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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I hate this consolidation of mobile and desktop apps and I hoped Apple would have had the design sense to keep them separate like they should be. Mobile and desktop UIs are two different worlds with different interaction paradigms. Trying to combine them makes an awkward UI that feels good nowhere.

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Most new macOS apps from Apple seem to be pretty awful and don't feel like an actual mac app. Home, TV, and Music have some really horrible ux/ui. Music is slightly better than the others but you would think they would have the resources to make these right. TV and Music are subscription-based in a way which seems like a no-brainer to add resources to make a proper app.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/155735766117120...

This thread of UI issues with the Ventura System Settings really says it all. Most of this would have been shocking in a different era of Apple.

For non-Mac users, Ventura is a forthcoming version of macOS which will be released this fall. Developers are reporting UX issues with beta releases now, and in my experience, many of them will be fixed by release. However, a System Preferences rethink is going to take multiple OS releases to get right.

It’s really quite remarkable how something as simple as a settings app ends up showing the toolkit isn’t ready for prime time. The new windows settings app was also a disaster.

Settings seems like a good way to test out a Framework. You've got a lot of different areas to cover, with a mix of graphical content, text, buttons, menus, & dropdowns.

Stealing from Windows

It’s a beta, this is not shocking in any era of Apple, just access and expectations have jumped ahead.

Software bugs notwithstanding, the actual design choices made in the settings menu are baffling.

Having items needlessly nested under modals/popups is a design choice and the complaints have little to do with the fact that the beta is buggy.

As a user of macOS betas for many, many years, this amount of visual issues this close to release date is pretty novel.

I have little faith this will be addressed in the scant time left before a GM release

Like most big tech companies I'm sure they find success metrics in every project they do. Especially the ones consumers hate.

Our telemetry says users are spending more time than ever before in the settings app. Engagement is up! Good work, team!

Supposedly a major justification for the continued separation of Mac and the others (especially iPad) was differing UI interaction patterns.

So what are they doing now? Using tools that evolved to serve touch-first interfaces to build desktop applications.

The Mac/iPad split grows more confounding with every iteration. Now it feels like familiar desktop features are being reimplemented poorly in both iPadOS _and_ macOS.

it’s not that confounding when you consider that iphones dominate apple’s earnings, and so apple wants to unify the platforms under ios (via ipados) rather than under macos where they have no app store lock-in.

It shouldn’t be confounding. It seems clear:

Apple views the Mac as an iPad with an attached keyboard and optionally cooling.

There will be touch on the Mac very soon and they are preemptively getting the Apps ready. The whole Apple Silicon migration is to facilitate this merge of macOS and iPadOS. As soon as the 3 year migration to Apple Silicon is complete and most developers have stopped relying on Rosetta, Macs will have touch and there will be no longer two OSs.

What a depressing future we're headed into :/ Instead of iPad becoming a "proper" computer, the Mac is being dumbed down to become a tablet with a keyboard attached. Sometimes I wonder if the people making decisions at Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. live on a completely different planet than me.

I wouldn’t worry about that. They need to hire developers, etc and they need to be able to build their own software.

The new iPad-Mac merge will have Xcode and maybe a Unix like terminal.

Yup, but you forget the famous "develop once, deploy everywhere" that will give the user "a consolidated experience". And allow you to make huge economy on the cost of development.

At least they don't suffer from the "it's working on Electron and on the web", meaning it will not run any good anywhere. Same result at the end though...

To some degree yes but it has been great to be able to use iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon.

Taps and clicks are completely compatible and the only issues come from multitouch interfaces but even they can work well with substitutions like scroll to zoom instead of pinch to zoom.

Besides, the web has been first-class on both platforms for quite some time now and interfaces that work well on both are pretty much ubiquitous. It comes with added benefit of UI familiarity, be it a Web UI or mobile UI.

Therefore, I think the current issues in some apps are not fundamental but simply bad design choices that can be fixed with better adaptations.

I also don't expect quick and complete re-write of the established apps as re-write with a new UI framework is a common death sentence.

I hoped Apple would have had the design sense to keep them separate like they should be

I don't think Apple lost their religion. I think Catalyst/SwiftUI were created as an answer to desktop applications moving to Electron. Moving to web-based applications significantly reduces the value proposition of macOS and to some extend also iPadOS/iOS. Most likely, a SwiftUI app will still be a better macOS app than an Electron app. And if you can use a single framework across Macs/iPhones/iPads, it might entice developers to use SwiftUI for Apple platforms instead.

IMO, Catalyst and SwiftUI (at least so far) are a regression compared to good-old AppKit apps. But the world has changed, and I'd rather have a Mac/iOS world with SwiftUI apps than one with Electron/Ionic/whatever apps. At least the SwiftUI apps will look somewhat consistent and provide stronger platform integration.

> I think Catalyst/SwiftUI were created as an answer to desktop applications moving to Electron.

How is it an answer? Electron gives the developer the same code for the web and for Microsoft Windows. Catalyst and SwiftUI give the developer none of theses.

macOS has a small number of users compared to iOS. Many companies do make native iOS apps due to its large market share. If macOS can be targeted with the same API as iOS, it's more attractive for developers who are writing an iOS app to make a macOS build as well.

This has already happened for a small number of applications -- e.g. the macOS Twitter app is a port of the iOS app using the Catalyst framework.

This has nothing to do with Electron.

There's no Electron for iOS (because Apple requires WebKit and prohibits Chromium).

I get Windows 8 flashbacks

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