The Mac is a great platform, but what it needs more than a cosmetic overhaul is an application frameworks overhaul.
AppKit has a ridiculous amount of legacy cruft in it. Just take a look at the documentation for NSWindow - it includes all kind of junk that isn't relevant any more; backing-store types, minimum colour depths (in case you have a B/W screen?
), and several screens full of other options.
Meanwhile, lots of those properties have documentation which looks like this:
Meanwhile, it's hard to observe very simple things like the window moving on-screen or getting resized. Lots of observable changes use key-value observing or notifications, but you can only get
that information via a delegate.
That's just one example. AppKit is full of this kind of thing.
You can really tell that 20 years passed between Apple creating AppKit and UIKit; the latter, on iOS, is a modern API which makes it easy to create great applications - animations are easy, things like custom layouts are easy, and the API is all very consistent.
That is the kind of change that is needed to rejuvenate the Mac as an application platform. A fresh coat of paint is all well and good, but when developers can't easily make use of it to express themselves it's meaningless as a platform.
