And desktop icons might not be a huge deal, but I’m glad to see Apple acknowledging that they’re useful and continuing to improve it, in contrast with major Linux distros removing files from the desktop entirely.
For the Mac App Store, developers have been complaining about how subpar, useless, and stagnant it’s been for years. If the new version can drive customers to buy things, it’s a potentially big deal.
Personally my favorite features are dark mode, fingerprinting protection in Safari, and improved security of the camera/microphone and sensitive files.
UIKit will be a big deal for the Mac ecosystem when developers outside Apple get it next year.
It's an annual, incremental OS release. We're not talking about multi-year developments or grand visions. There are a bunch of features that look quite nice from a usability standpoint, some improvements to the App Store, and a crack at a unified development platform for iOS and macOS. Those seem like a pretty reasonable set of features to roll out, and no doubt they'll be accompanies by the usual array of more minor improvements.
The only thing we should really be hoping for is that they focus more on reducing the number of bugs, performance issues and security vulnerabilities.
OS X/macOS has had releases (since version 10.0) after:
0 months, 10.0 released
6
11
14
18
18
16
15
12
15
12
11
12
12 10.13 released
Changes to the app store to make discovery easier and feature more developer stories also have a huge impact on Mac/iOS developers and their revenue.
You still need to adapt it to native UI conventions like the menu bar, you just won’t need to rebuild the entire UI from the ground up in AppKit anymore.
Maybe Facebook will make a Mac client for Messenger (messenger.com works, but some people might prefer a desktop version). Maybe Netflix will have a Mac client (they already have one in the Windows store). We could get Google Maps as an alternative to Apple's native Maps app. Slack could throw away their Electron battery-guzzler and replace the Mac version with one based on the native iOS codebase.
Not every app wants or needs a Mac port, but there are plenty of cases where it could be useful.
I love apps that allow me to work on an iPad while I'm on the tube, then pick right up where I left off on the desktop. It’s the best of both worlds.
A good example is Bear Writer[0], a Markdown-based writing and notes app. The Mac app, while fully featured, is based on Electron. Without knowing anything about this new system I’d think these changes would allow the developers to create a native Mac app at least as easily as an Electron web app.
This is something pretty much everyone I know wants that has had both a Mac and iPhone.
There are great iPhone apps and they usually don't have a Mac version. You're stuck whipping out your phone to use some app even though you're already using your laptop.
They obviously can't put all the under-the-hood changes on the slides as there's probably a ton of stability fixes and hardening going on behind the scenes.
There are good iOS apps for a lot of things, if they can easily be adapted to run on the Mac as they demonstrated by porting the News app it can only be good for the ecosystem. The apps won't look like they are running in an iOS simulator and you use a mouse pointer to do touch actions. It'll be a normal native app that shares code with iOS.
Additionally, if I want to bring an iOS app to the Mac, then it'd be great to not have to figure out the Cocoa version of a certain UIKit view and then rewrite all of the code to fit.
I can't imagine this would translate to some next-level version of universal binaries, but who knows what it'll be like in a few years.
Developing for Mac? Abismal.
What do you feel is the problem? Primarily Xcode? I hear many people have issues with it, though I've not been a heavy enough user to notice anything particularly problematic.
You just can't release an app without constant maintenance. Apple has no problem innovating, even if it means pulling every developer along with them, ready or not.
This was essentially their sales-pitch demonstrating write-once run-anywhere codebase reducing the effort required to develop an app which can be built to run on both iOS and MacOS hardware.
It’s professionals and those that aspire to be professional who spend > £2,000 on a laptop.
I want decent UI (including keyboard shortcuts I can touch type), more features and better performance more than I want fluff like voice commands or anything-moji.
When thy said there another part of the platform they were ignoring I got excited for a moment.
I thought they bringing out an Apple official version of homebrew. Nope iOS apps.
The WWDC technical sessions are about the changes that really matter.
Those reasons could be any number of things like not having native nvidia drivers, or lack of openGL support (which is completely deprecated in Mojave), etc...I'm happy to hear about their work on fortnite because currently my mac is overpowered for that game yet it is absolutely unplayable in its current state.
There are some games not available for MacOS but they seem to be less and less common. Almost everything now is cross platform, in part thanks to Unity making cross-platform games easy.
Most if not all of the Blizz games render using OpenGL. Heroes of the Storm used to have some experimental options to use Metal or OpenGL 4.1, however Blizzard got rid of them at some point. They seems to not be satisfied with Apple's drivers
They've been the biggest supporter of gaming on macos, and with them gone, the future is looking grim (for mac gamers - obviously a first world problem).
What I wish, though, was that they themselves would get more excited about making MacBook Pro hardware improvements intended to drive people to upgrade to new MacBook Pros instead of seemingly trying to drive them to move on to iPads.
But lately I’m on the fence wether some of this is really a free OS upgrade or really even fully justifies a full point release. Lots a hype for what imho used to be a 10.x.1 to 10.x.4 release.
But otherwise, it's pretty cringy not only seeing them demo the new animoji stuff as well as people frantically clapping.
Because you don't see the vision that the developers in that room do. You're thinking about yourself. You're not thinking about Apple expanding its user base and making more customers available for its developers and their companies.
There was a lot of love in the keynote if you're a company looking at the bigger picture. If you're just a dev pounding on a keyboard, I can understand being less than impressed.
For “Hacker” news, many people seem very much “get off my lawn” and fail to see the future. They see stickers and teenagers but what they should be seeing is an entirely new and natural way to interact with the world. This is like rounded corners in 1981.
Apple could invent a flying car that reverses global warming and people would complain that the color scheme is just a touch too whimsical to be taken seriously. They’d complain about how Apple doesn’t support their cassette deck they had installed in their old Audi. They’d complain that real drivers shouldn’t need cup holders.
Do any of you people care about actual joy, delight or fun? Does anyone actually have the ability to imagine the future even a little bit? Must we be constrained to a monochrome CRT?
This tech is a small building block of the future and many of you dismiss it like it’s some gimmick. I know you guys wanted Craig to talk about performance and stability — but, if people actually knew anything about WWDC, you’d know that those topics get covered exhaustively throughout the week. The keynote is about big ideas and what is going to be possible. The smaller sessions are where the questions get answered and the spec sheets get explained.