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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

It's not just Mac software - desktop software in general seems to be stagnating.

As noted, several app categories seem to have "matured" and/or ossified and are dominated by one or two players. For example, Microsoft and Apple dominate the "office" productivity software market on macOS.

Moreover, apps like Discord, Teams, VS Code, etc. seem to be cross-platform web apps which are clunky and unsatisfying compared to native apps. (Other web apps don't even have desktop versions and only exist in the browser.)

That being said, Adobe's offerings are expensive subscriptions which have opened up a market for Affinity as well as Pixelmator and Acorn.

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Some of what's in my /Applications folder:

* Omnigroup's suite of apps for macOS and iOS

* Craft

* Drafts

* Fantastical

* Hook

* Marked

* Mela

* Rectangle

* Scrivener

* Postbox

[1]: https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/omni-roadmap-2022

[2]: https://www.craft.do

[3]: https://getdrafts.com

[4]: https://flexibits.com/fantastical

[5]: https://hookproductivity.com

[6]: https://marked2app.com

[7]: https://mela.recipes

[8]: https://rectangleapp.com

[9]: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

[10]: https://www.postbox-inc.com

[11]: https://www.macstories.net

[12]: https://sixcolors.com

The most useful apps still come from the indie developers; it's just not as high profile as it once was. It's become more artisanal.

If you read MacStories [11], Six Colors [12] and other indie Mac websites, you'd see lots of innovative Mac and iOS apps.

I can’t imagine my life without audacity lol

Forgot about Acorn and Retrobatch from Flying Meat: https://flyingmeat.com.

iTerm2 is perhaps the best terminal app on any platform: https://iterm2.com.

3rd party Mac apps that I like better than any of their counterparts on any OS are:

- iTerm2 - it works right, it feels responsive. I don't have to futz with it but can

- Pixelmator Pro - it's what Photoshop used to be to me 20 years ago

- Omnigraffle - When I need to hand-layout a diagram it's my favorite ever

- Postico - It's weird that I like a single DB UI. But it's nice over just pqsl sometimes.

I have some handy utilities I like:

- The UnArchiver

- Flycut

- SwiftBar

- Disk Inventory X

- Amphetamine

- Skitch

- Magnet

I use Office 360 begrudgingly. But I do like it better on macos than Windows.

The rest of my GUI stuff is largely cross platform (and some electron)

- Firefox

- Chrome

- Notable

- Signal

- KiCAD

- Wireshark

- VirtualBox

- IntelliJ (I use less and less)

- Spotify

The killer app for me in a lot of ways is just Homebrew. I live in the terminal. I love having up-to-date dev tools. I hate maintaining it. Even with Linux it can be a pain to hit the sweet spot between up-to-date and DIY. I'm happy running a FreeBSD server, but I want my workstation to not require a lot of planning. I also love that I can install/update native apps from it. I always use it before I hit the App Store.

I've ditched making VSCode and IntelliJ like vim and made neovim like VSCode. It's glorious. I use git and text for almost everything I do, unless I can't or when a picture helps.

And I don't play games on my laptop anymore. Really just Minecraft on my tablet. Sometimes I let my kids play with me :)

> Postico - It's weird that I like a single DB UI. But it's nice over just pqsl sometimes

You might want to check out pgcli sometimes if you find yourself using pgql on occasions. It does the same but includes various quality of life features such as tab-completion, syntax highlighting and improved table views

Thanks! I’ll check it out.

> I've ditched making VSCode and IntelliJ like vim and made neovim like VSCode. It's glorious.

How does one go about getting the IDE features like autocomplete or source change tracking in NeoVim?

autocomplete has worked for a long time with extensions like deoplete. Syntastic pulled in all the normal syntax and style checkers.

But the most recent major neovim release has lsp support + treesitter. Some Linux distros don’t ship it yet, but Arch and Homebrew on my Mac are up to date.

There are lots of examples out there for the configuration. I don’t think that mine’s great enough to share.

I’d just Google “neovim lsp config” or such.

iTerm2 is amazing. https://www.patreon.com/gnachman/

> iTerm2 is perhaps the best terminal app on any platform

I'm curious (since I very rarely use MacOS) what makes it better than say: Alacritty, kitty, or even something basic like xfce4-terminal?

In terms of responsiveness I can't think of something better than alacritty/kitty.

In terms of everyday basic features something like xfce4-terminal seems to cover everything. Does iTerm2 have features that make everyday usage more pleasant?

I prefer Tilix to iTerm2 honestly.

That said both stay out the way and cause me no issues but I'll pick Cinnamon/Linux over MacOSX ninety nine times out of a hundred anyway.

I've recently moved away from iTerm2 to Warp (https://www.warp.dev), and there's no turning back. These guys are onto something big.

Thank you for mentioning it. Never heard of it and it looks very promising

Thanks for mentioning us!

We believe implementing platform-specific APIs for each platform, e.g. Objective-C APIs for Mac leads to a better user experience but it is much more challenging to maintain. We're currently building a cross-platform UI framework with that philosophy. Hopefully it will make Mac development easier. Learn more here [1]

[1] https://blog.warp.dev/how-warp-works/

Omniplan looks excellent - anyone aware of a good open source alternative?

Any particular OS?

VSCode at this point has so many optimizations that it can’t be put in the same bag as the others.

Its main rendering surface is not using the DOM, most of the work happens in other processes, it can even use native tabs in MacOS now. As a result it really feels snappy, unlike Slack and other common electron apps.

It may feel snappy compared to other electron apps but is still a lot slower than native apps. Especially the startup time.

I just dislike how non-native it feels and looks.

As a single part developer, If I wanted to build a native app for windows and Mac, maybe Linux. Also iOS and android.

How many good options are there.

I'm going to assume you want to make the best applications you can on each platform and are not willing to accept a lowest common denominator solution that is sub-optimal everywhere.

The only good option is to separate your UI and logic and write a new UI layer for each platform. It is hard work and there's no easy out. On a phone, the UI has to be touch only. On Windows you probably need to support touch and keyboard/mouse. Linux may lead you to develop a TUI and GUI. Your macOS version should probably be a GUI.

Then on each platform, there are significant differences for things like where the settings UI should be and where the settings should be persisted.

Your case here feels wrong. The goal is shipping something that provides value and can have features added to it at a pace customers expect, fixing bugs quickly, etc. Having a separate UI layer and needing domain knowledge for every single platform, coordinating releases accross all these different platforms, and everything else that comes with a cross platform app is quite simply not worth it from a business perspective. Especially with the idea that if you spend half the effort you would from developing 4 native UIs on wrangling the performance hit from Electron to maybe only 20% worse than native, it' just not even a consideration anymore.

It comes down to choosing quality or quantity. You can't have both. Obviously lots of people think like you and choose a lowest common denominator solution.

And you are seriously underestimating the cost of Electron (which isn't an option on some relatively big platforms like Apple Watch). Memory consumption, CPU utilization, and battery consumption are the key factors and a well written native app will always beat a well written Electron app usually by more than 20%, especially on battery consumption. If you are lucky and have millions of users, then multiply that across all the users and it's a tremendous amount of waste.

I can see why you might choose Electron if you have very few users or the app is essentially a web page.

Not sure why people keep claiming this but it's not true. Attach devtools and you'll see everything is divs and spans, including source code. The only canvas element is minimap.

The truth of the matter is that people do most of their computing on phones.

People conduct serious business on phones. Mobile apps and sites are more important to products that we would all assume are “sit down at a desktop computer” type of products.

Any effort you put into a desktop-only app is basically leaving most of the money on the table, unless it’s a desktop computing specific niche (and if it is, it was probably already thought up 10 years ago).

This is one of the hard pills for HN to swallow. The age of desktop computing for general consumers is shrinking. It'll probably always have a place but everything that can be done on a phone is getting done on a phone these days.

Many of the things that are more comfortable to do on a desktop computer is because many web app/site developers consider mobile devices as crippled computers and often such sites do not offer the user all of the options. The "request desktop site" shouldn't still be a thing in 2022.

Just personally, I use several of those "clunky" apps daily and they're more seamless than native counterparts. Particularly VS Code. Its biggest struggle is input latency, but if I really cared about that I wouldn't have left editing in the terminal.

I agree, some of the "clunk" apps feel real nice. Problem is, when you have 4 electron apps running, and your system starts grinding.

Yeah, I use VS Code as my terminal now. I love having the directory tree visible if I need or want to single click a file and play with it instantly with zero overhead. I use thunder client now instead of that dreadful postman obomination after learning about it here last week. VS Code is becoming my general purpose environment.

I was working in PowerShell ISE today and was thinking "this has to go" the whole time. So if I have any PowerShell work in the future I'm going to try the VS Code tooling for that.

I knew at least one person at Capital One who was using it for their Spring Boot project instead of Intellij.

I have dedicated tools for most tasks like the terminal, git client, REST client, etc, but most of the time I use VS Code (built-ins or extensions); even when I'm making compromises, I prefer the workflow of staying on one screen.

While I rarely use it, VS Code is great. But MS Teams? I feel as if I’m on a mobile device that’s running out of memory when I’m using it.

(Windows PC)

It’s actually disgusting, and probably broken in several regards.

Why is functionally so different between the native app, web and teams. How is this an industry standard?

I edited a table, moved a picture and changed a footer. How can that be complex?

We had to use Teams for the kids school over lockdown. What a dumpster fire.

On a daily basis you could never tell which method of extracting a document would or wouldn’t work. Sometimes they wouldn’t open at all. Or would only open on web, but not desktop (or the other way around).

I really have trouble with the idea that VS Code is "clunky".

Not least because one of the apps I used to use -- Panic's Coda -- had really severe keyboard lag issues in some situations, on hardware that should have been fine with it.

In my experience VS Code is plenty quick enough, not least when I am editing something inside a VM or on a remote server using the Remote SSH mode.

It might show a bit of keyboard latency but the Remote SSH mode more than makes up for this, for me; the sheer flexibility it offers me as a developer means I am going to ignore a bit of general latency.

And we've put up with worse in IDEs and programmers' editors, for sure.

One thing I would observe about speed complaints in VS Code is that they come from people who navigate through text mostly through keys; people with a vi or emacs back-story.

There is no doubt at all that it repaints more slowly than some editors when scrolling down through code line-by-line or page-by-page with the arrow keys etc., because of all the code actions that fire off when the cursor moves.

But it is not noticeably laggy when scrolling with a trackpad, because the cursor does not move.

This difference probably explains people's very polarised and simultaneously valid responses to VS Code.

I refuse to "update" any software now. Just been burnt by loss of features too many times.

Once I have something working as i like, I will not update. It seems that long term stability and continuity became a dirty word and now we are forced to update every year because someone has new hardware to sell you or a new subscription service to push you into.

That's fine and dandy until you need to update to target x new OS version with builds, or need y bug fix, or support for z hardware.

i'm not an app dev but generally i avoid itoy ecosystem for this reason.

having to install 12gb xcode so i can convert my chrome extension to safari. or my local env/build system stop working because i update from catalina to big sur for a new uglier flatter design.

and why they have to give these stupid arbitrary names to their os, its all marketing, it makes it confusing to know what was previous and what next...

In a professional context, desktop software is a pain, and so it's largely dying off now that browser based tools can do so much of it.

It's fiddly and annoying (and usually expensive) to license for a team (compared to SaaS subscriptions). It tends to be less "online" - more likely for work to exist only on staff laptops and more difficult to share and collaborate on work (compared to software where all of the "work" exists online and live collaboration is expected).

My work situation is just VSCode (which I'll probably use in the browser half the time going froward via codespaces), Chrome and whatever Terminal app comes with the OS. And 10 tabs open for email, chat, calendar, docs, video calls, project boards, version control, devops stuff etc. I assume that's pretty typical.

Honestly, these cross-platform apps are way better than the native apps of yore. I'd take VSCode any day over XCode or Sublime. Slack pretty much just works and is way less finicky than LimeChat ever was.

The reality is that the browser has become the OS that everyone targets. In many ways, this is a good thing. The apps I run on my Mac work just as well on Windows and Linux. You mention Microsoft/Apple dominating office software. But there's a whole new world built on top of things like Notion and Google Docs/Sheets now. Web apps are more than capable enough today outside of niche scenarios.

I don’t think VSCode belongs on that list. I’d much rather use it than XCode. We could probably all agree on the others though.

I wonder, how many claiming preference for VS Code vs Xcode (yes, it is spelled like this) have actually used Xcode, not only heard about it.

Xcode has a nicer, more robust UI and I like it for that. I actually like that I don't have to configure every last thing via some text file. However, the syntax highlighting/autocomplete/language support seems to crash or slow down far too often. It's just one (or two) built in languages, not 3 different plugin LSPs running on the same file like VSCode, so it really should be better, not much worse.

By now I would assume many people have at least once tried to build an app for iOS in one way or another. And it's easy to see why people prefer VSC which has a pretty classic UI for an IDE / editor, whereas Xcode tries to do so many things differently without good reason.

Onivim (https://onivim.io) solved input latency for anyone that felt VSCode was too slow while keeping plugin compatibility. Sadly though the project stalled when the dev had to pay bills (https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811).

> VS Code

You can have my Sublime Text when you pry it from my cold, head hands.

Shoutout for Tower Git, Kaleidescope, and TablePlus as well.

I've taken up photography as a hobby (quite some time now) and Affinity is sure worth its price. Surprisingly, there is even an open source app (RawTherapee) which beats Lightroom with no sweat. I still don't have a solution for organizing photos, but I think I'm going to settle on ACDSee, which seems pretty well geared towards my needs. So while the desktop doesn't feel as vibrant as it used to, there is still quite a bunch of players in this field who keep up the good work.

I'm not going to buy any subscriptions. And luckily I don't need to, since the classic funding model in this space still brings better apps.

Digikam appears to have a Mac version, but I don't know if the port is any good. It has a lot of what was lost when Google killed Picasa.

https://www.digikam.org/

I tried it on Linux and it appeared quite buggy, and unpolished. Although it may have been the fault of Debian patches (it's quite obvious that it's not the vanilla version). From videos on YouTube, it seemed that ACDSee is quite polished and exactly what I want on the other hand, so I'm going to try that - first with a trial version and then if I like it, I'll buy it.

> It's not just Mac software - desktop software in general seems to be stagnating.

Well... the golden ages (which I'd say are the mid-90s to 2010-ish) are over.

- Business software has pretty much consolidated and the existing tooling from office suites to data warehouse and workflow stuff (i.e. SAP) offers so many options that it's incredibly hard for new players to gain a foothold - you need to identify some niche, build it out well enough to offer an actual benefit and market the hell out of your idea, and maybe in 0.1% you have a chance at lucking out.

- there are a bit of open-source efforts (e.g. Thunderbird, Mozilla, LibreOffice) but they lack funding so they struggle along, mostly used by those not wanting to spend money on the above-mentioned pay products

- Utilities from file management (Winrar, Winzip, Total Commander) over media players (Winamp) to task managers have been absorbed by the operating systems. These days, particularly Apple is known for outright ripping off ideas from popular App Store apps.

- the people who made the really innovative apps in the golden age were highschool and college students. These people have since found employment at big companies, removing both the time and the ability to work on side gigs (hard to do a side gig when you're staring at a screen for 40+ hours a week, and why bother with side gigs when your employer demands copyright even over stuff you do on your own time?). Today's young people aren't interested in programming any more, they're more interested in Tiktok or to fight on the political level.

- All major OS platforms have alienated developers. Microsoft with win32 -> .net/WPF -> UWP -> WTF, Apple with Cocoa -> WTF, and Linux never got around to settle on one way of packaging applications and dependencies or on window managers or on <insert long list of forks, disagreements and other crap that happens without a central steward here>.

- it seems like the flurry of cheap or free high-quality IDEs and the consolidation (basically it's VS Code, IntelliJ or Eclipse these days) directly coincided with the end of big-corporate desktop app developments. Basically when no one pays four figures for an IDE any more because no one wants to develop for desktop, it makes sense that the others go down in price (Visual Studio/VS Code) or vanish (Borland).

- Mobile, web-based SaaS and subscription based stuff lured a part of said alienated developers with better pay and actual innovation

- ETA: Games... that's a different beast. Can't argue that there is innovation present. But most of the attention of the major actors seems to be focused on console-exclusive or other walled-garden deals, and the mobile market draws in the f2p whales. There are rare gems (e.g. Factorio) that simply would not work on a console due to a lack of a keyboard, but that's it.

Games have actively gone downhill. Entertainment is too much like drugs, and drugs are worthless outside their proper set and setting.

There are no LAN parties. Conventions are more corporate now. Nobody camps out in line for a Wii.

The 90s to early 2000s was the golden age of everything because of context. The substance is almost irrelevant.

All the corporate "Bring back 1996" releases fail because they just rerelease pieces. It's like telling people that drinking alone till you puke is the same as a party.

Even more businessy software is the same way. Programmers are no longer excited about tech. They just think it's a security risk and maybe secretly respect Kackzynsy's views

Why would they innovate even if they had time? The cool thing to do is interesting algorithms, blockchains, and minimalism. Nobody wants to make a super awesome GUI app. That's too easy and the new generation of programmers looks down on how the world is GUI dependent.

Everything it tech sucks because the culture in general manages to make it suck even though the actual tech is absolutely amazing.

You’re so right! Tech has become a job! It takes so much time to build something without bugs and with correct error management, that a new exciting feature is just yet-another-project.

And every new NPM dependency feels like installing a Russian hacker’s “free library” on my computer.

It kinda makes me wish I had dedicated web dev experience. Web seems to be a lot more excited about features, much less interested in DIYing algorithms, very reuse friendly, and generally positive about tech, preferring a nonprivate app over no app at all, etc.

They still take security seriously, but not to the point of avoiding widely trusted dependencies or trying to push back on tech in general and use more analog things

From a back-end position, front-end seems more enjoyable. Then from front-end, everyone still wants to move to be a designer ;)

I have to admit that, after starting my own product, I’ve found my thing (doing features with a bit of backend and a bit of product management…).

> The 90s to early 2000s was the golden age of everything because of context. The substance is almost irrelevant.

It is worth considering that this viewpoint is age-dependent.

I feel this way instead about the mid-eighties to the early 90s, and I personally believe that games went rapidly downhill just after Quake, until the mid-2000s casual gaming boom. Everything went 3D and the fun was beaten out of every game concept.

Speaking from a British position, I think your problem with "entertainment" generally is very specifically the manifold outcomes of the US television network syndication model.

US TV companies make too many episodes of everything, because of that model, and that feeds inevitably into a particular story development concept that involves teams of people growing and feeding an addiction.

Not so long ago, a British Prime Minister (David Cameron) told Tina Fey that he wanted a more American model in British TV -- more episodes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48021899

"Come and convince our showrunners that they can't just make six episodes of things. Like you guys, they should make 200 episodes," she recalled him saying.

Fey rejected the request, however, explaining that US writers were, in fact, jealous of the less-is-more British approach.

The way this works -- that everything has to have a spinoff, everything has to have a multi-episode story arc, everything has to have a universe -- is also why cinema is screwed, because it is now a feeder for this system.

So my suggestion is: watch things that don't have more than ten episodes ever. Watch films that don't have sequels. Reject syndication culture.

There's thousands of good indie games now all over Steam and itch.io. This is approximately the first time free game toolchains are good enough to make things that are really good and not just RPGMaker stuff.

In particular I think indie horror games feel well-crafted and original now even if they're cheap. Can't tell you why though.

> Entertainment is too much like drugs

I watched an interview from the 80's-90's in which a developer discusses the process of coming up with a concept for an arcade machine. They said something like "It's like trying to create digital drugs."

> the new generation of programmers looks down on how the world is GUI dependent

I personally think we have a good mix of GUI and terminal apps right now. They both have their uses.

> That's too easy

I feel like making a GUI app is harder precisely because of the added development work.

> Programmers are no longer excited about tech

I'm less enchanted with having to know several frameworks before getting a job, rather than simply understanding a language/paradigm well and being quickly onboarded, but that's probably just a sign that I personally shouldn't be a software developer.

I definitely think GUI development is easier, because there's often no algorithms or math work.

I've never sorted or btreed or third normal formed or a* searched something. I've never designed a new machine learning model. I couldn't implement even a toy version of AES. I've never done a GPU shader.

I just find out who has, come up with a workflow model and UI that uses it, then track down all the edge cases that need a few if statements to handle, and maybe pack and unpack some bytes for a microcontroller.

I couldn't quite be replaced by a CRUD builder tool, because I'm doing embedded stuff, and a lot of CSS theming work... but it's not unimaginable.

Pretty much a very good analysis of the current status.

Regarding the developers alienation, it is incredible how the developer advocates keep changing and newer PMs are able to sell rewrites with a straight face, ignoring what they were selling at previous BUILD, WWDC, Google IO.

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