language is slow. Web apps are anything but simple these days and since they have to work under the limitations of all the slow components, the CPU ends up making up for it. Chrome is almost always present in my Macbook’s ‘Using significant energy’ tab. On the other hand, I rarely if ever see native apps in the battery bar unless I’m doing something which should actually consume a lot of CPU cycles like running multiple synths in Ableton or Compiling. When apps are built for mobile, battery usage is a major area to optimize on. But nobody even gives it a thought for web apps 60 FPS Mobile apps run on 60fps, Native desktop apps run at 60fps, Games run ( or at least are designed to) run at 60fps. Instagram on chrome starts at 2-3 fps and usually hovers around 30fps. My laptop which is supposed to be more powerful than my mobile phone is only able to churn out half the frame rate even though they are both running at the same resolution! Web apps are not buttery smooth and can be jerky at times. Sure somebody can work really hard and optimize a website to run at 60fps at all times, but it needs a lot of effort. Mobile apps run at 60fps out of the box without much effort. Mobile and native apps use the GPU a lot more efficiently. Since they have a lot more information about which controls are being used, they can recycle items a lot better and do a much better job at hardware acceleration via the GPU. Not to mention that you have access to raw graphics APIs in case you want to push UI performance even further. Runtime Environment You can build desktop apps in a plethora of languages and even for mobile apps you have many cross-platform frameworks. But building for the web(and electron) forces you to HTML/Javascript(and derivates). Javascript is a dynamic prototypical language that was not designed for the scale of apps that are being built in it today. It has no type safety, memory leaks are common and it’s slow due to its dynamic nature. While there have been many efforts to improve performance like V8s JIT, it still lags behind a lot of major languages. WASM seems promising, but it’s still has a long way to go. And it’s laughable how weak the browser platform itself is. SQLite is available on raspberry pi, embeddable systems, mobile platforms and just about every other platform on the planet. You can store data, run complex relational queries and do more with so less. But it is not available on the most widely used platform on the planet, the browser. With the rise of electron apps, big and bulky web apps have started making their way onto the Desktop. There are some who are even trying to get the same apps on mobile via PWAs. While the web has the advantage of easy accessibility, IMO we have sacrificed too much in terms of user experience for that one convenience. If you built an app with the same UI and functionality in a native language and as a web app, the native app will run circles around it.

julius_set 7y ago

I’m sorry to knock down OP here but I’ve been doing Mac development for a long long time. A default app to me as a bare minimum involves: • Custom Application class • URI specifications • Custom NSDocument • Custom window controller • Customized NSToolbar • CoreData support • “Feature” targets / I.e. Todo target I’ve written a script which sets and generates all this for me: macapp new —with-ui —styles

tylerhall 7y ago
OP here. I think we're aiming for the same thing - though with slightly different priorities. Of your list of minimums that DefaultApp omits: Not every app adheres to a Document-based pattern. The apps I personally build typically fall into a "shoebox" style where explicit documents aren't used. And there are other data layers than CoreData, which is why I didn't add that - especially since even with CoreData everyone has their own favorite library/framework. So that's easy enough to drop-in for those who want it. (That said: probably 95% of the apps I write use CoreData, so ) A customized NSToolbar would be great, but, again, there are so many implementations out there, which one would you pick that would satisfy the majority of apps/developers? Anyway, like the accompanying blog post says, this project is "highly opinionated". It's just what I've cobbled together over the years. I'm not going to die on a hill for any of my particular choices. Do what works best for you.

Timpy 7y ago

I've never worked in macOS before, is there something exceptionally difficult about decent boilerplate code?

s3cur3 7y ago

I've been toying around with a macOS app idea for awhile. This looks like a great starting point for someone like me with no macOS native dev experience. Thanks!

tbergeron 7y ago

The fact that we need such boilerplate solution to start building a simple Mac app without having XCode in the way in 2020 means a lot about the current state of native app development.

Klonoar 7y ago
Eeehhh, this kind of comment erases a lot of the default things you get with Cocoa/AppKit (document handling, system integration, etc). These concepts aren't as widely understood as the concepts in web-dev-land because they're implementation specific, but they're pretty well designed and genuinely very powerful once you use them. Xcode just hides them away from you, is all.
- deleted 7y ago
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saagarjha 7y ago
But the author literally took inspiration from web frameworks…
dmix 7y ago
Most web starter kits are about the same as this these days...

jeffkeen 7y ago

Tyler! I knew I recognized that name/company. I bought VirtualHostX eons ago and it helped me out a lot. This sounds like a great project, this guy makes good stuff.

alxlaz 7y ago

Reading the comments here, I find it very distressing that people in our industry can simultaneously say the following two things: 1. Consistency is extremely important for UX and one of the cornerstones of user-friendliness 2. Users who aren't developers probably don't care too much about "native look and fell". If users, indeed, don't care if some applications don't look and can't be handled like other applications, maybe it's time we judged designs more in terms of innovation and usability, and less in terms of compliance. I haven't seen a new icon set, application theme or website that didn't look like any other icon set, application theme or website in years. If they do actually care, then maybe let's admit that. I'm not advocating for burning all JavaScript to the ground, but it would certainly help if we'd treat inconsistencies as bugs, so that we could use frameworks like Electron to write better (i.e. more consistent) applications, rather than hand-waving them as unimportant, except in topics about UX rather than Electron, in which case they're totally important.

_fat_santa 7y ago
I think that there is a way these two points can live in the same universe. One the one hand users expect a consistent UI, especially on mobile. While apps are free to define their own user interface and style, they should follow certain patterns that other apps in the past have established. When I hear the other point that users dont care about UX what that boils down for me is they don't see all the little things that we see. They still expect a consistent user interface but seeing a menu not render exactly where it should, an animation that stutters for one frame or other small things. These are all things that we as developers scrutinize but the user doesn't notice all that often. Now we should still scrutinize those little things. I feel like the thing that makes some apps feel more "magical" than others is how polished those little details are.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I think that makes a lot of sense. When people say users don't care about UI - that always leaves me wondering - have they tried releasing a little toy website or something to their friends that didn't have a hamburger menu on mobile? Even with all the blog posts I remember a while back about how those are suboptimal - I got question after question of "how do you navigate?" And this isn't like a rhetorical question by the way, not am I saying everyone would be like that for every app, I'm just curious if there are different social circles that react differently. My sor of laypersons intuition about UX has been that it's just about reducing cognitive effort for new adopters. For things that don't really matter to functionality, make it consistent with what they'd expect given their context so they don't have to think about it. Hamburger menus aren't "intuitive," give them to a tech naive person and they'll be confused, but they sure feel that way today because of how everyone has been thoroughly trained in how to use them to navigate them, so why not take advantage of that social training to lower the adoption activation energy? I would think that I would rather people spend effort figuring out the parts that have to be different for the new functionality. I'm curious to hear from someone with actual design training if that's a reasonable approach, or if there might actually be some reason that the opposite is actually empirically true (like a unique UX makes people feel like power users and locks then into the platform or something?)

weiming 7y ago

Tangential: we've been using xcodegen (https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen) to generate our projects from a simple yaml file. Don't need to muck around with Xcode toggles, easily repeatable, and .xcodeproj literally stays in .gitignore. Never know why Apple consistently shyes away from more programmatic generation of stuff.

eximius 7y ago

I think the real sentiment I see in the comments about "using web tech instead of native is selfish/unethical/etc" is: why isn't there a desktop technology that can compete with the ease of development as using web technology? I feel this very much. I'm building a reeealy simple app and I'm looking at Svelte Native (Svelte + Nativescript) to get things going. But even that's not quite native. But Android and iOS development are also a mess.

pjmlp 7y ago
Qt and wxWidgets come to mind. Definelty easier than making divs pretty with CSS spaghetti.

tptacek 7y ago

While it certainly works for me and serves as the basis for all of my apps, I don’t know yet if it will work well for others the way my PHP framework has over the years. It will definitely work better for people if the source code isn't all tagged "All rights reserved", in conflict with the MIT license. :)

JoshTriplett 7y ago
While it's confusing, "All rights reserved" isn't actually a license and doesn't conflict with MIT; it's effectively just a (now-redundant) part of the copyright notice. It's been redundant for a long time (since the Berne convention), but doesn't strictly speaking do any harm.
- antoncohen 7y ago
  This is correct. "All rights reserved" was a way of claiming copyright, similar to the © symbol. Open source non-public domain code still has a copyright, it is just licensed for use under an open source license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved
- tptacek 7y ago
  TIL! Thanks!
tylerhall 7y ago
Yeah, sorry. That's just Xcode's default header. Feel free to open a PR or issue.
hellofunk 7y ago
Copyright and software licensing are not the same thing, and there are many open source projects, some very high profile, that retain a copyright.

debt 7y ago

Should add support and all the boilerplate for NSDocument and CoreData. That's a bit more robust DefaultApp. Love this though.

yingw787 7y ago

Is there anything like this default app framework maintained for GTK or TCL or whatever the native KDE / GNOME framework is available for desktop Linux? I exclusively use Ubuntu as my OS for three computers, and I'm building out some front-ends for myself, and native desktop clients aren't cheap to make (in time and effort).

andymatuschak 7y ago

There's a lot of discussion in the comments here about Electron vs. native apps. But last year's Catalyst project, which allows you to ship iOS-based projects on the Mac, opens an important new path. I've been surprised not to see many people discuss it! In particular, this means that you can use React Native to build native macOS apps. You still get live reloading, hot code push, pleasant abstractions, etc. Most importantly, though, these apps can use straight-up AppKit controls on macOS and straight-up UIKit controls on iOS. Better still, you can use react-native-web to ship such projects on the web too. You will+should, of course, have many platform-specific branches. But I find that the vast majority of my code is shared, and there's a _world_ of difference in being able to use the same development tools to ship polished software on desktop, mobile, and web. My most recent project builds to macOS, iOS, Android, and web out of the same Typescript project. There was certainly some toolchain chicanery involved in this, but now that it's set up, it's delightful. Many of the companies shipping Electron apps on desktop are shipping React Native apps on mobile. I would very much like to see React Native-based desktop apps replace Electron apps.

ViViDboarder 7y ago
So what would you suggest then for the non-Mac desktops? Are there React Native based solutions for Windows and Linux?
- scarlac 7y ago
  Yes, at least officially for Windows. The official fork: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows
- andymatuschak 7y ago
  I can't suggest anything, I'm afraid—I haven't worked with Windows and Linux targets using React Native. But it appears that there are React Native rendering targets for Windows and Linux (https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows and https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop https://github.com/status-im/react-native-desktop). I'd probably start by looking there. And of course, because React Native can build to web, one could ship Electron apps for platforms with lower priority for your business.

nerder92 7y ago

My 2 cents, Flutter for the desktop will disrupt this market in the near future.

Klonoar 7y ago

Welp, if we're gonna do the same tired arguments (Electron, etc), I guess I'll go ahead and inject another HN-meme into this thread. Let's talk about Rust. I, like many, want to write the same code across platforms. I do not want to use the JS toolchain (the modern one, Webpack & co). I don't want to use C, because writing C feels contrarian outside of certain cases given the options available today. I want something that's fast, safe and mostly cross-platform. So I started porting AppKit to Rust. There's an example you can see here - it's meant to feel similar to writing native UI in Swift. https://twitter.com/ryanmcgrath/status/1238285152771440640 https://twitter.com/ryanmcgrath/status/1238285152771440640 I plan to put this in a longer blog post, but effectively I don't think write-once-run-anywhere UI works for the class of products I want to build. I don't mind rebuilding the app UI using GTK, AppKit, or what have you... provided I'm not running some ridiculous setup just to get code shared across platforms. Rust and Cargo do incredibly well with this. I'm building my next product in this as a way to dogofood and force the functionality in. If you're interested in following along, you can check out the repo below - note that it's still experimental, the example app (Subatomic) has not been updated for recent changes yet, and the main repo doesn't have docs being built just yet (though I'll probably have this later this week). Anyway, that's my bit - wondering if there's a better way to achieve cross platform code without the headache, so consider this another foray into getting there. https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/appkit-rs https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/appkit-rs

karakanb 7y ago

Shameless plug: I did a similar thing for browser extensions to have a fully functional browser extension with Vue and Tailwind in under 30 seconds: https://gumroad.com/l/XUPxA https://gumroad.com/l/XUPxA I actually like the idea of opinionated starter kits a lot, especially when built out of experience over multiple projects they show a lot of maturity, tailored for a specific workflow. Depending on the developers, these kinds of kits are mostly made for specific use-cases, and they pick the technologies already so that once the project is kicked off most of the non-crucial decisions are already made. Most of the time I have found myself thinking about which database library to use, what Docker image to deploy, which UI framework to use and all these kinds of decisions that have not much value add if all the other alternatives are getting the job done as well. If I were to start building a native macOS app, I'd definitely go for something like this because I just want to get to the core of the thing, not spending time on choosing libraries or thinking about where to put files. Great job!

misiti3780 7y ago
What do you think of Tailwind - about to pull the trigger and buy it
- karakanb 7y ago
  Overall I enjoy it a lot, it gave me a big productivity boost. Everytime someone talks about Tailwind there is a huge discussion going on here, but I just gave it a try a couple months ago and I really enjoyed it. The thing I love the most is, I can get something going without thinking about what padding to use, how to align things, what color palette to use and all that kind of stuff, while also having all the flexibility to change things at the end. YMMV, but I think you wouldn't lose much by trying that out, the worst case is you spend couple of hours and you don't like it, but a better outcome is you spend couple of hours to save yourself tens of hours, so I think it's a good bet.
  - misiti3780 7y ago
    thanks, i just bought tailwindui!

fulldecent2 7y ago

In a similar effort, here is a minimal Swift module (i.e. a reusable code package) which can be used a starting point for new projects: https://github.com/fulldecent/swift5-module-template https://github.com/fulldecent/swift5-module-template

sgt 7y ago

This is very useful - definitely bookmarking this to remember for the next time I write a macOS app.