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The erosion of the Mac experience began with Sublime Text. It’s a perfectly cromulent editor, but it was the inflection point where the Mac was becoming an impo

The erosion of the Mac experience began with Sublime Text. It’s a perfectly cromulent editor, but it was the inflection point where the Mac was becoming an important business target for efforts outside the ecosystem, and where developers who hadn’t been on Macs by choice were being issued them by their employers. It was the first widely adopted third party app on the platform that was both non-native and adopted enthusiastically. Formerly native apps embraced more cross-platform junk (Adobe famously moved a lot of its suite toward Flex, based on Flash). And then by the point Macs were becoming anything like commonplace, everything was a web app. Not that I disagree Apple’s UI frameworks have degraded the experience. But the whole platform was a wasteland before they even had a chance to degrade anything.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
The thing is though, even though Sublime Text doesn't adhere to all Mac UI conventions, it does respect the most important ones and its appearance can be brought further inline with custom themes. Additionally, it's always performed excellently which makes up for shortcomings in overall "nativeness". This cannot be said for much if not most cross platform software that runs on macOS — much of it is strictly least common denominator when it comes to UI conventions, system integration, etc and more often than not is slow and bloated. I would say that the erosion started in earnest with Atom. People flocked to it because it was free (even though Sublime kinda was too, being nagware) despite its performance being horrendous and its lack of maclikeness, setting precedence for the acceptance of generic UI, sluggishness, and high resource consumption.
1123581321 4y ago
I agree. Interesting point. I was one of those who switched, and, looking back, I didn’t give any thought to how Sublime was built vs. how Textmate was built. A testament to the performance and level of system respect from Sublime, but it did popularize the viability of the approach and a lot of less careful software followed.
ben-schaaf 4y ago
The only thing really differentiating ST and "fully native" apps (like TextMate) is that more of the UI is custom. It runs native code (ObjC/C++), uses appkit, native dialogs and generally follows platform conventions.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

The thing is though, even though Sublime Text doesn't adhere to all Mac UI conventions, it does respect the most important ones and its appearance can be brought further inline with custom themes. Additionally, it's always performed excellently which makes up for shortcomings in overall "nativeness". This cannot be said for much if not most cross platform software that runs on macOS — much of it is strictly least common denominator when it comes to UI conventions, system integration, etc and more often than not is slow and bloated. I would say that the erosion started in earnest with Atom. People flocked to it because it was free (even though Sublime kinda was too, being nagware) despite its performance being horrendous and its lack of maclikeness, setting precedence for the acceptance of generic UI, sluggishness, and high resource consumption.

1123581321 4y ago

I agree. Interesting point. I was one of those who switched, and, looking back, I didn’t give any thought to how Sublime was built vs. how Textmate was built. A testament to the performance and level of system respect from Sublime, but it did popularize the viability of the approach and a lot of less careful software followed.

ben-schaaf 4y ago

The only thing really differentiating ST and "fully native" apps (like TextMate) is that more of the UI is custom. It runs native code (ObjC/C++), uses appkit, native dialogs and generally follows platform conventions.