14 ms·

The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by S

by j-pb 5y ago

The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers. It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore. I've recently switched from VSCode to Panics Nova, and for a very brief moment I felt like I was back in the old days of Mac Os X where things just worked, and where I felt at home with my OS, without constantly waiting for a better alternative to come along.

kowlo 5y ago
What was wrong with VSCode?
- donatzsky 5y ago
  That it's an Electron app, mostly.
  - wayneftw 5y ago
    That's the reason it's excellent IMO. I get nearly the same exact experience on every platform... including when you embed it's components within a web app which is very useful.
    - dghlsakjg 5y ago
      I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you. I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines. Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.
      - wayneftw 5y ago
        Yes, perhaps we're alone in this thread but with 14 million users (out of an estimated 24 million) world wide we're probably in the majority. Picky users might complain but from what I see, most users are just fine with Electron apps. We all use Slack, Discord, etc. at work and everybody loves it.
  - nimvlaj30 5y ago
    It's one of the best Electron apps I've used in my life, honestly. But it still lags a little behind what I would expect from the same software written natively.
- burlesona 5y ago
  For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The VS Code ecosystem is superb though.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Its more the electron tradeoff. We have picked slightly slower software if it means more software at a cheaper price which works on more platforms and has more features. Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.
  - westoncb 5y ago
    I wonder how much of this is just a psychological effect from knowing it's Electron beforehand. Sometimes I think I can almost perceive a little bit of slowness compared to e.g. Sublime—but then I lose sight of it. Certainly in comparison to any similarly fully-featured IDE I've used its feel is notably quicker.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  For me, running more than one Electron app at a time for too long is a recipe for kernel panic. I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20% chance I'm going to have to reboot that day. Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    I think there's a huge tragedy of the commons when it comes to RAM. I get all the arguments about unused RAM being wasted RAM, and that it is more effective to drop a cache at the last moment, just in case it would be used before then. But those arguments only apply if you have a single entity handling the allocations. Otherwise the program holding the memory has no idea that it should drop a cache to allow a different program to use the memory. If the single program is the OS, great. If there's a single large program using RAM such as a browser, then it's still workable but not so great. If you have more than one program each trying to eat 80% of the RAM available, then you're in a world of hurt. And of course, every program thinks that it's the one and only important program running on the computer, which is how we get into the situation we're in.
    - userbinator 5y ago
      IM applications are the worst offenders --- they are often left in the background and only for notification purposes, yet we somehow end up with monstrosities like Slack and Teams which use more RAM when idle than an entire computer a decade ago.
  - hokumguru 5y ago
    I think the most infuriating thing is azure containers don’t really work with standard FTP clients like transmit But as long as the product is “good enough “we will see this trend more as most consumers of apps care more about features than performance
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap. They made one of the best text editor/IDE and released it for free. I wouldn't call that being lazy and cheap.
- irrational 5y ago
  That’s it’s not IntelliJ? Honestly, it’s not bad, but I think the price is the main thing it has going for it.
_fzslm 5y ago
how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.
- bingidingi 5y ago
  personally I found Nova to be kind of old school interface-wise… it’s good, but I’ve grown too used to IDEs like Atom/VS/etc, which seem more minimal on the surface Of course you can customize it and do whatever you want, but I found it hard to find a reason to switch outside of my affinity for the people at Panic (and I’ve got plenty of other ways to give them money).
- andrekandre 5y ago
  not the op, but... i find it pretty good, i use it for swift development (packages/libs) with a swift plugin (language server) it works pretty well for that, its quite lightweight and smooth for the most part my only concerns are 1. the swift plugin hasnt been updated in a long time, when will it stop working? (general issue of relying in plugins) 2. i think it uses its own text engine, so it "feels" different to other cocoa apps, not a big deal, just something i notice 3. if you wanna just open a file and get syntax highlighting, dont care about autocompletion/building, its maybe a little heavy for that (in the ui sense) 4. this may depend on plugin functionality, but error messages sometimes dont work as well as in xcode (click to fix, duplicate errors reported etc) --- its not as fully powered as jetbrains tho someday maybe it could!
WA 5y ago
There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on the Mac, but for iOS. In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. I'm willing to pay for quality. The main problem is convincing me of the quality before buying.
  - WA 5y ago
    Subscription-based pricing actually solves this – in a way.
    - phkahler 5y ago
      I don't really want to pay rent.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  I’m just curious because I’m not a heavy mobile app user. The only apps on my phone right now that I feel really good are free. I paid for many apps but most haven’t been updated in years and have a lot to improve. Where are the good apps?
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Procreate, Concepts, and fusion are the ones that come to mind. There are probably very few paid apps people buy for purely content consumption outside of games. But for content creators there is a fairly wide selection of pro apps that are pretty good. Luma fussion just updated to allow you to video edit directly from an external SSD without having to import/export to local storage.
nebula8804 5y ago
Wow thank you for that list of developers. I looked through all of them and found some great apps. Is there some place that catalogs development companies that are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support these guys and keep them going.
- gregsadetsky 5y ago
  Other companies: Omni Group (mentioned elsewhere), Bare Bones Software. There's also this page [0] which has a few names -- some unfortunately which don't exist anymore (Ambrosia! sigh) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Macintosh_software_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Macintosh_software_co...
b3morales 5y ago
Most of the developers you mentioned are still around and still cranking. Panic and Rogue Amoeba in particular. Others have emerged, though there's a lot of crossover with iOS these days, since people want their data available across their devices. Bear and Things come to mind; Dash by Kapeli; The Archive; Kaleidoscope has been reinvigorated by a company that seems to know what they're doing; Alfred; Paw, Proxie, and Proxyman... they are out there.
coldtea 5y ago
>But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers. Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup, Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are not 99ct and do just fine...
- ttepasse 5y ago
  Panic for years is rather open how they can't operate profitable on iOS and as a result discontinued many of their great iOS apps. The fear is that the Mac app market goes the same way like the iOS App Store.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Also wasn't Omni laying people off recently. I suspect all these companies are struggling. It's interesting that Apple struggled for a long time with 3rd party software. Developers weren't interested because the volumes were too small. Now it's almost the opposite, there are plenty of customers but the market is awash with cheap or free options.
gherkinnn 5y ago
Electron has killed it. Fast browsers have killed it. Saas killed it. There are many problems with Apple’s stores, but I don’t see how this is one.
- uniqueid 5y ago
  I can't say this view has it entirely backwards because part of the phenomenon is due to the strengths of the web today and of Electron. But the 'backward' part of the argument is that native Apple software could, but no longer does, provide its own strengths to counter the web and Electron. I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use Electron. Here's why: - I don't feel the Mac's UX is great these days. If my app doesn't benefit from a consistent and elegant GUI, I might as well do it with web tech. - I can't keep up with Xcode and the OS changing constantly. There was a time when you'd get a couple years between OS upgrades, when Apple's documentation wasn't (entirely) useless - Desktop software on the Mac involves so much complexity today (eg: sandboxing, certificates, iCloud, icon formats and sizes, etc) that I don't want to deal with it The Apple ecosystem doesn't offer enough advantages for me anymore to warrant the effort.
  - hugey010 5y ago
    Huge agreement to keeping up with the iOS and arbitrary app update requirements. My personal projects are in a place that releasing even minor updates is an endeavor I just don't have time for anymore.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    Agree. I hate every electron app I use, but even my longtime macOS favorites are beginning to feel only marginally better. They keep spicing up the UI, removing things that used to be reliable constants across applications and hiding more and more things behind ... menus like I'm on a mobile device, revealing or moving UI elements on mouse hover. Little details like the title bar of of every window behaving the same were great like ten years ago. You always knew if a dot was in the red close button it meant your work wasn't saved. You could drag and drop the tiny icon just like it was an icon in Finder. It was almost always consistent. Preview used to be a simple app for viewing documents. I welcomed the addition of annotation tools like adding a signature, but why did they axe the standard titlebar behavior? Now you have to hover over the filename of the document and wait almost a second before the title slides to the right and reveals the little icon. How is that possibly an improvement over just leaving it alone? Did they think saving 16px to show a longer filename without ellipses was more valuable? Notes is kind of a new app in my mind so it hit the scene when macOS was already starting to feel more like an iPhone, but it's still worth talking about. They keep making it more powerful, like adding checklists and tables and such, but they hide the most basic functionality, text formatting, under a flyout menu. I really like the iOS feature to scan documents. The cropping and contrast adjustments are so good that I can usually quickly scan several pages of handwritten homework within a couple minutes. However, exporting a scanned PDF out of a document on macOS is a mess. Right click on the scan and it take seconds for a context menu to appear. At first I thought it must be my computer got hung, but it's like this consistently. How did they ship a product that make something as basic as a context menu hang for several seconds? I could gripe with more examples, but the overarching feel I get is that macOS is being pushed more and more towards feeling like iOS, the emphasis on programs editing files is disappearing, and one day everything will be sandboxed and I'll have to click through "share" menus to transfer data from one app to another, provided those apps are kind enough to let me import or export.
reaperducer 5y ago
It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore. It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used the phrase in its television advertising. Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better. When it only sometimes is. You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included" because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and somehow we thought it was OK. There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart. Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization. In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will last the rest of our lives. But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things like household basics.
zepto 5y ago
This has nothing to do with anything Apple has done other than expand from serving a niche of self-identified tasteful customers into serving half the planet. It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful customers who would for good software, all you had to do was target the Mac. Obviously it’s harder now.
sombremesa 5y ago
> The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Considering that companies like Unity were in the same boat, I'm a bit hesitant to point the finger squarely at Apple without considering the decisions these companies made for themselves. Decisions such as making a 99 cent one-time purchase app and still expecting to succeed as a business.
zmix 5y ago
> Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. They all sound like band names, which shows the passion, that went into these endaveours!
oceanghost 5y ago
I agree whole-hardheartedly with this. When I jumped into Apple in the early 2000's, there was amazing software. I recall in particular my first Intel-Mac-laptop. There was this amazing program that changed the GUI to look like the Bjork video "All is Full of Love". It was absolute magic (beyond the random crashes of the first Intel macs which SUCKED). I think the problem with all app-stores is this: 1. There's lots of very low quality software. 2. There's no way to verify the software does what it says it does before purchasing. I can't tell you how many times I've bought an app for my daughter--even from "reputable" companies that only has a few minutes of content before it starts begging for money, coins etc. Or even if the game didn't beg for money, it was just nonsense. I bought my daughter a game that had no pay mechanics-- but, you had to earn "coins" to do impossible challenges to get prizes. I ended up playing most of the game for her because it was just too hard for a kid, and it was just too hard for an adult who cut his teeth on Atari and Nintendo. It wasn't fun, just tedious. The game required you to make 300ish correct decisions with about one second each in-between them. In the old days, I was happy to drop 25$ on an interesting app. I'd love to check out Panics Nova but the Apple Ecosystem isn't viable for me anymore. :-/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
omniscient_oce 5y ago
Two nice native apps for MacOS that I like are Craft and Eagle.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.
shp0ngle 5y ago
Yeah trying to switch from VSCode to Nova was the opposite experience for me. For a while, I had that same nostalgia... everything looked great... but then, nothing really worked, the plugins were all kind of bad (half of my work is Golang, which Nova does not support), and VSCode allows you to have the same stuff on all three major platforms. I realized the Mac software from your studios looked great, and yeah had unified Mac feel unlike the messiness of Windows world, but usually had worse functionality. (And they were all always paid.) There was recently an article from Sketch, that says, how proud they are to have a native app in 2020. https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-why-we-re-proud-to-build-a-truly-native-mac-app/ https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-wh... Yeah, nice, but... Figma is not native, it has a "worse" looking/feeling app, but... allows you to collaborate instantly - it's "collaboration first", not a feature side-bolted to existing app. And it can be run anywhere. Chromium is horrible in abstract (why do I need to take whole Chrome with every app?). But they win where matters I guess.
Razengan 5y ago
> when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers. What the fuck, it’s your decision to charge $1 because thousands of other devs do it, not Apple’s. If you want to charge $10-$50 and you think can convince users to pay that much, Apple is not stopping you. Seriously wtf. Apple’s ecosystem got those hundreds of millions of customers in the first place because Apple lets the users decide how much they think apps should be worth. Do you think users pay more on Android? https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/02/app-store-earned-twice-google-play-store-q3-2020/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/02/app-store-earned-twice-...
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. It's not just Apple, this has been a general trend for several decades. In the nineties I paid for Office (about £400 I think), now I use Google Docs. It was the same for development tools, £1800 for an MSDN subscription, now I use VS Community, git and open source components. I suspect this is inevitable because the marginal cost of software is so low.

by j-pb 5y ago

kowlo 5y ago

What was wrong with VSCode?

donatzsky 5y ago
That it's an Electron app, mostly.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  That's the reason it's excellent IMO. I get nearly the same exact experience on every platform... including when you embed it's components within a web app which is very useful.
  - dghlsakjg 5y ago
    I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you. I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines. Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.
    - wayneftw 5y ago
      Yes, perhaps we're alone in this thread but with 14 million users (out of an estimated 24 million) world wide we're probably in the majority. Picky users might complain but from what I see, most users are just fine with Electron apps. We all use Slack, Discord, etc. at work and everybody loves it.
- nimvlaj30 5y ago
  It's one of the best Electron apps I've used in my life, honestly. But it still lags a little behind what I would expect from the same software written natively.
burlesona 5y ago
For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The VS Code ecosystem is superb though.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Its more the electron tradeoff. We have picked slightly slower software if it means more software at a cheaper price which works on more platforms and has more features. Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.
- westoncb 5y ago
  I wonder how much of this is just a psychological effect from knowing it's Electron beforehand. Sometimes I think I can almost perceive a little bit of slowness compared to e.g. Sublime—but then I lose sight of it. Certainly in comparison to any similarly fully-featured IDE I've used its feel is notably quicker.
reaperducer 5y ago
For me, running more than one Electron app at a time for too long is a recipe for kernel panic. I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20% chance I'm going to have to reboot that day. Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  I think there's a huge tragedy of the commons when it comes to RAM. I get all the arguments about unused RAM being wasted RAM, and that it is more effective to drop a cache at the last moment, just in case it would be used before then. But those arguments only apply if you have a single entity handling the allocations. Otherwise the program holding the memory has no idea that it should drop a cache to allow a different program to use the memory. If the single program is the OS, great. If there's a single large program using RAM such as a browser, then it's still workable but not so great. If you have more than one program each trying to eat 80% of the RAM available, then you're in a world of hurt. And of course, every program thinks that it's the one and only important program running on the computer, which is how we get into the situation we're in.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    IM applications are the worst offenders --- they are often left in the background and only for notification purposes, yet we somehow end up with monstrosities like Slack and Teams which use more RAM when idle than an entire computer a decade ago.
- hokumguru 5y ago
  I think the most infuriating thing is azure containers don’t really work with standard FTP clients like transmit But as long as the product is “good enough “we will see this trend more as most consumers of apps care more about features than performance
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap. They made one of the best text editor/IDE and released it for free. I wouldn't call that being lazy and cheap.
irrational 5y ago
That’s it’s not IntelliJ? Honestly, it’s not bad, but I think the price is the main thing it has going for it.

_fzslm 5y ago

how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.

bingidingi 5y ago
personally I found Nova to be kind of old school interface-wise… it’s good, but I’ve grown too used to IDEs like Atom/VS/etc, which seem more minimal on the surface Of course you can customize it and do whatever you want, but I found it hard to find a reason to switch outside of my affinity for the people at Panic (and I’ve got plenty of other ways to give them money).
andrekandre 5y ago
not the op, but... i find it pretty good, i use it for swift development (packages/libs) with a swift plugin (language server) it works pretty well for that, its quite lightweight and smooth for the most part my only concerns are 1. the swift plugin hasnt been updated in a long time, when will it stop working? (general issue of relying in plugins) 2. i think it uses its own text engine, so it "feels" different to other cocoa apps, not a big deal, just something i notice 3. if you wanna just open a file and get syntax highlighting, dont care about autocompletion/building, its maybe a little heavy for that (in the ui sense) 4. this may depend on plugin functionality, but error messages sometimes dont work as well as in xcode (click to fix, duplicate errors reported etc) --- its not as fully powered as jetbrains tho someday maybe it could!

WA 5y ago

There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on the Mac, but for iOS. In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.

phkahler 5y ago
>> In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. I'm willing to pay for quality. The main problem is convincing me of the quality before buying.
- WA 5y ago
  Subscription-based pricing actually solves this – in a way.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    I don't really want to pay rent.
orhmeh09 5y ago
I’m just curious because I’m not a heavy mobile app user. The only apps on my phone right now that I feel really good are free. I paid for many apps but most haven’t been updated in years and have a lot to improve. Where are the good apps?
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Procreate, Concepts, and fusion are the ones that come to mind. There are probably very few paid apps people buy for purely content consumption outside of games. But for content creators there is a fairly wide selection of pro apps that are pretty good. Luma fussion just updated to allow you to video edit directly from an external SSD without having to import/export to local storage.

nebula8804 5y ago

Wow thank you for that list of developers. I looked through all of them and found some great apps. Is there some place that catalogs development companies that are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support these guys and keep them going.

gregsadetsky 5y ago
Other companies: Omni Group (mentioned elsewhere), Bare Bones Software. There's also this page [0] which has a few names -- some unfortunately which don't exist anymore (Ambrosia! sigh) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Macintosh_software_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Macintosh_software_co...

b3morales 5y ago

Most of the developers you mentioned are still around and still cranking. Panic and Rogue Amoeba in particular. Others have emerged, though there's a lot of crossover with iOS these days, since people want their data available across their devices. Bear and Things come to mind; Dash by Kapeli; The Archive; Kaleidoscope has been reinvigorated by a company that seems to know what they're doing; Alfred; Paw, Proxie, and Proxyman... they are out there.

coldtea 5y ago

>But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers. Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup, Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are not 99ct and do just fine...

ttepasse 5y ago
Panic for years is rather open how they can't operate profitable on iOS and as a result discontinued many of their great iOS apps. The fear is that the Mac app market goes the same way like the iOS App Store.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Also wasn't Omni laying people off recently. I suspect all these companies are struggling. It's interesting that Apple struggled for a long time with 3rd party software. Developers weren't interested because the volumes were too small. Now it's almost the opposite, there are plenty of customers but the market is awash with cheap or free options.

gherkinnn 5y ago

Electron has killed it. Fast browsers have killed it. Saas killed it. There are many problems with Apple’s stores, but I don’t see how this is one.

uniqueid 5y ago
I can't say this view has it entirely backwards because part of the phenomenon is due to the strengths of the web today and of Electron. But the 'backward' part of the argument is that native Apple software could, but no longer does, provide its own strengths to counter the web and Electron. I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use Electron. Here's why: - I don't feel the Mac's UX is great these days. If my app doesn't benefit from a consistent and elegant GUI, I might as well do it with web tech. - I can't keep up with Xcode and the OS changing constantly. There was a time when you'd get a couple years between OS upgrades, when Apple's documentation wasn't (entirely) useless - Desktop software on the Mac involves so much complexity today (eg: sandboxing, certificates, iCloud, icon formats and sizes, etc) that I don't want to deal with it The Apple ecosystem doesn't offer enough advantages for me anymore to warrant the effort.
- hugey010 5y ago
  Huge agreement to keeping up with the iOS and arbitrary app update requirements. My personal projects are in a place that releasing even minor updates is an endeavor I just don't have time for anymore.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Agree. I hate every electron app I use, but even my longtime macOS favorites are beginning to feel only marginally better. They keep spicing up the UI, removing things that used to be reliable constants across applications and hiding more and more things behind ... menus like I'm on a mobile device, revealing or moving UI elements on mouse hover. Little details like the title bar of of every window behaving the same were great like ten years ago. You always knew if a dot was in the red close button it meant your work wasn't saved. You could drag and drop the tiny icon just like it was an icon in Finder. It was almost always consistent. Preview used to be a simple app for viewing documents. I welcomed the addition of annotation tools like adding a signature, but why did they axe the standard titlebar behavior? Now you have to hover over the filename of the document and wait almost a second before the title slides to the right and reveals the little icon. How is that possibly an improvement over just leaving it alone? Did they think saving 16px to show a longer filename without ellipses was more valuable? Notes is kind of a new app in my mind so it hit the scene when macOS was already starting to feel more like an iPhone, but it's still worth talking about. They keep making it more powerful, like adding checklists and tables and such, but they hide the most basic functionality, text formatting, under a flyout menu. I really like the iOS feature to scan documents. The cropping and contrast adjustments are so good that I can usually quickly scan several pages of handwritten homework within a couple minutes. However, exporting a scanned PDF out of a document on macOS is a mess. Right click on the scan and it take seconds for a context menu to appear. At first I thought it must be my computer got hung, but it's like this consistently. How did they ship a product that make something as basic as a context menu hang for several seconds? I could gripe with more examples, but the overarching feel I get is that macOS is being pushed more and more towards feeling like iOS, the emphasis on programs editing files is disappearing, and one day everything will be sandboxed and I'll have to click through "share" menus to transfer data from one app to another, provided those apps are kind enough to let me import or export.

reaperducer 5y ago

It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore. It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used the phrase in its television advertising. Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better. When it only sometimes is. You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included" because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and somehow we thought it was OK. There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart. Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization. In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will last the rest of our lives. But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things like household basics.

zepto 5y ago

This has nothing to do with anything Apple has done other than expand from serving a niche of self-identified tasteful customers into serving half the planet. It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful customers who would for good software, all you had to do was target the Mac. Obviously it’s harder now.

sombremesa 5y ago

> The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Considering that companies like Unity were in the same boat, I'm a bit hesitant to point the finger squarely at Apple without considering the decisions these companies made for themselves. Decisions such as making a 99 cent one-time purchase app and still expecting to succeed as a business.

zmix 5y ago

> Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. They all sound like band names, which shows the passion, that went into these endaveours!

oceanghost 5y ago

I agree whole-hardheartedly with this. When I jumped into Apple in the early 2000's, there was amazing software. I recall in particular my first Intel-Mac-laptop. There was this amazing program that changed the GUI to look like the Bjork video "All is Full of Love". It was absolute magic (beyond the random crashes of the first Intel macs which SUCKED). I think the problem with all app-stores is this: 1. There's lots of very low quality software. 2. There's no way to verify the software does what it says it does before purchasing. I can't tell you how many times I've bought an app for my daughter--even from "reputable" companies that only has a few minutes of content before it starts begging for money, coins etc. Or even if the game didn't beg for money, it was just nonsense. I bought my daughter a game that had no pay mechanics-- but, you had to earn "coins" to do impossible challenges to get prizes. I ended up playing most of the game for her because it was just too hard for a kid, and it was just too hard for an adult who cut his teeth on Atari and Nintendo. It wasn't fun, just tedious. The game required you to make 300ish correct decisions with about one second each in-between them. In the old days, I was happy to drop 25$ on an interesting app. I'd love to check out Panics Nova but the Apple Ecosystem isn't viable for me anymore. :-/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

omniscient_oce 5y ago

Two nice native apps for MacOS that I like are Craft and Eagle.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.

shp0ngle 5y ago

Yeah trying to switch from VSCode to Nova was the opposite experience for me. For a while, I had that same nostalgia... everything looked great... but then, nothing really worked, the plugins were all kind of bad (half of my work is Golang, which Nova does not support), and VSCode allows you to have the same stuff on all three major platforms. I realized the Mac software from your studios looked great, and yeah had unified Mac feel unlike the messiness of Windows world, but usually had worse functionality. (And they were all always paid.) There was recently an article from Sketch, that says, how proud they are to have a native app in 2020. https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-why-we-re-proud-to-build-a-truly-native-mac-app/ https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-wh... Yeah, nice, but... Figma is not native, it has a "worse" looking/feeling app, but... allows you to collaborate instantly - it's "collaboration first", not a feature side-bolted to existing app. And it can be run anywhere. Chromium is horrible in abstract (why do I need to take whole Chrome with every app?). But they win where matters I guess.

Razengan 5y ago

> when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers. What the fuck, it’s your decision to charge $1 because thousands of other devs do it, not Apple’s. If you want to charge $10-$50 and you think can convince users to pay that much, Apple is not stopping you. Seriously wtf. Apple’s ecosystem got those hundreds of millions of customers in the first place because Apple lets the users decide how much they think apps should be worth. Do you think users pay more on Android? https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/02/app-store-earned-twice-google-play-store-q3-2020/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/02/app-store-earned-twice-...

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. It's not just Apple, this has been a general trend for several decades. In the nineties I paid for Office (about £400 I think), now I use Google Docs. It was the same for development tools, £1800 for an MSDN subscription, now I use VS Community, git and open source components. I suspect this is inevitable because the marginal cost of software is so low.