Apple Fooled All Mac Catalyst Developers
blog.wildcat.io
blog.wildcat.io
“This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features.”
Talking about 3rd parties, but the same problems seem to be limiting the cross-platform Catalyst system as well.
SwiftUI seems like a better approach if only because Apple is trying to make it a unified platform, instead of abstracting on top of two different platforms.
Catalyst, Swift are two prime example. The whole thing feel very Microsoft to me.
I seriously doubt any of these would fly under Steve or Scott Forstall.
There's just no substitute for platform native. I include hybrid systems, and frameworks like Qt in that statement.
Even though I can write a UI in SwiftUI that will work on all platforms, I have no illusions that it is something that I could ship to customers, with a straight face.
In some cases, this works great right now for mature interfaces and you can use certain tools on FreeBSD, Ubuntu Linux, and RedHat Linux interchangeably because they are using consistent interfaces. Where the interfaces aren't strongly consistent (or there are leaky abstractions), then it all falls apart.
Chrome, otherwise known as Electron.
It's not great, it's fucking terrible actually. But it's cross-platform, it gets shit done, and it's clearly good enough (relatively).
Nice cross-smartphone-tablet-desktop however is a no-app's land.
It’s not as good as fully native; but it does enable excellent code sharing as well as shipping new versions of your app as fast as you can deploy them.
That’s how we build Notion anyway.
I am personally not comfortable, shipping “meh” to my end-users, but I’m also quite aware that my methodology is not a money-maker, so it’s probably just sour grapes, on my part.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/sacred-cows-and-thir...
Surely Apple has seen Windows 8 and realised these touch approaches will always be suboptimal at best for non-touch devices? Surely they realise that such platforms are doomed if you don't implement the same system APIs on every target OS?
Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but I don't understand why users would be interested in these applications. I'd much rather have an Electron app than a weird cross platform abomination myself.
Windows 8's demise stems from its schizophrenic design language, something Windows still suffers to this day (though it's getting better).
Touch interactions in and of itself on Windows is fine and sufficiently servicable. It's not as quick as keyboard nor as comfortable as mouse, but it certainly works and is by far the most intuitive to the touchscreen generation.
WinRT was an excellent platform to use (with no apps to take advantage of the hardware) but Windows 8 on a non-tablet is as jarring as mobile apps running on desktop. They work, but that's about all the good things you can say about them.
The touch screen itself is useful when multiple people use a computer. Much nicer if everyone can interact with the screen vs. asking the person holding the mouse to scroll down a bit.
But the real game changer is the stylus. Annotating PDFs, signing contracts, kids doing school worksheets, the whiteboard app... It's amazing how much more naturally you can interact with a computer if you can just draw on it.
I love my big iMac, I just wish it came with a stylus.
This is understated.
Sometimes, you need to sign documents electronically, and let me tell you all: Trying to sign with a mouse is fucking miserable. I say that as someone who knows and breathes computer, too; the common man finds it downright intolerable.
Scribbling with a finger, let alone writing/drawing with a freaking pen, is an astronomical leap in intuitive usability.
Windows 8 has had excellent gesture support since Windows 8 and if you enable the right settings (tablet mode, for one) browsing the web becomes quite tablet-like on a laptop. On a desktop I don't think it would make too much sense outside of a digital artist's environment.
If your laptop has a flimsy hinge or a screen that stains easily, it probably won't make sense to use its screen as a touch screen (unless it folds all the way back). However, in my experience, most laptops that aren't designed to be as thin as possible will hold up quite nicely if you touch their screens. Our phones are perfectly usable when we put our greasy fingers all over them, so why would a laptop screen be any different? You don't need a lot of force to operate a touch screen, we're not constantly flinging our phones across the room when we need to tap something. It's just a matter of mounting and treating the screen right. If your screen gets to a reasonable brightness, you probably won't even notice the finger grease.
Touch screens on computers aren't for everyone, but most people that have tried them don't seem to want to go back. I haven't used one for an extensive amount of time myself, but I can definitely see the appeal.
Because moving my wrist a little bit is much easier than moving my entire arm. If the way you position your laptop allows you to not have to move your entire arm then you don't have a laptop, you have a tablet, and that's another discussion altogether.
Also having mouse interfaces allows for interface elements to be smaller, thus showing more information at the same time.
Many bugs remain indefinitely post-launch. Many features seem to languish to become replaced with something nearly identical and also not finished. Often you'll hear the advice to 'file a Radar (Feedback)', but among developers for Apple platforms it's become a running joke. It seems just to disappear into the aether without comment or resolution. The internal teams have moved on to the next launch.
It's tiring year after year to see polished marketing videos tell you 'what's now possible' but for it to be so unusable due to a myriad of bugs. And worse is the lack of acknowledgment – please don't send developers down a dead end if you know API isn't production ready. Let them know, communicate where it falls short – we can handle it.
At the end of the day, I just wish they'd slow down and polish what is already there.
First time? :V
This isn't an Apple-specific problem.
But yeah, once SwiftUI released it was a no-brainer this would happen. There's no way Apple would invest further into AppKit/UIKit after releasing it, that's not how they do things. This is how it has always been.