4 ms·

As someone who’s done a fair bit of native macOS development. I’d say modern Apple is also at least partially to blame by their lack of understanding for macOS

by jamil7 2y ago

As someone who’s done a fair bit of native macOS development. I’d say modern Apple is also at least partially to blame by their lack of understanding for macOS and seeming disdain for it. SwiftUI 5 years later is still full of issues on mac and missing a lot of the things AppKit provided for free that made mac apps mac apps. A SwiftUI app on mac doesn’t feel like a mac app in the way people are nostalgic for. While on iOS it chips away at UIKit every year.

eyelidlessness 2y ago
I’m definitely not a macOS developer, but I’ve been a Mac user longer than most (back when it was called “system”). What makes a “Mac app” feel like one has always been a constant evolution. Even in what I’d nostalgically consider the highest points in Mac experience. While SwiftUI apps do feel different from what came before, the underlying UX feels different too. A SwiftUI app intentionally built for macOS isn’t nearly as disjoint an experience as say Catalyst, let alone Electron. And given how much the non-native experience has taken hold, there’s no reason a new baseline native experience couldn’t be established. The reason it won’t isn’t because of any specific technology, it’s largely because there’s basically no market for a rich native app ecosystem as that baseline. The entire economy of desktop software is stagnant. I do wonder if desktop as a use case becoming even more niche than it already has could see that trend start to reverse. It would be a smaller market, but that’s exactly how the older macOS experience thrived.
- jamil7 2y ago
  Fair points, I’m probably inclined to vent about the tech more being closer to it. I do think that a niche will continue to exist as long as Apple offers an official way to build for it, for a variety of reasons.
brailsafe 2y ago
It's also just brutally slow, even with first-party implementations
- jamil7 2y ago
  Yeah absolutely. I’ve also noticed a lot of random AttributeGraph crashes showing up in our monitoring for macOS and not for iOS despite iOS having far more active users.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    Doing my SwiftUI dev for mac on a crappy little Intel 13" MBP feels like doing modern web dev while throttling down to 3g network. I notice things I might not otherwise notice on the M series chips with a ton of ram, like super laggy and buggy NavigationSplitView selection, laughably slow Settings app pane switching, etc.. Swift Charts actually seems pretty good so far, but the basics fall somewhere between chonky and just ok.

by jamil7 2y ago

eyelidlessness 2y ago

I’m definitely not a macOS developer, but I’ve been a Mac user longer than most (back when it was called “system”). What makes a “Mac app” feel like one has always been a constant evolution. Even in what I’d nostalgically consider the highest points in Mac experience. While SwiftUI apps do feel different from what came before, the underlying UX feels different too. A SwiftUI app intentionally built for macOS isn’t nearly as disjoint an experience as say Catalyst, let alone Electron. And given how much the non-native experience has taken hold, there’s no reason a new baseline native experience couldn’t be established. The reason it won’t isn’t because of any specific technology, it’s largely because there’s basically no market for a rich native app ecosystem as that baseline. The entire economy of desktop software is stagnant. I do wonder if desktop as a use case becoming even more niche than it already has could see that trend start to reverse. It would be a smaller market, but that’s exactly how the older macOS experience thrived.

jamil7 2y ago
Fair points, I’m probably inclined to vent about the tech more being closer to it. I do think that a niche will continue to exist as long as Apple offers an official way to build for it, for a variety of reasons.

brailsafe 2y ago

It's also just brutally slow, even with first-party implementations

jamil7 2y ago
Yeah absolutely. I’ve also noticed a lot of random AttributeGraph crashes showing up in our monitoring for macOS and not for iOS despite iOS having far more active users.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  Doing my SwiftUI dev for mac on a crappy little Intel 13" MBP feels like doing modern web dev while throttling down to 3g network. I notice things I might not otherwise notice on the M series chips with a ton of ram, like super laggy and buggy NavigationSplitView selection, laughably slow Settings app pane switching, etc.. Swift Charts actually seems pretty good so far, but the basics fall somewhere between chonky and just ok.