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Mac Catalyst Apps: Our Favorites So Far
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The timing is interesting. If Apple really is switching to ARM processors for Macs next year, they will need plenty of macOS apps that can actually *run* on ARM to help soften the transition away from Intel. Project Catalyst might be an effective way to get that process started.
Apple's failure: making Catalyst apps separate.
One purchase should suffice, even Microsoft got this right.
One purchase should suffice, even Microsoft got this right.
I am just another software developer. If I made the weather app, I would be very happy if someone paid me 15 dollars for it.
But that is unrealistic.
Therefore, I am not hypocrite when I say: “no way you should pay $15 for a weather app”.
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Is it just me, or can you pick of Catatalust apps immediatly just by looking at the GUI.?
It's exactly the same as iOS.... The touch feature, vs mousee/trackpad may be different, but looks like the GUI remains the same iOS....
Perhaps I expected better. But i guess if you made the GUI different, on par with other native Mac apps, no-one could really tell the difference, apart from just mentioning it. If i wanted a GUI iOS version, i'd use an iOS app (excluding the trackpad)
It's exactly the same as iOS.... The touch feature, vs mousee/trackpad may be different, but looks like the GUI remains the same iOS....
Perhaps I expected better. But i guess if you made the GUI different, on par with other native Mac apps, no-one could really tell the difference, apart from just mentioning it. If i wanted a GUI iOS version, i'd use an iOS app (excluding the trackpad)
But what do you need it for?
Preview already views pdf and can do basic annotations, resave specific pages and reduce file size.
Affinity photo works well really at editing and adding text to pdf.
The monthly fee is for the data, he has to pay for the data from weather service providers, and weather data is not cheap.
The problem with these apps is that you start indulging companies like Twitter who still haven’t learned that mobile and desktop are two different types of usability. Twitter’s approach to UX in 2019 really shouldn’t be encouraged.
This is just a hunch: I don't think there is a clearly identified method for that -- nor will there ever be one. The long-standing Apple school of thought is, basically end-users shouldn't need to care about how any given Mac app came into being. "It just works."
(Of course, reality being what it is, pretty much any Apple customer can tell you that their pithy mantra isn't always true of Apple's wares... but that's at least supposed to be the grounding philosophy.)
Seems to me, if you're interested in discovering whether or not a particular iOS app is going to be (or has been) ported with Catalyst, you'd probably have better luck searching the app vendor's support website and/or user forums.
I see Apple’s taking a Carrot w schtick approach to Catalyst rollout. Thanks but no thanks for year 1. And the wild laughter from the Carrot Weather houseboat crew is SO annoying.
The point isn't to port over apps which can be (or have been) replicated within the browser easily... Twitter is actually a pretty weak use case for Catalyst porting, IMHO, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it ends up having a fairly short life before being discontinued.
Rather, the stronger use cases are going to be things like video games and productivity apps which only exist on iOS (and possibly also Android) at present. Porting such apps over to a desktop OS could potentially open up an entirely new demographic of end-users, which the developers of those apps may have felt were not meaningfully accessible, prior to the introduction of this "one click" porting option.
First, I never suggested that developers shouldn't get paid. It's about relative cost and worth. A consumer weather app, per se, should not cost more than a professional productivity app. Period. I don't care what the developer has to do behind the scenes to make that price work business-wise, but it has to be done. If the developer of Carrot really does have that much overhead for a weather app, then something is seriously wrong.
Second, the Carrot dev is a bit overblowing the whole cost thing. He lists 7 data sources: DarkSky, AccuWeather, ClimaCell, Foreca, MeteoGroup, Aeris Weather, or WillyWeather. DarkSky costs $0.0001/call. AccuWeather costs $0.00012-0.00022/call. Aeris Weather costs $0.000460/call. WillyWeather costs roughly $0.00025/call. Foreca and MeteoGroup don't publicly say their pricing, but I would assume it is in the same realm. ClimaCell does pricing a bit different so it's hard to compare on a per call basis.
For the sake of rough back-of-the-napkin calculations, let's forget that many of these APIs offer a few thousand calls per month for free and let's assume a power user that uses the most expensive datasource and checks it every 10 minutes for 8 hours per day for a month. So that would be a monthly cost of $0.00045*6*8*30= $0.648 in monthly access cost. I think is a pretty extreme use case though. I would think typical use is checking the weather once per hour for 8 hours per day to an average-cost datasource, which comes out to $0.036/month.
I get that datasources have a cost, but the cost is still a magnitude or several magnitudes lower than what Carrot charges monthly. Either he has another overhead that is extremely expensive, or his margin is very very very nice. Or maybe the dev has decided it makes business sense to have fewer users paying a high monthly premium than many users paying a low monthly premium. But at the end of the day, I'm not alone in criticizing Carrot's cost and I think the criticism is well-founded.
God. Most audio plugins/daws i buy have valid crossplatform license to windows (actual different system to maintain), and Catalyst apps need to be paid twice, while being less cross-platform.
that's ridiculous.
I don't even like apps that charge you for desktop and separately for iOS "companion" app PRE-catalyst, but this is just meh.
that's ridiculous.
I don't even like apps that charge you for desktop and separately for iOS "companion" app PRE-catalyst, but this is just meh.
Carrot is very popular and I have priced out weather data before, it is some of the most expensive data you can buy. And the radar data is what costs so much.
Edit: Also, I think he macOS app is too high, but understand the monthly cost.
same reason you would need PDF Expert or Foxit... if you use Acrobat and rely on Clearscan to OCR your documents, Preview is a no go as it destroys the OCR layer irreparably (and replaces the text layer with gibberish; has to do with the way PDFKit relies on system fonts but Clearscan produces custom fonts to save space)
"Carrot Weather is a popular iOS app that's now on the Mac. It uses Dark Sky and offers up some accurate weather data. What's more, it has a snarky attitude that turns boring weather information into a much more fun interaction. Carrot Weather is one of our favorite Mac Catalyst apps so far, and given the app's simplicity, it's quite similar to the iPad version."
$14.99 for Carrot Weather on the Mac when its $4.99 for iOS and it gives you iPhone, iPad and AW all in one. Yet its just an iOS app ported to the Mac. No thank you, that is just stupid. I can use my weather app on my iPhone/iPad/AW to get the weather and not pay extra to have it on my computer. After all your phone, watch or tablet is likely with you anyways.
$14.99 for Carrot Weather on the Mac when its $4.99 for iOS and it gives you iPhone, iPad and AW all in one. Yet its just an iOS app ported to the Mac. No thank you, that is just stupid. I can use my weather app on my iPhone/iPad/AW to get the weather and not pay extra to have it on my computer. After all your phone, watch or tablet is likely with you anyways.
Maybe when iPads didn't become the pc replacement Apple claimed them to be they had to do something drastic and trash the ecosystem even more.
This would be truly fantastic if we had iOS pricing on macOS. It’s ridiculous to pay 2-4x for a desktop version when the code is nearly the same. Developers did the same thing when the iPad first launched until we got unified apps a year or two later.
Unfortunately most of these Catalyst apps will be the sort that require subscriptions. I wish we could have all of them.
Unfortunately most of these Catalyst apps will be the sort that require subscriptions. I wish we could have all of them.