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I mean, it depends on how much time you're spending in great, polished native apps. For work, I spend all of my time in VS Code, Chrome, Slack, and the terminal

I mean, it depends on how much time you're spending in great, polished native apps. For work, I spend all of my time in VS Code, Chrome, Slack, and the terminal. It's hard to justify any platform as being better if those are the apps you use, since they basically work the same on any platform. And then there are the people who spend day in, day out in programs like Photoshop, InDesign, Pro Tools, etc.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
At least two of the final three you mentioned run on Windows and macOS, meaning that somewhere there's a cross-platform layer for the GUI. And yet apparently, that works. There's a lesson there, though I'm not sure what it is.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Adobe and Microsoft both have spent 30 years optimizing their development around supporting both Macs and Windows. But how much of the GUI is actually cross platform? Adobe famously used Apple’s Carbon API and was very upset that it wasn’t ported to 64 bit. There is a lot of Cocoa in both products. Microsoft use to brag that they had more Mac developers than Apple did.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > But how much of the GUI is actually cross platform I find the idea that when Photoshop or Protools wants to open a dialog with a button, the developer creates two functions, one for Windows and one for macOS, completely unbelievable. There is almost without doubt some level of in-house cross-platform toolkit in place. It may not go as far as, say, Qt tries to, and it may differ in design philosophy from other similar toolkits, but they are not writing twice the code every time they have do something in the GUI. If I'm wrong, HN is the place to find out.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      That’s kind of backwards isn’t it? If I am writing a banking app for both the web and mobile. My GUI development is going to be different. But I’m calling the same set of APIs. The backend isn’t “opening a dialog box” to the front end. The developers would be designing a native dialog and calling backend shared codex
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I never said anything about the backend. The GUI code wants to open a dialog. The way to do that differs dramatically depending on whether you're opening a dialog on one of the (many) Windows native GUI APIs, or Cocoa (or even Linux). Are you proposing that when the, ahem, domain logic in Photoshop requires opening a dialog, that the developers write 2 or 3 or 4 different implementations at the call site? I would bet that they do not. Adobe has wrapped "dialog creation" (along with hundreds of other GUI abstractions) in their own cross-platform layer, and their GUI code calls that. This is the same thing done by pretty much any company developing for more than one platform. The approaches can differ a lot. For example, consider Reaper (another DAW). Its lead developer picked a tiny subset of the win32 API that he wanted to be able to use, and implemented that for macOS and Linux/X Window. Then he uses the (partial) win32 API for the entire GUI (with higher level stuff built on top of it).
        scarface74 4y ago
        > Are you proposing that when the, ahem, domain logic in Photoshop requires opening a dialog, that the developers write 2 or 3 or 4 different implementations at the call site? This is still backwards. The domain logic doesn’t open a dialog anymore than a back end API opens a dialog on a web app or mobile app. The front end gathers whatever information it needs to call the backend code along with an event saying when it’s done “call this”. The back end logic is usually naive to the presentation layer. Even in GUI apps it’s usually event based where the backend just sends an event saying “I’m done” and the front end registers an asynchronous function for a call back and when the function is called a dialog box shows up saying “done”.
- klodolph 4y ago
  The lesson is that you can get great cross-platform UX if you have a massive budget. There’s some cross-platform UI code, sure, there’s also duplicated work. Photoshop was originally written using MacApp, so it must have gone through some extensive, extensive changes to get its first Windows version.
scarface74 4y ago
True. But even then the reason I prefer my Mac is that it integrates with my personal hardware. I do log in to my personal account on my work Mac But I am careful about what gets synced.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

At least two of the final three you mentioned run on Windows and macOS, meaning that somewhere there's a cross-platform layer for the GUI. And yet apparently, that works. There's a lesson there, though I'm not sure what it is.

scarface74 4y ago
Adobe and Microsoft both have spent 30 years optimizing their development around supporting both Macs and Windows. But how much of the GUI is actually cross platform? Adobe famously used Apple’s Carbon API and was very upset that it wasn’t ported to 64 bit. There is a lot of Cocoa in both products. Microsoft use to brag that they had more Mac developers than Apple did.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > But how much of the GUI is actually cross platform I find the idea that when Photoshop or Protools wants to open a dialog with a button, the developer creates two functions, one for Windows and one for macOS, completely unbelievable. There is almost without doubt some level of in-house cross-platform toolkit in place. It may not go as far as, say, Qt tries to, and it may differ in design philosophy from other similar toolkits, but they are not writing twice the code every time they have do something in the GUI. If I'm wrong, HN is the place to find out.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    That’s kind of backwards isn’t it? If I am writing a banking app for both the web and mobile. My GUI development is going to be different. But I’m calling the same set of APIs. The backend isn’t “opening a dialog box” to the front end. The developers would be designing a native dialog and calling backend shared codex
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      I never said anything about the backend. The GUI code wants to open a dialog. The way to do that differs dramatically depending on whether you're opening a dialog on one of the (many) Windows native GUI APIs, or Cocoa (or even Linux). Are you proposing that when the, ahem, domain logic in Photoshop requires opening a dialog, that the developers write 2 or 3 or 4 different implementations at the call site? I would bet that they do not. Adobe has wrapped "dialog creation" (along with hundreds of other GUI abstractions) in their own cross-platform layer, and their GUI code calls that. This is the same thing done by pretty much any company developing for more than one platform. The approaches can differ a lot. For example, consider Reaper (another DAW). Its lead developer picked a tiny subset of the win32 API that he wanted to be able to use, and implemented that for macOS and Linux/X Window. Then he uses the (partial) win32 API for the entire GUI (with higher level stuff built on top of it).
      - scarface74 4y ago
        > Are you proposing that when the, ahem, domain logic in Photoshop requires opening a dialog, that the developers write 2 or 3 or 4 different implementations at the call site? This is still backwards. The domain logic doesn’t open a dialog anymore than a back end API opens a dialog on a web app or mobile app. The front end gathers whatever information it needs to call the backend code along with an event saying when it’s done “call this”. The back end logic is usually naive to the presentation layer. Even in GUI apps it’s usually event based where the backend just sends an event saying “I’m done” and the front end registers an asynchronous function for a call back and when the function is called a dialog box shows up saying “done”.
klodolph 4y ago
The lesson is that you can get great cross-platform UX if you have a massive budget. There’s some cross-platform UI code, sure, there’s also duplicated work. Photoshop was originally written using MacApp, so it must have gone through some extensive, extensive changes to get its first Windows version.

scarface74 4y ago

True. But even then the reason I prefer my Mac is that it integrates with my personal hardware. I do log in to my personal account on my work Mac But I am careful about what gets synced.