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Comment by finiteseries | Hacker News Reader

iOS sure but native mac applications are dead, D-E-A-D, muerto, morte, morto etc on macOS and have been almost entirely ejected in favor of web based SAAS and electron apps over the past 4 years.

I genuinely can’t name a native application released for macOS built with AppKit or SwiftUI or whatever that didn’t come from Apple.

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Off the top of my head: Nova (Panic's new code editor) and Craft are both pretty new such apps. Acorn and Pixelmator Pro are both image editors that aren't brand new, but aren't quarter-century old incumbents by any stretch. There's the whole Affinity suite of Adobe competitors. And while BBEdit is a quarter-century old incumbent, of sorts, it's pretty far from being in maintenance mode -- and it certainly has company.

It's certainly true that the center of gravity is tilting toward web apps, but not every kind of app makes a good web app, at least yet.

Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, Sketch, Paw, TablePlus

Just named five I use daily...

TablePlus looks cool! Also the only one started in the last decade.

Inertia is the most powerful force in the universe, and gravity is up there as well. Adobe & Microsoft dynastyware dating back to 1990, and two also rans devoured by the web (Figma/Postman). And TablePlus which genuinely looks cool and gives just enough hope to mourn again.

I think Paw and Sketch are better than Postman and Figma, respectively. But I see your point.

You're basically right, but at least we have much more cross-compatibility now. Not something we could say about Macs of yore. Pros and cons.

I’ve come around on Figma these days honestly, but will take Paw’s quality over Postman’s funding any day.

I will say as a former Mac developer who came of age and experience during the Carbon Y2K transition days, the fact you can just expect some form of availability regardless of Linux or iOS or macOS or Chrome or Safari is a genuine fucking achievement for the human race, how far and low we’ve come.

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