Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

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Pixelmator was launched in 2007 and used the same strategy as Sketch, it’s similarly based on the AppKit frameworks that Sketch is based on. It would be great if Apple had continued to create those kinds of powerful APIs instead of say, bringing iOS share sheets to macOS.

MindNode’s about page lists seven people. That’s pretty close to the maximum level of success Apple’s policies allow on their platforms. If you don’t care about ambitious apps sure, no big deal, but I care.

Couple of other quick points: I’m less concerned about existing apps like Adobe (they’ll be fine), I want new apps that are powerful like those apps. Also, and this is pretty subtle, I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy here, I know I talk like it is, but I don’t think executives are sitting in a room saying let’s make our products bad for powerful apps, it’s more like indifference, and “hey iOS is making us so much money, why not just use that same stuff everywhere?” But an implication of that is it moves the Mac to a more iOS-like software market, and that’s a market that’s failed to produce technology that’s the same caliber as things like Adobe, Office, Ableton. Whereas what Apple was doing before the iPad was producing apps of that caliber with the OmniGroup’s apps, and Sketch.

@robenkleene I concur with your pov and re conspiracy to clear things up - the way you see things is more a result of the law of unintended consequences than anything else - right?

One of those (partially at least) is IMHO the way swift makes apps unextendible when you compare it with the flexibility of objc app in this area and that's a huge part of creative search too.

These are fair observations, however your answer is too general to be informative.

It seems like Apple has added a lot of powerful stuff - e.g. CoreML, ARKit, massive improvements to 3D apis etc, which makes the ‘share sheets from iOS’ comment seem like an inaccurate dismissal.

Team size seems like an odd measure off success. If Apple is actually supporting the development of new tools, you would expect the team size for more powerful apps to go down, not up.

It’s fair to say that the rise of iOS (and Android and the web) has drawn attention away from the Mac, but it’s not clear that this has anything to do with Apple investing in the Mac or not. The market isn’t just larger for Apple it’s larger for everyone else too, so that is going to guide everyone else’s strategies as well.

What kind of apps of the caliber of the ones you list are missing? And what kinds of functionality should Apple have been investing in to enable them?

Core ML and ARKit would be great examples if those weren't so core to Apple's mobile strategy that they really didn't have any other choice. I can almost hear the bitterness in the concession: "Well, we could try build these technologies on iOS but that would mean improving iOS as a platform for creative work, but that's our worst nightmare. So instead we'll actually make something good for macOS, which is our second worst nightmare." I know I'm exaggerating, but I think you can see where I'm coming from, the only examples of good technologies they've shipped for macOS are things that they absolutely had to do for their mobile strategy.

To answer the question of what they should be doing: The dream of the Mac in 2010 was a bunch of Cocoa native apps built custom for the platform. Sketch had just come out, Acorn and Pixelmator were great Photoshop alternatives, one of the best text editors was TextMate. All of these were native Cocoa apps that presented a consistent desktop experience, and more and more use cases had apps like that on an upward trajectory.

Then Mac App Store sandboxing came down like a hammer on those dreams, and it followed with AppKit languishing, AEpocalypse, then notarization. It's been nothing short of an all out attack on native Cocoa apps. And with these trends the dream of a consistent, native, Cocoa desktop experience is now completely and utterly dead. Most new apps use Electron, or non-Cocoa in-house GUI kits. And the actual powerful Cocoa apps are forced to either handicap themselves to be in the Mac App Store like Pixelmator, or tread-water trying to figure out some way to modernize their stack like Sketch to try and stay on the top of the heap by competing with Figma, with zero help from Apple.

I could go on and on, but here's a few bullet points:

1. The size of the company is incredibly important for powerful apps because they all support vast ecosystems, this is one of the ways sandboxing handicap's apps because sandboxing prevents ecosystems from forming. Every major creative app has a vast ecosystem of peripheral technology that springs up around it, and those ecosystems need employees to support.

2. The best case study on what Apple should be doing differently is to look at 3D, a market that Apple has almost entirely lost, I don't have time to write out the decade of neglect here, but this podcast is great summary https://greyscalegorilla.com/podcasts/is-this-the-end-of-the...

3. They never got Mission Control/Spaces right, that's a true desktop-first technology that just isn't finished.

4. They have no automation strategy for the Mac, just letting AppleScript languish with no replacement.

5. Nearly every new app on the Mac has a command palette where you can type menu commands. This is an obvious true desktop-first feature they should add to AppKit.

6. WKWebView/WebView is another example of Apple's absolute contempt for macOS developers. Do you know there's no built-in search for WKWebView? You have to invent your own search for a web view in 2020 in Cocoa app! I don't even know what to say anymore...

7. Node-based editors are all the rage in high-end creative apps, they're every where from Foundry Nuke, to SideFX Houdini, to Blender, to Cinema 4D. I'd say Apple should provide some built-in support for doing this type of UI/implementation, but now I just feel like I'm dreaming...

It seems like you are determined to be contemptuous of Apple here.

It’s fairly clear that things like sandboxing are good faith efforts to improve platform security against risks that are very real.

It’s also clear that they are seeing their platforms as unified, and attempting to bring as much technology to the Mac as they can, rather than reserving some for iOS.

Without these kind of improvement the Mac platform would have no future.

I can agree that it would have been better for the dream of Mac application space if they hadn’t had to address these issues, but I can’t see where the idea that it is bad faith comes from.

That argument doesn't work because the Mac App Store is not a popular way to buy software. Most of the apps people still buy Macs for are not in the Mac App Store (source: none of the most popular creative apps are in the Mac App Store https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...), so it didn't help security (https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/8/20687014/zoom-security-fla...). What it did do is harm the Cocoa apps that relied on Apple's stack. Look I understand the prism that you're looking at this through, and I do believe that was the security team at Apple's intention, but I don't think that's the reality of how it has played out.

UPDATE: I think the fatal flaw of Apple's security teams approach is that it only would have worked if there were some way to pull mobile use cases back to the Mac, because those use cases are compatible with sandboxing. But that just hasn't happened, the use cases that moved to mobile, e.g., social media, chat, video consumption, aren't coming back to the Mac ever. And the use cases that did stay on the Mac: audio/video editing, 3D, programming are just simply demonstrably not compatible with sandboxing.

The Mac App Store not being popular doesn’t invalidate the argument at all, since Apple had reason to believe that it would be when they made the investment. It’s not clear what you mean with your update - what would it even mean to pull social media apps back to the Mac, and how would that help the situation with tools for thought?

It’s not at all clear to me that the use cases that did stay on the Mac are demonstrably not compatible with sandboxing. Can you explain that?

Certainly in-process plug-ins aren’t compatible, but those are utterly insecure and Apple continues to improve out of process extension mechanisms.

Generally agree with your opening statement about the Mac App Store, I cover the incompatibilities with sandboxing here: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...

But yeah plugins are a big one.

I don't know how you'd pull mobile use cases back to the Mac, that's Apple's strategy, not mine. My overarching point is that Apple seems to be trying to trying to fix what they perceive as macOS's flaws, e.g., security relative to iOS, instead of improving it's strengths, e.g., that it can run categories of apps that haven't had much success on mobile, like the major creative apps. If the users of these apps are given a choice: Use a less effective versions that works in Apple's ecosystem, or switch platforms, we already know what is going to happen, they'll switch platforms, that's what's happened with the markets Apple has already lost like 3D and special effects.

UPDATE: Here's the question I have, how does improving the Mac for mobile use cases (e.g., the ones that work well with the new security model, I think we can take this as a given since it's a security model that came from iOS) help Apple sell Mac's if the main reason people buy Macs is to use software that doesn't work with this security model?

And if you're still not convinced about the security model being incompatible with the major creative apps, then I'd ask: Why haven't any major creative apps been successful on iOS? Because I attribute that to the security model as well.

I don’t see how it’s Apple’s strategy to pull mobile use cases back to the Mac - that seems to be something you are inferring but I don’t see anything that demonstrates it.

Your observations about people switching platforms seem accurate.

However the security strategy Apple is adopting seems to me to be nothing to do with mobile, and everything to do with a globally connected world where personal data is valuable and subject to attack.

The fact that it originated on iOS has nothing to do with it being mobile, and much more to do with it being a clean slate where they didn’t have to deal with legacy insecure apps.

It seems unclear to me why you’d think that major creative apps haven’t been successful on iOS because of the security model when the processing power, storage, input method, and screen size all seem like they have much more influence over this and are only just now becoming viable for these apps.

I also note that you are increasing the conflation of ‘major creative apps’ with ‘Tools for thought’.

> I don’t see how it’s Apple’s strategy to pull mobile use cases back to the Mac - that seems to be something you are inferring but I don’t see anything that demonstrates it.

SwiftUI and Catalyst, Apple's biggest developer technology pushes since Swift, both are explicitly for this purpose. Not to mention Apple themselves porting a bunch of their own apps from iOS to Mac, and then all the previous technologies that have gone from iOS to Mac. And Apple Arcade being mainly about mobile games on the Mac.

> However the security strategy Apple is adopting seems to me to be nothing to do with mobile, and everything to do with a globally connected world where personal data is valuable and subject to attack.

The apps that people use Macs for listed here like Adobe CS, Sketch, Ableton, etc... don't harvest data the same way mobile apps do. That's not their business model. The security model is about mobile apps like Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, etc... whose business model is about harvesting data. But nobody runs apps like that on desktop, therefore the security model is less relevant for the platform. And again, the reason Apple is pushing it is because they are just blanket applying their mobile app strategy to the desktop even though it doesn't make sense there.

> I also note that you are increasing the conflation of ‘major creative apps’ with ‘Tools for thought’.

Yes, I'm explicitly talking about the major creative apps in this conversation. If you're talking about apps like MindNode, then I agree that an app like that is being served pretty well by Apple's technology stack today, but then there's not much to talk about there :)

The point about "processing power, storage, input method, and screen size" is a valid counter hypothesis, personally I disagree, and I think the evidence points to the security model having a devastating impact on these types of apps by how sandboxing impacted the creative app market on macOS. But I can certainly understand a different perspective here.

The security model isn’t just about data harvesting, although it does attempt to contain that.

It is also about prevention of malware and exploits. Apple can’t control the attack surface of of 3rd party apps, but it can contain the damage caused if they are exploited.

Those major creative apps are gigantic attack surfaces.

Beyond plugins - what is this ‘devastating impact’ sandboxing has had?

Agreed on all your points about the security model. None of these things are black and white, it's more like each platform is a recipe and right now Apple is adding way too much salt to macOS.

The devastating impact isn't the plugins themselves, it's that no major creative apps are sandboxed in the Mac App Store, and the apps did invest in Apple technology stack are struggling for relevance. The devastating impact is in the lack of apps, and the problems the current apps are running into. I expect you're response will be: These apps are declining for other reasons, but I disagree and see a simple pattern: Apple had a strategy of supporting creating apps from 2000-2010 and creative apps thrived on their platforms, their policy was to work against creative apps from 2010-2020, and those apps stopped thriving. Simple cause and effect.

Hmm - this seems like circular reasoning.

I don’t see Apple working against creative apps at all. I see them as securing the platform in a way that is vital to the future.

The makers of these creative apps simply don’t care about security and have chosen not to invest in it.

The makers of creative apps are therefore working against users over time.

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