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Apple Planning New Mac Catalyst Resources to Help Devs Create 'Amazing Mac Experiences'
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they should make an 8 foot sign with this post on it and hang it on the wall at Apple HQ.
seriously,who thought three junky media apps were better than 1 iTunes? I get it’s easier and cheaper for Apple to maintain, but when did Apple start putting customers second?
I bought a Mac for Mac apps. I like the experience. I really have no desire to port and iPad app to a desktop or MacBook. The iPad app is touch based in its design.
More importantly, I want an OS that works. That isn’t happening across the entire Apple ecosystem right now. Yes Mail, I’m looking at you.
More importantly, I want an OS that works. That isn’t happening across the entire Apple ecosystem right now. Yes Mail, I’m looking at you.
What has shipped so far is terrible and seems far harder than building a Mac app. The developer documentation is the worst Apple has ever produced, and no apps seem to be making the jump. What a mess.
I think 'native Mac apps' insofar as the old APIs are concerned are going to go bye-bye as soon as Apple gets Catalyst where they want it.
The way to get developers to make great native macOS applications is to make Apple's support for macOS clear through assignment of development resources and maintaining a robust product line. Apple are moving in the right direction after neglecting macs for a good chunk of the last decade but it will take a sustained commitment to get developers to trust there is a long term macOS future.
Yes... that makes perfect sense in the corporate world where developers no longer have access to source code, funding to pursue the project, or even the legal rights to publish an update.
Which is the exact kind of program you shouldn't run in this modern age of cybersecurity threats.
I agree with you on the Asphalt part, I'd love to see that come to the Mac. One of my favourite iOS games by far.
I don't get why Apple hasn't updated iMessage on the Mac. It's in desperate need of a face-lift.
that is Apple's way of saying that they will build more first-party APIs to abstract away more work that developers otherwise have to do manually
We have to remember that appkit and cocoa apps were at one point the new foreign frameworks on the Mac. Over time they’ve come to replace carbon. There is no reason the same couldn’t happen with catalyst.
AppKit and Foundation were first-class citizens from the Next days.
Carbon was a compromise (extra effort to make first-class Mac apps).
Catalyst is also a compromise (extra effort to make first-class Mac apps).
Because the Home.app experience in Catalina is the best, right? I use it but it doesn't feel like a Mac app. The controls are all touch focused, they feel too spaced out and far away for mouse input. You can't move the overlay windows, there's tons of white space that could be use to show controls instead of having to scroll everywhere.
Nah. Real motivation is purely money grab while offering an inferior experience without touch input. ChromeOS with Android support is the better implementation and you only have to pay for the app once.
You mean the motivation of developers to take advantage of Catalyst? I meant Apple’s motivation for making Catalyst.
By that, I hope they mean "we'll actually fill out the documentation".
BTW, kids whining, with a touch effort put into it, you literally wouldn't even know you were using a Catalyst app. Anything you are seeing right now is what developers have managed to mash out in the past 3/4 months, with a relatively undocumented new framework (that Apple largely seemed to ignore in favour of burning through SwiftUI, which should have waited until next year) through an incredibly rough beta year whilst also presumably getting their iPad/iOS app ready. Essentially these are all very 1.0 right now. Things will get a lot better with a bit of time.
Catalyst seems more like a way to attract iPad devs to macOS than the other way around.
As much as Apple says it won't merge iOS and macOS I'm certain at some point the same SDK will be used for both iOS and macOS. Cocoa will disappear much like Carbon has disappeared with Catalina. Objective-C is already slowly being deprecated as well.
Mac development has been going downhill for the past couple of years and by deprecating everything (Carbon, Cocoa, Objective C, OpenGL, etc) Apple is not helping much.
As much as Apple says it won't merge iOS and macOS I'm certain at some point the same SDK will be used for both iOS and macOS. Cocoa will disappear much like Carbon has disappeared with Catalina. Objective-C is already slowly being deprecated as well.
Mac development has been going downhill for the past couple of years and by deprecating everything (Carbon, Cocoa, Objective C, OpenGL, etc) Apple is not helping much.
I think that is exactly where this is all going. Catalyst is the slow turning of the ship toward apps that can run on Apple's own A-chips. Inevitably they will ditch Intel and go with their own silicon. But with the way Apple is run now I don't see them bothering to license any Rosetta-like translation software, especially in a world where cloud and subscription based software is prevalent.
TL;DR Catalyst is the beginning of the end for OS X. When Apple makes the jump to putting their own chips in Macs you'll see OS XI.
I see macCatalyst as a great way to upgrade my existing Mac app with features that are far easier to code for iPad than native Mac apps. The iPad SDK's are two decades newer than the Mac sdk's, and reflect a lot more convenient-intention and elbow-grease-polish at being convenient than macOS's native AppKit SDk.
Unfortunately, many of the things that are supposed to "just work", like multi-windowed apps, or compositional collection view layout, "just don't". they crash, or fail in so many ways that work fine when compiled and run an on actual iPad.
I've filed over a dozen bugs that weren't just "show-stoppers", they were "development stoppers", as in, until this bug is fixed, my whole app crashes at entry-level stuff, and thus I cannot continue development.
However, the bugs are getting fixed (and new ones are being created), so I still expect to be able to deliver the next major update of my app with macCatalyst, and ditch the AppKit code.
Also the insane lack of / splintering of documentation for supporting document-based apps is maddening. Apple's own app-templates can't get multi-window-document-based app support right. So I'm glad to hear they're gonna improve the docs, because they're awful.
What really frosts me is how little Apple's user experience evangelists have learned from the dramatic success of iPhone & iPad contrasted with Mac. They're telling us to do things in a more 'Mac'-like way, which I think the iPhone proved wasn't a good idea. I get that a mouse pointer isn't a finger, and the Mac can't do "direct interaction", and is stuck with "indirect", but so much of what I wrote for iPad just works better on Mac than a Mac-like interface did, that is if Apple can fix the bugs.
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I have no idea whether Apple will go with arm-chips or not, but if that was their sole logic, I would think they'd just add a processor option for arm, instead of porting an entire UI framework and supporting application management. Back with the intel transition, we just checked a checkbox, and as long as we followed Apple's best practices for endian-independent code, we were fine. In fact, with most iOS apps running in the simulator on intel hardware, our iOS code is generally already processor agnostic. And most of the same processor-independent coding best practices are still applicable on Mac. (Many of them are built-in features of Swift!)
Apple gave us a 10-year warning they were dropping 32-bit support. 10 years ago, I started my first job out of school helping a Mac app company begin upgrading to 64-bit processor support, and that company had been dragging it's feet.
Unfortunately, many of the things that are supposed to "just work", like multi-windowed apps, or compositional collection view layout, "just don't". they crash, or fail in so many ways that work fine when compiled and run an on actual iPad.
I've filed over a dozen bugs that weren't just "show-stoppers", they were "development stoppers", as in, until this bug is fixed, my whole app crashes at entry-level stuff, and thus I cannot continue development.
However, the bugs are getting fixed (and new ones are being created), so I still expect to be able to deliver the next major update of my app with macCatalyst, and ditch the AppKit code.
Also the insane lack of / splintering of documentation for supporting document-based apps is maddening. Apple's own app-templates can't get multi-window-document-based app support right. So I'm glad to hear they're gonna improve the docs, because they're awful.
What really frosts me is how little Apple's user experience evangelists have learned from the dramatic success of iPhone & iPad contrasted with Mac. They're telling us to do things in a more 'Mac'-like way, which I think the iPhone proved wasn't a good idea. I get that a mouse pointer isn't a finger, and the Mac can't do "direct interaction", and is stuck with "indirect", but so much of what I wrote for iPad just works better on Mac than a Mac-like interface did, that is if Apple can fix the bugs.
[automerge]1572067742[/automerge]
I have no idea whether Apple will go with arm-chips or not, but if that was their sole logic, I would think they'd just add a processor option for arm, instead of porting an entire UI framework and supporting application management. Back with the intel transition, we just checked a checkbox, and as long as we followed Apple's best practices for endian-independent code, we were fine. In fact, with most iOS apps running in the simulator on intel hardware, our iOS code is generally already processor agnostic. And most of the same processor-independent coding best practices are still applicable on Mac. (Many of them are built-in features of Swift!)
Apple gave us a 10-year warning they were dropping 32-bit support. 10 years ago, I started my first job out of school helping a Mac app company begin upgrading to 64-bit processor support, and that company had been dragging it's feet.
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