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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

Transmit by Panic was one of the applications that were always featured back in the golden days of Tiger and Leopard.

I find it a bit sad that the boutique and indie apps market on Macs seems to be languishing.

There are still some great things around, but I think it was overshadowed by iOS.

I think the Mac App Store has been a terrible distribution system for indie devs... I never even think of going there for apps, nor do the non-technical folks I know.

The iOS App store is a monopoly that is breaking down in Europe. I expect the landscape will continue to evolve globally and it will fall in other markets as well.

>I think the Mac App Store has been a terrible distribution system for indie devs... I never even think of going there for apps, nor do the non-technical folks I know.

Not sure what you mean. Everyone I know with a Mac gets their stuff from MAS and brew, only if forced go to some separate installer, like Adobe shit and specialized apps. From hardcore system programmers to graphic designers to home users...

I actively bias towards non-MAS downloads if an app offers both. And I’ll bias towards non-MAS options unless I absolutely need the MAS-only option

Now everything is being written in Electron because "shipping" has become culturally the most important thing. This is a whole misunderstanding of human happiness. We don't need anything beyond food and shelter. Don't need banks, VCs, markets and Slack. So we should focus on tinkering and making quality stuff again instead otherwise there is really no need to do anything.

Electron feels odd compared to native applications, and resource usage is pretty insane. A single Electron app takes more memory than everything running in my machine, including an X server, PipeWire, plus an Emacs and an XTerm instance. Well done native applications are really refreshing, and they don't spin my computer fans all the time.

Macs had a very healthy boutique and indie app scene at some point, with lots of attention to detail, because users were happy to pay for good quality software. The Omni Group, Panic, Cultured Code, etc. all delivered outstanding things. GNOME 2 was pretty nice too in its own ways. After a lot of churn and changes, it is again re-emerging as a noteworthy desktop ecosystem. See https://apps.gnome.org.

As someone who’s done a fair bit of native macOS development. I’d say modern Apple is also at least partially to blame by their lack of understanding for macOS and seeming disdain for it. SwiftUI 5 years later is still full of issues on mac and missing a lot of the things AppKit provided for free that made mac apps mac apps. A SwiftUI app on mac doesn’t feel like a mac app in the way people are nostalgic for. While on iOS it chips away at UIKit every year.

I’m definitely not a macOS developer, but I’ve been a Mac user longer than most (back when it was called “system”). What makes a “Mac app” feel like one has always been a constant evolution. Even in what I’d nostalgically consider the highest points in Mac experience.

While SwiftUI apps do feel different from what came before, the underlying UX feels different too. A SwiftUI app intentionally built for macOS isn’t nearly as disjoint an experience as say Catalyst, let alone Electron. And given how much the non-native experience has taken hold, there’s no reason a new baseline native experience couldn’t be established. The reason it won’t isn’t because of any specific technology, it’s largely because there’s basically no market for a rich native app ecosystem as that baseline. The entire economy of desktop software is stagnant.

I do wonder if desktop as a use case becoming even more niche than it already has could see that trend start to reverse. It would be a smaller market, but that’s exactly how the older macOS experience thrived.

Fair points, I’m probably inclined to vent about the tech more being closer to it.

I do think that a niche will continue to exist as long as Apple offers an official way to build for it, for a variety of reasons.

It's also just brutally slow, even with first-party implementations

Yeah absolutely. I’ve also noticed a lot of random AttributeGraph crashes showing up in our monitoring for macOS and not for iOS despite iOS having far more active users.

Doing my SwiftUI dev for mac on a crappy little Intel 13" MBP feels like doing modern web dev while throttling down to 3g network. I notice things I might not otherwise notice on the M series chips with a ton of ram, like super laggy and buggy NavigationSplitView selection, laughably slow Settings app pane switching, etc..

Swift Charts actually seems pretty good so far, but the basics fall somewhere between chonky and just ok.

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