34 ms·

A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation

142 points by mgrayson 5y ago

ZYinMD 5y ago
I think modern human beings tend to be like "give me something I haven't seen before!" or "where is innovation!?". We take very fast tech advancements for granted, but I think things can't simply just go up and up forever, sooner or later it'll plateau.
manicdee 5y ago
I have BBEdit, Reeder, OhMyZsh. What else do I need in order to actually do my work? It doesn’t make sense to have a new app for Django development since there’s so much stuff that happens “under the hood”. Is this ecosystem stagnant or mature? You say tomayto I say tomarto
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I use to write about what I think is a similar idea to yours: imagine a time 500 years in the future when most software has been frozen in a secure and feature rich state. Cyber and other criminal attacks on digital life infrastructure has become so bad that both people and the few international corporate cartels that rule the planet prefer using software that has hundreds of years of security audits, attack surface simulations, etc. The only bits that are changing are data: new books and movies, data driving metaverse style AR and VR, etc. Is this possible? If I remember back to the 1980s when much of my works was done with Emacs, Makefiles, Common Lisp, and C/C++, then I can imagine a world today where I would still get paid to just use those tools, these tools were only used to produce non-executable digital content, but we had fresh digital entertainment always available. Can this all be extrapolated out to 500 years in the future? I could live with it if everything was secure, efficient, and inexpensive.
criddell 5y ago
I wish the Windows software landscape was as interesting as the Mac. Windows gets all the best games, but if you aren’t interested in games, there isn’t a whole lot of anything new or interesting. The web, although newer, is just as dull these days. iOS and Android aren’t doing much better. Maybe it’s a sign that personal computing is now about as interesting as other appliances. Things are mature. The author has posted a follow-up here: http://morrick.me/archives/9523 http://morrick.me/archives/9523
- brimble 5y ago
  > The web, although newer, is just as dull these days. I think it's that we stopped building, promoting, and improving new public protocols. And by "we" I mean "tech giants". There should be an open, widely-used social layer atop the Web, supported by everything under the sun. Why isn't there? Facebook and Google and Twitter have infinity money (thanks to advertising and/or VC) to throw at free products that lock in users, instead. Why's chat more silo'd now than ever? Similar reason, deep pockets with large marketing & advertising budgets pushing products that deliberately don't interoperate well. Et cetera. We couldn't invent email today. I'm not even sure we could invent the Web, anymore. For values of "invent" that include getting enough support for something to really be a standard that's widely used, not just a few white papers and something a few enthusiasts use, doomed to obscurity. This state of things is not because we ran out of things that would make excellent, useful protocols.
  - rektide 5y ago
    Agreed basically. The G+ era murdered the engineering driven vision of the future & replaced it with more gloss-coated shit-consumerism. Things werent going great with Buzz, Salmon, OpenSocial. But they were teething, finding themselves, evolving. That all got killed by one vain executive, who murdered an explorable interconnected future for a cheapass Facebook knock-off. It's sad af it takes a massive name to drive big change, to get people hyped. There's plenty of interesting-ish projects about that could, that deserve uptake, usage, advancement. Maybe BlueSky will have technics sufficiently capable to match & drive a new interconnected angle. Im so tired of the ongoing re-silo-ization of all computing.
    - wolpoli 5y ago
      Also, independent (and interconnected) blogs simply have no place in their future where valuable/insightful content would be on Google+. Thus, to choke off the audience for blogs, Google Reader had to die.
      - ohCh6zos 5y ago
latchkey 5y ago
mimestream (a native gmail client) is a relatively new app and is fantastic. still in beta, but actively developed and solved the one thing I wanted more than anything... to be able to command-tab into my email box.
- adparadox 5y ago
  I totally agree about mimestream. It's everything I want in an app -- single focus, Mac-native, fast, and works well. Two other Mac-native tools that I really enjoy using every day: GitUp (http://www.gitup.co/ http://www.gitup.co/) and Postico (https://eggerapps.at/postico/ https://eggerapps.at/postico/).
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Another thing excellent native Mac git client is Fork[0], which is unique in that it has a perfectly mirrored native (MFC I think) Windows version. It works together very well with Secretive[1] which allows you to keep your SSH key in your Mac’s Secure Enclave and require Touch ID to use them, as well as displaying a notification showing what’s trying to access keys. It can also store keys in hardware dongles (like YubiKeys) and has a nice native UI for managing multiple keys. [0]: https://git-fork.com/ https://git-fork.com/ [1]: https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      I think the Windows version of Fork is .Net/WPF.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  I have a friend who is a UX guru, and as a sort of hobby tries out various email clients from time to time. He absolutely couldn't believe it when I showed him "this great new client [Mimestream] that has made my email dreams come true." "It looks… just like Apple Mail." "Yes" "… why?"
  - 5y ago
musicale 5y ago
It's not just Mac software - desktop software in general seems to be stagnating. As noted, several app categories seem to have "matured" and/or ossified and are dominated by one or two players. For example, Microsoft and Apple dominate the "office" productivity software market on macOS. Moreover, apps like Discord, Teams, VS Code, etc. seem to be cross-platform web apps which are clunky and unsatisfying compared to native apps. (Other web apps don't even have desktop versions and only exist in the browser.) That being said, Adobe's offerings are expensive subscriptions which have opened up a market for Affinity as well as Pixelmator and Acorn.
- duped 5y ago
  Just personally, I use several of those "clunky" apps daily and they're more seamless than native counterparts. Particularly VS Code. Its biggest struggle is input latency, but if I really cared about that I wouldn't have left editing in the terminal.
  - clumsysmurf 5y ago
    I agree, some of the "clunk" apps feel real nice. Problem is, when you have 4 electron apps running, and your system starts grinding.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Yeah, I use VS Code as my terminal now. I love having the directory tree visible if I need or want to single click a file and play with it instantly with zero overhead. I use thunder client now instead of that dreadful postman obomination after learning about it here last week. VS Code is becoming my general purpose environment. I was working in PowerShell ISE today and was thinking "this has to go" the whole time. So if I have any PowerShell work in the future I'm going to try the VS Code tooling for that. I knew at least one person at Capital One who was using it for their Spring Boot project instead of Intellij.
    - bdcravens 5y ago
      I have dedicated tools for most tasks like the terminal, git client, REST client, etc, but most of the time I use VS Code (built-ins or extensions); even when I'm making compromises, I prefer the workflow of staying on one screen.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
It’s not the focus of the article—which is clearly intended to narrowly focus on the current state of macOS UI APIs—so I can’t fault it for having no mention of Electron. But it’s hard not to see a huge Electron-shaped hole in the picture painted. At least for my usage, nearly all of my dailyish use apps are either: - built in (Finder, Activity Monitor, Reminders) - macOS native but get little benefit from that other than existing before Electron (iTerm, Tower but even that is an ancient unmaintained version because I’m not sold on the subscription model) - Some Chromium thing, mostly Electron (~90% of my daily usage if not more) And I know this will vary by user but… I suspect that breakdown is similar for anyone using more than built-ins. I love the idea of “Mac-assed Mac apps”[1], but there just… aren’t many and they’re either very specialized (Panic stuff and Pixelmator being prominent examples) or very minimal and of unpredictable quality (the vast majority of the Mac App Store). Though this is a good reminder that I want to buy Paw[2] even though I currently don’t have much use for it. But like… being real, the issue isn’t that native macOS UI toolkits are bad in some way. The issue is that nobody is developing platform-specific desktop UIs at all, give or take first parties and marginalia. If anything, Linux is healthier in this respect than anything else, and that’s because it’s already a hodgepodge of community efforts. 1: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-apps https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a... 2: https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  And my goodness I’d love to switch from VSCode to Nova if I could figure out how to both support my own debugging story and know how to document it for the larger VSCode crowd, but last I checked both are impossible and I work in open source so I’m going to milk the cows in the field they’re actually grazing (I have no idea if I’m butchering an existing aphorism or just butchering one I just made up).
chubs 5y ago
Some theories: * Lucrative FAANG jobs have hollowed out the indie dev market * Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps * The rise of iOS has pulled ObjC (and now Swift) devs away from Mac software * Our industry has moved towards vertical integration. Eg before we used to use Campfire for team communication, using indie apps such as Flint as clients because campfire had an api. Nowadays tech companies want to 'own' the whole shebang, eg Slack has no API and publish their own desktop client. But these big companies by nature have no appetite for making a nice native app, it's all electron so they can get x-plat feature parity.
- ncr100 5y ago
  * Mobile app development is sucking the air out of the room.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > * Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps I'm not going to blame Apple for that. Unless it is to have provided the App Store arena — within which developers quickly raced to the bottom on pricing. Who can blame users though for expecting free stuff? Web browsers became free. Apple and Microsoft started bundling more and more apps with their OS's. Facebook: free, Twitter: free, etc. I honestly don't know how indie developers make any money these days. I'm considering trying shareware again. At least the odd check in the mail used to get pizza for the girlfriend and I on Friday nights. But try and keep your day job too.
  - oddity 5y ago
    The race to the bottom was absolutely Apple's fault. Software distribution over the internet existed before the App Store. Even Steam existed before the App Store. But Apple based the App Store on iTunes, where the songs were 99 cents and curation was a token effort. It took years for Apple to recognize that people needed to be able to find the good apps more than a few hours after they released onto the store.
    - 5y ago
tbrock 5y ago
There’s tons of great stuff coming out: Mimestream is the mail best app I’ve used in decades (gmail only). Id pay the creators $100 or more for a license if he charged. TablePlus is decent. Obsidian for notes. Monodraw for ascii drawings.
- robbiep 5y ago
  TablePlus certainly is decent
- nomel 5y ago
  That is definitely on the skimpy side of "tons".
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    I'll add one more: Airflow. Easily the smoothest solution I've found to stream local video files to Chromecasts and Apple TV: https://airflow.app/ https://airflow.app/
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Another +1 for TablePlus. OmniFocus is great (if you're into that kind of task-tracking/GSD tool)
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    For those, like me, who find OmniFocus to be overkill, Things might be a better fit. I think it's great.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  What do you like about Mimestream? I'm happy enough with Mac Mail, except that search sometimes sucks. What am I missing out on?
  - kall 5y ago
    I believe it searches via the gmail api so it has good search results. I personally like it because it feels really snappy and lightweight, in terms of UI and performance.
deleted 5y ago
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duped 5y ago
At the end of the day Mac users are so few in number and cost so much to retain and acquire that it's not worth the dev cycles to make Mac native software. MacOS is slightly better than Windows to target as a developer, and fine to use if you disable all the nag/scare messages that $App wants to be able to save your preferences - but it's just cheaper and easier to make a web app today.
- alwillis 5y ago
  At the end of the day Mac users are so few in number and cost so much to retain… You're kidding, right? In its nearly 40 year history, the Mac has never sold better; Apple has had many consecutive record quarters since the start of the pandemic. It's obviously not just about price and consumers; several companies bought boatloads of Macs for their developers: "Uber, Twitter among companies giving engineers 'fully loaded' M1 Max MacBook Pro": https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/11/08/uber-twitter-among-companies-giving-engineers-fully-loaded-m1-max-macbook-pro https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/11/08/uber-twitter-amon...
  - duped 5y ago
    They're great laptops. How many of those developers are targeting MacOS though? iOS has 50% market share in the US. It makes sense why Uber and Twitter (a pittance of desktop users) buys them - they have to.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      Macs are basically standard developer hardware at well funded tech companies, for all sorts of engineers besides just iOS teams.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Only if you happen to live in the US or countries with similar salary levels and writing UNIX software or iOS/iPad/watchOS is all that those "developers" care about.
- 5y ago
shp0ngle 5y ago
Honestly? It's Chrome (and, by extension, Electron) being relatively good as a "native platform" that killed "native apps" on Mac. (And I guess Windows/Linux too, I don't know.) Ironically Chrome got its start as an Apple WebKit fork, but they invested a lot in it from then. Anyway. People just write it in Electron, or just go for web app directly. It's like Java of yesteryear - "write once, run anywhere, but never good". We can fight it or embrace it, I'm afraid.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  This. So much functionality I used to expect in desktop apps is now done in the browser. Any sort of 'office' software for example... Any communication software. Email. And so on. Dev tools and games are literally the only 'native' apps I ever use on the desktop.
- criddell 5y ago
  Web apps are stagnant too. Personal computing in general has matured and is mostly boring these days.
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    not really though? Look at figma; look at stuff like Miro. Even Google Docs are getting better. Discord came out of nowhere and now owning its space. The one that has stagnated is GMail I guess; I think they have too much legacy stuff that they cannot cut, so it’s hard to innovate.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      >Look at figma; look at stuff like Miro. Even Google Docs are getting better. It's amazing what they have achieved within that constrained platform but I was using vector graphics tools, image editors, word processors and spreadsheets in the eighties and nineties. Some things have changed of course, a wider range of formats, easier collaboration online but there is nothing fundamentally new about this stuff.
mistersquid 5y ago
Crusty developers gonna crust? Off the top of my head, these apps are fairly recent and pretty great. - OBS (obsproject.com) - Visual Studio Code - Tower (git-tower.com) - Timing (timingapp.com)
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Note that neither OBS nor Visual Studio Code are native mac apps.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    One need only open the OBS preferences to see just how non-native: https://i.imgur.com/At8MQPJ.png https://i.imgur.com/At8MQPJ.png
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    In practical terms though, who cares? This reminds me of the debate about Wine being integrated with Steam before Proton came out. A big argument against was that it would kill the native Linux game market. But then valve did it anyway and the compatibility layer was so seamless that to the end user you would never notice it was a windows game so you have no practical reason to care. VS Code works incredible on MacOS despite not being native.
    - checker659 5y ago
      You're commenting on the article. In that context, it is every bit as relevant.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      >VS Code works incredible on MacOS despite not being native. It's a bit of a dog on my machine. I only use it for one particular plugin.
- declnz 5y ago
  OBS is approaching ten years old though [1]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBS_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBS_Studio
GlenTheMachine 5y ago
This isn’t a hard position, but I’m leaning towards the idea that we may actually have all the desktop software we need, at least in broad strokes. The applications could of course always get better <cough>Microsoft Office<cough>, but I’m not sure there are all that many unfilled needs in desktop software. “The platform is the application”, in a sense. The last piece of software that really truly changed my life was Waze. And that software couldn’t have been desktop software. The next piece was one of Google Translate and/or the many language translation apps in the App Store, including the camera-based ones. Again, that’s software that if it was useful at all would have a very different level of usefulness as desktop software. At some point I suspect AI will actually become useful, and that might - MIGHT - open up new desktop software categories. But we aren’t there yet.
perfopt 5y ago
I worked on Mac and iOS apps until about 10 years ago and then briefly just to keep in touch with changes until about 5 years ago. The main reason I am not interested in indie development is that (1) it is very difficult to sustain in the long run and (2) I don't want to invest a lot of time to learn skills that work only in a closed env Also, I think most necessary apps for the desktop are already there - I cannot think of anything new that would be a must have. I could say the same for mobile apps but many of them are not apps, they are a window into a service once can subscribe to. So in that sense they are new
programmarchy 5y ago
I love native apps as a user, but as a developer why invest time and energy into a shifting landscape? Better to put effort into building a SaaS. I think this quote from the article sums it up well: > Right now, it feels a little bit like the three main MacOS app frameworks are floating in unanchored space: AppKit is not the future, Catalyst is not ready to replace it, and using SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps.
- alwillis 5y ago
  SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps. I think OmniFocus counts as a big and complicated app and it's being rewritten using SwiftUI: https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omni-roadmap-2022 https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omni-roadmap-2022
  - programmarchy 5y ago
    That's impressive. Of their suite of apps, OmniFocus is the low hanging fruit, though. I doubt OmniOutliner would even be possible in SwiftUI because I imagine they're heavily relying on TextKit. Part of me also wonders, though, if OmniGroup had shifted to building web apps 10 years ago, would they be making significantly more money?
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      >Part of me also wonders, though, if OmniGroup had shifted to building web apps 10 years ago, would they be making significantly more money? I seem to remember they were laying people off a couple of years ago.
irrational 5y ago
I use Mac. Other than my browser (Firefox), my IDE (Intellij), and Terminal, I don’t really use any other desktop software. Everything else is in the browser. For example, Google docs more than fulfills all my word processing and spreadsheet needs. On occasion I’ll use software that comes on the OS, like Preview. Other than my IDE, I don’t have any other paid software. And I only use IntelliJ because my work pays for it. If I had to purchase it on my own, I’d just use VSCode (despite IntelliJ clearly being superior in my experience).
- vincent-manis 5y ago
  Yes. I use my Mac primarily as a really nice platform for running Emacs and TeX; apart from that, there's Thunderbird, Safari and occasionally Chrome, Parallels (because I very occasionally need to run Windows), Inkscape, and the Gimp. Not a one of these is new.
langsoul-com 5y ago
Why build Mac apps when IOS apps would make more money? Why build native instead of cross platform. The costs are significantly higher and you'll lose out on market share. See figma VS sketch.
- kall 5y ago
  Apple seems to be thinking the same thing because when you're creating a new iOS app its fairly easy to just let it run on the Mac as well.
torstenvl 5y ago
I think part of this is Apple constantly deprecating core functionality, combined with the threat environment. People can't just not update their computers anymore. And when you do, old software stops working. So you have to update that, too, often upgrading to a new version and paying for it (or else already being on a subscription plan). This means that a large part of your software budget is eaten up by the overhead of just keeping up to date. Relatedly, SaaS/subscription pricing means software companies are less incentivized to make new software versions enticing. And the hassle of switching subscriptions means transaction costs and lock-in. Consumers aren't likely to switch apps and newer versions of apps won't likely get any switchers because their improvements are incremental at best. So what's the business proposition for a new first-class desktop application?
phendrenad2 5y ago
Most apps on Mac worth buying are either cross-platform (like Word) or a replacement for something on Windows (Pixelmator Pro, which you could argue is a replacement for several Windows-only paint apps for Windows, including MS Paint itself and Corel Paint Shop Pro). I think that some of the reasons are Mac's smaller market share (so it's harder to recoup your time spent making the app), and the fact that you have to learn a new language (Swift) or at least use a user-unfriendly IDE (XCode) to ship an app (meanwhile you can make an app that's cross-platform between Windows and Linux using GTK or Qt with relative ease).
sbr464 5y ago
I think it’s unclear what to actually use (language/workflow) for a macos/desktop specific app, when you open xcode. I usually give up after a minute of clicking around and go back to the tools, whose name we don’t speak of here. I’d recommend iina over vlc for everyday use. Keep vlc though for all the wierd stuff. serial 2 for console/hw needs iterm2 rectangle deliveries from junecloud calculator/textedit little snitch karabiner elements homebrew tables plus mongodb compass beta (db client) negative (pdf dark mode) tailscale medis (redis gui) lanscan google earth pro davinci resolve studio fcp/logic/motion/compressor xcode contrast.app (picker/a11y) betterDummy (screen res) all the beta/dev/browser versions midiview
cwdegidio 5y ago
One thing that prevented me from looking at getting into native macOS development has been that lack of good development resources or training. Every time I have looked at getting into it and start asking around I hear things like "Oh, just learn iOS development and start from there..." or "Just learn Swift and see where it takes you." If there were more learning resources available (and I admit there may be some incredible ones out there that I'm just ignorant of), I think it would still lead some to be interested in the platform.
- yen223 5y ago
  I've dipped my toes into Mac app development and had the same experience as you did. Forget good resources, a lot of AppKit APIs have no documentation at all. This makes me understand why JavaScript is winning here - for all its faults, there are plenty of resources to pick and choose from when it comes to learning javascript.
travisgriggs 5y ago
I blame typesafe languages.
silvestrov 5y ago
I think you can't leave out how much html/css/js has progressed since Netscape Navigator in late 90'ies. Modern browsers and web backends makes it so much faster to implement functionality that takes forever to implement in a native Desktop app. People who are "native app" envangelists tend to completely ignore this major difference. e.g. "Auto Layout" in Swift is just a bare bones reimplementation of what we have in modern css with flexbox and grid. also: it is much easier to collaborate with other people when you can just send them a link instead of "Word doc version 2, final, really final".
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I don't know, I always feel much less productive doing web development rather than desktop. I've been doing some work with drawing on a canvas and it feels archaic compared to doing the same thing on Windows or macOS.
- y7 5y ago
  People that prefer native apps reason from the user's perspective, not the developer's. The user doesn't benefit from the fact that it's easier to get a web app up and running; they just see a GUI that is less responsive. And yes, a shared document is convenient for collaboration, but having the control of storing and being able to access a specific version offline on a device you own is also valuable.
- jamil7 5y ago
  Yeah that’s all true but we lost quite a lot in the transition too.
  - rimliu 5y ago
    None of that is true, actually. It is only "true" for those, who have no idea of native SDKs capabilities.
    - jamil7 5y ago
      Fair enough, I chose to ignore the Auto Layout comment, I was more responding to the implied point of the web being networked-first and immediately shareable unlike desktop (again different story on mobile). The overall point I was trying to make was that this didn't come free and we lost a lot of functionality, user experience, performance and accessibility during this transition (especially on macOS).
singularity2001 5y ago
I wished the android intent system was adopted by mac (or windows). the share with/open with landscape and workflow is very patchy. case in point: I have blender and five 3d model viewers installed but still often get zilch options when I try to open a model from the web. image you could click on an image or object and being offered a myriad of actions already installed or available on the app store.
hughrr 5y ago
Are we sure the software isn’t just done as in finished? Stagnation means not being experimented on by vendors. I’m happy with that.
brailsafe 5y ago
I really like Klokki Slim, Bear, Canary Mail, Dato. I think menubar apps are the future.
- janandonly 5y ago
  How is Canary Mail better than mail.app on macOS ?
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    I don't know, I've been using third-party clients forever. I'd say that probably Canary beats it handily in dealing with encryption, but I don't use it and maybe mail.app has caught up. I went from Sparrow -> Airmail -> Spark + Canary, but I'd rather ditch Spark because it doesn't get some calendar integration right and often gets my Google account suspended, but Canary doesn't do delayed emails.
submeta 5y ago
What no one seem to mention is the mentality that software should cost almost nothing. The other day I researched an alternative to MS Word for Mac and found Nisus Writer Pro. Immediately fell in love with it and did not hesitate a second before paying 65 Euros for this beautiful app. My colleague went like „Woah, that‘s expensive.“ Really? We pay so much for so many things, why not value a good product and pay the price. This colleague buys several cups of coffee a day (!) for almost four euros each, and thinks software should cost almost nothing. And this is a mentality that I see very often. When I read software reviews they go like: „xyz is a pretty decent piece of software, but at 50 Euros it is a rather expensive piece.“ WTF.
- janandonly 5y ago
  Well, 50 or more euros for an RTF text editor (with versioning support) is a bit.... rich?
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Well, the mentality exists because pricing is largely based on what people believe they should pay and when they can find a ton of high quality and/or high complexity (that many people can confuse with quality) for free, it makes sense that the perceived value of software becomes zero.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    When people go buy physical goods they don't pay what they think they should pay at the cashier, unless they are at a street bazaar and even then, it depends pretty much on their negotiation skills.
coldtea 5y ago
>If you’ve been a Mac user for more than a few years, let me ask you a question: what is the newest application you have installed that turned out to be so useful and well-made it’s now part of your essential tools? An app that really got you excited and happy to be a Mac user? CleanShotX, Viscocity, Tunesify, and Pixelmator. >Remember when I was pointing out that iPads were becoming incredibly powerful machines but with an OS that wasn’t capable of taking full advantage of that amazing hardware? Apple has managed to put the Mac in a similar position, in my opinion. The new 14-inch and 16-inch M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros are brutally performant and energy-efficient machines, but with an operating system that instead of aging well has been rendered immature by too many haphazard plastic surgeries. Such as? Because all my pro apps still work: Photoshop and Creative Suite (and Affinity versions of the same), Final Cut Pro, Resolve, and Premiere, Logic, Pro Tools, Live, Cubase, and co, and so on. In fact, thanks to M1, their recent versions work better and faster than ever.
ZYinMD 5y ago
I've been staying with PC for 2 decades now because of foobar2000. I hope Mac gets something similar, but it's becoming less and less likely to happen as time goes on.
- lextuto 5y ago
  Do you know about Cog[0]? It's available via homebrew [1]. I found it to be a suitable replacement for foobar2000 on the Mac. YMMV, of course. [0] https://cog.losno.co/ https://cog.losno.co/ [1] brew install --cask cog Edit: I'm not affiliated with the project in any way.
  - ZYinMD 5y ago
    Thanks! I'll keep it in mind. I think I've actually checked Cog before, but Wikipedia says the last build was 10 years ago, so I passed. Today I checked github and it's very active, great to know!!
deleted 5y ago
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soapdog 5y ago
One aspect that I think is crucial is to the stagnation of Mac software is the lack of good documentation and books. Most of what you find about developing apps with Swift is focused on iOS. If you ask anyone about good resources to learn, they point you to scattered WWDC videos and personal sites of cool developers offering video courses and tutorials. This is very different than what I remember from when Mac OS X was introduced. I remember getting big fat books from Big Nerd Ranch and having wonderful documentation to me as I learned the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa. I've been trying to get back to desktop app development after more than 10 years doing web stuff, and if feels like a totally different place. Heck, there are stub pages at Apple that only list the function signatures and nothing more?! WTF! There are no recent books about developing for macOS.
apricot13 5y ago
I used to install loads of apps - but now I tend to keep things as osx only as possible. One reason is I switch machines so often and my early macs we're customised to the hilt and I've never achieved that level of greatness again. The other is simply I don't trust the 99p and Free apps to do the job as well as the 'old apps' Things like little snitch, disk inventory x theres so many clones that never quite do what you want so I just don't bother. Things like macheist we're great back in the day because you knew you were getting (reasonable) quality but most importantly safe apps. The closest thing now is setapp. I don't subscribe to it but it sure is useful as a first port of call for finding an app that does what I'm looking for thats probably been through some sort of quality control. I've found a few apps through there. Apps I use daily and install instantly on any mac: AppCleaner, AppPolice, little ipsum (random strings of lorum impsum), colorslurp (colour picker), itsycal (calendar in your toolbar) disk inventory x, betterSnapTool (mimics window snapping from mac but lets you drag and drop to custom sizes) Rocket for emojis, and licecap for gif screen recording
chazeon 5y ago
After Apple’s years’ of advocating iPads being the next computer, I bought Magic Keyboard and other accessories, but I can confidently tell you it is not. It’s just not the one that belongs to me. Seeing the state of Mac software ecosystem being stagnated is just sad.
togs 5y ago
I think most software has stagnated because we have hit a wall in terms of user interface until AR/VR/Brain interface improves. I have a few assorted goalposts: * Where are the AR glasses? Google dropped the ball. * I need to be able wave my hand to send things to other people's eyes. * Most games still can't play at 60 fps, which is 2006-era tech. * VR headsets are still poor quality. * Cloud gaming still can't achieve < 1ms input delay. What's up with that? How am I going to post a multi-speedrun where a program randomly switches between game tabs? * Interfaces in general are slow. There needs to be as little delay as possible between my thoughts/actions and the computer's response. * Why can't an iPad simulate the sensation of texture? Tracing lines in sand with my finger on my phone was a cool webgl tech demo 10 years ago. Now I want to feel the sand. * Self-driving cars still don't work.
- ncr100 5y ago
  Much of this could be solved quickly if the Market Opportunity were made clear. $$$$
- no_time 5y ago
  >Cloud gaming still can't achieve < 1ms input delay. What's up with that? The laws of physics are a hard pill to swallow. Unless you want a datacenter at every street corner, this is not gonna happen.
caycep 5y ago
I wonder if Apple's dev tools/swift teams can overcome whatever dysfunction is going on there (see the whole Chris Lattner Swift brouhaha) and release something coherent i.e. a mature swift UI w/ cross compiling support for windows and web js apps...would that give a shot in the arm to getting mac-first native apps that can spread elsewhere? It might take the wind out of some of electron's sails
samieljabali 5y ago
The sad reality is we've solved many of computation's problems, and don't have much of a utopia around as perhaps expected in solving them. Macs in the 2000's had productivity apps that were needed, fun to discover & to try out: * Growl for notifications * AppFresh for automatic downloads * Quicksilver for file/app search All of which has been solved by the OS. Web 2.0 solved connecting with friends and strangers around the world, as well as many other problems, by FAANG+. Web 3.0/VR will be 2.0 on steroids, which too eventually will get boring. As big of a nerd I am, computation I'm finding can only go so far in satisfaction, thus eventually "stagnate."
pjmlp 5y ago
> Right now, it feels a little bit like the three main MacOS app frameworks are floating in unanchored space: AppKit is not the future, Catalyst is not ready to replace it, and using SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps. This is why I cannot take MAUI's decision to use Catalyist on the Mac as anything other than taking shortcuts to port Xamarin.iOS to the Mac, not even VS for Mac rewrite is using it.

142 points by mgrayson 5y ago

I think modern human beings tend to be like "give me something I haven't seen before!" or "where is innovation!?". We take very fast tech advancements for granted, but I think things can't simply just go up and up forever, sooner or later it'll plateau.

manicdee 5y ago

I have BBEdit, Reeder, OhMyZsh. What else do I need in order to actually do my work? It doesn’t make sense to have a new app for Django development since there’s so much stuff that happens “under the hood”. Is this ecosystem stagnant or mature? You say tomayto I say tomarto

mark_l_watson 5y ago
I use to write about what I think is a similar idea to yours: imagine a time 500 years in the future when most software has been frozen in a secure and feature rich state. Cyber and other criminal attacks on digital life infrastructure has become so bad that both people and the few international corporate cartels that rule the planet prefer using software that has hundreds of years of security audits, attack surface simulations, etc. The only bits that are changing are data: new books and movies, data driving metaverse style AR and VR, etc. Is this possible? If I remember back to the 1980s when much of my works was done with Emacs, Makefiles, Common Lisp, and C/C++, then I can imagine a world today where I would still get paid to just use those tools, these tools were only used to produce non-executable digital content, but we had fresh digital entertainment always available. Can this all be extrapolated out to 500 years in the future? I could live with it if everything was secure, efficient, and inexpensive.

criddell 5y ago

I wish the Windows software landscape was as interesting as the Mac. Windows gets all the best games, but if you aren’t interested in games, there isn’t a whole lot of anything new or interesting. The web, although newer, is just as dull these days. iOS and Android aren’t doing much better. Maybe it’s a sign that personal computing is now about as interesting as other appliances. Things are mature. The author has posted a follow-up here: http://morrick.me/archives/9523 http://morrick.me/archives/9523

brimble 5y ago
> The web, although newer, is just as dull these days. I think it's that we stopped building, promoting, and improving new public protocols. And by "we" I mean "tech giants". There should be an open, widely-used social layer atop the Web, supported by everything under the sun. Why isn't there? Facebook and Google and Twitter have infinity money (thanks to advertising and/or VC) to throw at free products that lock in users, instead. Why's chat more silo'd now than ever? Similar reason, deep pockets with large marketing & advertising budgets pushing products that deliberately don't interoperate well. Et cetera. We couldn't invent email today. I'm not even sure we could invent the Web, anymore. For values of "invent" that include getting enough support for something to really be a standard that's widely used, not just a few white papers and something a few enthusiasts use, doomed to obscurity. This state of things is not because we ran out of things that would make excellent, useful protocols.
- rektide 5y ago
  Agreed basically. The G+ era murdered the engineering driven vision of the future & replaced it with more gloss-coated shit-consumerism. Things werent going great with Buzz, Salmon, OpenSocial. But they were teething, finding themselves, evolving. That all got killed by one vain executive, who murdered an explorable interconnected future for a cheapass Facebook knock-off. It's sad af it takes a massive name to drive big change, to get people hyped. There's plenty of interesting-ish projects about that could, that deserve uptake, usage, advancement. Maybe BlueSky will have technics sufficiently capable to match & drive a new interconnected angle. Im so tired of the ongoing re-silo-ization of all computing.
  - wolpoli 5y ago
    Also, independent (and interconnected) blogs simply have no place in their future where valuable/insightful content would be on Google+. Thus, to choke off the audience for blogs, Google Reader had to die.
    - ohCh6zos 5y ago

latchkey 5y ago

mimestream (a native gmail client) is a relatively new app and is fantastic. still in beta, but actively developed and solved the one thing I wanted more than anything... to be able to command-tab into my email box.

adparadox 5y ago
I totally agree about mimestream. It's everything I want in an app -- single focus, Mac-native, fast, and works well. Two other Mac-native tools that I really enjoy using every day: GitUp (http://www.gitup.co/ http://www.gitup.co/) and Postico (https://eggerapps.at/postico/ https://eggerapps.at/postico/).
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Another thing excellent native Mac git client is Fork[0], which is unique in that it has a perfectly mirrored native (MFC I think) Windows version. It works together very well with Secretive[1] which allows you to keep your SSH key in your Mac’s Secure Enclave and require Touch ID to use them, as well as displaying a notification showing what’s trying to access keys. It can also store keys in hardware dongles (like YubiKeys) and has a nice native UI for managing multiple keys. [0]: https://git-fork.com/ https://git-fork.com/ [1]: https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I think the Windows version of Fork is .Net/WPF.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
I have a friend who is a UX guru, and as a sort of hobby tries out various email clients from time to time. He absolutely couldn't believe it when I showed him "this great new client [Mimestream] that has made my email dreams come true." "It looks… just like Apple Mail." "Yes" "… why?"
- 5y ago

musicale 5y ago

It's not just Mac software - desktop software in general seems to be stagnating. As noted, several app categories seem to have "matured" and/or ossified and are dominated by one or two players. For example, Microsoft and Apple dominate the "office" productivity software market on macOS. Moreover, apps like Discord, Teams, VS Code, etc. seem to be cross-platform web apps which are clunky and unsatisfying compared to native apps. (Other web apps don't even have desktop versions and only exist in the browser.) That being said, Adobe's offerings are expensive subscriptions which have opened up a market for Affinity as well as Pixelmator and Acorn.

duped 5y ago
Just personally, I use several of those "clunky" apps daily and they're more seamless than native counterparts. Particularly VS Code. Its biggest struggle is input latency, but if I really cared about that I wouldn't have left editing in the terminal.
- clumsysmurf 5y ago
  I agree, some of the "clunk" apps feel real nice. Problem is, when you have 4 electron apps running, and your system starts grinding.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Yeah, I use VS Code as my terminal now. I love having the directory tree visible if I need or want to single click a file and play with it instantly with zero overhead. I use thunder client now instead of that dreadful postman obomination after learning about it here last week. VS Code is becoming my general purpose environment. I was working in PowerShell ISE today and was thinking "this has to go" the whole time. So if I have any PowerShell work in the future I'm going to try the VS Code tooling for that. I knew at least one person at Capital One who was using it for their Spring Boot project instead of Intellij.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    I have dedicated tools for most tasks like the terminal, git client, REST client, etc, but most of the time I use VS Code (built-ins or extensions); even when I'm making compromises, I prefer the workflow of staying on one screen.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

It’s not the focus of the article—which is clearly intended to narrowly focus on the current state of macOS UI APIs—so I can’t fault it for having no mention of Electron. But it’s hard not to see a huge Electron-shaped hole in the picture painted. At least for my usage, nearly all of my dailyish use apps are either: - built in (Finder, Activity Monitor, Reminders) - macOS native but get little benefit from that other than existing before Electron (iTerm, Tower but even that is an ancient unmaintained version because I’m not sold on the subscription model) - Some Chromium thing, mostly Electron (~90% of my daily usage if not more) And I know this will vary by user but… I suspect that breakdown is similar for anyone using more than built-ins. I love the idea of “Mac-assed Mac apps”[1], but there just… aren’t many and they’re either very specialized (Panic stuff and Pixelmator being prominent examples) or very minimal and of unpredictable quality (the vast majority of the Mac App Store). Though this is a good reminder that I want to buy Paw[2] even though I currently don’t have much use for it. But like… being real, the issue isn’t that native macOS UI toolkits are bad in some way. The issue is that nobody is developing platform-specific desktop UIs at all, give or take first parties and marginalia. If anything, Linux is healthier in this respect than anything else, and that’s because it’s already a hodgepodge of community efforts. 1: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-apps https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a... 2: https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/

eyelidlessness 5y ago
And my goodness I’d love to switch from VSCode to Nova if I could figure out how to both support my own debugging story and know how to document it for the larger VSCode crowd, but last I checked both are impossible and I work in open source so I’m going to milk the cows in the field they’re actually grazing (I have no idea if I’m butchering an existing aphorism or just butchering one I just made up).

chubs 5y ago

Some theories: * Lucrative FAANG jobs have hollowed out the indie dev market * Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps * The rise of iOS has pulled ObjC (and now Swift) devs away from Mac software * Our industry has moved towards vertical integration. Eg before we used to use Campfire for team communication, using indie apps such as Flint as clients because campfire had an api. Nowadays tech companies want to 'own' the whole shebang, eg Slack has no API and publish their own desktop client. But these big companies by nature have no appetite for making a nice native app, it's all electron so they can get x-plat feature parity.

ncr100 5y ago
* Mobile app development is sucking the air out of the room.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> * Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps I'm not going to blame Apple for that. Unless it is to have provided the App Store arena — within which developers quickly raced to the bottom on pricing. Who can blame users though for expecting free stuff? Web browsers became free. Apple and Microsoft started bundling more and more apps with their OS's. Facebook: free, Twitter: free, etc. I honestly don't know how indie developers make any money these days. I'm considering trying shareware again. At least the odd check in the mail used to get pizza for the girlfriend and I on Friday nights. But try and keep your day job too.
- oddity 5y ago
  The race to the bottom was absolutely Apple's fault. Software distribution over the internet existed before the App Store. Even Steam existed before the App Store. But Apple based the App Store on iTunes, where the songs were 99 cents and curation was a token effort. It took years for Apple to recognize that people needed to be able to find the good apps more than a few hours after they released onto the store.
  - 5y ago

tbrock 5y ago

There’s tons of great stuff coming out: Mimestream is the mail best app I’ve used in decades (gmail only). Id pay the creators $100 or more for a license if he charged. TablePlus is decent. Obsidian for notes. Monodraw for ascii drawings.

robbiep 5y ago
TablePlus certainly is decent
nomel 5y ago
That is definitely on the skimpy side of "tons".
- lelandfe 5y ago
  I'll add one more: Airflow. Easily the smoothest solution I've found to stream local video files to Chromecasts and Apple TV: https://airflow.app/ https://airflow.app/
AceJohnny2 5y ago
Another +1 for TablePlus. OmniFocus is great (if you're into that kind of task-tracking/GSD tool)
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  For those, like me, who find OmniFocus to be overkill, Things might be a better fit. I think it's great.
gnicholas 5y ago
What do you like about Mimestream? I'm happy enough with Mac Mail, except that search sometimes sucks. What am I missing out on?
- kall 5y ago
  I believe it searches via the gmail api so it has good search results. I personally like it because it feels really snappy and lightweight, in terms of UI and performance.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

duped 5y ago

At the end of the day Mac users are so few in number and cost so much to retain and acquire that it's not worth the dev cycles to make Mac native software. MacOS is slightly better than Windows to target as a developer, and fine to use if you disable all the nag/scare messages that $App wants to be able to save your preferences - but it's just cheaper and easier to make a web app today.

alwillis 5y ago
At the end of the day Mac users are so few in number and cost so much to retain… You're kidding, right? In its nearly 40 year history, the Mac has never sold better; Apple has had many consecutive record quarters since the start of the pandemic. It's obviously not just about price and consumers; several companies bought boatloads of Macs for their developers: "Uber, Twitter among companies giving engineers 'fully loaded' M1 Max MacBook Pro": https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/11/08/uber-twitter-among-companies-giving-engineers-fully-loaded-m1-max-macbook-pro https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/11/08/uber-twitter-amon...
- duped 5y ago
  They're great laptops. How many of those developers are targeting MacOS though? iOS has 50% market share in the US. It makes sense why Uber and Twitter (a pittance of desktop users) buys them - they have to.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Macs are basically standard developer hardware at well funded tech companies, for all sorts of engineers besides just iOS teams.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Only if you happen to live in the US or countries with similar salary levels and writing UNIX software or iOS/iPad/watchOS is all that those "developers" care about.
5y ago

shp0ngle 5y ago

Honestly? It's Chrome (and, by extension, Electron) being relatively good as a "native platform" that killed "native apps" on Mac. (And I guess Windows/Linux too, I don't know.) Ironically Chrome got its start as an Apple WebKit fork, but they invested a lot in it from then. Anyway. People just write it in Electron, or just go for web app directly. It's like Java of yesteryear - "write once, run anywhere, but never good". We can fight it or embrace it, I'm afraid.

Mikeb85 5y ago
This. So much functionality I used to expect in desktop apps is now done in the browser. Any sort of 'office' software for example... Any communication software. Email. And so on. Dev tools and games are literally the only 'native' apps I ever use on the desktop.
criddell 5y ago
Web apps are stagnant too. Personal computing in general has matured and is mostly boring these days.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  not really though? Look at figma; look at stuff like Miro. Even Google Docs are getting better. Discord came out of nowhere and now owning its space. The one that has stagnated is GMail I guess; I think they have too much legacy stuff that they cannot cut, so it’s hard to innovate.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >Look at figma; look at stuff like Miro. Even Google Docs are getting better. It's amazing what they have achieved within that constrained platform but I was using vector graphics tools, image editors, word processors and spreadsheets in the eighties and nineties. Some things have changed of course, a wider range of formats, easier collaboration online but there is nothing fundamentally new about this stuff.

mistersquid 5y ago

Crusty developers gonna crust? Off the top of my head, these apps are fairly recent and pretty great. - OBS (obsproject.com) - Visual Studio Code - Tower (git-tower.com) - Timing (timingapp.com)

AceJohnny2 5y ago
Note that neither OBS nor Visual Studio Code are native mac apps.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  One need only open the OBS preferences to see just how non-native: https://i.imgur.com/At8MQPJ.png https://i.imgur.com/At8MQPJ.png
- Gigachad 5y ago
  In practical terms though, who cares? This reminds me of the debate about Wine being integrated with Steam before Proton came out. A big argument against was that it would kill the native Linux game market. But then valve did it anyway and the compatibility layer was so seamless that to the end user you would never notice it was a windows game so you have no practical reason to care. VS Code works incredible on MacOS despite not being native.
  - checker659 5y ago
    You're commenting on the article. In that context, it is every bit as relevant.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >VS Code works incredible on MacOS despite not being native. It's a bit of a dog on my machine. I only use it for one particular plugin.
declnz 5y ago
OBS is approaching ten years old though [1]... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBS_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBS_Studio

GlenTheMachine 5y ago

This isn’t a hard position, but I’m leaning towards the idea that we may actually have all the desktop software we need, at least in broad strokes. The applications could of course always get better <cough>Microsoft Office<cough>, but I’m not sure there are all that many unfilled needs in desktop software. “The platform is the application”, in a sense. The last piece of software that really truly changed my life was Waze. And that software couldn’t have been desktop software. The next piece was one of Google Translate and/or the many language translation apps in the App Store, including the camera-based ones. Again, that’s software that if it was useful at all would have a very different level of usefulness as desktop software. At some point I suspect AI will actually become useful, and that might - MIGHT - open up new desktop software categories. But we aren’t there yet.

perfopt 5y ago

I worked on Mac and iOS apps until about 10 years ago and then briefly just to keep in touch with changes until about 5 years ago. The main reason I am not interested in indie development is that (1) it is very difficult to sustain in the long run and (2) I don't want to invest a lot of time to learn skills that work only in a closed env Also, I think most necessary apps for the desktop are already there - I cannot think of anything new that would be a must have. I could say the same for mobile apps but many of them are not apps, they are a window into a service once can subscribe to. So in that sense they are new

programmarchy 5y ago

I love native apps as a user, but as a developer why invest time and energy into a shifting landscape? Better to put effort into building a SaaS. I think this quote from the article sums it up well: > Right now, it feels a little bit like the three main MacOS app frameworks are floating in unanchored space: AppKit is not the future, Catalyst is not ready to replace it, and using SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps.

alwillis 5y ago
SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps. I think OmniFocus counts as a big and complicated app and it's being rewritten using SwiftUI: https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omni-roadmap-2022 https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omni-roadmap-2022
- programmarchy 5y ago
  That's impressive. Of their suite of apps, OmniFocus is the low hanging fruit, though. I doubt OmniOutliner would even be possible in SwiftUI because I imagine they're heavily relying on TextKit. Part of me also wonders, though, if OmniGroup had shifted to building web apps 10 years ago, would they be making significantly more money?
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >Part of me also wonders, though, if OmniGroup had shifted to building web apps 10 years ago, would they be making significantly more money? I seem to remember they were laying people off a couple of years ago.

irrational 5y ago

I use Mac. Other than my browser (Firefox), my IDE (Intellij), and Terminal, I don’t really use any other desktop software. Everything else is in the browser. For example, Google docs more than fulfills all my word processing and spreadsheet needs. On occasion I’ll use software that comes on the OS, like Preview. Other than my IDE, I don’t have any other paid software. And I only use IntelliJ because my work pays for it. If I had to purchase it on my own, I’d just use VSCode (despite IntelliJ clearly being superior in my experience).

vincent-manis 5y ago
Yes. I use my Mac primarily as a really nice platform for running Emacs and TeX; apart from that, there's Thunderbird, Safari and occasionally Chrome, Parallels (because I very occasionally need to run Windows), Inkscape, and the Gimp. Not a one of these is new.

langsoul-com 5y ago

Why build Mac apps when IOS apps would make more money? Why build native instead of cross platform. The costs are significantly higher and you'll lose out on market share. See figma VS sketch.

kall 5y ago
Apple seems to be thinking the same thing because when you're creating a new iOS app its fairly easy to just let it run on the Mac as well.

torstenvl 5y ago

I think part of this is Apple constantly deprecating core functionality, combined with the threat environment. People can't just not update their computers anymore. And when you do, old software stops working. So you have to update that, too, often upgrading to a new version and paying for it (or else already being on a subscription plan). This means that a large part of your software budget is eaten up by the overhead of just keeping up to date. Relatedly, SaaS/subscription pricing means software companies are less incentivized to make new software versions enticing. And the hassle of switching subscriptions means transaction costs and lock-in. Consumers aren't likely to switch apps and newer versions of apps won't likely get any switchers because their improvements are incremental at best. So what's the business proposition for a new first-class desktop application?

phendrenad2 5y ago

Most apps on Mac worth buying are either cross-platform (like Word) or a replacement for something on Windows (Pixelmator Pro, which you could argue is a replacement for several Windows-only paint apps for Windows, including MS Paint itself and Corel Paint Shop Pro). I think that some of the reasons are Mac's smaller market share (so it's harder to recoup your time spent making the app), and the fact that you have to learn a new language (Swift) or at least use a user-unfriendly IDE (XCode) to ship an app (meanwhile you can make an app that's cross-platform between Windows and Linux using GTK or Qt with relative ease).

sbr464 5y ago

I think it’s unclear what to actually use (language/workflow) for a macos/desktop specific app, when you open xcode. I usually give up after a minute of clicking around and go back to the tools, whose name we don’t speak of here. I’d recommend iina over vlc for everyday use. Keep vlc though for all the wierd stuff. serial 2 for console/hw needs iterm2 rectangle deliveries from junecloud calculator/textedit little snitch karabiner elements homebrew tables plus mongodb compass beta (db client) negative (pdf dark mode) tailscale medis (redis gui) lanscan google earth pro davinci resolve studio fcp/logic/motion/compressor xcode contrast.app (picker/a11y) betterDummy (screen res) all the beta/dev/browser versions midiview

cwdegidio 5y ago

One thing that prevented me from looking at getting into native macOS development has been that lack of good development resources or training. Every time I have looked at getting into it and start asking around I hear things like "Oh, just learn iOS development and start from there..." or "Just learn Swift and see where it takes you." If there were more learning resources available (and I admit there may be some incredible ones out there that I'm just ignorant of), I think it would still lead some to be interested in the platform.

yen223 5y ago
I've dipped my toes into Mac app development and had the same experience as you did. Forget good resources, a lot of AppKit APIs have no documentation at all. This makes me understand why JavaScript is winning here - for all its faults, there are plenty of resources to pick and choose from when it comes to learning javascript.

travisgriggs 5y ago

I blame typesafe languages.

silvestrov 5y ago

I think you can't leave out how much html/css/js has progressed since Netscape Navigator in late 90'ies. Modern browsers and web backends makes it so much faster to implement functionality that takes forever to implement in a native Desktop app. People who are "native app" envangelists tend to completely ignore this major difference. e.g. "Auto Layout" in Swift is just a bare bones reimplementation of what we have in modern css with flexbox and grid. also: it is much easier to collaborate with other people when you can just send them a link instead of "Word doc version 2, final, really final".

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I don't know, I always feel much less productive doing web development rather than desktop. I've been doing some work with drawing on a canvas and it feels archaic compared to doing the same thing on Windows or macOS.
y7 5y ago
People that prefer native apps reason from the user's perspective, not the developer's. The user doesn't benefit from the fact that it's easier to get a web app up and running; they just see a GUI that is less responsive. And yes, a shared document is convenient for collaboration, but having the control of storing and being able to access a specific version offline on a device you own is also valuable.
jamil7 5y ago
Yeah that’s all true but we lost quite a lot in the transition too.
- rimliu 5y ago
  None of that is true, actually. It is only "true" for those, who have no idea of native SDKs capabilities.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    Fair enough, I chose to ignore the Auto Layout comment, I was more responding to the implied point of the web being networked-first and immediately shareable unlike desktop (again different story on mobile). The overall point I was trying to make was that this didn't come free and we lost a lot of functionality, user experience, performance and accessibility during this transition (especially on macOS).

singularity2001 5y ago

I wished the android intent system was adopted by mac (or windows). the share with/open with landscape and workflow is very patchy. case in point: I have blender and five 3d model viewers installed but still often get zilch options when I try to open a model from the web. image you could click on an image or object and being offered a myriad of actions already installed or available on the app store.

hughrr 5y ago

Are we sure the software isn’t just done as in finished? Stagnation means not being experimented on by vendors. I’m happy with that.

brailsafe 5y ago

I really like Klokki Slim, Bear, Canary Mail, Dato. I think menubar apps are the future.

janandonly 5y ago
How is Canary Mail better than mail.app on macOS ?
- brailsafe 5y ago
  I don't know, I've been using third-party clients forever. I'd say that probably Canary beats it handily in dealing with encryption, but I don't use it and maybe mail.app has caught up. I went from Sparrow -> Airmail -> Spark + Canary, but I'd rather ditch Spark because it doesn't get some calendar integration right and often gets my Google account suspended, but Canary doesn't do delayed emails.

submeta 5y ago

What no one seem to mention is the mentality that software should cost almost nothing. The other day I researched an alternative to MS Word for Mac and found Nisus Writer Pro. Immediately fell in love with it and did not hesitate a second before paying 65 Euros for this beautiful app. My colleague went like „Woah, that‘s expensive.“ Really? We pay so much for so many things, why not value a good product and pay the price. This colleague buys several cups of coffee a day (!) for almost four euros each, and thinks software should cost almost nothing. And this is a mentality that I see very often. When I read software reviews they go like: „xyz is a pretty decent piece of software, but at 50 Euros it is a rather expensive piece.“ WTF.

janandonly 5y ago
Well, 50 or more euros for an RTF text editor (with versioning support) is a bit.... rich?
badsectoracula 5y ago
Well, the mentality exists because pricing is largely based on what people believe they should pay and when they can find a ton of high quality and/or high complexity (that many people can confuse with quality) for free, it makes sense that the perceived value of software becomes zero.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  When people go buy physical goods they don't pay what they think they should pay at the cashier, unless they are at a street bazaar and even then, it depends pretty much on their negotiation skills.

coldtea 5y ago

>If you’ve been a Mac user for more than a few years, let me ask you a question: what is the newest application you have installed that turned out to be so useful and well-made it’s now part of your essential tools? An app that really got you excited and happy to be a Mac user? CleanShotX, Viscocity, Tunesify, and Pixelmator. >Remember when I was pointing out that iPads were becoming incredibly powerful machines but with an OS that wasn’t capable of taking full advantage of that amazing hardware? Apple has managed to put the Mac in a similar position, in my opinion. The new 14-inch and 16-inch M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros are brutally performant and energy-efficient machines, but with an operating system that instead of aging well has been rendered immature by too many haphazard plastic surgeries. Such as? Because all my pro apps still work: Photoshop and Creative Suite (and Affinity versions of the same), Final Cut Pro, Resolve, and Premiere, Logic, Pro Tools, Live, Cubase, and co, and so on. In fact, thanks to M1, their recent versions work better and faster than ever.

ZYinMD 5y ago

I've been staying with PC for 2 decades now because of foobar2000. I hope Mac gets something similar, but it's becoming less and less likely to happen as time goes on.

lextuto 5y ago
Do you know about Cog[0]? It's available via homebrew [1]. I found it to be a suitable replacement for foobar2000 on the Mac. YMMV, of course. [0] https://cog.losno.co/ https://cog.losno.co/ [1] brew install --cask cog Edit: I'm not affiliated with the project in any way.
- ZYinMD 5y ago
  Thanks! I'll keep it in mind. I think I've actually checked Cog before, but Wikipedia says the last build was 10 years ago, so I passed. Today I checked github and it's very active, great to know!!

deleted 5y ago

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soapdog 5y ago

One aspect that I think is crucial is to the stagnation of Mac software is the lack of good documentation and books. Most of what you find about developing apps with Swift is focused on iOS. If you ask anyone about good resources to learn, they point you to scattered WWDC videos and personal sites of cool developers offering video courses and tutorials. This is very different than what I remember from when Mac OS X was introduced. I remember getting big fat books from Big Nerd Ranch and having wonderful documentation to me as I learned the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa. I've been trying to get back to desktop app development after more than 10 years doing web stuff, and if feels like a totally different place. Heck, there are stub pages at Apple that only list the function signatures and nothing more?! WTF! There are no recent books about developing for macOS.

apricot13 5y ago

I used to install loads of apps - but now I tend to keep things as osx only as possible. One reason is I switch machines so often and my early macs we're customised to the hilt and I've never achieved that level of greatness again. The other is simply I don't trust the 99p and Free apps to do the job as well as the 'old apps' Things like little snitch, disk inventory x theres so many clones that never quite do what you want so I just don't bother. Things like macheist we're great back in the day because you knew you were getting (reasonable) quality but most importantly safe apps. The closest thing now is setapp. I don't subscribe to it but it sure is useful as a first port of call for finding an app that does what I'm looking for thats probably been through some sort of quality control. I've found a few apps through there. Apps I use daily and install instantly on any mac: AppCleaner, AppPolice, little ipsum (random strings of lorum impsum), colorslurp (colour picker), itsycal (calendar in your toolbar) disk inventory x, betterSnapTool (mimics window snapping from mac but lets you drag and drop to custom sizes) Rocket for emojis, and licecap for gif screen recording

chazeon 5y ago

After Apple’s years’ of advocating iPads being the next computer, I bought Magic Keyboard and other accessories, but I can confidently tell you it is not. It’s just not the one that belongs to me. Seeing the state of Mac software ecosystem being stagnated is just sad.

togs 5y ago

I think most software has stagnated because we have hit a wall in terms of user interface until AR/VR/Brain interface improves. I have a few assorted goalposts: * Where are the AR glasses? Google dropped the ball. * I need to be able wave my hand to send things to other people's eyes. * Most games still can't play at 60 fps, which is 2006-era tech. * VR headsets are still poor quality. * Cloud gaming still can't achieve < 1ms input delay. What's up with that? How am I going to post a multi-speedrun where a program randomly switches between game tabs? * Interfaces in general are slow. There needs to be as little delay as possible between my thoughts/actions and the computer's response. * Why can't an iPad simulate the sensation of texture? Tracing lines in sand with my finger on my phone was a cool webgl tech demo 10 years ago. Now I want to feel the sand. * Self-driving cars still don't work.

ncr100 5y ago
Much of this could be solved quickly if the Market Opportunity were made clear. $$$$
no_time 5y ago
>Cloud gaming still can't achieve < 1ms input delay. What's up with that? The laws of physics are a hard pill to swallow. Unless you want a datacenter at every street corner, this is not gonna happen.

caycep 5y ago

I wonder if Apple's dev tools/swift teams can overcome whatever dysfunction is going on there (see the whole Chris Lattner Swift brouhaha) and release something coherent i.e. a mature swift UI w/ cross compiling support for windows and web js apps...would that give a shot in the arm to getting mac-first native apps that can spread elsewhere? It might take the wind out of some of electron's sails

samieljabali 5y ago

The sad reality is we've solved many of computation's problems, and don't have much of a utopia around as perhaps expected in solving them. Macs in the 2000's had productivity apps that were needed, fun to discover & to try out: * Growl for notifications * AppFresh for automatic downloads * Quicksilver for file/app search All of which has been solved by the OS. Web 2.0 solved connecting with friends and strangers around the world, as well as many other problems, by FAANG+. Web 3.0/VR will be 2.0 on steroids, which too eventually will get boring. As big of a nerd I am, computation I'm finding can only go so far in satisfaction, thus eventually "stagnate."

pjmlp 5y ago

> Right now, it feels a little bit like the three main MacOS app frameworks are floating in unanchored space: AppKit is not the future, Catalyst is not ready to replace it, and using SwiftUI remains a long way off for big, complicated apps. This is why I cannot take MAUI's decision to use Catalyist on the Mac as anything other than taking shortcuts to port Xamarin.iOS to the Mac, not even VS for Mac rewrite is using it.