7 ms·

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?
      • vintagedave 7y ago
        It uses different UI paradigms, doesn't even try to look like native controls let alone use them, and isn't fully system-integrated with the behaviour you'd get from a native app. I just opened, and saw: * Has an expand/collapse panel on the left, using large icons. Not Mac-ish, very Google though. * Title bar isn't integrated with the system (eg can't right-click on the filename to access locations.) * General look and feel uses different controls. For example, the Problems/Output/Debug Console tabs: they aren't rendered like macOS tabs. They're capitalized text, and the UI is completely different. * Cmd+, to open Preferences opens a tab, not a Preferences dialog. This is text (which is nice, good for a dev environment) but even the headings and collapse/expand controls are custom. There is no UI here that behaves like a Mac app. I could continue for hours. There's almost _nothing_ in the app that is built in an Apple or macOS-congruent style. Now, it's a good app. Absolutely. But it's not a Mac-ish app. With a native app, all of these things could be done in just as clean (and very similar in layout) UI, but in a Mac style and with what you, as a Mac user, have grown to expect as Mac app behaviour.
        • snazz 7y ago
          I'm not sure how much non-developers care about "native look and feel". In the arena of iOS apps, extremely popular ones like Snapchat, Discord, Gmail, GroupMe, and Facebook (to an extent) use non-native-looking controls and different user interface paradigms. All of them are cross-platform as well.
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
          • _jal 7y ago
            That's mobile. Single-small-screen use patterns are quite obviously very different than desktop use. I care very much when normal Macintosh facilities are ignored, widgets don't act like they should, etc. etc. The entire point of the Mac is that seamlessness. I wonder how many of these folks claiming nobody cares about desktop consistency will turn around and say the reason why Linux on the desktop isn't popular is because of lack of desktop consistency.
            • mroche 7y ago
              Part of the burden of building a cross platform desktop application is making sure the experience is consistent across platforms as users may need to be moving between them. For example, most CG/VFX applications are multi-platform to various degrees. None of them are native by your standards as that would be an obscene amount of complexity to develop, maintain, and more importantly support. However, all of the applications behave identically on all the platforms they run on (sans some specific host platform features like D3D support, RTX/Optix, macOS menu bar, etc), which makes supporting vast user bases simpler, and enabling mixed OS environments without introducing cognitive load just to understand what’s different about the app. We have our own gripes with UI/UX of these apps because they are complex, but not because they are not "native". Building a "native" application only works when you choose to target a single platform (like the Chime Go text editor), or if you have the reasonable ability and resources to have and support separate teams for each platform and the organization to coordinate roadmaps and priorities across them. From my experience, the only group I really see complain about "native" appearance is macOS users. Windows users really don’t seem to care, and on Linux (there are some vocal people) I guess you could say GTK is the native toolkit above X/Wayland, but it’s really up to the DE/WM for determine what the "native" context is.
    • solarkraft 7y ago
      Which anywhere decent IDE does feel like a native Mac app?
      • leadingthenet 7y ago
        XCode. Nova is another new addition, that while not a fully fledged IDE, is a an amazing Mac experience (still in private beta, unfortunately: https://panic.com/nova/ https://panic.com/nova/).
        • Cyberdog 7y ago
          Have you tried Nova yourself? Any ETA on when will it be available? I've been using Coda for a decade or so now and would really like to see another Mac-native code editor that solves some of Coda's jankiness while preserving its good things (most drastically, IMO, vertical splitting. Why do so many other editors not support that?).
          • leadingthenet 7y ago
            I have, and genuinely the only thing I’d like to see included at this stage is vim-keybindings, which I realise aren’t important for the vast majority of people. Everything else is great, it looks and feels like a very high quality Cocoa app. You’ll be happy to know that Both horizontal and vertical splitting are included. While everything has been moved around compared to Coda, I think there haven’t really been any feature regressions (though I was never a heavy Coda user). Panic has done a great job, imo.
      • gbear605 7y ago
        XCode?
        • vintagedave 7y ago
          RemObjects Fire, too. Visual Studio for Mac, better at least. The list of macOS IDEs that do not feel native is larger. The Jetbrains one, likely due to Java, are to me fairly horrendous. Love the language breadth and features, really dislike the lack of care for UI.
    • moooo99 7y ago
      Does it have to feel like a native app? Depending on the audience you're targeting, I'd argue that most people don't even care, as long as its a good user experience.
    • madeofpalk 7y ago
      People acting as if "native apps" don't ever customise their UI or draw their own controls. Hell, even look at Apple's first party apps and you'll see they're full of "non-native" controls - Final Cut Pro has its own entire custom UI library that it uses. VSCode and the Github App I think are fairly good examples of good UIs that don't use the default OS widget appearances.
      • saagarjha 7y ago
        The difference is that custom platform widgets can get platform behaviors if the developers care enough, which they do.